Reid, like his contemporary Kant, felt his philosophical conscience stirred by Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, and, like Kant, set himself the task of opposing it. Unlike Kant, however, whose philosophic system was designed to arrest man's reason before the abyss into which Hume threatened to cast it, Reid contrives to detect the bridge that leads safely across this abyss. Even though it was not granted to him actually to set foot on this bridge (this, in his time, only Goethe managed to do), he was able to describe it in a manner especially helpful for our own purpose.