The Scottish Enlightenment E-Book

Alexander Broadie

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Scottish Enlightenment was one of the truly great intellectual and cultural movements of the world. Its achievements in science, philosophy, history, economics, and other disciplines also, were immense; and its influence has hardly if at all been dimmed in the intervening two centuries. This book, written for the general reader, considers the achievement of this most astonishing period of Scottish history. It attends not only to the ideas that made the Scottish Enlightenment such a wondrous moment, but also to the people themselves who generated these ideas – men such as David Hume and Adam Smith, who are still read for the sake of the light they shed on contemporary issues.

Leseprobe

Alexander Broadie is Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University – a Chair once occupied by Adam Smith – and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He holds an honorary doctorate from Blaise Pascal University (Clermont-Ferrand), conferred in recognition of his contribution to Franco-Scottish philosophical relations. He has published many books on Scottish thought and is currently completing work on his History of Scottish Philosophy.

This ebook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2007 by Birlinn Limited

Copyright © Alexander Broadie 2001, 2007

The moral right of Alexander Broadie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-498-0 ISBN: 978-1-84158-640-3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Contents

Preface

ONE  Introduction

TWO  The Enlightenment in Scotland

1  The problem of origin

2  Thinking for yourself

3  Theory and practice

4  Light and darkness

5  The literati

6  The age of criticism

7  Improvement

THREE  History and Enlightenment

1  Why study the past?

2  The dynamic of society

3  History and national identity

4  History and moral philosophy

5  Conjectural history

6  The course of history

FOUR  Morality and Civil Society

1  Some key concepts

2  Nature and society

3  The fragility of freedom

4  Patriotism as a passion

5  Sympathy and education

6  A general education

FIVE  Enlightened Religion

1  Religion and Enlightenment

2  The Natural History of Religion

3  Why dialogue?

4  Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

5  Kames in trouble

6  The view from the pulpit of St Giles

SIX  Enlightenment in the Arts

1  Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?

2  Scots in Rome

3  Painting and education

4  Portraiture

5  The craft of painting

6  Hutcheson’s aesthetics

7  Hume on the standard of taste

SEVEN  Science and Enlightenment

1  Science and its unity

2  The psychology of scientific discovery

3  Theology and Newtonian science

4  The blind geometer

5  The age of the earth

Epilogue The End of the Scottish Enlightenment?

Bibliography

Preface

The Scottish Enlightenment was a wondrously rich cultural movement in eighteenth-century Scotland, and I was faced with a thousand choices regarding what to discuss, or at least mention, and what to omit. The problem of choice was the more difficult because the very concept ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ is contested. Some say that essentially the movement consists of a range of eighteenth-century Scottish contributions in the fields of political economy, moral philosophy and history, while others argue that writings on mathematics and the natural sciences were also an essential part. My own sympathies are with the inclusivists, and I chose to follow my sympathies in writing this book. Since in addition to these fields it is easy to argue that the fine arts were no less a part of the Scottish Enlightenment, I included them also in my narrative, and, having to choose among the fine arts, I have paid particular attention to painting, though theatre and other arts are given at least walk-on parts. Finally, religion had a bearing on almost everything that was accomplished during the Age of Enlightenment, and this fact prompted me to give religion a prominent place in my discussion.

An enormous number of people contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment, and choices regarding whom to focus on were difficult. Many of my own favourites are here, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, James Hutton and Henry Raeburn, but I have also included a large supporting cast. Sadly, many who made a valuable contribution are hardly, if at all, mentioned. There are simply too many. My aim, however, was not to compile an encyclopedia, but instead to convey an idea of what the Scottish Enlightenment was all about and why it is now perceived to have been such an important moment in European culture.

The Scottish Enlightenment boasts an extraordinary number of brilliantly creative persons. As well as their ideas there were the people themselves, a highly sociable group who spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, attending societies, clubs and taverns, enjoying good wine, good food and good conversation, and this side of their lives is important as contextualising their work. These highly sociable people wrote highly original works on society, sociability and the nature of good citizenship, and in this book I have therefore attended to the thinkers as real, live flesh-and-blood participants in the society they analysed so acutely. I wanted to make the point that they were speaking from rich experience. Nevertheless, the fundamental reason why there is now a large and growing industry centred on the lives of these great thinkers is simply that they had thoughts that were startlingly original in their own day, and that still today have the power to hold our attention and to enlarge our intellectual horizons. This fact is acknowledged in these pages by the predominance of discussion on the ideas themselves.

Not all the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment are readily intelligible to the non-specialist. I have done my level best to be as clear as possible on matters where clarity is not easily achieved. That my level best is better than it might have been is due largely to the kind offices of Patricia S. Martin, who read the whole book in typescript and, in the name of clarity, made many suggestions, almost all of them acted on.

A.B.

