Ayn Rand said that the only names in philosophy she could recommend were “the three As: Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand.”1 She also tipped her hat to Francis Bacon, John Locke, and the American founders.2 But in the long line of thinkers before Rand, there were others who groped toward an objective basis of knowledge and morality, some of whom made significant progress. One of them was Thomas Reid (1710–1796), founder of the Scottish philosophical school now known as common-sense realism. His is a chapter that most histories of philosophy skip—including even Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s excellent course. This essay provides a taste of Reid’s philosophy, with an emphasis on parallels between Reid and Rand.

Students of both will, of course, find many substantial and important differences between them. For one, Rand witnessed the horrors of Communism and recognized that all such forms of collectivism were secularizations of the Christian moral code of sacrifice: altruism. Reid, by contrast, was an Enlightenment-era Christian who, between 1737 and 1752, was also a Presbyterian minister of the Church of Scotland.3 Despite this and many other differences between the two philosophers, some similarities are striking, and these make Reid an excellent foil against which to compare and better understand Rand’s views.

Moreover, Reid’s fierce wit, clear exposition of philosophic problems, and insightful solutions make him a thinker worth reading in his own right. Even his contemporary and ideological nemesis, the arch-skeptic David Hume, came to view Reid as a lucid thinker whose ideas posed real challenges to his own. A mutual friend, Dr. Hugh Blair, sent him Reid’s first book, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, a few sections at a time. “It is certainly very rare,” Hume afterward wrote to Reid,

that a piece so deeply philosophical is wrote with so much spirit, and affords so much entertainment to the reader. . . . I must do you the justice to own that, when I enter into your ideas, no man appears to express himself with greater perspicuity than you do—a talent which, above all others, is requisite in that species of literature which you have cultivated. There are some objections which I would willingly propose to the chapter, Of Sight, did I not suspect that they proceed from my not sufficiently understanding it; and I am the more confirmed in this suspicion, as Dr Blair tells me that the former objections I made had been derived chiefly from that cause. . . . I shall only say that, if you have been able to clear up these abstruse and important subjects, instead of being mortified, I shall be so vain as to pretend to a share of the praise; and shall think that my errors, by having at least some coherence, had led you to make a more strict review of my principles, which were the common ones, and to perceive their futility.4

Here are some reasons to dig up Reid’s spirited and “deeply philosophical” works: his Inquiry (1764), Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788).

1. Reid attacked philosophic skepticism at the root.

During the Age of Enlightenment, the weed of skepticism grew up alongside the tree of knowledge, threatening to choke it off. Today, the dominant story of modern philosophy is essentially a time lapse of the growth of this weed. It begins with Descartes who, to put knowledge on a more solid foundation, resolved to doubt everything—even his own existence—and patiently rebuild his beliefs on the basis of “clear and distinct” ideas. He held that sense perception, misleading as it sometimes seems to be, could not be trusted. “[F]rom time to time I have found that the senses deceive,” he wrote, “and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”5 No matter: The ideas at the foundation of knowledge are innate, baked into the human mind, and we can tease out all truths upon their basis.6

John Locke then toppled the Cartesian system, arguing forcefully that there are no such things as innate ideas, that all ideas are products of experience, whether of sensations from the external world or reflections upon the contents and operations of our minds.7 But, he added, our ideas are the only things we can ever know directly; and, to a large extent, those of the external world don’t reflect it as it really is.8

Why suppose there is such an external, material world?, asked the Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley. There isn’t, he answered; there are only minds and ideas, and God puts ideas into our minds directly.9 But, retorted David Hume, there is no God. Nor is there really any “you.” The only thing “we” can be certain really exists is a constant stream of impressions and ideas. All “we” perceive is a scramble of disconnected stimuli, and “we” make a lot of unfounded leaps from incomplete data to mistaken conclusions.10

Consolidating these and other counter-enlightenment currents, Immanuel Kant offered what the philosopher David Stove has called “the biggest, though also the simplest, bluff ever tried.”11 He supposed that the world is cut in two. This world of appearance in which we live and experience our lives is governed by scientific principles. But the world as it actually is lies beyond the bounds of our experience and comprehension.12

As for this scientifically governed realm of experience, said Kant, thinkers went astray by trying to explain how the mind grasps it. Just as Copernicus had flipped on its head the common view that the Sun revolves around the Earth, so Kant prosecuted what he called a “Copernican revolution,” supposing that the mind does not grasp reality but rather shapes it. He wrote,

It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition.13

Kant ultimately concluded that objects do conform to the mind. What we regard as knowledge may or may not be true. Our sciences tell us less about the world than they do about the way our minds organize and structure human experience.14 The skeptical implications of Kant’s views were drawn out and clearly demonstrated by his 19th-century successors, including Johann Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and others.15

But Kant was not the only thinker awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” (as he put it) by Hume’s skepticism. Thomas Reid was, too, and his philosophy of common-sense realism, as its name indicates, provided an answer to Humean skepticism entirely different from Kant’s. As such, it constitutes another side of the story of modern philosophy—one that is rarely told.

Reid, before anyone else, grasped that the problems in Hume’s philosophy lay primarily in his starting points—points that Reid, too, had long taken for granted, as had most thinkers in history. The essence of Reid’s philosophy, as he would tell a friend, “lies, I think, chiefly, in having called in question the common theory of ideas, or images of things in the mind, being the only objects of thought.”16 He was the first to ascertain that “All the arguments urged by Berkeley and Hume against the existence of a material world, are grounded on this principle, That we do not perceive external objects themselves, but certain images or ideas in our own minds.”17 Philosophers call this belief—that we do not perceive external objects but only some mental representation of them—representationalism.

The roots of this theory, said Reid, stretch back to Plato’s “Theory of Ideas,” also known as the theory of forms. Plato held that what makes different objects of the same type similar is that they are material manifestations of the same Idea—Ideas being immaterial, nonspatial, atemporal forms or patterns existing in another dimension. “[O]f the writers that are extant,” Reid reported, Plato “first introduced the word idea into philosophy.”18 Aristotle and his followers, the Peripatetics, rejected Plato’s otherworldly theory and, on Reid’s interpretation, held instead that the forms or essences of objects exist within them: We perceive objects when they fire off invisible particles or “phantasms,” which impinge upon our sense organs and cause impressions in the brain.19

Descartes rejected these phantasms but accepted their effects—impressions or images in the brain—and resurrected Plato’s term for them: ideas.20

Locke—who accepted the theory of ideas from Descartes and “beg[s] pardon of [readers] for the frequent use of the word idea” throughout his Essay Concerning Human Understanding—devotes only a single paragraph to the subject. He says that ideas are “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks,” and he construes “thinking” broadly to cover all operations of the mind—not just reflection and imagination, but also perception.21 He figured that the existence of ideas would be “easily granted,” and it was.22 As Hume scholar Berry Stroud wrote, for example, Hume “never asks himself whether the theory of ideas is correct, and he never gives any arguments in support of it.”23 On Reid’s survey, this was true of most thinkers who accepted it. “I cannot help thinking,” he wrote, “that the whole history of philosophy has never furnished an instance of an opinion so unanimously entertained by Philosophers upon so slight grounds.”24 But why should we believe that all we ever perceive or think about are these supposed things called “ideas”?

In any operation of the mind, Reid pointed out, there are three elements: a mind, its object, and its actions. For instance, “in the perception of an external object,” he said, “all languages distinguish three things—the mind that perceives, the operation of that mind, which is called perception, and the object perceived. Nothing appears more evident to a mind untutored by philosophy, than that these three are distinct things, which, though related, ought never to be confounded.”25

However, “Philosophers have introduced a fourth thing in this process, which they call the idea of the object,” said Reid, and their use of “idea” confounds the object of the mind with the actions of the mind.26 Consider that people often use “idea” interchangeably with “a thought.” But a thought, Reid stressed, is an act of the mind, what we might think of as the action of mentally grasping something. If you think of a lightbulb that you saw yesterday, for instance, your mind is performing the action of projecting what it looked like or focusing on some facet of it, say, the fact that it turns electricity into light by means of a filament. This so-called “idea” of the lightbulb is not a thing in itself but an action of the mind. And the object or content of that action is not an “idea” but the lightbulb you saw or some aspect of it.

