Dr Thomas, a distinguished Scottish philosopher, and founder of the school of Natural Realism, was born on the 26th of April 1710 at the manse of Strachan in Kincardineshire, a parish about twenty miles from Aberdeen, where his father, the Rev. Lewis Reid, was minister for fifty years. His mother was Margaret Gregory, daughter of David Gregory, Esq. of Kinnairdie in Banffshire, and one of twenty-nine children, the most remarkable of whom were David, James, and Charles Gregory, then professors of astronomy and mathematics at Oxford, St Andrews, and Edinburgh. By his father, Thomas Reid could look back on a long line of ancestors, most of whom had been ministers of the Scottish Church, and with a decided bias towards literature; and in two cases they had forced their way within the shadow of the throne, the one as Greek and Latin secretary, and the other as physician to royalty. On his mother's side he could count the names of men who were as distinguished for their genius as they were illustrious for their worth; and who, by their brilliant talents, had shed lustre on the northern colleges, and left a memorable name in connection with the universities of the south. It was this twofold stream of literature and science that was to combine in forming the philosophy of Reid.

Young Reid received his elementary education first at the parish school of Kincardine, and subsequently at Aberdeen. He entered Marischal College in his twelfth or thirteenth year, where, according to his own account, he received an education that was somewhat slight and superficial. He gave no indication of future eminence, but displayed a modest perseverance in study which amounted almost to a passion. About a century before, one of his ancestors had left an endowment to the librarian of his college; and to this office Reid had the good fortune to be appointed. He could now indulge his love of study amid the calm of an academical retreat. Like his great German rival and contemporary Kant, he at first showed a decided predilection for mathematical pursuits, a taste which was confirmed and strengthened by his familiar intimacy with John Stewart, subsequently professor of mathematics in the same college, and author of A Commentary on Newton's Quadrature of Curves. The two youths read mathematics with ardour, and studied the Principia with fascination.

In 1736 Reid resigned his office as librarian, and accompanied his friend Stewart on an excursion to England. They visited London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and made the acquaintance of many persons of the first literary and scientific distinction. On Reid's return to Aberdeen, he was presented by King's College to the living of New Machar, in the same county. The popular prejudice was not, however, in his favour; yet he completely disarmed the animosity of the people by the forbearance of his temper and his active spirit of humanity, and so endeared himself to them that they afterwards said, "we fought against Dr Reid when he came, and would have fought for him when he went away." He seems to have had an aversion at this time to original composition; and it is recorded of him that he preached the sermons of Tillotson and Evans for years after he became a clergyman. The greater portion of his time was spent in intense study, chiefly of a metaphysical cast, and when he took any relaxation it was for the most part in the shape of gardening and botany. A paper which appeared in the London Philosophical Transactions for 1748, entitled "An Essay on Quantity, occasioned by reading a Treatise in which Simple and Compound Ratios are applied to Virtue and Merit," will show how far he still clung to his earlier investigations, and to what extent he had realized the larger field which lay beyond. The work alluded to in the title of this paper was the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of Dr Hutcheson of Glasgow, who died the previous year. In 1752 Reid was elected professor of philosophy in King's College, Old Aberdeen, where he required to teach mathematics and physics, as well as logic and ethics. Shortly after his removal to his new sphere of labour, Dr Reid took part in organizing a literary society, which was instrumental during many subsequent years in kindling and fostering that spirit of philosophical research which, in the writings of Reid, Gregory, Campbell, Beattie, and Gerard, reflected so much lustre upon northern literature. The Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense was published by Reid in 1764, after having received the sanction and applause of his immediate associates. He was then in his fifty-fourth year, and he seems to have meditated this work for twenty-five years, from the publication of Hume's remarkable Treatise of Human Nature in 1739. Thus Hume had the unexpected credit of awakening the suspicions of Reid by his sceptical conclusions, as he not long afterwards had of arousing Kant from his "dogmatic slumber." As the refutation of Hume's scepticism was the great object of Reid's Inquiry, he took the opportunity of submitting his manuscript, through Dr Blair, to the great sceptic's perusal. Hume, after reading the manuscript, wrote to Reid, "I have read your performance with great pleasure and attention. It is certainly very rare that a piece so deeply philosophical is wrote with so much spirit, and affords so much entertainment to the reader."

