If you go down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, you will come across the statue of David Hume opposite St Giles’ Cathedral. Hume’s toe is bright and shiny from all those thousands of agnostic and atheist devotees who annually rub it to respect him, or for good luck. He became the leading antagonist against the belief in God during the Edinburgh Enlightenment. For him, miracles could be explained away through rationalism, and even God’s Ten Commandments could be rewritten. The statue depicts him treading underfoot the first tablet of the four commandments towards God; the second tablet, with the six commandments of how we treat each other, has been left blank, inviting us to write our own laws. With such an onslaught against the Christian faith in Scotland, who would rise up and challenge him, and meet him on his own ground?
Thomas Reid (1710-1796) was a Church of Scotland minister at Newmachar, ten miles from Aberdeen, when he read Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Although he admired Hume, he was horrified at his philosophy. What unsettled Reid most about the book was the way in which Hume promoted the idea that our perception of the world is all wrong, and even that our moral conscience is uncertain and based on mere convention. For Reid, the evidence of God was all around us in creation, and within us in the form of our consciences. ‘Settled truth can be attained by observation,’ he said. He left the ministry to enter the academic world, to teach at King’s College in Aberdeen in 1751. It was here that Reid established a stronghold of what became known as the Scottish School of Common Sense, arguing that all human beings are born with the capacity to operate through common sense in a real world of objective reality, which we experience through our five senses. He saw that his purpose was to dispel the confusing mist of philosophical ideas that were contrary to human nature.
As his view grew in popularity, he was promoted to become the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1764, a position of great honour which had been filled by his predecessor, Adam Smith, who wrote The Wealth of Nations, and before him, by Revd Francis Hutcheson. It was here that Reid wrote his work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense. ‘The evidence of sense, the evidence of memory, and the evidence of the necessary relations of things, are all distinct,’ he wrote, ‘To reason against any of these kinds of evidence is absurd… They are first principles, and as such fall not within the province of reason, but of commonsense.’
It was this work that not only formed a stronghold in Scotland against Hume’s attack, but crossed the pond to America and was received with great enthusiasm by the thinkers and debaters over there. Professor Arthur Herman, who wrote The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World, calls Reid’s Common Sense argument ‘a science of human freedom’, and says it ‘Democratised the intellect, by insisting that the ordinary man could be as certain of his judgements as the philosopher was.’ Reid’s phrase ‘self-evident’ truths began to take root in the mind of Thomas Jefferson and the movers behind the Declaration of Independence. The evangelical scholars, Revd Dr John Witherspoon and Benjamin Rush, were active in promoting the Common Sense School in America, and it spread rapidly in the universities. It is believed that Reid’s idea was included in the famous line in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, which says: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Here we find two professors of Moral Philosophy from the University of Glasgow: Revd Thomas Reid, and Revd Francis Hutcheson, influencing this cornerstone of American thinking in the phrases, ‘self-evident’ and ‘unalienable Rights’ and ‘pursuit of Happiness’.
‘Therefore he reasoned… in the market place daily with those who happened to be there’ (Acts 17:17, NKJV).
Image: Revd Professor Thomas Reid, http://www.abcgallery.com/R/raeburn/raeburn4.html, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons