The Scottish EnlightenmentM.A.StewartINTRODUCTIONThe term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ is used to characterize a hundred years of intellectualand cultural endeavour that started around the second decade of the eighteenth century.Our knowledge of the period is changing, as scholars investigate more of the manuscriptdeposits and publishers reissue more of the scarcer printed sources. Although I am hereconcerned with philosophical developments, the Enlightenment was not narrowlyphilosophical. Scottish historical, legal and medical writers responded to the influence ofphilosophical debate; philosophers themselves did pioneering work in social science; andthe natural sciences and the arts reached new heights of national and internationaldistinction.1 The Enlightenment should not, however, be defined solely in terms ofinnovation. There were significant continuities with the previous century, while thechallenge of criticism brought a new quality to the work of the best defenders of orthodoxtradition.The controversy surrounding the replacement of the Catholic King James by the jointmonarchy of William and Mary in 1688 had reawakened interest in the nature and basisof civil government, and fuelled a certain amount of idealism about the reform of theinstitutions of state to re-establish ancient ideals of public and personal virtue.2 TheScottish universities were caught up in this mood of reform, while constrained by thepreparedness of those involved to subscribe the Westminster Confession of Faith.William III, faced with the rival claims of episcopacy and presbytery to the control of theScottish Church, awarded the contest to the presbyterians on the understanding that theyappoint ‘moderate’ persons to positions of influence, persons who would avoid pulpitdemagoguery and theological witchhunts. The mandate was more easily fulfilled in theuniversities, where there was greater influence over appointments than in the Church,though an attempt in the 1690s to steer the universities into a uniform national syllabusfailed.One reform, introduced piecemeal over the following century, contributed to atemporary superiority of the Scottish over the English universities: the institution ofDutch-style specialist appointments in the different branches of the curriculum.Scotland was unusual in the degree to which developments in philosophy occurredwithin, rather than in opposition to, the universities.3 The main exception is in the workof David Hume (1711–76), who was twice barred, by clerical opposition, from universityappointments, at Edinburgh in 1745 and Glasgow in 1752. But Hume interacted with theintellectual establishment, and it will be convenient to build the following account roundsome of this interaction.The curriculum was dominated by the three traditional divisions of philosophy: logicand metaphysics, moral philosophy, and natural philosophy.4 Logic in the early part ofthe century was still substantially Aristotelian, sometimes recast in the language of‘ideas’, but half a century later Alexander Gerard, Thomas Reid and George Campbellcould write of this formal training as largely discredited. Meanwhile rhetoric, anothertraditional component, was being transformed into the study of belles lettres.5 A certainamount of epistemology, Cartesian and later Lockean, whose methodology ran counter tothat of syllogistic logic, might be added.6 Metaphysics, even after the decline ofAristotelianism, remained primarily the study of ontology. This could extend, particularlyin later usage and among medical writers, to the nature of mind and its modes ofoperation.7 The latter was traditionally called ‘pneumatology’ and was regarded as thefoundation for moral philosophy. Moral philosophy was not confined to ethics, for ethicshad to be grounded in a thorough understanding of human nature. A century earlier, thishad been the prerogative of the theologians, whose emphasis on humanity’s fallen statehad encouraged a strictly biblical view of moral teaching. The Enlightenment changedthis ethos, but the aim of instruction remained one of instilling principles of virtue andgood citizenship within a context of general piety.8As for natural philosophy, Cartesianism and the controversies it brought in its wakehad become the staple of most universities by the later seventeenth century, but gave wayto the science of the early Royal Society by the turn of the century. This was presented indifferent ways in different institutions, according to the experimental facilities andmathematical expertise available. Some stressed the experimental or at least datagatheringbasis of the new science, some its inherently systematic character in reducingdiverse phenomena to a body of laws; while all of them in some degree saw the differentbranches of philosophy as sharing a common methodology.9
THE AGE OF HUTCHESONThe official face of reform appears in the increasing use of classical Stoic sources forteaching purposes.10 These offered a morality attractive enough to the moderate Calvinistmind to satisfy the pedagogical requirement that secular writings should not endanger thefaith. Cicero was frequently studied as a Stoic resource, and Scottish editions of Seneca,Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius were reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. FrancisHutcheson (1694–1746) and James Moor (1712–79) collaborated on an annotatedtranslation of Aurelius which was promoted as an antidote to sectarianism.11 Along withthis went a revived interest in natural law—a field where ethics and epistemologyconverge. Because these studies traditionally related to natural religion, for which theadvances in science appeared to be opening up spectacular new vistas, the arts faculties atlast found themselves with an integrated agenda for the post-scholastic era, in which,even if they continued to respond to the religious climate of the day, they could reestablishtheir independence from dogmatic theology.The natural religion which was particularly in vogue was that of the DutchRemonstrant tradition of the previous century, which ran from the jurist Hugo Grotius—on whom Hutcheson used to give public Sunday lectures—to the theologian-journalistJean LeClerc. It had received expression in English through the work .of Henry More,John Wilkins, John Tillotson and other English divines close to the early Royal Society;while their defences of the biblical revelation had received additional support in thewriting of Locke. Locke had argued that the existence of God could be rationallydemonstrated, though his handling of the arguments of natural religion was relativelycursory and dogmatic for someone working in the heyday of the Design argument; and hehad developed a defence of revelation from his own historical researches. Believers inrevelation appeared to have two lines of recourse. They could appeal to personalexperience and claim to have been favoured with individual revelations. This, for Locke,gave carte blanche to the ‘enthusiast’ or fanatic, hence to sectarianism and socialdivision. A personal faith impervious to rational arbitration was a kind of madness.12 Thealternative appeal was to the public revelation of the written, ultimately spoken, doctrineof the Scriptures, validated by the miraculous events contained within their history. Buthere the same difficulty recurred: when can a miracle story be believed? A rational testwas found in the criteria for ‘weighing’ historical evidence by reference to the quantityand quality of ancient witnesses.13 One Scot who was influential in insisting on therational credentials of revelation was Hutcheson’s teacher John Simson (1667–1740),who was prevented by the Church from carrying out his office as professor of divinity atGlasgow after 1729.14Besides these overt trends in the curriculum, there was a more clandestine debate,particularly among the students of divinity and law. We find it in the graduate clubs,some of whose members go on to form the nucleus of the professional literary andscientific societies of the mid-century. Four not entirely separate interests can bedocumented, almost contemporaneously—a sharpened political consciousness, and afascination with the imported philosophies of Shaftesbury, the deists, and Berkeley.Politically, it was the Ulster students at Glasgow who made the running. Theirdisabilities at home made them sensitive to authoritarian administration. Some came, too,with a hostility to theological regimentation, at a time when other young intellectuals,some of them trainees for the ministry, were questioning the Church’s continuing role inthe oversight of the universities and arguing that religion could as easily corrupt moralsas promote them.15 If they and their fellow students found Shaftesbury’s ironic attitude toreligious and educational institutions attractive, they were particularly receptive to hisargument that religion presupposes morality rather than the reverse; and if that meansthere has to be an instinctive moral feeling—particularly if it can be shown that this isalso the impetus to all that is best in art and literature—then there must be a brighter sideto human nature than either traditional theology or recent philosophy had proposed.Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729), the first designated professor of moral philosophy atGlasgow, was no follower of Shaftesbury, but he nevertheless laid the groundwork forthis reception, by emphasizing the social nature of humanity, and putting it on a newphilosophical footing, as part of a theory of rights founded in the love of God rather thanthe fear of man.16More radical free-thinkers were also discussed, such as John Toland (himself a Scottishgraduate), Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal. George Turnbull (1698–1748), whotaught at Aberdeen in the 1720s, had gone through a deist phase when he sought toengage Toland, and Toland’s patron, Lord Molesworth, in correspondence. Hiscontemporary in Divinity school, Robert Wallace (1697–1771), who was avowedlyutilitarian in his thinking, subjected religious doctrine to moral tests and questioned theintended universality of some Bible precepts. But both used the deist challenge to test thelimits of acceptable belief rather than to go beyond them, and both responded to Tindalwith defences of the Christian dispensation.17 The one committed Scottish deist of theperiod was William Dudgeon (1706–43), who has no known academic connections. Hepublished tracts in the 1730s defending a natural religion whose content was purelyethical. He accepted an afterlife, but denied the reality of sin. In the divinely ordainedorder, conduct is fully determined by motive, but no motive is inherently evil: error,which is the by-product of our necessary imperfection, can be corrected by selfdiscipline.18Dudgeon combined this with a Berkeleyan metaphysic which reduced a causallyinoperative ‘matter’ to ‘ideas’ caused immediately by God, the only autonomoussubstance, on whom finite intelligences depend. Turnbull also wrote, in the work whichgrew out of his Aberdeen lectures, as if matter is reducible to perceptions (the dissolutionof bodies in death is the end of certain ideas, and the effects of matter upon matter are nomore than perceptions excited in our minds). But what he rejected, like many of hiscontemporaries, was active matter. Its indestructibility as a
passive object, operationsupon which are linked to our minds by laws, is a prerequisite for his argument forimmortality.19Thomas Reid (1710–96), Turnbull’s most distinguished pupil, is the only individual forwhom we can document an initial attachment to outright immaterialism.20 For others ofthe period, what caught their fancy was Berkeley’s theory of vision—until it wassubjected to influential criticism by the physician William Porterfield21—and histheological voluntarism: the laws by which the objects of our experience are related areseen as direct evidence of God’s sustaining power. These notions were sufficientlycongenial that, when Berkeley attacked their other hero, Shaftesbury, in
Alciphron in1732, it provoked one former admirer, William Wishart (1692–1753), to violent satire.22By this time, however, Edinburgh students were hearing in their logic class that ColinMacLaurin in his natural philosophy lectures had invalidated Berkeley’s metaphysics.23Andrew Baxter’s (1686–1750) defence of the conventional two-substance view of thecreation was also influential: he challenged the assimilation of perception with the objectof perception and established the stereotype of Berkeley as a Cartesian doubter whonever found the way back to reality.24Turnbull’s engagement with all these new trends in a single body of writing—deism,Berkeleyanism, liberty in religion, the reform of education, the moral basis of art, morallaw, the restoration of civic virtue—has given him an interest for modern scholars whichhe could not claim in his lifetime, when most of his books were remaindered. Bindingthem together is a consistent methodology in which all studies can be reduced to laws bya combination of historical and experimental study. Turnbull was already practising thisbefore Hume conceived his own project of ‘introducing the experimental method ofreasoning into moral subjects’, but, significantly, both were pupils of the same ‘professorof natural philosophy and ethics’ in Edinburgh, Robert Steuart.25Hutcheson was less flamboyant but more influential, a charismatic teacher whoseUlster background contributed to his strong interest in natural and civil rights. Thecommon good is enjoined by the law of nature, and there is a natural right to engage inwhatever mode of action advances this common good. The conventions of socialorganization are all subordinate to this purpose. Hutcheson’s arguments against undueauthority in every form made him a leading campaigner, not only for toleration, butagainst slavery, hereditary power, and so-called ‘rights of conquest’.26 It was probablyHutcheson’s version of the contract theory of civil authority, entitling the governed toresist, and if necessary to separate from, whatever power threatened the common good,that had most influence in the American colonies. But what Hutcheson defended as therights of colonies he also identified as the rights of ‘provinces’.27Our concern for the common good and the rights that it entails both reflects andreinforces an instinctive philanthropy that shows itself when we look self-critically at thehappiness and misery brought about by different kinds of behaviour. It excites in us an‘esteem’ or ‘perception of moral excellence’ of any action motivated by benevolence.Not all action is so motivated, nor is all appraisal moral; but Hutcheson was best knownin his lifetime for this theory of moral appraisal and its aesthetic analogue. He developedit in the four treatises, in two books, composed while he kept an academy in Dublin in the17205, before he succeeded Carmichael at Glasgow in 1730.28Moral practice was for Hutcheson a matter as much of the heart as of the head, and hiswork is concerned with both analysing and cultivating the appropriate ‘affections’. Wehave a sense of beauty, which shows itself not only in our appreciation of the arts andmathematics, but in our response to the whole creation as a manifestation of infinitewisdom. The humane affections are as much part of this creation—as much inherent inhuman nature and independent of social artifice—as size and shape, and almost as readilydetectable; and that they are is evidence in turn of the benevolence and intention of theirdesigner.Hutcheson’s account is built round his theory of a moral sense, which is less wellarticulated than its place in his system requires. The aesthetic analogy drops out in hislater writing. Hume believed he had a similar account, when he argued that virtue is aquality of action or character that promotes in persons of normal sensibility a distinctive‘pleasing sentiment of approbation’;29 its being virtuous lies in its promoting such asentiment, and he then seeks to analyse the sentiment (a kind of love) and its causes (thebenefit of those affected). Both agreed we may feel such sentiments even when the actruns counter to our interests. Hutcheson, however, in a work published after Hume’s
Treatise of Human Nature, insists that ‘the good approved is not this tendency to give usa grateful sensation’ but is independent of and prior to it: it lies in the
source of thesentiment, which for him is the benevolent affections of the agent.30The St Andrews theologian Archibald Campbell (1691–1756) agreed with Hutchesonthat we have an instinctive tendency to social bonds, but instead of attributing this tobenevolent motives, he attributed it to the feature Hutcheson disdained: self-love.31 Tosome degree this was a verbal dispute, since self-love for Campbell is not a form ofselfishness and is not a consideration of advantage. It includes self-esteem, or respect, butit can be gratified through the esteem of others, because the ‘self in question is the ‘self ofAristotle’s theory of friendship, whereby another person can be ‘self’ to oneself; indeedself-love on this account motivates God as much as humans. Moral virtue is broughtabout through the love and respect that self-love prompts us to desire and deserve ofothers, who desire and deserve it of us, creating an amicable society in which there ismutual esteem. While the phrasing is not ideal, there is a substantive point at the back ofit, picked up later by Hume and Kames: benevolence on its own is not enough to engagean agent to any particular action.Elsewhere, Campbell threatened to challenge the rational religion of theEnlightenment. In
