Author: REID (Thomas):
Title: Essays on the Active Powers of Man.
Description: Edinburgh: Printed for John Bell..., and D. G. G. J. & J. Robinson..., 1788. FIRST EDITION. 4to, 265 x 200 mms., pp. [v], vi - vii [viii blank], 493 [495 blank, 495 adverts, 496 blank], including half-title (vertical crease), contemporary mottled calf, neatly rebacked with old gilt spine and black morocco label; last three leaves creased and with slight worming, but a very good and attractive copy Reid (1710 - 1796) began his career as professor and philosopher at King's College, Aberdeen, but later transferred to Glasgow, where he became Professors of Moral Philosophy in 1764. Many of the ideas developed in this volume, a companion an earlier volume on the intellectual powers of man, published in 1785, while he was lecturing and tutoring students in moral philosophy. The same reviewer who had taken notice of Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man in 1785, in The English Review, Or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, also reviewed this volume: "Although our arguments struck at the foundation of his system, we gave him the praise, which could not be denied, of invention, precision, perspicuity, and pleasing, dispassionate eloquence. Nothing appears in his sequel to make us alter our opinion. He rambles over the beaten path of moralists, distinguished only by a peculiar garb, holding fast his theory of first principles with inflexible pertinacity, and defending if with admirable subtilty [sic]." At the end of the review, noting Reid's assertion that the "substance of the following four chapters was wrote long ago" and in the same paragraph that they were "being wrote at different time," suggests "This must be an interpolation; for we can hardly believe that it was written by Dr. Reid."

Keywords: Philosophy psychology prose Scottish Enlightenment


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