And again, "I kept a watchful eye all along over your style; but it is really so correct, and so good English, that I found not anything worth the remarking." Reid had unquestionably in this work fallen upon a mine of the very purest metal, and "by an ignorance wiser than knowledge," worked it out with untiring perseverance. It may be fairly questioned, however, whether he was in all respects consistent in his application of the principles of Common Sense to the refutation of the Scepticisms of Hume, or of an Idealism more subtle than that of Berkeley. Reid informs us that he "had embraced the whole of Berkeley's system" in the course of his speculative inquiries; and was only withheld from giving it his final approbation on "finding other consequences to follow from it, which gave me more uneasiness than the want of a material world." His reading in philosophy was, to say the least, exceedingly limited; and this limitation had both its advantages and its disadvantages. For, while it kept his mind comparatively free and untrammelled to look at the facts which his consciousness revealed to him, it, by this very freedom, threw him off his guard in analysing the contents of his experience, and deluded him with the conviction, that when he had conjured a doctrine under a particular development, his principles were proof against that doctrine, under whatever guise it might assume. So it was with the doctrine of Idealism, which he hastily identified with the Idealism of Berkeley. He raised, however, a substantial protest against the doctrines which it was his business to refute, and in his future work was more guarded in his expression as well as more circumspect in his estimate of philosophical opinion.

The fame of Dr Reid spread rapidly all over the country; and in 1763 he was invited to Glasgow to fill the chair of moral philosophy, then vacated by Dr Adam Smith. Glasgow at that time presented strong attractions to a man of Dr Reid's habits of mind. Simson, Moer, and Black, were still in the full vigour of their faculties, and were still looking forward to long years of intellectual enjoyment. Animated by the presence and stimulated by the zeal of such associates, Dr Reid entered upon the new scene of his labours with an ardour that was very uncommon at his period of life. Dugald Stewart, who was a pupil of Reid's in Glasgow, and who has left us an elegant Account of his Life and Writings, in speaking of his merits as a public teacher, bears the following testimony:—"The merits of Dr Reid as a public teacher were derived chiefly from that rich fund of original and instructive philosophy which is to be found in his writings, and from his unwearied assiduity in inculcating principles which he conceived to be of essential importance to human happiness. In his elocution and mode of instruction there was nothing peculiarly attractive." "A brief Account of Aristotle's Logic, with remarks," appeared in 1774, from the pen of Dr Reid, in the second volume of Lord Kames's Sketches of the History of Man. In 1781 Reid resolved to retire from his public duties, and to devote himself, while his health and faculties would permit, to the further elucidation of the phenomena and laws of the human mind. Although at that time upwards of seventy, neither in vigour of body nor of mind did he seem to have sustained any injury from time. He published his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man in 1785; and his Essays on the Active Powers of Man appeared in 1788. This last performance may be said to have closed his literary career, for, with the exception of short occasional essays on subjects which happened to interest him, written for a philosophical society of which he was a member, it was the last work he ever wrote. His active and useful life was now drawing to a close. He was seized with a violent disorder in the month of September 1796, and after a severe struggle he died on the 7th of the following month, in the eighty-seventh year of his age.