Likewise, for imagination: “what is commonly called the image of a thing in the mind, is no more than the act or operation of the mind in conceiving it. . . . That very mode of thinking which we call conception, is by another name called an image in the mind.”⁠27 For instance, imagining a woman in a red dress holding a wine glass is an act of the mind. However, in this case, the object of the mind is not a real thing but is created or its constituent parts assembled by the mind. In all cases, “We know nothing that is properly in the mind but thought and, when anything else is said to be in the mind, the expression must be figurative, and signify some kind of thought.”28

Insofar as we use “idea” to mean a thought or action of the mind, we speak intelligibly. But Reid’s predecessors reified ideas, supposing them to be nouns (things) instead of verbs (actions), (just as Plato reified essences as “ideas” or “forms”). As Locke put it in a letter to the Bishop of Worcester, “the things signified by ideas, are nothing but the immediate objects of our minds in thinking.”29 Not true, said Reid; this blurs the line between actions of the mind and the object of those actions.

Of course, we can refer to actions, whether mental or physical, as things. The gesture of raising your thumb, for instance, is called “a thumbs-up.” And we can refer to mentally grasping something (an action) as a mental grasp on something (a thing). Instead of saying you thought of a lightbulb, you could say you had a thought or an idea of one. Instead of saying you imagined a woman in a red dress holding a wine glass, you could say you had an image or idea of her. Grammarians call this nominalization: “the process or result of forming a noun or noun phrase from a clause or a verb.”30 But then the “thing” you’re referring to is, in fact, an action.

However, said Reid, philosophers often and mistakenly supposed that ideas are not actions of the mind but materials upon which the mind acts. And, given that they held that ideas are the sole materials upon which the mind acts, they reduced all operations of the mind—perception, reflection, imagination, and so forth—to the “perception” of ideas. But they didn’t do so on the basis of any evidence. This “theory of ideas,” said Reid, is a baseless hypothesis.

Likewise, Ayn Rand realized that “concepts pertaining to the products of psychological processes, such as ‘knowledge,’ ‘science,’ ‘idea,’ etc.,” all “require special consideration” and are easy to misconstrue. Similar to Reid, she wrote,

Two fundamental attributes are involved in every state, aspect, or function of man’s consciousness: content and action—the content of awareness, and the action of consciousness in regard to that content. . . . To form concepts of consciousness, one must isolate the action from the content of a given state of consciousness, by a process of abstraction.31

The concept of “thought,” for instance, “is formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of psychological action (a purposefully directed process of cognition) and by omitting the particular contents as well as the degree of the intellectual effort’s intensity” (emphasis added).32 The concept of “knowledge” is formed “by retaining its distinguishing characteristics (a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation) and omitting the particular fact(s) involved.”33 The concept of a “concept,” falls in this same category: “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated according to a specific characteristic(s) and united by a specific definition.”34 These “mental grasps” (knowledge) and “mental integrations” (concepts) are, like ideas, acts of a mind. Like a thumbs up, they can be cognized as things or, as Rand put it, “mental entit[ies].”35 But these “entities” are the products of a selective focus on “psychological action.”36

Reid pointed out a further complication with the theory of ideas; even if we were to grant the existence of these supposed things called ideas, they could not help us explain or account for the phenomena in question: our means of perceiving, imagining, remembering, and all the other operations of our minds. For instance, according to the common theory of ideas, our sensory faculties convey sensations, which give rise to ideas in the form of “images” in mind. The images supposedly impress upon the mind, like a seal upon wax, resulting in perception. But, Reid pointed out, an impression alone could not explain how perception works. For instance, though a seal may leave an impression in wax, we don’t suppose that the wax thereby perceives anything. A hammer may leave an impression in a piece of metal, but the metal doesn’t perceive anything.

Conjecturing, without evidence, that we perceive ideas instead of external objects does not explain what perception is or how it works—never mind why it’s more plausible than perceiving external objects directly. Professor Lorne Falkenstein explains Reid’s position:

Since we must nevertheless accept that [perception] occurs, we might as well allow that we are so constituted as to [perceive] external objects, rather than brain impressions. After all, the former is no more mysterious an operation than the latter, it provides us with a more direct and simple account of the cognitive achievement we are seeking to explain, and it conforms better with the introspective evidence (we seem to perceive objects outside of us in space, not impressions in our brains).37

2. Reid formulated a doctrine of direct realism similar, in some respects, to that of Rand.

As we’ve seen, Locke’s (and Descartes’s) theory of ideas held that the senses convey images of external things to the mind through the medium of ideas, thus severing any direct link between man and the external world. Philosophers call this theory indirect realism and contrast it with naive realism, which holds (1) that we perceive external objects directly—not ideas of them—and (2), as Pierre Le Morvan puts it, “perceived objects or events always appear exactly as they are.”38

Although Locke rejected naive realism’s first premise, he accepted a modified version of its second premise: In order for our ideas to provide us with accurate knowledge, they have to mirror reality “as it really is”—they must resemble the things they convey. We can call this the resemblance hypothesis. Reid thought this hypothesis, like the theory of ideas itself, led straight to the skepticism of Berkeley and Hume. In claiming that man is confined to directly experiencing only his own ideas, the theory of ideas precludes advocates from claiming—with any consistency, at least—that their ideas resemble the external world. And the resemblance hypothesis progressively became more suspect as philosophers and scientists began amassing reasons why mental experiences cannot be like or resemble qualities of inert matter.

Relevant here is Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. For example, in Locke’s view, we all see a given strawberry as having the same shape (a so-called “primary quality”). But different people, or even the same person under different circumstances, may experience its color, taste, and smell differently (all supposed “secondary qualities”). One person might have a very acute sensation of its smell and a correspondingly vivid experience of it, whereas another might have a cold and so hardly be able to smell it at all, leading him to a very different experience. And if two people each were to take a bite of that strawberry, one might taste it as very sweet, whereas another who had just brushed his teeth would taste it as bitter, again leaving each with different—indeed, conflicting—experiences.

So, Locke held that we all perceive, in the same way, an object’s “primary” qualities, including its bulk, figure, number, and motion, because our perceptions of these qualities resemble what the quality really is, in and of itself. We perceive these qualities, as Norman Kemp Smith put it, via a “mirror-like mode of representation.”39

By contrast, variations among relevant causal factors lead to different experiences of an object’s “secondary qualities,” including color, taste, smell, or sound. So, Locke and others held, our perceptions of these qualities don’t resemble the qualities themselves; such perceptions are merely effects that exist only in our minds and so don’t give us knowledge of the external world.

The resemblance hypothesis that Locke and others adopted from naive realism led them to think that the only genuine knowledge we get through the senses pertains to the “primary qualities” of bulk, figure, number, and motion. We have many “ideas of sensation” when viewing a dining room set, for instance. Our ideas of the shape of the table, the number of chairs, and the motion of someone sitting down supposedly resemble real external qualities. But those of the table’s amber color, the smell of the varnish, and the sound of the chair being slid across a rug do not. They are only the mental effects on us of some underlying material qualities that we don’t perceive.

About a decade after Locke’s death, Berkeley wrote that everything we perceive is perceived via sensible qualities, but sensible qualities exist only in sentient beings.40 Like Locke, he held that we perceive sensible qualities as “ideas of sensation,” but, he added, nothing “but an idea can be like an idea.”41 Our mental experience of the shape of a strawberry might resemble another person’s mental experience of its shape, but it cannot resemble something that is not a mental experience at all. All perceived qualities, said Berkeley, are like Locke’s “secondary qualities” in that they are purely mental experiences, not resemblances of a supposed external, material world.

