The Pastor in the River

Thomas Reid is known to history as a philosopher, the founder of the school of thought known as Scottish Common Sense Realism. But he was also a pastor, one whom we might call "the pastor in the river." We'll get to that in a bit.

Reid's life spanned nearly the entire eighteenth century; he was born in 1710 and he died in 1796. In his own day, he was one of the ablest critics of the philosophers John Locke and David Hume. Philosophers sometimes overlook Reid when it comes to critics of Locke and Hume and instead focus on Immanuel Kant. But Reid had a huge influence, especially in America and on American thought. Much of that influence came through John Witherspoon, an early Scottish-American pastor and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) who was the only active clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.

To give you a further sense of Reid's influence, we can look at his career as a philosopher. He taught at the University of Aberdeen, and then, in 1764, he succeeded Adam Smith as the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Smith was not a moral philosopher or an ethicist but instead made his mark in economics: he wrote the seminal work The Wealth of Nations. When Smith was ready to retire, the powers-that-be at the University of Glasgow thought so highly of Reid that they invited him to take Smith's chair. But we still need to talk about that river.

Before Reid was a philosopher, he was a pastor. His father had been a pastor, and after studying to become a minister, Reid took a post at a Church of Scotland parish in Aberdeen. As it turns out, he was an abominable pastor, and he was an even worse preacher. He would stand before his congregation and drone on and on, not really giving sermons at all. His sermons were more like philosophy lectures. One day, the congregation had had enough, and after the Sunday service, they went up to the pulpit, took Reid and carried him out of the church, marched down to the River Dee, and rather unceremoniously threw him into the river.

That cold water did a lot for Reid. He thought, "Maybe I need to do something else." And so Reid stepped out of the pulpit and he stepped behind the lectern. And he stepped away from the church and he stepped into the academy, and he found the job that he was suited for. He found his calling in the academy and as a philosopher.