Thomas Reid Quotes (20 Quotes)

In the strict and proper sense, I take an efficient cause to be a being who had power to produce the effect, and exerted that power for that purpose.

Every indication of wisdom, taken from the effect, is equally an indication of power to execute what wisdom planned.

It follows also, that the active power, of which only we can have any distinct conception, can be only in beings that have understanding and will.

The vulgar allow that this expression implies a mind that thinks, an act of that mind which we call thinking, and an object about which we think. But, besides these three, the philosopher conceives that there is a fourth-to wit, the idea, which is the immediate object.

This is the philosophical meaning of the word idea and we may observe that this meaning of that word is built upon a philosophical opinion for, if philosophers had not believed that there are such immediate objects of all our thoughts in the mind, they would never have used the word idea to express them.

If we could obtain a distinct and full history of all that hath passed in the mind of a child from the beginning of life and sensation till it grows up to the use of reason, how its infant faculties began to work, and how they brought forth and ripened all the various notions, opin-ions, and sentiments, which we find in ourselves when we come to be capable of reflection, this would be a trea-sure of natural history which would probably give more light into the human faculties, than all the systems of philosophers about them from the beginning of the world.

If no other test or measure of the strength of motives can be found but their prevailing, then this boasted principle will be only an identical proposition, and signify only that the strongest motive is the strongest motive, and the motive that prevails is the motive that prevails -which proves nothing.

It is the invaluable merit of the great Basle mathematician Leonard Euler, to have freed the analytical calculus from all geometric bounds, and thus to have established analysis as an independent science, which from his time on has maintained an unchallenged leadership in the field of mathematics.

It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances.

But I have never seen any proof that there are such laws of nature, far less any proof that the strongest motive always prevails.

However much our late fatalists have boasted of this principle as of a law of nature... I am persuaded that, whenever they shall be pleased to give us any measure of the strength of motives distinct from their prevalence, it will appear, from experience, that the strongest motive does not always prevail.

The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules.

This is the original mosaic tile and marble.

When, therefore, in common language, we speak of having an idea of anything, we mean no more by that expression, but thinking of it.

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

The idea is in the mind itself, and can have no existence but in a mind that thinks but the remote or mediate object may be something external, as the sun or moon it may be something past or future it may be something which never existed.

A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.

And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also.

But when, in the first setting out, he takes it for granted without proof, that distinctions found in the structure of all languages, have no foundation in nature; this surely is too fastidious a way of treating the common sense of mankind.