Reid recognized that, in limited respects, both Locke and Berkeley had gotten something right. Our sensations are the products of a process involving our sense organs and our minds. Because they are processed by our faculties of awareness, they must be distinguishable from the material things we perceive by them. So, our sensations do not simply reflect their material causes.

This being the case, accepting the hypothesis that we can only know things of which we have resembling images or ideas in the mind leads inexorably to skepticism. If the resemblance hypothesis is true, we must be incapable of knowing the external material world.

But, said Reid, given that we do have such knowledge, this resemblance hypothesis must be wrong.

[T]he argument, leading to a false conclusion, recoils against the hypothesis from which it was drawn, and thus directs its force backward. If the qualities of body were known to us only by sensations that resemble them, then colour, and sound, and heat could be no qualities of body; but these are real qualities of body; and, therefore, the qualities of body are not known only by means of sensations that resemble them.42

Rejecting the resemblance hypothesis that Locke and company had adopted from naive realism, Reid formulated a new, natural, direct realism that, in several respects, anticipated Ayn Rand’s realism.

Crucial to understanding Reid’s realism is his distinction between sensations and perceptions. Rand would later write that “chronologically, man’s consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual.”43 Reid is widely credited with having been the first to make this strict distinction between sensation and perception (and he likewise held that what Rand called the conceptual stage rests upon the earlier two). Citing philosopher H. H. Price and psychologist J. J. Gibson, Professor James Van Cleve writes, “To Reid we owe the now familiar distinction between sensation and perception.”44

Reid taught not only philosophy but many branches of natural philosophy, or what we today call science. He read widely on physiology, including the physiology of vision, and this may have helped him toward the distinction between sensations and perception. In his Inquiry, Reid referenced Dr. William Cheselden’s account of a blind patient who had recently regained his vision: “He (the patient) knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude.”45 It appears that, at first, he saw merely a wash of color; and only after some experience was he able to distinguish between objects.

Similarly, Rand later wrote, “As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos.”46 In time, though, she held, the infant’s brain begins to automatically integrate sensations, giving rise to perception.47

Reid may have thought similarly, though he lacked the concept of “integration.” It was not part of his lexicon, nor of the philosophical lexicon more broadly. It did not appear in the works of Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, or Reid’s greatest successor, Dugald Stewart.48 If we trust the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of “integrate”—in the sense of “to put together (parts or elements) so as to form one whole”—was in an essay in the very first issue of the Edinburgh Review, published in 1802, six years after Reid’s death. However, Reid held that, at least with visual perception, our minds must “put together” certain elements.49

Rand held, “Sensations, as such, are not retained in man’s memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation.”50 Reid, by contrast, did not rule out the possibility of such an experience but held that attending to one’s sensations is extremely difficult; only artists regularly attempt to do so, and this is the hardest part of their job.

He held that just as we automatize the connection between words and their meaning, so we automatize the connection between sensations and perceptions. In both cases, the relation is that between a sign and the thing signified. “Nature intended [sensations] only for signs,” he wrote, “and in the whole course of life they are put to no other use. The mind has acquired a confirmed and inveterate habit of inattention to them; for they no sooner appear, than quick as lightning the thing signified [or perceived] succeeds, and engrosses all our regard.”51 So, on Reid’s account, sensations are signs by which we learn to automatically perceive the things signified.

Unlike learning and automatizing the connections between words and their meanings, though, learning and automatizing the connections between sensations and perceptions is not under our conscious control and does not require any reasoning. We do not infer our perceptions from our sensations. Anticipating the educator Maria Montessori, Reid indicated how children naturally learn to automatize the perceptual processes.

From the time that children begin to use their hands, Nature directs them to handle everything over and over, to look at it while they handle it, and to put it in various positions, and at various distances from the eye. We are apt to excuse this as a childish diversion, because they must be doing something, and have not reason to entertain themselves in a more manly way. But, if we think more justly, we shall find, that they are engaged in the most serious and important study; and, if they had all the reason of a philosopher, they could not be more properly employed. For it is this childish employment that enables them to make the proper use of their eyes. They are thereby every day acquiring habits of perception, which are of greater importance than anything we can teach them.52

Reid thought, “All the systems of philosophers about our senses and their objects have split upon this rock, of not distinguishing properly sensations, which can have no existence but when they are felt, from the things suggested by them,” meaning the things we perceive by them.53 By distinguishing between sensation and perception—between signs and things signified—Reid could answer those whose skepticism was rooted in the theory of ideas (the theory that the only immediate objects of the mind are ideas) and the resemblance hypothesis. True, our sensations are the product of mental processing and are categorically different from their material causes in the external world. Moreover, our sensations do not resemble those causes.

But (perhaps, beyond a certain level of developmental maturity) we aren’t aware of sensations at all—except by extreme mental effort and focus. What we are directly aware of is the external world. We perceive the external world in a process facilitated by sensations of which we are unaware. But, Reid held, the world is not represented to us by sensations, ideas, or any third factor, as supposed by the representationalism of Locke and Descartes. Rather, it is presented to us directly via perception. Thus, Reid upheld what philosophers call presentationism or direct realism while distancing himself from the problems involved in naive realism—problems that Locke and other proponents of the theory of ideas unwittingly absorbed. As Le Morvan states,

One can be a Direct Realist without being so naïve or ignorant as to think that in the actual world (and relevantly similar possible worlds), humans perceive external objects or events directly in the sense that there are no causal intermediaries between the external object or event and the percipient. Does this concession entail the falsity of Direct Realism? No. In holding that external objects or events are immediate or direct objects of perception, Direct Realists deny that perception of these external objects or events must be mediated by a prior awareness (emphasis added) of causal intermediaries in the causal series eventuating in perception.54

Ayn Rand would also uphold presentationism and direct realism, repudiating the remnant of naive realism I’ve been calling the resemblance hypothesis. But she did so in a very different way. She, too, distinguished between sensation and perception, but she did not rely on this distinction, as Reid did, to explain why mental experiences do not resemble external things or why certain aspects of perception are variable. Rather, she pointed to the fact that perception is the product of a process involving both the object of awareness and our means of awareness. Changes in either—or relevant differences in the sensory faculties of different observers—can impact the perception resulting from this process. Explaining her view, Dr. Leonard Peikoff wrote,

Our sensations are caused in part by objects in reality. They are also—an equally important point—caused in part by our organs of perception, which are responsible for the fact that we perceive objects in the form of sensations of color, sound, smell, and so forth. A being with radically different senses would presumably perceive reality in correspondingly different forms. Ayn Rand observes, however, that a difference in sensory form among perceivers is precisely that: it is a difference in the form of perceiving the same objects, the same one reality.55

What Rand called a “percept” is part object and part subject in the sense that it is the result of a causal process involving both the object and our means of awareness. On this view, it is incomprehensible to speak of a “resemblance” between a percept and an object (or part of an object). Although, metaphysically, there are two things, epistemologically, there is one process uniting those two things—and one unified result.

Despite these differences, in the history of philosophy, Reid’s view marks an important precedent to Rand’s. “Almost alone among the great modern philosophers” writes Van Cleve, “Reid sought to uphold a direct realist theory of perception.”56

#Thomas Reid is not only an excellent foil against which to compare and better understand #AynRand’s views, his fierce wit, clear exposition of philosophic problems, and insightful solutions make him a thinker worth reading in his own right.
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3. Reid defended the validity of sense perception.

Reid held that perception depends on “certain means and instruments, which, by the appointment of nature, must intervene between the object and our perception of it; and, by these, our perceptions are limited and regulated.”57 He noted that impulses are conveyed from organs to nerves to brain, and—although he did not use the same terms as Rand—he pointed out particular ways in which these means of awareness impact our form of awareness. For instance, after conducting experiments laid out by Christoph Scheiner (in his Oculus Hoc Est: Fundamentum Opticum), Reid concluded that we always see objects in the direction of a straight line passing from their image on the retina through the center of the eye. In normal vision, impressions of, say, a pineapple, strike the retinas of both eyes at corresponding points, causing us to see a single pineapple. But, under certain circumstances, impressions strike the retinas at points that don’t correspond, causing double vision such that we see two pineapples. “We may, by a variety of optical experiments, change the appearance of figure and magnitude in a body, as well as that of colour; we may make one body appear to be ten,” he wrote.