Glasgow, June 2007

ONE

Introduction

During a period of a few decades on either side of 1760, Scotland was home to a creative surge whose mark on western culture is still clearly discernible. That creative surge is now known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It was a moment when Scots produced works of genius in chemistry, geology, engineering, economics, sociology, philosophy, poetry, painting. The list is long. These works can be examined largely in abstraction from their historical context and treated, as nearly as is possible, as statements of universal significance that somehow transcend the individual circumstances of their production. That indeed is how they are sometimes examined. The aim of this book is to give an account of some of the great achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment, treating them not in abstraction but instead within their historical context, as works produced by people who were in constant contact with each other, and who were among the leading movers and shakers in those great centres of Scotland’s high culture, the ancient universities, the church and the law. Since those institutions survived the Union of 1707 with their Scottish identity fully intact and protected by law, and since they therefore constituted a major principle of continuity for Scotland during the period when the country was being integrated into the new British political system, the Scottish Enlightenment is inextricably bound up with the country’s identity, which reaches back to the Reformation and beyond that to the great cultural achievements of medieval Scotland.

I begin by focusing on what I take to be the two essential features of Enlightenment. The first is its demand that we think for ourselves, and not allow ourselves to develop the intellectual vice of assenting to something simply because someone with authority has sanctioned it. Secondly, Enlightenment is characterised by the social virtue of tolerance, in that, in an enlightened society, people are able to put their ideas into the public domain without fear of retribution from political, religious or other such authorities that have the power to punish those whose ideas they disapprove of.

With these two criteria in mind, I seek to demonstrate that Scotland across the eighteenth century was indeed an enlightened country, at least relatively speaking. It is shown, first, that many people were engaged in highly innovative thinking; the thinkers not only refused to settle for accepting the word of earlier authorities but argued that some of the great authorities of earlier times were simply wrong. In subsequent chapters, aspects of their destructive critical thinking and of their constructive alternative proposals are fleshed out at length. Secondly, it is shown that some whom certain authorities found a serious irritant were able nevertheless to get on with their lives, suffering no more than minor inconveniences, pinpricks, for their irritating behaviour. The example on which I focus is David Hume, whose ideas on religion appalled sections of the Kirk, but whose presence in Edinburgh was treated by many there as a cause for celebration.

Hume is perhaps now the most famous of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, but I discuss the work, and the lives, of many others also who contributed to the movement. These include a remarkable group, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, who successively occupied the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. At Aberdeen were formidable academics, including the Newtonian mathematician and physicist Colin Maclaurin, the philosopher and art historian George Turnbull, and the rhetorician George Campbell. In Edinburgh were Hugh Blair, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and James Hutton. However, these are only a very few of those who could be named here; for one of the most remarkable things about the Scottish Enlightenment is the sheer number of people who participated actively in the movement. Chapter 2 contains a discussion of the relations, both personal and intellectual, between these men, and focuses on the fact that their sociability was an important aid to their work. One factor in their sociability was the large number of clubs and societies that sprang up in Scotland during the period, especially in the main cities, and I attend to their role in the grand scheme.

Thereafter in successive chapters there is detailed discussion of some of the great figures and their ground-breaking theories. The starting point is the strong interest in history shown in eighteenth-century Scotland. I respond to the fact that some of the most prominent writers, such as David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, wrote extensively on history, and in Chapter 3 this interest in history, and in the writing of it, is explored, with particular regard to the relation between Scottish historical writing and national identity, and between the study of the past and the sense of the dynamic of society. Finally, and in light of the fact that the eighteenth-century Scottish historians employed scientifically respectable methods of enquiry, I consider whether their scientific approach committed them, any of them, to a belief in historical determinism.

Many of those who wrote histories also commented extensively on the nature of society and on its values, both civic and moral. Their knowledge of history was of course essential if they were to write illuminatingly on the dynamics of society and on the prospects for progress. In Chapter 4 I pursue these themes, relying particularly on Adam Ferguson as my guide. Ferguson attends to the idea of civic freedom and to the question of whether it is not only enshrined in law but really protected by it. For he holds that adjudications can be according to the letter of the law while yet totally against its spirit, and that the possibility of a gap between the letter and the spirit gives a corrupt magistracy room to act to curtail the civic freedoms that were thought to have legal protection. For this reason Ferguson speaks of the need for there to be citizens who resolve to be free and who ‘having adjusted in writing the terms on which they are to live with the state, and with their fellow-subjects, are determined by their vigilance and spirit, to make these terms be observed’. (Ferguson, Essay, p.239) I explore the issues implicit in this quotation, and explain why Ferguson could not really bring himself to trust the leaders of the Enlightenment, the ‘superior geniuses’ who, in his opinion, were well capable of acting to curtail civic liberties, even while proclaiming their dedication to the very liberties they were curtailing.

Among the civic liberties that seemed at times most under threat in the Scottish Enlightenment was the liberty to say publicly whatever one wanted on matters of religion. In Chapter 5 I discuss the difficulties that some leading writers on religion had with sections of the Kirk, and show that the course the difficulties took demonstrates how very enlightened Scotland had become within a relatively short period of time. These large social points provide the context within which I explore some of the ideas on religion produced in Scotland during the eighteenth century, particularly ideas associated with David Hume, Lord Kames, and also Hugh Blair, who occupied the pulpit of the High Kirk of St Giles for four decades.

