 The first statement, (1′), expresses Reid’s commitment to an agent causal account of human free action. Reid presents various arguments for this view in Essays on the Active Powers of Man, but it is worth emphasizing that a central consideration that Reid furnishes in its favor appeals not to common sense but to what science appears to tell us. Reid, like most of his contemporaries, was a Newtonian. In Reid’s judgment, however, Newtonian science is committed to the claim “that matter is a substance altogether inert, and merely passive; that gravitation, and the other attractive or repulsive powers … are not inherent in its nature, but impressed upon it by some external cause” (EAP I.vi: 34). Matter, according to this view, does not cause anything. On the assumptions that there is genuine causality in the world and that agents are causes, it follows that agents, who are not material things, in Reid’s view, are the only causes. Reid takes Newtonian science to imply a mitigated version of occasionalism according to which the only genuine causation in the world is agent causation.