But all men believe, that, as a multiplying glass does not really produce ten guineas out of one, nor a microscope turn a guinea into a ten-pound piece, so neither does a coloured glass change the real colour of the object seen through it, when it changes the appearance of that colour.58

Mirrors, too, produce what some might call a “fallacy of vision”; yet even children “learn not to be deceived by these appearances”—usually before they learn to speak. “These, as well as all the other surprising appearances produced by optical glasses,” said Reid, “are a part of the visual language, and, to those who understand the laws of Nature concerning light and colours, are in nowise fallacious, but have a distinct and true meaning.”59

Reid acknowledged that “[w]e can perceive external objects only by means of bodily organs; and these are liable to various disorders, which sometimes affect our powers of perception. The nerves and brain, which are interior organs of perception, are likewise liable to disorders, as every part of the human frame is.”60 Only in such cases of “delirium or in madness,” when “perception, memory, imagination, and our reasoning powers, are strangely disordered and confounded,” can we speak of “deceptions of sense” with any propriety.61 But this liability to disorder is not grounds for considering the senses universally fallacious, as many do.

By and large, though, the commonly supposed fallacies of sense perception are simply errors in interpretation.

Many things called deceptions of the senses are only conclusions rashly drawn from the testimony of the senses. . . . Thus, when a man has taken a counterfeit guinea for a true one, he says his senses deceived him; but he lays the blame where it ought not to be laid.

Suppose that I mold some soft turf into the shape of an apple, paint it, and infuse it with the smell of an apple. You judge it to be an apple, a judgment wherein some would say that several of your senses deceive you. “To this I would answer,” wrote Reid,

that no one of our senses deceives us in this case. My sight and touch testify that it has the shape and colour of an apple: this is true. The sense of smell testifies that it has the smell of an apple: this is likewise true, and is no deception. Where then lies the deception? It is evident it lies in this, that because this body has some qualities belonging to an apple, I conclude that it is an apple. This is a fallacy, not of the sense, but of inconclusive reasoning.62

Rand would likewise write that the evidence of the senses “is an absolute, but [man] must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives.”63

4. Reid likened perception to an irrefutable axiom.

Like Aristotle, Reid held that all our knowledge ultimately must rest on some self-evident basis. If it did not, then justifying any idea would involve an infinite regress. He wrote that for

any proposition, either we find it self-evident, or it rests upon one or more propositions that support it. The same thing may be said of the propositions that support it, and those that support them, as far back as we can go. But we cannot go back in this track to infinity. Where then must this analysis stop? It is evident that it must stop only when we come to propositions which support all that are built upon them, but are themselves supported by none—that is, to self-evident propositions.64

Perception is a self-evidently valid source of such self-evident truths, and all our reasoning about the world is based on it.

Simple perception has the same relation to the conclusions of reason drawn from our perceptions, as the axioms in mathematics have to the propositions. I cannot demonstrate that two quantities which are equal to the same quantity, are equal to each other; neither can I demonstrate that the tree which I perceive, exists. But, by the constitution of my nature, my belief is irresistibly carried along by my apprehension of the axiom; and, by the constitution of my nature, my belief is no less irresistibly carried along by my perception of the tree. All reasoning is from principles. The first principles of mathematical reasoning are mathematical axioms and definitions; and the first principles of all our reasoning about existences, are our perceptions.65

Repeatedly, Reid described the existence of things perceived as axiomatic. “If the word axiom be put to signify every truth which is known immediately, without being deduced from any antecedent truth,” he wrote, “then the existence of the objects of sense may be called an axiom.”66 Similarly, Rand later stated that consciousness is an axiom, “consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists”—and that “Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.”67

On Reid’s view, perception is not something we can or should try to reason for. It’s a self-evident fact that is only ever questioned by philosophers. Indeed, without relying on the senses, a man could not acquire the learning that enables him to question them. Reid wrote, “I gave implicit belief to the informations of Nature by my senses, for a considerable part of my life, before I had learned so much logic as to be able to start a doubt concerning them.” And if he hadn’t, “I should not even have been able to acquire that logic which suggests these sceptical doubts with regard to my senses.”68

Reid counseled his readers that one means of drawing out the absurdity of such skeptics—one that applies to all first principles—is to show that “a first principle which a man rejects, stands upon the same footing with others which he admits.”69

Rand later observed that such skeptics proclaim,

“You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” . . . blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.70

Like Reid, Rand held that skeptics implicitly rely on the senses while attacking them. She wrote, “the arguments of those who attack the senses are merely variants of the fallacy of the ‘stolen concept,’” which she defined as the fallacy of using a concept while denying other concepts on which it logically depends.71 She also made the general point that “An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.”72

Whereas Rand very clearly laid out and demonstrated what she took to be the basic axioms of philosophy, Reid sketchily enumerated a great many “principles of common sense,” the validity of perception being just one among them.73 But he held that these principles are “judgments of nature” that are “immediately inspired by our constitution,” and if we could shake them off, we’d drive ourselves mad in the process.74

As with axioms, though, we cannot shake them off. Even the philosopher who denies them “must yield, after he imagines he hath confuted them.” This is because the principles of common sense “are older, and of more authority, than Philosophy: she rests upon them as her basis, not they upon her. If she could overturn them, she must be buried in their ruins,” and philosophers disgrace philosophy to the extent they try to overturn them. But they can’t succeed; “all the engines of philosophical subtilty are too weak for this purpose; and the attempt is no less ridiculous than if a mechanic should contrive an axis in peritrochio to remove the earth out of its place.”75

5. Reid held that self-interest aids morality.

For an 18th-century Protestant minister, Reid had some surprisingly rational views in the realm of morality, likely because, here too, he took cues from Aristotle.

He held that morality derives from human nature—the good is that which comports with our nature as human beings, and the bad is that which does not. “As far as the intention of nature appears in the constitution of man, we ought to comply with that intention, and to act agreeably to it.” The lower animals act in accordance with their nature and, on Reid’s view, cannot choose to do otherwise. “Man only, of the inhabitants of this world, is made capable of observing his own constitution, what kind of life it is made for, and of acting according to that intention, or contrary to it,” he wrote. But “Every virtuous action agrees with the uncorrupted principles of human nature.”76 Thus, although men may have differing opinions on what is good and what is bad, “there is a real distinction between right and wrong in human conduct,” which is as real as that “between true and false, in matters of speculation” regarding other phenomena.77 Virtue is the right use of our human powers—vice, the opposite.

Everything virtuous and praiseworthy must lie in the right use of our power; everything vicious and blameable in the abuse of it. . . . Knowledge derives its value from this, that it enlarges our power, and directs us in the application of it. For, in the right employment of our active power consists all the honour, dignity, and worth, of a man, and, in the abuse and perversion of it, all vice, corruption, and depravity.78

Rand would later say, “All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”79

In Reid’s view, there are two sets of motives that prompt us to act in accordance with our nature and, thus, morally: “What is good for us upon the whole, and, What appears to be our duty. They are very strictly connected, lead to the same course of conduct, and cooperate with each other; and, on that account, have commonly been comprehended under one name—that of reason.”80 These are, according to Reid, “like two fountains, whose streams unite and run in the same channel.”81 Let’s look at each.

In his chapter titled “Of Regard to Our Good on the Whole,” Reid wrote: “Whatever makes a man more happy or more perfect, is good, and is an object of desire as soon as we are capable of forming the conception of it. The contrary is ill, and is an object of aversion.” He continued:

We learn to observe the connexions of things, and the consequences of our actions; and, taking an extended view of our existence, present, and future, we correct our first notions of good and ill, and form the conception of what is good or ill upon the whole; which must be estimated, not from the present feeling, or from the present animal desire or aversion, but from a due consideration of its consequences, certain or probable, during the whole of our existence.