The Necessity of Revelation (1739), he adopts a basically Lockeanepistemology, but takes issue with the idea that the existence of God, the soul’simmortality, and the conduct necessary to eternal happiness, can be proved withoutrevelation. God’s existence is provable to those who see the evidence. But this evidencewas unavailable until within living memory—the Design arguments of antiquity werenaive—whereas the foundations of religion must have been open to persons of ordinarycomprehension at all periods. The mass of mankind, surveying nature, ascribesupernatural powers to everything, and it requires a revelation to see, with modernscience, that that is a mistake. Neither do ordinary persons understand the essence ofmatter, or how to abstract from experience to form the idea of another immaterial,indissoluble, substance. In section III of this work, Campbell rejects Plato’s argumentsfor immortality as sophistries, and contends that no other of the ancients suspected thesoul was immaterial: ‘all the great ends of morality and religion are well enough securedwithout it’. The data of comparative religion suggest that no one attained a doctrinallysound monotheism and its associated morality by reason alone.But if we are dependent on revelation, we face Locke’s problem afresh: how is arevelation to be identified? We cannot simply assume a Deity, or fall back on the word ofa being whose existence is in contention. Campbell’s solution, in section VII, isbafflingly brief and unimpressive, though a variant on the argument from testimony: heconjectures that an angel ‘led on the human mind by rational proofs and arguments’which were communicated in turn to posterity, the moral probity of the source being thefactor that carried conviction. We have the evidence of Mosaic history that such arevelation, once given, was corrupted and lost. Campbell is happy to count Pierre Bayleas one of his authorities.Campbell’s strategy had been anticipated by another Scottish theologian, ThomasHalyburton (1674–1712). The deists, Halyburton claimed, cannot pretend that mankind ingeneral subscribe to natural religion: experience is plainly against it. Some have beensteered into it by the authority of a small group of thinkers, but on what principles didthey recognize the authority of their evidence? Appended to his
Natural ReligionInsufficient was
An Essay concerning the Nature of Faith, where Halyburton specificallyattacked Locke’s argument to found faith in reason. It does not fit the scheme ofknowledge as intuitive, demonstrative, or sensitive, and conflicts with Locke’s claim toaccord revelation the highest degree of assent. The external signs (miracles) to whichLocke appealed in confirmation of an original revelation did not serve that function. Theymight deepen the hearers’ faith, but most biblical doctrine was delivered without suchsigns. To do without them is not to fall back on ‘enthusiasm’: enthusiasm is irrational andat some point conflicts with the evidence of sense and reason. The prophets did not needexternal signs to recognize God’s hand. They had it by an ‘irresistible Evidence’, likesomeone who knows an author’s style well enough to recognize it in anonymousinstances.32
HUME’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONAL RELIGIONWhile this native sceptical tradition was grist to his mill, Hume’s own critique ofprevailing trends grew out of a wider background, in British and French thought of theprevious hundred years and in the main traditions of antiquity; and it is from thatbackground that we must understand his disagreements with Hutcheson.33 Hume wasintroduced to Hutcheson in 1739 between the publication of Books II and III of
ATreatise of Human Nature, and their ensuing correspondence shows an unsuccessfulattempt at a meeting of minds. Hutcheson was probably behind at least one of thecautiously critical reviews of the
Treatise which appeared in the
Bibliothèque raisonnéein 1740–1. Hume responded to the reviewer’s criticisms of his theories of belief, powerand the self through the Appendix to the
Treatise, while in the body of the text he tried toaddress problems raised by Hutcheson in correspondence, problems which the laterreviewer seized on afresh to scotch any suggestion that Hume was Hutchesonian in hismoral philosophy. Hume was seen to derive morality from a strictly secular view ofhuman nature, and to analyse it with the unengaged aloofness of a pure metaphysician.He reduced the moral sense to a limited sympathy, and seemed to turn justice into aHobbesian conventionalism.34These charges returned to haunt Hume in the mid-1740s, when an alliance of clericalinterests helped defeat his attempt to succeed John Pringle (1707–82) as professor ofmoral philosophy at Edinburgh.35 Hutcheson and another Glasgow colleague worked toavert Hume’s election, as did Wishart, principal of Edinburgh University and a life-longsupporter of Hutcheson’s philosophy. The sceptical aspect of Hume’s thought—his stresson the limitations of reason—attracted most attention. He was seen as rejecting theoperation of causes and the reality of moral distinctions, indeed as denying our ability tobelieve the existence of anything; and this despite the lengths he went to, to explain howwe all, including himself, unavoidably come to such beliefs. The main target of attackwas the supposed implications of his tenets for religious and moral conviction. Humecomplained that his philosophy had been traduced, and denied there were anti-religiousimplications (meaning implications for personal faith) in the argument of the
Treatise.36In rebuilding his defences in
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), hefinally addressed the applications of his philosophy to both revealed and natural religionwhich had been suppressed in bringing the