Eighteenth-century Scotland boasted a richly and diversely talented artistic community, and it is to the achievements of the artists that much of Chapter 6 is dedicated. Many Scottish artists studied abroad, particularly in Rome, with the result that there was always a community of Scottish artists there during the eighteenth century. In this chapter the work of the most outstanding figure in that community, Gavin Hamilton, is considered, especially in its relation to some of the big ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, ideas such as George Turnbull’s doctrine that a properly slanted education in painting can enhance civic virtue. Since there was a major dispute in the Scottish Enlightenment about the objectivity of aesthetic judgments, about for example whether there is a standard we can agree on by which to measure the aesthetic worth of a painting, I probe this dispute, attending in particular to the philosopher Francis Hutcheson and to David Hume’s famous essay ‘Of the standard of taste’.

During the Scottish Enlightenment, science flourished no less than did the arts, and in Chapter 7 I explore some of the singular achievements of the period. Among them is one, Thomas Reid’s development of a non-Euclidean geometry, that seems to have escaped the notice of nineteenth-century mathematicians who were developing that same field. Reid’s remarkable discovery has only recently begun to receive the attention which is its due. I present Reid’s main findings in this area and discuss their significance. Attention is also paid to the epochal work by James Hutton, ‘father of modern geology’, whose theory of the earth introduced people to the concept of ‘deep time’, a concept matching that of the astronomer’s ‘deep space’, and no less stupendous for its effect on our view of our place in the grand scheme of things. Chapter 7 has a particularly important place in this book, because as we look about us in Scotland we see everywhere examples of the triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment in the field of the visual arts – I have in mind especially painting and architecture. In addition we all know about Hume’s reputation as a philosopher and Adam Smith’s as an economist. It is therefore easy, too easy, to think that the achievements in these fields were the great success stories of the age. But among the achievements of the scientists were many that were awesome, and certainly Joseph Black’s work on the chemistry of heat, and Hutton’s on the geological processes that shape continents, bear comparison with the greatest works of the philosophers, economists, historians and others who contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment. It was therefore necessary in this book to celebrate loudly those scientific advances.

Given that the Scottish Enlightenment was one of the greatest moments in the history of European culture, it is natural to think it a great pity that it came to an end. At the close of the book I wonder aloud whether it did come to an end, and conclude that from one perspective, that provided by my initial discussion of the nature of Enlightenment, it has not yet done so. The good news therefore is that we are, in a quite robust sense, still living in the Age of Enlightenment that was initiated in Scotland in the early eighteenth century by such thinkers as Hutcheson, Turnbull and Maclaurin.

TWO

The Enlightenment in Scotland

Section 1: The problem of origin

The explosion of creativity that composed the Scottish Enlightenment is an awesome thing. It is also a matter of surprise that it happened. One reason for surprise is that, by the early years of the eighteenth century, the country was bereft of a court and a parliament and had become impoverished. It had lost its royal court to London at the time of the Union of the Crowns in 1603 when James VI of Scotland became also James I of England. It is true that, in the later seventeenth century, James, Duke of York, established a miniature court in Edinburgh, but it had a very brief lifespan. Scotland had also lost its parliament to London at the time of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 when both the parliament of Scotland and the parliament of England ceased to exist, and the British parliament came into existence and began to sit where the English parliament had previously sat. Each of these events might have spelled disaster for high culture in Scotland, since a royal court and a parliament are both major centres of patronage. And, even if it was still a Stewart king who ruled (as it was until the revolution of 1688 which brought William of Orange to the throne), the fact that the throne was in London was bound to result in less royal patronage for Scotland than would otherwise have been the case. And so we find that, from the start of the Enlightenment period, a number of star Scottish performers, who would in all probability have spent their lives in Scotland contributing significantly to the cultural ambience of the country, spent instead a significant part of their working lives in England, especially in London, working for southern patrons. For obvious reasons this is particularly true of painters. For example, William Aikman (1682–1731), the leading Scottish portraitist of his generation, went to London in search of patronage and there he stayed. And the painter John Smibert (1688–1751), a native of Edinburgh, practised in London, before eventually going to America. His honorific title ‘father of American painting’, indicates the magnitude of Scotland’s loss. And Allan Ramsay (1713–84), unsurpassed as a portraitist among Scottish painters, also spent many years of his adult life in London, and whatever the significance of Hogarth’s apparently slighting reference to Ramsay as ‘another face painter from abroad’, Ramsay enjoyed great success in London. As well as painters, writers also gravitated to London. A conspicuous example is James Thomson (1700–48) from Ednam in Roxburghshire, who during his own lifetime had a considerable reputation as a poet. He went to London in 1725 and never returned. He is now best known as the author of Rule Britannia though his greatest literary achievement was a long nature poem, The Seasons. There were, however, many others who made their home in England, for example David Mallett (described by Dr Johnson as ‘the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend’), James Beattie, Tobias Smollett, James Macpherson and James Grainger. There were many others.

