Abstract

This volume features Reid’s previously unpublished manuscripts on natural history, physiology, and materialism. The manuscripts, over 150 pages of new material, follow a lengthy introduction in which Reid’s philosophical orientation and opponents are nicely laid out. What would otherwise be a narrowly informative reading of the Natural History manuscripts, that is, Reid’s notes to himself on Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle and Bonnet’s Contemplation de la Nature, is instead illuminated by Wood’s tour of the relevant eighteenth-century debates. Wood achieves this by indicating that Reid’s interest in botany derived from his goal of showing that the vital functions of plants depended on immaterial causes. Also informative are selections from Reid’s correspondence with Lord Kames on the issue of whether unthinking matter could be self-organizing, and the chronicling of Reid’s development on the subject of generation, which paralleled Bonnet.