Thou hast well said ...

Thomas Reid
(1710-1796)

'After the Peripatetic system had reigned above a thousand years in the schools of Europe, almost without a rival, it sunk before that of Des Cartes ... The characteristic of Plato's genius was sublimity, that of Aristotle's subtlety: but Des Cartes far excelled both in perspicuity, and bequeathed this spirit to his successors. The system which is now generally received, with regard to the mind and its operations, derives not only its spirit from Des Cartes, but its fundamental principles; and, after all the improvements made by Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, may still be called the Cartesian system.'

— 'An Inquiry,' in Inquiry and Essays, pp. 108-9; Reid's emphasis.

I'm reading Reid for the first time. So far, so good. His manner is that of an (almost Climacusian) existentialist, dismissive of all unliveable metaphysical dicta (ergo dismissive of modernism generally, from Descartes to Locke to Hume). Yes, there are the standard calumnies against mediæval philosophy—e.g. on page six it is 'dust and rubbish'—but Reid makes up for it by saying that post-mediæval philosophy 'can have no other tendency than to shew the acuteness of the sophist, at the expense of disgracing reason and human nature, and making mankind Yahoos' (ibid., p. 10).

Well - kept false paths ...

'Teaching philosophy involves the same immense difficulties as instructions in geography would if the pupil brought with him a mass of false and falsely simplified ideas about the course and connections of rivers and mountains.
     'People are deeply embedded in philosophical, i.e. grammatical, confusions. And to free them from these presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. One must, so to speak, regroup their entire language ...
     'Language contains the same traps for everyone; the immense network of well-kept false paths. And thus we see one person after another walking the same paths, and we know already where he will make a turn, where he will keep on going straight ahead without noticing the turn, etc., etc. Therefore wherever false paths branch off I should put up signs which help one get buy the dangerous places.'

—Wittgenstein, 'Big Typescript,' p. 423.