Besides the departure of the two great centres of patronage, a further reason why Scotland’s breathtaking achievements in the eighteenth century are so much against the run of history is the fact that, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, Scotland was in an impoverished state due in part to the failure of the Darien scheme to establish a Scottish colony in the Isthmus of Panama, a failure that cost Scotland approximately a quarter of the country’s liquid capital. There had also been a series of disastrous harvests in the 1690s. A country in such a low economic state could not be expected to produce a high culture, even less a high culture on the world-beating scale achieved by Scotland in the eighteenth century. What then can be said that might contribute to an explanation of the occurrence of the Scottish Enlightenment?

As a first step to the answer, we should avoid exaggerating the negative factors at work in Scotland in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. The departure of the royal court did not lead to the departure of a high proportion of the aristocracy. Moreover the departure of parliamentarians to London did not mean the end of political activity in Scotland, especially as the Scottish MPs were comparatively few; by the Treaty of Union, sixteen aristocrats went to the House of Lords and forty five men were elected to the Commons (a rather small proportion of the total number of 586 MPs). With the united parliament sitting in Westminster, Scotland in large measure continued to be ruled by Scottish aristocrats living in Scotland. For decades the third Duke of Argyll governed Scotland from Scotland. It is true that British, and therefore Scottish, foreign policy was made in London. But after 1707 Scotland was in large measure an autonomous region, left to look after itself so long as it did not threaten to destabilise Britain (which it did in 1715 and 1745). After the Union of the parliaments these centres of political power in Scotland were major centres of patronage for the universities, the church, the legal institutions and the arts. Scotland therefore, though fast becoming ‘unionised’ in many details as well as in the grand political scheme, preserved highly visible and genuinely potent symbols of its distinctive identity. The country was narrowly spared what would have been a remarkable symbol of the Union when draft plans for Edinburgh New Town were drawn up by James Craig in the 1760s. There is compelling evidence that one of Craig’s draft plans envisioned the New Town in the form of a Union Jack with a central square from which the spokes of the Jack radiated (see Plate 1; also McKean, ‘James Craig’, pp.48–56). Perhaps the plan was revised because of the bad design of rooms that was implicit in the tight angles of the buildings near the centre square. Nonetheless the Hanoverian agenda is plain. Indeed that agenda triumphed in the final version of the plan when the streets of New Town received their names: George Street, Queen Street, Frederick Street, Hanover Street; and Charlotte Square. New Town, in nomenclature though not in shape, was and is a celebration of the Union. But the triumph should not be allowed to mask the preservation of Scottish identity. Hence if there was going to be an Enlightenment in Scotland there was good prospect that it would have a Scottish character.

That there was a possibility of something special happening in the eighteenth century is suggested by the impressive level of cultural achievements that existed in the country prior to the Union. Scotland had been at least as civilised as most other European countries and it possessed an intellectually vigorous, well-educated and outward-looking class, looking outward particularly to the European continent. This perspective was deeply ingrained by the seventeenth century. The three Scottish universities founded in the Pre-Reformation period had always been strongly oriented towards Europe. St Andrews (founded 1411/12) and Glasgow (founded 1451) had been modelled on the universities of Paris and Bologna respectively, and in their early decades almost all the teaching staff at St Andrews and Glasgow, and also at King’s College, Aberdeen (founded 1495), had been foreign-educated Scots, with Paris providing the great majority of the Scottish teachers for the Scottish universities. In the sixteenth century this state of affairs continued, with Scots working at the highest levels in the universities of continental Europe before returning to posts in Scotland, including posts at the University of Edinburgh (founded 1583).

Thus, for example, John Mair (c.1467–1550), from Gleghornie near Haddington, rose to be professor of theology at Paris, and was described as the university’s ‘prince of philosophers and theologians’. His lectures at Paris were attended by Ignatius Loyola, John Calvin, Francisco Vitoria, George Buchanan and François Rabelais. During his early years in Paris, Mair lived in the same house as Erasmus. While provost of St Salvator’s College in St Andrews, he tutored John Knox, who declared of him that ‘his word was then held as an oracle on matters of religion’. (Knox, John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, vol.1, p.15) Mair also spent five years from 1518 to 1523 as principal of Glasgow University. There was at that time no more distinguished an academic in Europe. He was at the centre of things, teacher of some of the great movers and shakers of the age. His friend and fellow logician and theologian, Hector Boece (c.1465–1536) from Dundee, who was also a student and then professor at Paris, became the first principal of King’s College, Aberdeen; and George Lokert (c.1485–1547) of Ayr, another friend and fellow logician and theologian, who had likewise been a student and then a professor at Paris, returned to become dean of Glasgow. Robert Galbraith (c.1483–1544) was professor of Roman Law at Paris before returning to take up the post of senator of the College of Justice in Edinburgh. William Manderston (c.1485–1552), a Glasgow graduate, was successively rector of the universities of Paris and St Andrews. We know of many other foreign-educated Scots who likewise returned to Scotland to contribute to the rich cultural scene. Demonstrably Scotland was culturally as much in Europe as France was.