That which, taken with all its discoverable connections and consequences, brings more good than ill, I call good upon the whole.

That brute-animals have any conception of this good, I see no reason to believe. And it is evident that man cannot have the conception of it, till reason is so far advanced that he can seriously reflect upon the past, and take a prospect of the future part of his existence.

It appears, therefore, that the very conception of what is good or ill for us upon the whole, is the offspring of reason, and can be only in beings endowed with reason. And if this conception give rise to any principle of action in man, which he had not before, that principle may very properly be called a rational principle of action.82

So, “our good upon the whole” requires that “we extend our view both forward and backward,” that we employ reason to consider the entirety of our lives, choosing that which, given the full context of our knowledge, “makes a man more happy or more perfect.”83 This is remarkably close to the “rational self-interest” or “rational selfishness” of Rand’s Objectivist ethics.84

Often, men act rashly, gratifying a whim at some cost to their long-term happiness. Maybe a man feels like buying a vintage guitar that he can’t really afford or cheating a business partner out of some money. Giving in to this desire does not serve his “good upon the whole,” but rather constitutes sacrificing his “self-love,” as Reid said. “To call this acting from self-love, is to pervert the meaning of words. It is evident that, in every case of this kind, self-love is sacrificed to appetite.”85

Rand made a similar point, but far more emphatically. She held, “The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word ‘selfishness’ is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual ‘package-deal,’ which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.” This “package deal” combines the concept’s legitimate meaning—“concern with one’s own interests”—with the image of “a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.”86

In Reid’s view, “a regard to our own good” aids a man in being moral, because consistently acting on that principle “leads to the practice of every virtue.” It might not be “the noblest principle of conduct,” said Reid, but it has a “peculiar advantage”—“its force is felt by the most ignorant, and even by the most abandoned. Let a man’s moral judgment be ever so little improved by exercise, or ever so much corrupted by bad habits, he cannot be indifferent to his own happiness or misery.”87

So where does Reid think “duty” comes into the picture? Benjamin Franklin once told a religious satirist that those with “a clear perception of the advantages of virtue and disadvantages of vice” might “find it easy to live a virtuous life without the assistance afforded by Religion,” but many are not so enlightened.88 Likewise, Reid said, “The right application of this principle to our conduct requires an extensive prospect of human life, and a correct judgment and estimate of its goods and evils”—no easy feat. “He must be a wise man indeed, if any such man there be, who can perceive, in every instance, or even in every important instance, what is best for him upon the whole, if he have no other rule to direct his conduct.”89

The job can be made easier by weighing our own decisions as if “considering what we think best for those for whom we have the strongest affection, and whose good we tender as our own.” That’s because, “In judging for ourselves, our passions and appetites are apt to bias our judgment; but when we judge for others, this bias is removed, and we judge impartially.”90

Even still, said Reid, by itself, a regard for “one’s good upon the whole” does not provide “a sufficiently plain rule of conduct” or “yield so much real happiness” as it does when paired with what he considered to be man’s second natural and rational spring toward moral action: a regard for our moral obligations or “duty”—“that is what we ought to do—what is fair and honest.”91

If plain rules of conduct are necessary, we would expect Reid to elaborate something like a list of commandments or Jordan Peterson’s “rules for life.” After all, as Rand said, “A deontological (duty-centered) theory of ethics confines moral principles to a list of prescribed ‘duties’ and leaves the rest of man’s life without any moral guidance.”92 We might expect Reid to argue for “the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest” as did, said Rand, “[t]he arch-advocate of ‘duty,’” Immanuel Kant.93

Not so. Rather, on Reid’s view, a man’s

Duty, or moral obligation . . . appears to be neither any real quality of the action considered by itself, nor of the agent considered without respect to the action, but a certain relation between the one and the other. When we say a man ought to do such a thing, the ought, which expresses the moral obligation, has a respect, on the one hand, to the person who ought; and, on the other, to the action which he ought to do. Those two correlates are essential to every moral obligation; take away either, and it has no existence.94

So, Reid held that moral status is not intrinsic to an action but rather depends on the specifics of one’s context. Whereas Locke thought that morality could be turned into a demonstrative science like mathematics, Reid held that “The truth of all [moral] propositions depends upon the constitution and circumstances of the persons to whom they are applied.”95

Well, we want to know, what do we do when “duty” and “one’s good upon the whole” appear to conflict?

Which of these ought to yield if they happen to interfere?

Some well-meaning persons have maintained—That all regard to ourselves and to our own happiness ought to be extinguished; that we should love virtue for its own sake only, even though it were to be accompanied with eternal misery.

This seems to have been the extravagance of some Mystics, which perhaps they were led into in opposition to a contrary extreme of the schoolmen of the middle ages, who made the desire of good to ourselves to be the sole motive to action, and virtue to be approvable only on account of its present or future reward.

Juster views of human nature will teach us to avoid both these extremes.

On the one hand, the disinterested love of virtue is undoubtedly the noblest principle in human nature, and ought never to stoop to any other.

On the other hand, there is no active principle which God hath planted in our nature that is vicious in itself, or that ought to be eradicated, even if it were in our power.

They are all useful and necessary in our present state. The perfection of human nature consists, not in extinguishing, but in restraining them within their proper bounds, and keeping them in due subordination to the governing principles.

As to the supposition of an opposition between the two governing principles—that is, between a regard to our happiness upon the whole, and a regard to our duty—that supposition is merely imaginary. There can be no such opposition.96

So, on Reid’s view, doing what is morally good—“what is fair and honest”—is always in our long-term self-interest. “Duty” and self-interest cannot conflict. Just as supposed “fallacies of the senses” are, in fact, errors of interpretation, so are apparent conflicts between a man’s “moral obligation” and his good upon the whole.

Rand more vociferously denounced “the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites” as a “lethal tenet” that pits “joy” and “whatever profits you” against “the good, the moral” and so presses man to choose either “to be moral or to live.”97 She also held that “duty” is “one of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy,” destroying reason by “making the process of thinking and judging irrelevant to one’s actions” and destroying values by demanding “that one betray or sacrifice one’s highest values for the sake of an inexplicable command.”98 Clearly, though, Reid’s conception of “duty” was crucially different from the Kantian notion that Rand rightly regarded as inimical to human life and happiness.

Reid—also counter to “the extravagance of some Mystics”—held that even our less rational springs to action, such as our appetites and desires, when kept in check by reason, supplement virtue and lead men to do good. They are natural parts of what it means to be human, and “to eradicate them, if it were possible, (and I believe it is not,) would only be like cutting off a leg or an arm.”99 Consider that even

The pursuits of power, of fame, and of knowledge, require a self-command no less than virtue does. In our behaviour towards our fellow-creatures, they generally lead to that very conduct which virtue requires. I say generally, for this, no doubt, admits of exceptions, especially in the case of ambition, or the desire of power.

The evils which ambition has produced in the world are a common topic of declamation. But it ought to be observed that, where it has led to one action hurtful to society, it has led to ten thousand that are beneficial to it. And we justly look upon the want of ambition as one of the most unfavourable symptoms in a man’s temper.100

The passions, too, when governed by reason and so “kept within their proper bounds, give life and vigour to the whole man. Without them man would be a slug.”101 Discoveries, inventions, great works of art—all things superb—require intense industry. Those who put forth the effort are the ones who “have a love and admiration of [their fields] bordering upon enthusiasm. . . . So that, I think, we may with justice allow no small merit to the passions, even in the discoveries and improvements of the arts and sciences.”102

And this is the only way to truly live, said Reid—by vigorously and steadily pursuing some valuable end. Unlike a slug’s, man’s “good consists in the vigorous exertion of his active and intellective powers upon their proper objects; he is made for action and progress, and cannot be happy without it. . . . That tranquility of soul in which some place human happiness, is not a dead rest, but a regular progressive motion.”103 The life of unbroken leisure is no life for man. He must be actively and passionately engaged in some useful work.

