Thomas Brown, a philosopher on the periphery of the common sense school, was born at Kirkmabreck in Scotland. Radically opposed eighteenth-century traditions met in him. He shared with the common sense school, which derived from Thomas Reid, a number of its metaphysical doctrines and its appeal to intuitive truths; and he was also Reid's tireless critic. Philosophy, for Brown, was very largely "analysis": analysis of what he regarded as darkened notions, designed to exhibit their character free from spurious mystery and complication; analysis of the genuinely complex into its elementary constituents and of the deceptively simple into its real complexity. He saw Reid as a great resister of analysis. In the procedure of analysis Brown was influenced by French empiricism in the line of descent from Étienne Bonnot de Condillac.

During the course of his studies at the University of Edinburgh, Brown attended the...