In the Post-Reformation period also there was a substantial flow of young Scots to the universities of continental Europe, many of whom returned to Scotland to take up academic posts. One consequence is that students in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Scotland were no more in an educational backwater than their predecessors had been. They were receiving high-quality education that kept them abreast of latest developments across the spectrum of subjects, such as physics, medicine, philosophy, theology and law. Among the Scots who went to continental Europe to deepen their education was the mathematician and astronomer Duncan Liddel (1561–1613) of Aberdeen, who studied in Gdansk, Frankfurt and Breslau, discussed astronomy with Tycho Brahe, and rose to be pro-rector of Helmstedt. He was the founder of the mathematics chair at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Thomas Seget of Seton near Edinburgh studied at Edinburgh, Leiden and Louvain before moving to Padua in 1598 where he knew Galileo. He subsequently stayed at Prague and worked with Kepler. The two carried out astronomical observations together in 1610 in search of confirmation of some of Galileo’s observations. Another of Galileo’s Scottish acquaintances was John Wedderburn (1583–c.1654) of Dundee who matriculated at the University of Padua in 1598, and who published a mathematically strong defence of Galileo. Wedderburn later went to Prague, where Kepler speaks of him as mihi amicissimus, ‘my very dear friend’. Somewhat against the trend of Scots scholars travelling abroad, the greatest contribution to science made by a Scot during this period was John Napier’s (1550–1617) who did not, so far as we know, train abroad. His Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1614) was taken up by a delighted Kepler, who was quick to see the value of Napier’s tables of logarithms. In addition to his invention of logarithms Napier’s invention of a slide-rule was to have a substantial impact.

Speaking generally, it is evident that Scotland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was an outward-looking country, well aware of European high culture and wide open to its new ideas. It is also demonstrable that Scots of the period contributed substantially to that shared European culture.

Throughout the seventeenth century, Scots were intellectually very active at home and abroad, as witness Thomas Forbes (c.1629–1688), philosopher and academic medical doctor at Pisa (1659–62), and Robert Sibbald (1641–1723), who went to Leiden in 1660 to study medicine and subsequently became first professor of medicine at Edinburgh University. His interest in botany (and particularly his interest in the medicinal properties of herbs) led him in 1670 to co-found, with Andrew Balfour (1630–94), the Physic Garden (later the Royal Botanic Gardens) in Edinburgh. Edinburgh’s pre-eminence during the eighteenth century as a centre of medical studies was presaged by the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians of which Robert Sibbald was a founder. Another of the co-founders was Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713) who, like Sibbald, had trained at Leiden. A further distinguished scientist of the Pre-Enlightenment period was James Gregory (1638–75) from Drumoak, Aberdeenshire, the first professor of mathematics at Edinburgh, chiefly known now for his mathematical account of the reflecting telescope. I mention these men (though many others also could have been named) to illustrate the fact that during the seventeenth century Scotland’s universities boasted a strong science base. The amazing advances that were made by Scottish scientists during the eighteenth century were possible only because Scotland was already strong in the sciences. Throughout the seventeenth century Scottish professors had been cognizant of work that was being carried out elsewhere in Europe and they had passed their knowledge on to their students. As mathematicians, experimenters and informed observers, Scots had also been contributing substantially to the Europe-wide scientific enterprise, and had done so both in Scotland and abroad – it is possible that at least as much science was done by Scots living abroad as by Scots at home.

I have stressed the interest that Scots took in science and mathematics, but they were active across the whole range of fields of high culture, including theology, philosophy and law. Among the outstanding theologians were Robert Leighton (1611–84), Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), and Henry Scougall (1650–78) whose The Life of God in the Soul of Man was a key text. But none of the theologians was of the stature of James Dalrymple, the first Viscount Stair (1619–95), the outstanding figure in Scottish law during the Pre-Enlightenment period and one of the greatest thinkers on law that Europe has produced.

Dalrymple graduated from Glasgow University in 1637 and was a Regent in Arts there from 1641 till 1647. The following year he became an advocate and thereafter was appointed a judge. From 1661 Dalrymple, by now titled Viscount Stair, was active in the Court of Session and sat on many commissions through which he was connected to important moments in Scottish History. He is also connected to a great moment in Scottish literature since, owing to the events of her tragic final weeks, his daughter Janet was the model for Lucy Ashton, in Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermuir, who attempted to murder her new husband and died in a deranged state shortly afterwards.

Above all, however, the reason Stair is important to Scotland is his treatise The Institutions of the Law of Scotland, deduced from its originals and collated with the civil, canon and feudal laws, and with the customs of neighbouring nations, first published in 1681, with a revised and longer edition appearing in 1691. The word ‘deduced’ works hard in this informative title. The book has the structure of a deduction or inference. In the dedication to Charles II, Stair writes: ‘you have governed this nation so long and so happily, by such just and convenient laws, which are here offered to the view of the world, in a plain, rational and natural method … There is not much here asserted upon mere authority, or imposed for no other reason but quia majoribus placuerunt [because most people liked them]; but the rational motives, inductive of the several laws and customs, are therewith held forth.’ The Institutions, which set the practice of law in Scotland on a sound philosophical base, almost certainly helped to ensure that Scots law would remain in force as a distinct entity after the Union of 1707. For with Stair’s Institutions in use, everybody knew that Scotland had a distinct system of law and knew, or could easily find out, what its content was. English law therefore could not be imposed on Scotland by default.