Treatise to publication, and this helpedprovoke some of the first published responses to his philosophy.37 A fuller critique ofnatural religion appeared posthumously.Hume’s target is the Lockean scenario presented above, which claimed a
rationalfoundation for revealed and natural religion. Hume, like Locke, has no time for the‘enthusiast’, and ignores the attempts to immunize personal revelation against criticism.38He builds his critique of revealed religion round the question of the historical credibilityof the miracle stories associated with the foundation of the main theistic systems.39 Thekey concepts in the debate—probability and testimony—link his discussion to Locke.Locke had distinguished the general evidence we have in experience for specific types ofphenomena from the quality of the evidence in the particular case—the number and skillof the witnesses, the consistency and circumstances of the report, the purpose of thereporter, and the nature and extent of contrary testimony. The importance of theparticular evidence is in inverse proportion to the strength of the general evidence. Wheretestimonies conflict with experience, or with each other, we should ‘proportion’ ourassent after weighing the circumstances, and any signs of passion, interest or confusion inthe telling.40This epistemology is taken over by Hume in a way that defeats Locke’s attempt toplead a special case for biblical miracles. To believe in a one-time exception to the orderof nature, we must be aware of an exceptionless order to constitute the law from whichthe departure occurred. The type of evidence needed to establish the norm destroys ourability to identify the exception, for which the evidence is at best derivative.41 And yetHume is not impugning the
concept of miracle. A miracle is ‘a transgression of a law ofnature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some [other]invisible agent’.42 The laws are what operate (by God’s general providence) in theabsence of such transgressions (or particular providences). The problem is one ofdetectability.Hume presents it as a problem of matching proof against proof. He accepts with Lockethat the regular sequence of cause and effect offers the highest degree of empirical proof.So we have proof of tomorrow’s sunrise from uniform past experience, though there is nological absurdity in suggesting it will not rise; and we have comparable proof of any lawof nature from comparable natural uniformity. In this sense there is ‘proof against anymiracle.43The potential counter-proof cannot claim direct evidence of divine intervention. Itconsists in looking for evidence of the reliability of historical witnesses—witnesses withas much proven reliability as other people’s experience of the laws of nature. Humedepicts it as an outweighing in numbers, calculated by subtraction, and illustrates it by theway that witnesses to one side in a legal case can offset those for the other side. It isdifficult to make sense of this notion of subtraction for the case in hand, and some of hiscriteria remain clearly qualitative.44 Appealing to all the weaknesses that Locke identifiedin human testimony, Hume argues that there is no case where the quantity and quality ofthe witnesses have met the required standards. One hypothetical case would give himpause: if people came in sufficient numbers from all corners of the earth testifying to aweek’s darkness, he would accept that as evidence of something unusual. But he wouldnot leap to a supernatural explanation.45Locke could make that leap, because he accepted the tradition, established by Bacon,that miracles were not intended to convert atheists. The theist has already accepted thearguments of natural religion, and considered that these lead to a being who would wishto communicate with the sentient creation. Miracles are there to establish a particularsystem, within an existing framework of belief. Hume challenged this strategy on twofronts. First, a miracle can ‘never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system ofreligion’. No matter how worthy the witnesses, they could not show that an appeal tosupernatural power—an appeal necessarily outside our experience—was our onlyrecourse.46 Secondly, reason is incapable of establishing the kind of Deity whoserevelation is being postulated.This brings us to the second limb of Hume’s critique of rational religious belief: thecritique of natural religion. Because his fullest treatment of this is presented as a dialoguesequence, one must be alive to the limitations of the genre.47 The views that Hume setsup for critical scrutiny are little more than stereotypes. But a number of factors supportthe verdict of his contemporaries that the character of Philo in the
Dialogues concerningNatural Religion is more than a ‘careless sceptic’ and is predominantly Hume’smouthpiece, even sharing his characteristic irony. In the first state of the manuscript,some 60 per cent of the work was assigned to Philo; 85 per cent of the subsequentrevision belongs to Philo, including the additions of Hume’s last months.48 He investedhis labour overwhelmingly in Philo’s side of the case. Furthermore, even at the time ofthe
Treatise, he had sketched out a narrative study, in which he developed in his ownperson an argument similar in structure to Philo’s in the
Dialogues, and identical insubstance on the one topic where comparison is still possible—the problem of evil.49All parties to the