A dog that is made for the chase cannot enjoy the happiness of a dog without that exercise. Keep him within doors, feed him with the most delicious fare, give him all the pleasures his nature is capable of, he soon becomes a dull, torpid, unhappy animal. No enjoyment can supply the want of that employment which nature has made his chief good. Let him hunt, and neither pain, nor hunger, nor fatigue seem to be evils. Deprived of this exercise, he can relish nothing. Life itself becomes burdensome.

It is no disparagement to the human kind to say, that man, as well as the dog, is made for hunting, and cannot be happy but in some vigorous pursuit. He has, indeed, nobler game to pursue than the dog; but he must have some pursuit, otherwise life stagnates, all the faculties are benumbed, the spirits flag, and his existence becomes an unsupportable burden.104

Such ideas have never been better dramatized than in the novels of Ayn Rand. She held that “productive achievement” is man’s “noblest activity,” and we see her heroes give every fiber of their being to work they love.105

They live lives of meaning and purpose and inspire others to do the same. In The Fountainhead, a young boy comes across a resort town that has just been built. He thinks that “some power had known how to build on these ledges in such a way that the houses became inevitable, and one could no longer imagine the hills as beautiful without them.” They are “like variations on a single theme, like a symphony played by an inexhaustible imagination, and one could still hear the laughter of the force that had been let loose on them, as if that force had run, unrestrained, challenging itself to be spent, but had never reached its end.” It is so perfect, so unlike anything he has ever seen, that the boy thinks it must be a movie set or an illusion. But when he learns that it is real and speaks with the man who built it, Howard Roark, he thanks him and rides away with “the courage to face a lifetime.”106 Similarly, in Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart thinks there is “a sense of fitness” in the large crowds gathered to for the opening of the John Galt Line because “the sight of an achievement [is] the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.”107

Reid, too, understood that the sight of another man’s achievement is a powerful elixir. “While he views what is truly great and glorious in human conduct,” he wrote, “his soul catches the divine flame, and burns with desire to emulate what it admires.”108 This explains the rational man’s love of heroes.

When we contemplate a noble character, though but in ancient history, or even in fiction; like a beautiful object, it gives a lively and pleasant emotion to the spirits. It warms the heart, and invigorates the whole frame. Like the beams of the sun, it enlivens the face of nature, and diffuses heat and light all around.

We feel a sympathy with every noble and worthy character that is represented to us. We rejoice in his prosperity, we are afflicted in his distress. We even catch some sparks of that celestial fire that animated his conduct, and feel the glow of his virtue and magnanimity.109

However, the greatest and most enduring fount of happiness in life, said Reid, is the self-esteem we derive from integrity. The man who, “by a noble effort, maintains his integrity, is the happiest man on earth.”110 This because of “the intenseness of the happiness it affords, its stability and duration, its being in our power, and its being proof against all accidents of time and fortune.”111

Rand would write that “that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection,” and she described pride as “moral ambitiousness.”112

Similarly, Reid wrote,

There is also an elation of mind, which arises from a consciousness of our worth and integrity, such as Job felt, when he said “Till I die, I will not remove my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me while I live.” This may be called the pride of virtue; but it is a noble pride. It makes a man disdain to do what is base or mean. This is the true sense of honour.113

Again and again, Reid hit upon key tenets of a rational morality. Unfortunately, his insights were blended with—and undercut by—Christianity’s standard fare: altruism. “The basic principle of altruism,” Rand would later write, “is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.” As she would make clear, “in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given” for the idea “that self-sacrifice is [man’s] highest moral duty.”114

Nonetheless, granting Reid his context, we can say that he did more than virtually any other Enlightenment philosopher to put morality on a rational foundation.

***

Thomas Reid was no proto-Objectivist. He said plenty that Objectivists would regard as wrong. But he also got more right than just about any philosopher between Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

Reid forcefully attacked skepticism and its attendant “anything-goes” moral subjectivism. The philosopher Wallace Matson—who, although a Christian, was sympathetic enough to Objectivism to write that it “deserved more serious attention from the so-called professional philosophers”—named Reid as one of only “[t]wo philosophers [who] demonstrated an effective technique” against subjectivism. Referring to Reid as a little-o “objectivist” in the sense that he began “with a world out there as a given,” Matson said that Reid showed the way by “shifting the burden of proof from the shoulders of the objectivist back to those of the subjectivist where it belongs,” “querying, at each step, the subjectivist’s argument purporting to show that our awareness of the world is indirect and therefore problematic,” and (quoting J. L. Austin) “‘dismantling the whole doctrine before it gets off the ground.’”115

Among modern philosophers, Reid single-handedly upheld direct realism and presentationism. Professors Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg write that “among all the great eighteenth-century philosophers, Reid is arguably the most learned and expert concerning scientific issues,” and he employed that scientific expertise studying the nature of sense perception, concluding that it is self-evidently valid and provides the basis for all our reasoning about the world.116 It is axiomatic, and virtually all arguments against it arise from rash judgments. And despite the “the extravagance of some Mystics,” there is no conflict between what is moral and what promotes “our good upon the whole.”

There are many more reasons than I can detail here why fans of Ayn Rand may find Thomas Reid intriguing. For instance, he wrote an analysis of Aristotle’s logic at the request of Henry Home, Lord Kames, who requested it from Reid because, he said, “No man is better acquainted with Aristotle’s writings.”117 Reid was also, as Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff put it, “one of the most lucid writers in the history of philosophy” and, as Hume acknowledged, one of the most spirited, entertaining, and “deeply philosophical.”118 And his ideas fueled not only the Scottish Enlightenment but also impacted many American founders, especially John Witherspoon and William Small, professors to James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.

Reid may even have impacted Rand’s thinking to some extent, though I hasten to add that, so far as I know, there is no clear and direct proof of this. However, works by Dugald Stewart, Reid’s greatest student and popularizer, were translated and included in philosophy courses at Petrograd State University, where Rand took several classes in philosophy.119

Rand may have been familiar with the thought of Nicholas Lossky, an assistant professor within the department, whose philosophy of “personal-intuitivism” appears to have been influenced by Reid to some extent.120 In 1906, Lossky published The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge, wherein he criticized empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume for holding that “the knowing subject is dealing not with the external object as it is in itself, but with a more or less exact image of it which is in the subject’s mind and is therefore a mental state of the subject.” On this premise, continued Lossky, “a theory of knowledge is unable to account for the objective significance of knowledge, and becomes involved in insuperable difficulties.”121 He distanced himself from naive realism before going on to argue that, contrary to traditional empiricists, “the object is known as it is in itself. What is present in knowledge is not a copy, symbol, or appearance of the thing that is to be known, but the thing as it really exists.”122

Although many elements of Lossky’s “personal-intuitivism” are bizarre to the point of unintelligibility, the above argument, which gets his entire project off the ground, is strikingly similar to Reid’s. Indeed, in introducing the English translation of Lossky’s book, G. Dawes Hicks wrote, “By ordinary common-sense intelligence it is taken for granted that in and through knowledge we become acquainted with the facts and events of the world as they actually are. . . . Professor Lossky contends that a searching analysis of the entire situation so far confirms the common-sense view.”123

Reid also is mentioned a handful of times in William James’s Principles of Psychology, most conspicuously in the section titled “Helmholtz and Reid on Sensation,” the former being “the great nineteenth-century physiologist” Hermann von Helmholtz whom Rand references in her essay “Art and Cognition.”124 James’s abridged version, Psychology: The Briefer Course, was translated into Russian by Rand’s logic professor, Ivan Lapshin, and used in some of the university’s courses. The abridged version omits the section mentioned above but retains a brief passage on Reid (along with several on Helmholtz).125 Rand’s For the New Intellectual also evidences a basic familiarity with the ideas of Herbert Spencer, who was influenced by Reid and often references him. Spencer also was quite popular in 19th-century Russia.126

If Rand did come across Reid in any of these places, she would not have gotten an accurate indication of his ideas, but she may have gotten enough to alert her to Reid’s importance.

