Scottish Realism

A popular movement in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, which attempted to overcome the epistemological, metaphysical, and moral skepticism of the Enlightenment philosophy of David Hume (1711 - 76) with a philosophy of common sense and natural realism. The founder of Scottish Realism was a moderate (as opposed to evangelical) Presbyterian clergyman, Thomas Reid (1710 - 96), born in Strachan, Kincardineshire, and educated at Marischal College. He became professor at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1751. Reid was disturbed by studying Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739), which he thought denied the objective reality of external objects, the principle of causation, and the unity of the mind. In answer, Reid wrote An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense in 1764, and the same year was appointed professor in Glasgow. In 1785, he wrote Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, and in 1788, Essays on the Active Powers of Man.

Reid traced Hume's skepticim to what he considered a common fallacy in the great philosophers Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley: representational idealism, which postulates that "the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them" (Essay on Intellectual Powers, IV,4,3). That is, ideas are an intermediary between the mind and things, which prevents direct knowledge of the actual things, so that we do not immediately know the external reality in itself, but only the idea (or representation or impression) that it causes in us.

On the contrary, the human mind, argued Reid, perceives external objects directly through intuitive knowledge. We know reality, not by a "conjunction" of separated sense experiences, but by immediate "judgements of nature," which we make because our mind is constituted by God to know reality directly. These "original and natural judgements" (by which we know real objects) "make up what is called the common sense of mankind; and what is manifestly contrary to any of those first principles is what we call absurd" (Inquiry, VII, 4). These first principles, of course, cannot and need not be proved: they are "self - evident" to the common experience of mankind. Among these principles are the existence of external objects, cause and effect, and the obligations of morality. Any philosophy that denies these commonly accepted principles on which all men must base their lives is of necessity defective.

Dugald Stewart (1753 - 1828), professor at Edinburgh and a distinguished successor of Reid, laid more stress on observation and inductive reasoning, and subscribed to an empiricist approach to psychology. Stewart's successor, Thomas Brown, moved even further in an empiricist direction, and is considered a bridge between Scottish Realism and the empiricism of J S Mill. Sir William Hamilton (1791 - 1856), Edinburgh professor, attempted the impossible task of uniting the epistemologies of Reid and Kant (who tried to meet the skepticism of Hume in an entirely different way, by asserting that unity and structure are imposed upon the phenomena of sensation by forms in the mind). J S Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy administered an empiricist death blow to Scottish Realism. Empiricism in Britain and idealism in Germany drove realism from the field.

The Scottish philosophy, however, had wide and profound effects. Royer - Collard, Cousin, and Jouffroy gave it wide circulation in early nineteenth century France. Sydney Ahlstrom has shown that it exercised supreme influence over American theological thought in the nineteenth century. While it has long been recognized that the conservative Calvinist theologians of Princeton adopted Scottish Realist epistemology wholesale. Ahlstrom demonstrates a less noted fact: moderate Calvinists of Andover, liberals of Yale, and Unitarians of Harvard were also deeply indebted to the same commonsense realism. Thus it provided the epistemological structure utilized by both "liberals" and "conservatives" in nineteenth century America.

D F Kelly
(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)

Bibliography
T Reid, Works, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, and Philosophical Orations; S E Ahlstrom, "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology," CH 24; S Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense; R Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy; J McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy; A Seth, Scottish Philosophy; J S Mill, Collected Works, IX.