The fact just demonstrated, that from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth there were many Scots of the highest intellectual calibre working creatively across the entire range of high culture, is crucial if we are to understand how the Scottish Enlightenment came into existence. The enlightened Scots – they called themselves ‘literati’ and I shall follow them in this – were the beneficiaries of an immensely rich cultural heritage. They took up their inheritance with gratitude and exploited it to the full. It is implausible to suppose that that amazing surge of the human spirit in the eighteenth century would have been so magnificent if the intellectual patrimony of the literati had not itself been so magnificent. The outcome makes David Hume quite boastful in a letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto: ‘Is it not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy, in our Accent & Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that, in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe?’ (Letters, vol.1, p.255)

There is a common view that, during the eighteenth century, two Scottish cultures are distinguishable. One (to which Hume refers in the passage just quoted) was a high or polite culture to which the geniuses belonged. It was literary, was based on the universities, the Kirk, the legal institutions and the country’s many literary and scientific societies, and was international, at least in the sense that its members were in constructive dialogue with their counterparts in other countries. The other culture was popular or vernacular; it was primarily oral, had a wide base, and was more nationalistically Scottish, as can be gathered from the many popular ballads that were an important conduit for the ideas and sentiments of the people.

The distinction seems clear; but there is room for doubt about its usefulness as an analytic tool for historians, since the reality is much more complex than the abstract categories would suggest. For example, in the field of poetry it is not easy to categorise Allan Ramsay senior, Robert Burns and Robert Fergusson in terms of the distinction; nor James Macpherson, whose translation of Ossianic poetry from Gaelic brought into Enlightenment society an epic, claimed to be of ancient origin, describing the Gaels in a primitive stage of society. There is a similarly complex situation in the music of Scotland during the eighteenth century, as witness the difficulty in classifying the great fiddler Niel Gow (1728–1807) and his brother Nathaniel whose music, primarily dance music, straddles the divide between art music and popular music, or rather is firmly placed on both sides of the divide. Nevertheless, while recognising that the classification of Scottish culture into ‘high’ and ‘popular’ is problematic in its application, there is no doubt that at least most of the major figures of the Enlightenment in Scotland, the geniuses and the large supporting cast of fellow academics, scientists, lawyers, ministers and medical doctors, were unequivocally on the side of high culture.

Section 2: Thinking for yourself

The literati formed part of an international community of thinkers who saw themselves as citizens in the Republic of Letters, somewhat like workers in a multinational corporation whose aim is to place intellectual property in the public domain. These citizens addressed each other across as well as within national boundaries. Citizenship depended not on place of birth but solely on the writings with which a person put his thoughts before the public for discussion, dispute and improvement. The literati therefore did not just write for each other, they wrote for anyone anywhere willing to read them, and in fact some had a large international readership. A few Scots, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, were among the most widely read and influential members of this international community. The international dimension of the Scottish Enlightenment was therefore crucial to it, just as it was essential to the Pre-Enlightenment Scottish culture.

Nevertheless in several ways the Scottish Enlightenment had a distinctively national character. This will be spelled out in subsequent chapters, but it is in any case plain that Scots who think about politics, economics, social structures, education, law or religion are bound to have in mind the politics, economics, society, education, law or religious life of Scotland, and these national considerations are bound to influence what they write. It is not simply that Scottish models are the ones that the Scottish thinkers naturally light upon as a starting point for their reflections. The point is that Scottish thinkers write as Scots, that is, as people who have lived in, worked with, and in substantial measure been formed by, these same institutions. Hence, in so far as there is something distinctively Scottish about the institutions on which the thinkers reflect (and demonstrably there is), there will also be something distinctively Scottish about those reflections upon the concepts embodied in the institutions, and upon the values that the institutions were created to serve.

There are therefore two elements or aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment that need to be considered, namely what was enlightened about it, and what was Scottish. I shall deal with these matters in turn. The question, ‘What was enlightened about the Scottish Enlightenment?’, calls for an analysis of the concept of enlightenment. With the analysis to hand we will also be able to tackle the question, which will be considered in the Epilogue, of when the Scottish Enlightenment ended. As to the analysis of enlightenment my account will be roughly according to that found in the essay ‘What is enlightenment?’ by the greatest of Europe’s Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) from Königsberg in East Prussia. There are Post-Enlightenment accounts of enlightenment, but it is worth paying special attention to contemporary accounts, for it may reasonably be supposed that those living through the historically conditioned experience of the Enlightenment will have particularly apposite insights into the concept. Though Kant’s account is and has always been controversial, it is the most famous, and probably also the most widely accepted. It also fits well the Scottish experience.

The term ‘enlightenment’ suggests emergence from darkness. To claim enlightenment is therefore to congratulate oneself on not being, or no longer being, benighted. But if the eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment, what was it about previous ages that constituted their darkness? We need to unpack these metaphors ‘light’ and ‘dark’. From the perspective of the eighteenth century, what previous ages suffered from was the dead hand of authority, especially political authority and even more especially religious authority. Of course political and religious authorities were hardly if at all less in evidence in the eighteenth century than in the Middle Ages, but the scope of those earlier authorities was perceived to be different. Among thinkers of the Middle Ages, religious authority was conspicuous in at least two ways.

