A Study of Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788)

Abstract

The publication of Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of Man in 1788 fully completed his project, begun in 1785 with his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, to present to the public the substance of his lectures and reflections during his tenure as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. The Active Powers comprises five essays on the metaphysics of causation and the foundation of morals--four essays dealing with causation, motivation, and human liberty, and a fifth containing the main lines of his theory of morals and critique of Hume's moral theory. Unlike the Intellectual Powers, and unlike his first book, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), the Active Powers has kept the attention of few philosophers and scholars. Even those who have turned its pages are unclear about the central doctrines contained therein, and are accordingly undecided as to their implications and philosophical merits. Through a critical reconstruction of the Active Powers, this thesis remedies a long-standing neglect. After an extensive developmental exploration of Reid's epistemological designs and the naturalistic stamp of his theory of knowledge, I turn to his Active Powers and argue that the unifying doctrine of the essays is man's moral liberty, a doctrine that he supports with two strategic theses--first, that the only legitimate kind of cause, an efficient cause, is always an intelligent agent and, second, that men are efficient causes which act on rational motives. The first thesis has genuine religious implications, especially for his epistemology, but he cannot hold it, I argue, without also proving the second. Initially unable to do this, as a comparison with Hume demonstrates, Reid must then outline the nature of efficient causation by reason alone, and must prove that humans are efficient causes by rendering consistent our commitment to the durable causal principle, Every event must have an efficient cause that produced it, and what is necessarily demanded by our natural system of morals. Although the balance between animal motivation and the practical ends provided by reason is uneven, only the latter enable men to have moral liberty and make it possible for us both to accept the causal principle and to have the freedom required by our system of morals. Unfortunately, I argue, Reid's need for the motivation of reasons, or "rational principles of action," entails an untoward paradox: Either no efficient cause acts on reasons or liberty is simply irrelevant to our acting morally.