Influencing contemporaries like (*) James Beattie, he wrote essays "On the Intellectual" and "On the Active" power of man.  
This thinker asserted that "the idea … can have no existence but in a mind that thinks" and addressed the mind's conception of control in "Of Power".  His early "Essay on Quantity" earned him tenure at a university where he gave speeches collected in his Philosophical Orations.   Influencing contemporaries like (*) James Beattie, he wrote essays "On the Intellectual" and "On the Active" power of man.  An advocate of common sense over Hume's skeptical empiricism, for 10 points, name this Scottish philosopher.
This thinker asserted that "the idea … can have no existence but in a mind that thinks" and addressed the mind's conception of control in "Of Power".  
{Thomas Reid}