First, the philosophers and theologians knew well that mistakes could have deadly consequences for them. Two examples will serve. The first concerns John Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), a native of Duns in Berwickshire and arguably the greatest philosopher that Scotland has produced. In 1307, while living in Paris, he wrote a short passage on the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. Some theologians were appalled at what he had written, one even declaring that ‘one should proceed [against Scotus] not by arguments but otherwise’. (Frank and Wolter, Duns Scotus, p.8) The menace behind the words did not need to be spelled out. News reached Scotus, and he fled the city, in such haste that he did not even go to his rooms to collect the manuscripts he was working on. The fact that the teaching in that passage was shortly thereafter adopted as the official doctrine of the Church should not detract attention from the risk Scotus took in placing in the public domain an idea that was at the time heterodox. The second example concerns David Guild, a student at the University of St Andrews. In 1541 he was charged with heresy on account of assertions he had made in an exam. With the support of John Mair, then provost of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews, Guild survived the accusation and indeed went on to become dean of the Arts Faculty. But the risk he ran was plain to all. It had been only a few years previously in 1528 that Patrick Hamilton, proto-martyr of the Scottish Reformation, had been burned at the stake before St Salvator’s College, on account of his heretical views. That Hamilton had been burned and Guild threatened with the same punishment distinguishes the Enlightenment from what the Enlightenment stood out against, the lethal authority of a Church in its dealings with those who contradicted its doctrines.

The second role that should be emphasised as regards the place of authority in the Middle Ages is the routine widespread use of so-called ‘arguments from authority’. These are arguments in which the justification offered for affirming a given proposition is that the proposition has the support of an authority in the relevant field. For example, everything that the Bible says, and everything that follows from what the Bible says, must be true because the Bible is the word of God. No conceivable argument for a proposition could be stronger than the argument that a given proposition must be true since God affirmed it or affirmed something that implied it. And likewise, from around the middle of the thirteenth century, Aristotle, the greatest thinker of ancient Greece, was thought to be an authority on almost everything, and hence the fact that he had affirmed a given proposition was often taken as proof that the proposition was true.

I dwell on these two roles played by authority in the Middle Ages because it was against these more than against anything else that the Enlightenment defined itself. Enlightenment is a movement or process away from the constraints of such forms of authority. This aspect of the self-image of the Enlightenment is negative in so far as it concerns what people have escaped from and stand out against. It is hardly necessary these days to say what is wrong with authority so far as it threatens the lives of those tempted to say something theologically off-message. But what is wrong with arguments from authority? The short answer is that they appear to rule out major intellectual progress. In particular, it is difficult to see that much progress is possible if there is a climate of intellectual passivity in which the authorities on which people rely are not themselves called to account. Why after all should the authorities not be called to account? What is the proof that they are speaking truly? Might Aristotle not be wrong about something? Should there not be some means of answering this question other than by taking on trust the word of a later authority to the effect that Aristotle speaks with authority on this matter? And while it might seem bizarre that the word of God should be called to account, his word is interpreted for us by human authorities and accepted on their interpretation, and we ought to be able to call those interpreters to account. In any case the word of God comes down to us in humanly edited versions, and the editions can also be called to account. We can therefore ask: ‘Is this really what God said?’ and ‘Is this really what God meant?’. Intellectual progress appears not to be possible except in an intellectual climate in which people are not overly respectful of authorities. This shift in climate was a major feature of the Enlightenment.

It has to be said that the comments just made regarding the medieval use of arguments from authority are totally unfair. While those philosophers and theologians did indeed rely on the authority of the Bible, of Aristotle, of St Augustine, and so on, they also sought to reach the truth by bringing before the tribunal of reason the propositions derived from the authorities; and a good deal of philosophy and theology was written by brilliantly creative thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William Ockham, men whose insights into human nature, morality and the nature of existence are still unsurpassed. How can they be thought to have laboured under the dead hand of authority if they made such profound and original contributions to their disciplines? Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Age of Enlightenment (and that is the perspective that concerns me here), there were during the Middle Ages strict limits to the autonomous use of reason, for the bottom line was laid down by the Church – as witness Scotus’s flight from Paris to Cologne and Patrick Hamilton’s burning. In the sense just outlined therefore the word of authority did not merely set the agenda for thinkers; it also set the limits of what dare be said.

If we do not rely on authorities to tell us what to think, what is the alternative? The one emphasised in the Enlightenment is this, that we do the thinking for ourselves. To determine the answer to a question we go and look for ourselves, or experiment for ourselves or reason for ourselves. In this way we gain freedom from the oppressive authority of another’s thinking. This freedom is the space that our spirit needs if we are to grow intellectually and morally. Habitual respect for authority, where in effect we simply leave the authority to do the thinking for us, is a slavery of the mind. Since this slavery, even more than slavery of the body, constrains and distorts the humanity of the enslaved person, it follows that to cut oneself free from such slavery is to take a step towards one’s flourishing as a human being and it is therefore to make an assertion on behalf of a morally sound conception of humanity. On this account of the matter, to think freely is morally superior to leaving others to do our thinking for us, and it is therefore little wonder that the enlightened ones employed ‘Enlightenment’ as a term of self-congratulation. Freedom from intellectual servitude is celebrated by Robert Burns when he lauds the stance of ‘the man o’ independent mind’ (‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ v.3, line 7).