Dialogues accept the existence of a ‘first cause’, but this does notcommit them to a meaningful theism.50 It opens up the debate over whether anything canbe known of the attributes of an entity so removed from experience. The main focus ofdiscussion is the Design argument, espoused by the character Cleanthes, and presented inthe form of an analogy. The world is an integrated system of interacting ‘machines’, inthat their essential feature is ‘the adaptation of means to ends’ through an ‘order,proportion, and arrangement of every part’ according to regular laws. From a similarityof effects (the adaptation of means to ends both in artefacts and in the works of nature)Cleanthes infers a similarity of causes (reason and intelligence).‘Machines’ here does not have narrowly mechanistic associations.51 The emphasis ison organic nature—the structure of legs and eyes, and biological, psychological andsocial circumstances that combine to support human reproduction. Cleanthes, underpressure, goes on to try to make a virtue of the logical weaknesses exposed by Philo, byself-consciously emphasizing the ‘irregularity’ of the argument—that is, its power tocarry more conviction than its logic warrants. The ‘idea of a contriver’ strikes us ‘withthe force of sensation’ when we dissect the eye.52 It is like hearing or reading a familiarlanguage, where the recognition of intelligence is, or would be, instantaneous even inbizarre conditions. Everyone sees that the recognition in the linguistic case is sound, andthis should inspire our confidence in the other. Although the analogies of immediaterecognition are offered by Cleanthes, at the beginning of Part III, as so many‘illustrations, examples, and instances’ to reinforce the ‘analogy between their causes’,they are better seen as a commentary on it, and as a rhetorical attempt to circumventPhilo’s insistence on case-by-case assessment.The discussion develops round a distinction between God’s natural and moralattributes. The natural attributes relate to intelligence and power, and would pertain to aDeity in any circumstances, whether there had been a creation or not. The moralattributes arise from a freely chosen relationship with sentient creatures. Most of thedebate is over the natural attributes, and involves three contentious issues.First, most fundamental, is whether ‘order, arrangement, or the adjustment of finalcauses’ is the ‘proof of design’ that the argument requires. Philo contends that we cannotsee things in cosmic perspective and can only infer design in the kinds of cases we knowfrom experience; order and arrangement are not, themselves,
kinds of cases. But if it is acondition that the manifestations of design be recognizably analogous to that in humanartefacts, we shall end up ascribing human characteristics to divinity.53Second, we cannot from experience prove the ultimate priority of ordering mind overordered matter. Perhaps mind needs to be and can be explained in turn through naturalcauses; while this is contrary to a common assumption of the time, it is a live issue forthose who admit that the essence of matter and mind is unknown.54Third, the evidence of experience is that there are many ‘springs and principles’ innature, and different kinds of order. There is an absurdity in taking any singly as themodel for all nature. If we do, we have no worse reason to see the world as an orderedanimal, or vegetable, than to see it as an artefact; while even a disordered world musthave its parts so structured that they would in due course shake out into some sustainablepattern.55To these challenges to God’s natural attributes, Philo adds a version of the problem ofevil. In reasoning from experience we cannot attribute to the cause qualities that are notprovable by the effects, and the calamities of human and animal life give no support tobelief in the moral attributes of the creator. The committed theist can accommodate thisproblem, but what is at issue is what we can infer without that commitment. Hume arguesthrough Philo, and in his own person in the early fragment, that the balance between thefrequency of pleasures and intensity of pains is such that no determination of whetherthere is moral purpose in nature is possible.56Thereafter, in the final Part of the
Dialogues, Philo somewhat relents, and concedesthat, whatever the limitations of our understanding, the psychological pressures to believein
something are very considerable. But it is a qualified concession, and nowhere more sothan in the longest paragraph of the work, the only significant addition from Hume’s lastweeks of life, and thereby his dying testament to posterity.57 The dispute between theistand atheist, it is argued, is ‘verbal’. The theist grants the nature of God’s mind to beincomprehensible; the atheist concedes a remote analogy between the orderings of natureand intelligence—not, however, moral intelligence in the human understanding of thephrase. Each from their opposite position must consider the analogy so attenuated thatneither has the means to make it more precise or useful.The critical arguments of the
Dialogues have found most of their admirers in thetwentieth century, but only after Darwinism changed scientific attitudes to the study ofnature. In the short term, Hume’s critique stimulated a number of forceful apologists, ofwhom the most successful was the English theologian William Paley. Moderncommentary portrays Paley’s
Natural Theology (1802) as a reactionary work written inignorance of Hume, but careful study of the language and logic of his opening chaptershows it is a systematic riposte, item by item, to many of Hume’s moves. Because Paleybuilds into his exposition of the Design argument the limitations that Hume’s critiqueimposes, Hume’s criticisms have no particular target in his work.As for Hume himself, where we fail to find adequate reasons for a belief we may stillexplain its causes. The belief in God is not one of those fundamental to ‘common life’,where the mechanisms of the mind compensate automatically for the deficiencies ofreason. Indeed, the ordinary mind does not have the synoptic view of nature that—unlikePaley—Hume supposes essential to the theistic perspective. Hume explores the roots ofreligious belief in