Dr Reid, though somewhat under the middle size, was uncommonly muscular and athletic—advantages to which his habits of temperance and exercise, as well as the extreme evenness of his temper, contributed not a little. In private he combined the dignity of the philosopher with the amiable modesty and gentleness of the child. His philosophical genius was peculiarly distinguished by a singular patience of thought, and by a cautious discriminating judgment. He was endowed by nature with a disposition, which early worked itself into a habit, of riveting his most fixed and concentrated attention on his own mental operations; and though there have been men who, with such a disposition, would unquestionably have drawn from the evanescent sphere on which he fixed his contemplation results more brilliant and conclusions more startling, yet it remains a question whether a loftier genius would have outshone Reid in the ultimate task of photographing, so to speak, the phenomena of the human consciousness, and of cautiously attending to what that consciousness implied. He was by no means a brilliant thinker; but no philosopher ever surpassed him in patience. His style was simple, easy, and familiar; and perhaps his works have suffered somewhat from not being written in a language more elaborately technical, or at least in a manner less readily accessible to the ordinary comprehension of men. Since Reid's time the estimates of his philosophical capacity have been alike curious and various. Some would have him endowed with a commanding genius, at whose light darkness became visible, and before whose glow all things false were consumed; others would degrade him beneath the dignity of the philosophical class, and have men believe he had no business among philosophers. Extravagant as these estimates must appear, they might perhaps find an explanation in the mode of writing which the author adopted. To the one class, not very discriminating, his simple and familiar language would at once declare him the man of genius; while with the other class, equally undiscriminating, the absence of rigorous and severe technicality would at once erect a barrier between their talent and their appreciation. Suffice it to say, that his philosophy of Common Sense, his theory of external perception, still holds ground amid the war of conflicting systems and the general uprooting of opinion; and so far as one can observe amid the dim and dusky confusion attendant on the strife, it is a philosophy, or, if men will, a bundle of theories, which is likely to outlive the rough weather of human speculation for a considerable time to come. The polemic which Reid implicitly or explicitly carried on was of a twofold character, and the method which he brought to it was in some measure peculiar. In the first place, it was against the Scepticism of Hume he directed his primary and ineradicable beliefs; and in the second, it was at the Idealism of Berkeley he aimed his principles of the common sense. Hume, as a sceptic, who knew well the functions he had to fulfil, accepted the premises afforded him by the sensationalists, and carried these premises to their legitimate conclusions. These conclusions, as all know, were one bewildering, chaotic sea of the wildest doubt; and the fatal reflection regarding the whole of his speculations was, the perfect legitimacy of his polemic, and the absolute justness of his reasoning. It was obvious that if Philosophy was again to raise her cloven front before the altar of truth; she must disrobe herself of her meretricious attire, and be content to adorn her person in the simple and severe dress of a handmaid. Thomas Reid saw this truth, to the extent of his vision, and resolved to make the most of it. He would avoid the hollow empiricism which had so greatly degraded his century; and he would shun the extravagant folly of aspiring to a speculative ontology on which so many have made shipwreck. The method which he accordingly adopted was that of observation and experiment, of the analysis of the contents of his inner consciousness; in a word, the method of Induction. Such was his method, and such was his design. It was nothing less than the re-construction and re-establishment of the entire speculative edifice, which, in such an humbling and confounding manner, lay level with the ground. He at once assailed the Idealist and the Sceptic in his doctrine of External Perception; and he entirely confounded the latter by his metaphysical theory of the laws of Substance and Cause. He reduced perception to an act of immediate or intuitive cognition, viewing the one total object of perceptive consciousness as real, and founding the doctrine on the spontaneous consciousness or common sense of mankind. He thus instituted the doctrine of Natural Realism, as Sir William Hamilton calls it, to oppose the Idealists, whether absolute like Berkeley, or hypothetical, like the great body of philosophers before his time. Reid may have fallen upon this doctrine by his very ignorance of the literature of philosophy. Of the great principle first explicitly announced by Empedocles, and hitherto assumed by philosophers, that "the relation of knowledge inferred an analogy of existence," Reid, in dealing with Norris, professes his entire ignorance. "This argument," he says, "I cannot answer, because I do not understand it." Thus at least was Reid saved from one great snare which lay on the beaten path to External Perception. But in the further pursuit of scepticism, Reid, on analysing the contents of his observation of the metaphysical laws of Substance and Cause, found that, so far from those principles being entirely deducible from experience, as had hitherto been alleged, they were emphatically of that nature of which experience could give no account at all. Here, again, like the great German critic Kant, he was forced to avow that, while all knowledge began with experience, all knowledge was not therefore necessarily derived from experience. He ascribed those laws to the primary and fundamental beliefs which the mind had brought with it to the observation of phenomena; and without taking account in any very precise way as to whether the Reason in which those radical convictions inhered was personal or impersonal, he left the conviction on the mind of the reader that the principles of Substance and Quality, of Cause and Effect, &c., could not with safety be carried beyond the sphere in which human experience is possible. Thus, again, his philosophy is antagonistic to speculative ontology under every form, whether of a more abstract and indeterminate shape, such as Spinoza, Hegel, and Schelling have promulgated, or whether of a less abstract and more determinate nature, as in the modern speculations of M. Cousin. Reid's philosophy partook to a considerable degree of the modesty of his character. As he knew well that an uneasy vanity was generally inconsistent with true wisdom, so a kindred instinct seems to have taught him a genuine philosophical sagacity. Not that he exhibited throughout that clear seizure of the truth and complete self-consistency, which would have rendered his works immaculate and his conclusions impregnable; but Sir William Hamilton has since thrown his opinions under a much greater light, both of learning and speculative genius, than Reid could pretend to; harmonizing what was discordant, giving definite shape to what was before obscure, inserting useful distinctions, and completing what the author had only dimly apprehended or but imperfectly grasped. (For further information regarding Reid and his philosophy, the reader is referred to Hamilton's edition of his works. Casual information respecting the philosophy of Common Sense will occasionally be found in the First Preliminary Dissertation of Dugald Stewart, prefixed to the present work.) (J.D.—S.)

Reid, Sir William, distinguished for his success in physical science and in civil administration, was born in 1797, at the innse of Kinglassie, a village in Fife-shire, and entered the army in 1809 as a lieutenant of Royal Engineers. The first part of his career was passed in unobtrusive though active service. He passed through the heat of the French war under the Duke of Wellington, playing his part in most of the onsets, and bringing away several wounds. His next important engagement was at the bombardment of Algiers in 1816. He is then found in Barbadoes in 1832 as major of the engineers who were re-erecting the government buildings. It was not until 1838 when, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, he was governing Bermuda, that Reid began to come prominently before the public. In that year he published his Law of Storms, the first result of a course of patient and sagacious observation. He continued to test and mature his views while holding the governorship of the Windward Islands; and published in 1849 The Progress of the Development of the Law of Storms. The fame of these publications, as well as his growing reputation for administrative talent, gave him a high standing on his return home, and led him to several distinguished honours. In 1851 he was appointed chairman of the executive committee of the Great Exhibition. No sooner had that important task been finished than he was made a K.C.B., and sent out to govern Malta. There, too, his vigorous and spirited rule gained for him distinction; and he had just returned home with the title of major-general when he died in October 1858.