Rand sometimes learned from her friends and students, with whom she discussed ideas on a regular basis. So it is worth noting that Leonard Peikoff referenced Reid in his 1964 PhD dissertation, along with Sir William Hamilton, the editor of Reid’s collected works who attempted to meld common-sense realism with Kantianism.127 (I could not reach Dr. Peikoff for comment.)

Regardless of whether Reid influenced Rand, he is certainly deserving of careful study. His teachings had an enormous impact on the world that lasted for decades after his death. And, as I aim to show in the future, he helped to prolong the Enlightenment even as the counter-Enlightenment came into full bloom.

Yet, for more than a century, histories of philosophy (including several that Rand definitely did read) have summarily dismissed the father of Scottish “common sense”—or skipped him entirely. In his A History of Philosophy, B. A. G. Fuller devoted three paragraphs to Reid, writing that he “puts up little argument for his contention [that we perceive the world directly and so are capable of knowledge] beyond insisting that our belief in an external world is implanted in us by God, and that, if it were not valid, God would not have implanted it in us.”128 Similarly, in his A History of Philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband said that Reid had “a philosophical attitude [of] dogmatism (after Kant), unconditional confidence in the agreement of thought with reality.”129

I won’t here discuss the legitimate problems in Reid’s views or the confluence of factors that led to his near eradication from the philosophical canon. However, bemoaning the “sad history of misinterpretation of Reid’s doctrine of common sense,” Wolterstorff wrote that perhaps “it was impossible to understand what Reid was trying to say until [Ludwig Wittgenstein’s] On Certainty was published!”130 This is unlikely given that, as Wolterstorff himself says, Reid was one of the clearest philosophic writers in history—far clearer than Wittgenstein. But, if readers of Reid can benefit from prior familiarity with any 20th-century philosopher, it would have to be Ayn Rand. None are better poised for that intellectual journey than those who already understand the destructive nature of the ideas Reid sought to counter—and who grasp that a philosophy of direct realism and rational self-interest is the only one based in fact.

“Throughout the centuries,” wrote Ayn Rand, “there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.”131 Thomas Reid was one such man.

For more than a century, histories of philosophy have summarily dismissed #ThomasReid, the father of Scottish “common sense.” That's an injustice.
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“Throughout the centuries,” wrote #AynRand, “there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.” #ThomasReid was one such man.
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Endnotes

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Andrew Bernstein, Lee Pierson, Carrie-Ann Biondi, and Robert Begley for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would especially like to thank Shoshana Milgram for providing leads that were an enormous help to my research and for her thoughts on the article. However, herein I speak only for myself.

1. Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A, edited by Robert Mayhew (New York: New American Library, 2005), 149.

2. On Francis Bacon, see Ayn Rand, “The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, centennial edition (New York: Signet, 1984), 34; on John Locke, see Rand, Ayn Rand Answers, 149, and Ayn Rand, “Aristotle by John Herman Randall,” The Objectivist Newsletter, vol. 2, May 1963, republished in The Objectivist Newsletter: Volumes 1–4, 1962–1965 (Irvine: CA: Second Renaissance, 1990), 19; on America’s founders, see Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Signet, 1963), 21, 53­–54.

3. For more on Reid’s life, see Dugald Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Reid,” in The Works of Thomas Reid, 3rd ed., edited by Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Machlachlan and Stewart, 1852); also see Alexander Broadie, “Reid in Context,” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, edited by Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); for more on Rand’s life, see Shoshana Milgram, “The Life of Ayn Rand: Writing, Reading, and Related Life Events,” A Companion to Ayn Rand, edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri (West Sussex, UK: Wiley, 2016).

4. Parts of Hume’s letter are relayed in Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Reid,” 8.

5. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 27.

6. For an excellent and accessible account of Descartes, see W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy: Hobbes to Hume, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1952). See the same volume for similarly excellent accounts of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume; on Descartes’s prescribed methods for gaining knowledge, see, among others, Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” translated by Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach, available at HCC Learning Web, https://bit.ly/3rW2ktn (accessed February 13, 2021).

7. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, “Of Innate Notions,” in The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, vol. 1, 12th ed. (London: C & J Rivington & Partners, 1824).

8. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 8, “Other Considerations Concerning Simple Ideas.”

9. “To me it is evident,” wrote Berkeley, “that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit. From this I conclude, not that they have no real existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind in which they exist. As sure, therefore, as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite, omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it.” See George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources, 2nd ed., edited by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 477.

10. Hume wrote that man is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” When this stream of “perceptions” ceases, “as by sound sleep,” then a man “may truly be said not to exist.” See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), 252.

11. David Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 103; for an extended argument on why Kant is a counter-enlightenment thinker, not an Enlightenment thinker, see Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, chap. 2, “The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason,” expanded ed., (Ockham’s Razor, 2011); for arguments for and against this interpretation of Kant, see “Immanuel Kant and Classical Liberalism,” Cato Unbound, October 2016, https://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/october-2016/immanuel-kant-classical-liberalism.

12. H. J. Paton, a Kant scholar and author of three books on Kant, wrote that “in one of the clearest [passages] in the whole Kritik,” Kant “shows beyond any reasonable doubt . . . that he holds the thing-in-itself to be unknowable.” See H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience: A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik Der Reinen Vernunft, vol. 2 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), 453; also see Nicholas F. Stang, “Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 4, 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/; for an accessible account of Kant’s famously obscure philosophy, see W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy: Kant and the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1952).

13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1901), 41.

14. For an accessible account of Kant’s view that the mind structures and organizes experience, see Jones, History of Western Philosophy: Kant and the Nineteenth Century, 20–21.

15. For an excellent account of the skeptical, anti-reason intellectual tradition stemming from Kant, see Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, chap. 2, “The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason.”

16. Thomas Reid to James Gregory, undated, in Hamilton, Works of Thomas Reid, 88.

17. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, in Hamilton, Works of Thomas Reid, 446.

18. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, in Hamilton, Works of Thomas Reid, 203.

19. Ayn Rand also took Aristotle to be a “moderate realist” (see Ayn Rand, “Foreword to the First Edition,” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd ed. [New York: Meridian, 1990], 2), as have most interpreters. However, some Aristotle scholars challenge this view, saying that this is an error caused primarily by poor translations. For instance, see Gregory Salmieri, “Aristotle’s Conception of Universality,” https://www.academia.edu/1069932/Aristotles_Conception_of_Universality (accessed January 19, 2021); Reid’s characterization of Aristotle’s views on perception is more straightforwardly wrong. What he outlines here is the view of Atomists such as Democritus.

20. See Kurt Smith, “Descartes’ Theory of Ideas,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 14, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-ideas/#ideas.

21. Locke says, “I have used [idea] to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking.” See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, 6.

22. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, 6–7.

23. Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge, 1977), 17.

24. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 305.

25. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 293.

26. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 293.

27. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 363.

28. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 363.

29. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, 7.

30. Nominalization, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominalization (accessed January 21, 2021).

31. Ayn Rand, “Concepts of Consciousness,” in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 29–30, 32.

32. Rand, “Concepts of Consciousness,” 32.

33. Rand, “Concepts of Consciousness,” 35.

34. Ayn Rand, “Concept-Formation,” in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 10.

35. Rand, “Concept-Formation,” 10.

36. This is what Rand called the “unit perspective.” For more, see Ayn Rand, “Cognition and Measurement,” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 6–7; in his essay “Rand on Concepts,” Wallace Matson worried, regarding “concept,” that “this fundamental notion of Rand’s philosophy seems to have all the characteristics of a Cartesian or Lockean ‘idea’—and we know what that leads to!” The above discussion indicates how Rand’s “concept” differs crucially from Locke’s/Descartes’s “idea.” See Wallace Matson, “Rand on Concepts,” The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, edited by Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen (Urbana, IL: Illini Books, 1986), 29.