The Natural History of Religion, which presents a logicalreconstruction of popular thought in the guise of a series of historical steps.58Hume argues that humanity develops from a state of ignorance motivated by hope andfear. This hope, and more particularly fear, is directed to the unknown causes of humanfortune, which come to be personified as unseen rulers. Hence polytheism. From thatarises the idea of a chief ruler, to whom virtues are ascribed by way of flattery, whiletheir servants amass exaggerated honours. There is a ‘flux and reflux’ in the popularmind, between polytheism and monotheism, the former tending towards toleration andsocial virtues, the latter towards authoritarian control and a moral abasement that runscontrary to human nature.59 This ‘vulgar’ superstition is contrasted with the sophisticatedinsight of the minority—Hume ironically includes Adam in Paradise—who appreciate theconnected order of nature and derive from it a more fitting and consistent view of thedivine character.Though written from a contrary perspective, Hume’s account of ‘vulgar’ religion islargely consistent with contemporary Calvinist teaching about human belief since theFall, where it was a commonplace, as we have seen, that monotheism is not a positionthat comes naturally to the unaided mind.60 His writing was a greater challenge to thosewho favoured the claims of natural religion, because he seemed to show that they couldnever carry the bulk of mankind with them. But it had a direct influence on WilliamRobertson (1721–93), leader of the Moderate Party in the Scottish Church, whoseaccounts of primitive religions follow Hume’s specification.61One frequent element in religious belief, which commonly links it to moral practice, isthe belief in immortality. Hume examines this in a posthumous essay, ‘Of theImmortality of the Soul’, which first recapitulates the argument on immateriality in the
Treatise.62 Philosophers had often contended that thought, as immaterial, must inhere inan immaterial substance, which by its nature lacked the power to disperse. Humeresponded that we have no experience of the substance of anything, so cannot show thatany given properties are essential to it; while the doctrine of an indivisible soul-stuffseems to carry with it the implication of an undivided substance throughout nature—athesis beset with paradox. In the essay, he adds further objections. Assuming theorthodoxy that immortality is bound up with reward and punishment (which liberalthinkers already disputed), he focuses on the apparent disproportion between the pettyconduct of most human life and the eternal after-effects. Furthermore, all the analogy ofnature is against there being something that resists the processes of change; indeed, wehave the evidence of experience that the mind declines as well as the body, and in parallelwith it.
THE RESPONSE TO HUMEThe first significant response to Hume’s philosophy within Scotland came with the
Essays of Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), in 1751. Its criticism was sufficientlymuted that some contemporaries saw little to choose between them, despite Kames’ssupport for natural religion. A flurry of pamphlets in the 1750s, aimed at both thinkersand their circle, repeated the charge that Hume’s philosophy, and now Kames’s, was athreat to morals and religion, but it failed to advance the debate philosophically. On theperiphery of this controversy was another dispute with theological ramifications, betweenKames and John Stewart, natural philosophy professor at Edinburgh, over whetherNewton’s admission of mechanical forces was tantamount to conceding activity tomatter.63Kames’s reading of Newtonianism as a necessitarian system seemed to open the way tofatalism and the denial of providence, particularly when he characterized the sense wehave of human liberty as a kind of divine ‘deceit’.64 Within this framework, Kamesnevertheless offered a balanced picture of human motivation. ‘Self-love operates bymeans of reflection and experience’ and belongs to the calculating part of our nature,guided by considerations of pleasure and pain. But our appetites and affections do notdirectly correlate with pleasure and pain. Grief and compassion move us alike in real lifeand in the arts, and our ability to be drawn to what is painful, and be stimulated by it todelicate feelings, is a sure sign of our social nature. This nature forms the basis of thelaws to which we are subject, and which we discover through the instinctive responses ofour moral sense to the beauty or deformity of human character and action.65 Kamesthought, however, that neither Hutcheson nor Hume gave sufficient attention to the senseof duty and justice, which he traced to a distinctive feeling, without which the trust thatholds society together could never have arisen.Kames considered the deceptiveness of moral liberty no different in principle from the‘unreality’ of secondary qualities. It is consistent with the great design that God shouldpresent things in the way best suited to his purposes for mankind, while still enabling usto discover the underlying reality. Berkeley, who might have contemplated a similarargument, was one of his targets here, and Hume another. For Kames it would be morethan divine deceit—it would be a totally pointless assignment of useless faculties—if oursenses did not put us in touch with a material world. Our perceiving observable qualitiesas aspects of a whole is proof that we have a sensory impression of substance, that is, of‘independent and permanent existence’. Equating belief with a simple, unanalysablefeeling, he considers there is no appeal against our sense of the externality and power ofobserved objects; if they are indeed external, and have the power they appear to us tohave, no better way of conveying this can be conceived than the