Scottish Enlightenment

Scottish Enlightenment, the conjunction of minds, ideas, and publications in Scotland during the whole of the second half of the 18th century and extending over several decades on either side of that period. Contemporaries referred to Edinburgh as a “hotbed of genius.” Voltaire in 1762 wrote in characteristically provocative fashion that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening,” and Benjamin Franklin caught the mood of the place in his Autobiography (1794): “Persons of good Sense…seldom fall into [disputation], except Lawyers, University Men, and Men of all Sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.”

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The personalities were fundamental: most prominent in retrospect are the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, matched at the time by Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. However, the Scottish Enlightenment was neither a single school of philosophical thought nor a single intellectual movement. But movement it was: a movement of ideas and the disputation of those ideas. The men who developed and disputed those ideas as they met in the societies and ate and drank in the taverns of the Old Town in Edinburgh created momentum on many fronts. It was a movement of taste in architecture—Robert Adam and his brother James, followed in due course by William Playfair; a movement of taste in literature and belles lettres—Hugh Blair, the holder of the first chair of rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh, and the poets James Thomson, Allan Ramsay, and the incomparable Robert Burns, as well as the playwright John Home; a movement in the arts, especially in portraiture—the portrait artists Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn and the miniature wax and paste portraitists James Tassie, his nephew William Tassie, and John Henning. Equally central were those who made lasting and formative impacts on the development of the sciences of mathematics (Colin Maclaurin), medicine (William Cullen), chemistry (Joseph Black), engineering (James Watt and Thomas Telford), and geology (James Hutton).

The philosophical context

Underlying and stimulating the activity in all these fields were developments in philosophy, which, although they do not define a single school, set a context for the intellectual endeavours that were integral to the Scottish Enlightenment. These developments had four key characteristics. The first was a skepticism about various forms of rationalism and about the attempts by such thinkers as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to find a single method or set of rules of rationality from which all truths might be deduced. The second was the central place given to what was connoted by the terms sentiment and sense (as in the technical expression “moral sense,” which was at the core of the moral sense school founded by the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, and as in the name given to the philosophy of common sense, which emerged in Scotland in the 18th century). The third was the drive toward empirical methods of inquiry, and the fourth, which draws on all of these, was given a prominent position in the title of the first and ultimately most important of Hume’s writings: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). Hume’s dream, shared by others, was to replace the appeal to forms of rationalism as a means of distinguishing true from false beliefs with the development of a science of human nature.

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In Scotland at this time Alexander Pope’s line “The proper study of mankind is man” (An Essay on Man [1733–34]) came to crystallize the way in which much intellectual inquiry and artistic expression came to life. Yet this may lead to a focus that rests too much upon the individual human being; as a corrective, the vigour of the study of the history and nature of human society (Hume, Smith, William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson) and of the detailed study of the natural world and the capacity of humans to manipulate it (Black, Cullen, Watt, and Hutton) should be recalled.

Origins and activity in Edinburgh

There are those who specify that the Scottish Enlightenment began in 1740, although this fails to take account of the date of publication of one of the two most significant books to come out of the period: Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, the product of agonized labours in France in the 1730s. Its first two volumes were published in 1739, preceding the other truly great work of the Enlightenment, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, by 37 years. Also very influential was the first major work of Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). Hutcheson, a professor at the University of Glasgow, was a major source of inspiration for his pupil Smith as well as for Smith’s professorial successor, Thomas Reid.

The primary focus of the activity of the Scottish Enlightenment, however, was the city of Edinburgh—initially the closes, the wynds, and the staircases of the tenements clinging to the rock of the Old Town and thereafter the Classical proportions of the New Town, which remains the clearest architectural expression and physical legacy of the intellectual ferment of that period. The energy of mind to be found there was astonishing but indeed was part of a broader Scottish phenomenon, not least in Glasgow and Aberdeen.

The disputatious men of Edinburgh to whom Franklin referred honed their skills in many ways—over a bottle of claret, over the dining tables of the taverns in which they gathered, in many printed papers and books, and in the learned societies that waxed and waned at that time. The societies were variously inquisitive and intellectually improving: they included, for example, the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland, active in 1723, and the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge, founded in 1731, with a parallel student society founded in 1734. The first volume of published papers from the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge appeared in 1733 as Medical Essays and Observations. Even more definitive of the Scottish Enlightenment were the activities of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society for Improving Arts and Sciences and Particularly Natural Knowledge; its range of topics, officials, and contributors are well illustrated in the three volumes of Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary, published intermittently from 1754. Henry Home, later Lord Kames, who helped reinvigorate the society, begins the first of these published papers (“Of the Laws of Motion”) in a way that provides a manifesto-like statement for the society’s activities: “Nothing has more perplexed philosophy than an unlucky propensity, which makes us grasp at principles without due regard to facts and experiments.” A page later, however, he adds a complementary thought: “Facts and experiments are useless lumber if we are not to reason about them, nor draw any consequences from them.”

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The society’s other collected papers include many based upon physical dissection of the human body; they also include another, dated Dec. 22, 1755, “giving an Account of the Agitation of the Waters of Loch Ness on the 1st of November 1755, when the City of Lisbon was destroyed by an Earthquake,” and a piece from Franklin sent by letter to Hume “on the Method of securing Houses from the Effects of Lightning.” In addition to the link with Franklin, the society showed its aspirations to a place in the international firmament by electing Voltaire a foreign member in the mid-1740s.

The diversity of the intellectual activity is evident, as is the focus upon empirical methods and the application of such learning as “useful knowledge.” This expression had currency in both the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 under Franklin’s impetus, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1783 when the Edinburgh Philosophical Society was dissolved to make way for it. Such aspiration to and engagement with the advancement of learning was by no means confined to Edinburgh, and even in Scotland comparable societies were to be found in Glasgow and Aberdeen. But the intensity of the engagement in Edinburgh, as well as the genius of the outcome, was quite distinctive.