37. Lorne Falkenstein, “Nativism and the Nature of Thought in Reid’s Account of Our Knowledge of the External World,” Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 176.

38. Pierre Le Morvan, “Arguments against Direct Realism and How to Counter Them,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 41, no. 3 (July 2004): 222.

39. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), xlvi–xlvii.

40. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 475.

41. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 474.

42. Reid, Inquiry, 142.

43. Rand, “Cognition and Measurement,” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 5.

44. James Van Cleve, “Reid’s Theory of Perception,” Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 104; see H. H. Price, Perception (London: Methuen, 1932), 22; also see J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 1, 319.

45. William Cheselden, The Anatomy of the Human Body, 5th ed. (London: William Bowyer, 1740), 301–2. Quoted in Reid, Inquiry, 136–37, note b.

46. Rand, “Cognition and Measurement,” 5; this view of an infant’s sensory experience has since been disproved. See, for instance, Philippe Rochat, “What Is It like to Be a Newborn?,” The Oxford Handbook of the Self, edited by Shaun Gallagher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

47. Rand, “Cognition and Measurement,” 5.

48. Nor did it appear in the works of Reid’s most important teacher, George Turnbull, nor in the works of Reid’s critic, Joseph Priestley, nor Priestley’s chief intellectual inspiration, David Hartley.

49. Reid did not say whether he thinks we all start off like the patient described above, but he did think that visual perception in normal-sighted people developed through (at least) two stages. First, we perceive the world in two dimensions, and this “visible appearance” varies with changes in relevant causal factors, such as lighting, the state of our eyes, and our position relative to the object (Inquiry, 141). With more experience, however, we learn “to make allowance for the variety of visible figure arising from the difference of position” and other factors (Inquiry, 143). We learn to “put together,” in Reid’s words, “the different positions of the several parts of the body with regard to the eye” (Inquiry, 141). That is, we “put together” aspects of visible figure or successive appearances of visible figure into an apprehension of a thing’s real figure. Thus, “When I see a man at the distance of ten yards, and afterwards see him at the distance of a hundred yards,” observed Reid, “his visible appearance, in its length, breadth, and all its linear proportions, is ten times less in the last case than it is in the first; yet I do not conceive him one inch diminished by this diminution of his visible figure” (Inquiry, 135). For more on Reid’s theory of perception, see Van Cleve, “Reid’s Theory of Perception,” Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid.

50. Rand, “Cognition and Measurement,” 5.

51. Reid, Inquiry, 135.

52. Reid, Inquiry, 200.

53. Although Reid often wrote that our sensations “suggest” our perceptions, he did not mean that we reason from sensations to perceptions, or that we infer perceptions from sensations. As I have explained, he held that the connection between sensations and perceptions is automatic and does not depend on any act of volition by the perceiver; Reid, Inquiry, 130–31.

54. Le Morvan, “Arguments against Direct Realism and How to Counter Them,” 222–23.

55. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Penguin, 1991), 41–42.

56. Van Cleve, “Reid’s Theory of Perception,” 101.

57. Reid, Inquiry, 186.

58. Reid, Inquiry, 137.

59. Reid, Inquiry, 194.

60. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 335.

61. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 338.

62. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 335.

63. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet, 1957), Kindle ed., loc. 24498.

64. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 435.

65. Reid, Inquiry, 185.

66. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 329.

67. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 23913; Ayn Rand, “Kant versus Sullivan,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, centennial ed. (New York: Signet, 1984), 121.

68. Reid, Inquiry, 184.

69. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 439.

70. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 24466.

71. Rand, “Foreword to the First Edition,” Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 3.

72. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 24476.

73. In the passages quoted here, Reid includes as principles of common sense the validity of clear and distinct memories and of the basic principles of logic.

74. Reid, Inquiry, 110.

75. Reid, Inquiry, 102.

76. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, in Hamilton, Works of Thomas Reid, 638.

77. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 584, 587.

78. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 511.

79. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 23872.

80. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 580.

81. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 584, 588, 586.

82. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 580–81.

83. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 580.

84. Ayn Rand, introduction, The Virtue of Selfishness, centennial ed. (New York: Signet, 1964), xi.

85. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 552.

86. Rand, introduction, Virtue of Selfishness, vii.

87. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 638.

88. Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 748–49.

89. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 584.

90. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 583.

91. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 587.

92. Ayn Rand, “Causality versus Duty,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 131.

93. Rand, “Causality versus Duty,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 129.

94. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 584, 589.

95. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 555.

96. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 598.

97. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 24762.

98. Rand, “Causality versus Duty,” 128, 130–31.

99. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 555.

100. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 556.

101. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 574–75.

102. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 574.

103. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 580.

104. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 579.

105. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 27510.

106. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, centennial ed. (New York: Plume, 2005), 529–30.

107. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 5783.

108. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 388.

109. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 593.

110. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 594.

111. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 593.

112. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, loc. 24033; Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” Virtue of Selfishness, 29.

113. Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 576.

114. Rand, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 83, 84.

115. Matson, “Rand on Concepts,” 21, 23, 28; the second thinker he named is J. L. Austin, whose Sense and Sensibilia he references in the last part of the above quote.

116. Terence Cuneo and René van Woudenberg, introduction, Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 3.

117. This comment appears in the appendix of Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1788), 304. Reid’s “A Brief Account of Aristotle’s Logic. With Remarks,” runs from 320–443 in that volume. It is also included in Hamilton, Works of Thomas Reid, 681–714.

118. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ix; Stewart, “Account of the Life and Writings of Reid,” 8.

119. We know that Rand took at least two philosophy courses while earning her degree in history: logic and a course on Ancient Greek philosophy focused on Plato and Aristotle.

120. Rand said she took a course in ancient philosophy taught by a “famous Platonist,” whom she identified as Nikolai Lossky, but Shoshana Milgram has pointed out that “this is likely a confusion, since the description Rand gave of the teacher’s career, age, appearance, demeanor, and scholarly expertise is more consistent with its having been [Aleksandr] Vvdenskij,” (also transliterated Vvedensky), the philosophy department chair at Petrograd State University. See Milgram, “The Life of Ayn Rand,” 38, n. 9; also see Shoshana Milgram, “The Education of Kira Argounova and Leo Kovalensky,” Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012), 89–94, n. 20–23 on 107–10; for a different view, one that argues for Lossky as the likely teacher of the ancient philosophy course and as a significant influence on Rand, see Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 78–85, 366–70, 388–90, 393–99.

121. N. O. Lossky, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (London: MacMillan, 1919), 19–20.

122. Lossky, Intuitive Basis of Knowledge, 82.

123. G. Dawes Hicks, preface to Lossky, Intuitive Basis of Knowledge, x, xiv; I found no direct mention of Reid in Lossky’s Intuitive Basis of Knowledge or in his 1952 History of Russian Philosophy (which, I believe, are the only works of his currently available in English translation). However, the first mentions Sir William Hamilton, a Scotsman who studied in Germany and attempted to meld the ideas of common-sense realism with Kantianism. Hamilton was also the editor of Reid’s collected works (referenced throughout this article). Herbert Spencer, also influenced by Reid, is mentioned in both works.

124. James points out that Helmholtz “confirms Reid’s maxim” in regard to the nature of spatial perception, a maxim James takes issue with. See William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1950), 216–20; Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, rev. ed. (New York: Signet, 1975), 56.

125. See William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, chap. 20, para. 3, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/55262/55262-h/55262-h.htm#page_313.

126. Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 34.

127. Sylvan Leonard Peikoff, “The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classic Logical Ontologism,” (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1964), (Reid) 116–17, (Hamilton) 170.

128. Underscoring Fuller’s low evaluation of Reid, this appears in a chapter titled “Minor Eighteenth-Century British Thinkers,” in a section titled “Reactions against Hume.” See B. A. G. Fuller, A History of Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938), 186.

129. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 483.

130. Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology, 232.

131. Rand, Fountainhead, 710.

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