ABSTRACT
Reid offers his tentative list (“I shall rejoice to see an enumeration more perfect”) of what we are calling his ‘rafts’, and what he calls “the first principles of contingent truths”, in chapter v of Essay VI of the Intellectual Powers. At first sight, this list looks like an impatient begging, one by one, of all the questions that philosophers have found most important to ask and most difficult to answer. We have already encountered principle 1, Reid’s equivalent of the cogito, which he baldly asserts without going to any Cartesian trouble. Reid’s procedure appears to possess, in Russell’s famous phrase, all the advantages of theft over honest toil. Problems of the self are summarily dealt with by principles 2 and 4:
2. Another first principle … is, That the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call MYSELF, my MIND, my PERSON.
