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Scottish Common Sense Realism

The importance of Scottish Common Sense Realism (CSR) in the United States and particularly in the Christian Churches has long been recognized. Mark Noll has referred to the revolutionary period as the ‘triumph of Common Sense in American Intellectual life.’1 E. Brooks Holifield has traced the pervasive influence of Scottish CSR at least as far back as John Witherspoon of Princeton.2 The sheer number of stu- dents influenced by Witherspoon at Princeton virtually guaranteed a sig- nificant influence for quite some time.3 Others who were greatly influenced by CSR include Thomas Jefferson,4 Benjamin Franklin, Ben- jamin Rush and Thomas Paine.5 The importance of Scottish CSR in the American Church was made clear by Sidney Ahlstrom over fifty years ago.6 The influence of this philosophy has been studied in such im- portant movements as Fundamentalism7 and Dispensationalism.8 What has not been recognized is the important role of Scottish CSR exercised in providing the philosophical grounding for the rise and acceptance of the Pentecostal doctrine of speaking in tongues as the initial physical evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit.

1 Mark Noll, ‘Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought,’ Amer- ican Quarterly 37.2 (1985), p. 218. 2 E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture 1795-1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), p. 116. 3 Mark Noll, The Princeton Theology 1812-1921 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1983), p. 19. 4 Dale Tuggy, ‘Reid’s Philosophy of Religion,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, ed. Terence Cuneo and Rene Van Woudenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 328. 5 Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam Books, 1977), p. 204. 6 Sidney Ahlstrom, ‘The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,’ Church His- tory 24 (1955), pp. 257-72. 7 George Marsden is one who also has noted the relationship between Fundamental- ism and CSR. See George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 8 See E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 2. Scottish Common Sense Realism 9

Scottish CSR grew out of the writings of Thomas Reid of the Uni- versities of Aberdeen and Glasgow, Scotland. It was in Glasgow that Reid succeeded Adam Smith in moral philosophy.9 Reid reacted to the publication of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature by questioning the foundations of the philosophy behind Hume’s treatise. Reid con- tended that there was a fundamentally incorrect hypothesis at the heart of the treatise which he could neither accept nor verify, a hypothesis which he referred to as the ‘ideal system’ or the ‘theory of ideas,’ which taught that every object in our knowledge is only an idea in our mind.10 This hypothesis is also called the ‘copy theory,’ the idea that the only relation between the external world and our mental ideas of that world is that the latter are (hopefully) a copy of the former.11 The concept was not unique to David Hume. As Reid examined Hume’s treatise, he came to the conclusion that the ‘theory of ideas’ could be traced all the way back to Descartes. He further concluded that this concept could only lead to complete skepticism about the nature of the world in which we live, since under this philosophy one could never be sure that one’s ex- perience had any real connection to the world outside of one’s mind. While Reid was not saying that this was the conclusion of all of those previous philosophers upon which Hume had built, he did insist that, in spite of the attempts by previous philosophers to prove the existence of the material world, including Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley, he could only conclude that they had failed to do so. Reid wrote that ‘poor untaught mortals’ might believe in all kinds of things, including the sun, moon and stars, and in the material substance of the rest of their lives, but that philosophers, particularly Hume, seemed to be saying that no such thing exists, but that, ‘pitying the credulity of the vulgar, [they] resolve to have no faith but what is founded upon rea- son.’12 Reid concluded that the ‘ideal theory’ inevitably led to skepticism about what really existed and that the logical conclusion was that what seemed to exist might be nothing more than an idea in the mind with no corresponding reality. The skepticism of Hume played havoc with the emerging field of scientific endeavor. By the time he was finished, Hume had called into question the very concept of causality, which he had called nothing more than a ‘persistent human prejudice based on habit and habitual expectation.’13 Reid immediately perceived the threat that this presented

9 Ahlstrom, ‘The Scottish Philosophy,’ p. 260. 10 Andrew Seth, Scottish Philosophy: A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume (New York: Garland, 1983), p. 7. 11 Flower and Murphey, p. 248. 12 Sir William Hamilton, The Works of Thomas Reid, D.D., vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1872), p. 100. 13 Flower and Murphey, p. 243.