Church leaders tell us what to think, so do politicians, so do many others. We never need to look far to find guardians of the truth who are forever trying to be helpful by saving us from the difficult and potentially dangerous task of independent thinking. As distinct from these kindly acts by church leaders and politicians, these guardians of the truth, there is at the heart of the entire Enlightenment project, and represented a thousand times in the Scottish Enlightenment, the idea of autonomous reason, not our reason going down tramlines that others have laid for us, but instead our reason following through lines of thought according to its own dictates, saying ‘yes’ to propositions because it can see them to follow logically from things that it can see to be true.

This is not to say that the voice of authority has no role to play; it has a crucial one, that of setting the agenda. The enlightened person accepts the word of authority not as something to which he has to say ‘yes’, but as something which it is appropriate to subject to critical analysis. The question for the enlightened person therefore is whether the word of authority can stand up to cross-examination before the tribunal of reason. If it can then it is accepted because it is sanctioned not by authority but by reason. If on the other hand it cannot withstand the cross-examination then it has to be discarded, however exalted the source. The Enlightenment was an age of criticism in the sense of ‘critical analysis’ or ‘critical reflection’. It was through critical reflection that people were to gain their freedom – I do not say ‘secure’ it, because our freedom is never secure. Any position gained from the dead hand of authority has to be defended. Without an effective holding operation the position is lost.

This emphasis on independent thought, or autonomous reason, might suggest that the ideal of the Enlightenment is the solitary thinker working things out for himself. But any such suggestion should be resisted, for there was nothing solitary about the enlightened ones of the eighteenth century. It is one thing to think for yourself, another to think by yourself, and the enlightened ones were not much given to thinking by themselves. On the contrary, thinking was regarded as essentially a social activity. People thought with each other; that is, they shared their thoughts. I now therefore wish to emphasise a second feature of enlightenment, namely its distinctive form of sociality. Earlier I mentioned the Republic of Letters, a notion that gained common currency during the Enlightenment. Citizens of this Republic, writers who committed their writings to the public domain, discussed and disputed with each other in public, and did so in freedom, in the sense that they were not constrained by fear of what might become of them if their ideas met with the disapproval of the political, religious, or other authorities. In this respect there is a sharp contrast between on the one hand the enlightened countries of the eighteenth century and on the other the Church and the countries of medieval Europe.

Section 3: Theory and practice

I do not wish to imply that in an enlightened country freedom of speech would be accompanied by unbounded freedom to act in the direction dictated by the freely spoken words. According to the concept of enlightenment here being expounded, a minister of the Church should be able, without fear of punishment, to publish a book in which he criticises doctrines of his own Church. But this does not imply that he should be at liberty to stand before his congregation in the course of a religious service and criticise those same doctrines, nor that he should consider himself free to teach children in the congregation doctrines that the Church would reject. In short, whatever he says as a citizen of the Republic of Letters, he must do what the Church does. On entry to the ministry he undertook to teach and preach within the doctrinal framework laid down by the Church, and to teach or preach otherwise would be to betray his oath of commitment. Likewise a member of the public can, as a person of ideas, write a treatise attacking the country’s system of taxation, but he must do what citizens are bound to do, namely pay their taxes. And likewise as regards a soldier who is also a person of ideas. In the latter role he can publish a scholarly article criticising the strategic thinking of the military high command, but of course he must do as soldiers do, obey orders.

Enlightenment, as so understood, might seem of limited value because it seems to be on the side of theory not of practice. But this is an inaccurate assessment for it presents the literati as living in their ivory towers while the world proceeds as if their influence could not pass through ivory. In reality, if the literati did not have their hands directly on the reins of power, they had lines, direct or otherwise, to those who did. For example, governments certainly attended to Adam Smith’s arguments against monopolies and in favour of free trade. There is a strong tradition, which accurately reflects attitudes even if it is not verbally correct, that when Smith entered a room in which William Pitt the Younger, William Wilberforce and others were sitting, they all rose, and Smith asked them to be seated. Pitt’s reply is reported to have been: ‘No, we will stand till you are first seated, for we are all your scholars.’ (Ross, Life of Adam Smith, p.376) Pitt was later to pay tribute to Smith in referring to ‘the writings of an author of our own times, now unfortunately no more, (I mean the author of a celebrated treatise on the Wealth of Nations,) whose extensive knowledge of detail, and depth of philosophical research, will, I believe, furnish the best solution to every question connected with the history of commerce, or with the systems of political economy’. (Ross, Life of Adam Smith, p.378) There is likewise evidence that Smith’s strongly argued support for American independence also affected government action. In other fields also the literati exercised power directly or indirectly.