James McCosh, an influential representative of "commonsense realism," was born in southern Ayrshire, Scotland. He was educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. McCosh was licensed for the ministry in 1834 and served as a pastor of the Established Church of Scotland until 1850, when he was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen's College of Belfast. In 1868 he came to America to serve as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), a position he held until 1888.

McCosh's philosophical outlook was in its largest features inherited from the "Scottish school" of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and others. On one side this meant the denial that our beliefs about the external world rest on any dubious inferences, causal or otherwise, from immediately presented ideas. Those beliefs are rather the natural, noninferential accompaniments of sensation, and their general reliability cannot sensibly be questioned. On another...