way we actuallyexperience them.66 Our sensitivity to the presence of God in nature is accounted for onsimilar principles.67Kames’s appeal to a ‘feeling’ which opposes any philosophical scepticism with regardto an objective order—an appeal, in fact, to the concurrent operation of external and whathe sometimes calls ‘internal’ senses—has been seen as an extension into the metaphysicsand epistemology of Hutcheson’s concept of an inner sense in morals. If so, it is a stagetowards the ‘common sense’ theory developed among the members of the AberdeenPhilosophical Society, in part, again, in reaction to the scepticism of Hume.68 Because the‘common sense’ theory is a theory that accounts for those fundamental convictions whichboth parties placed outside the province of, reason, and which Hume attributed in certaincases to ‘natural instinct’, the difference between them has sometimes seemed merelyverbal. But natural instinct in Hume —as it relates, for example, to belief in the self andthe external world, the identification of purposive behaviour, and the operation ofcauses—is something brought about by the natural processes of the mind
consequent toexperience, and is not inherent in that experience; and it does not extend to a religiousinstinct.The first salvoes against Hume’s philosophy to be publicly fired from Aberdeenoriginated from the pulpit. George Campbells (1719–96)
Dissertation on Miracles isintended to demonstrate the rational basis of revealed religion. Its two parts match thesections of Hume’s critique, assessing first the a priori case, then the a posteriori case, formiracles.Campbell argues that ‘testimony hath a natural and original influence on belief,antecedent to experience’, but we learn, by experience, to regulate our confidence in it.The predisposition to accept testimony is a feature of our ‘common sense’, one of theoriginal ‘grounds of belief, beyond which our researches cannot proceed, and of whichtherefore ‘tis vain to attempt a rational account’. Belief in the uniformity of nature, and inthe prima facie reliability of memory, is of this kind. ‘If we had not previously given animplicit faith to memory, we had never been able to acquire experience’, notwithstandingthat memory, like testimony, can be corrected by experience.69The unusualness of an event, Campbell concedes, may be a presumption against itsauthenticity, but cannot always be so. If I have had two thousand experiences of a ferryboat making a safe and regular crossing, then one day meet a stranger who gravelyreports he has just seen it lost with all on board, I am likely to give more credence to thisthan Hume’s simple subtraction formula would authorize. This holds until sufficientcounter-evidence is found, either from other witnesses about the fact, or from witnessesabout the witness. Hume had tried to weigh incommensurables; and whether pastexperience is a sound guide to a new case depends not only on how far relevantcircumstances are the same, but on whether they are known.70 Hume himself ran intoinconsistency in exploiting testimony to help establish the laws of nature whilediscounting it in cases of alleged violations, and in dismissing untested any reports thathe considered religiously motivated.71 Campbell scores some sound points againstHume’s logic, but sometimes misreads his irony, and is less effective on the decisivequestion of how one would identify divine intervention.72Thomas Reid likewise criticized Hume from common-sense principles, but took as histarget Hume’s critique of natural rather than revealed religion. He claims to detect ‘firstprinciples of necessary truths’, principles ‘of which we can give no other account but thatthey necessarily result from the constitution of our faculties’, in grammar, logic,mathematics, taste and morals, but he is mostly concerned with metaphysics.73 Humeproperly showed that we cannot derive, either from experience or reason, the belief inmaterial and mental substance, the principle of universal causation, or the certainty ‘thatdesign and intelligence in the cause may be inferred from marks or signs of it in theeffect’. Any attempt to do so already assumes the principles in question, so, argues Reid,they must be self-evident. In regard to other intelligence, the case for the existence ofGod is no different from the case for other minds generally.74 Hume had argued in
Enquiry XI that we cannot infer an intelligent cause for the universe because we have hadno experience of the origin of other universes. Reid retorts that ‘according to thisreasoning, we can have no evidence of mind or design in any of our fellow-men’, either,since we have never been able to match their wisdom against its visible signs. The role ofthese signs is not, therefore, to form the premises for inductive argument. It is part of theprovidential design for human life that they are transparent.Hume got into the sceptical impasse, in Reid’s view, because he was obsessed with theprinciple that there are no ideas without preceding impressions, and no impressionsappropriate to the case. Hume’s failing is, however, part of a broader failing of thephilosophical tradition since Descartes, which Reid castigates as the ‘theory of ideas’.This is the attempt to build up an account of human knowledge entirely through anaccount of the atomic contents of experience. But these contents in themselves neverreach to the world of which we claim the knowledge, so the project is self-defeating. Reiddraws a clear distinction between the study of the body and its relations with otherbodies, which may give us a natural history of the senses, and the anatomy of the mind,by which we obtain a history of human consciousness;75 and he sees an obvious absurdityin supposing either that the second is in some way a representation of the first, or—if theabsurdity of that is granted—that the first is then beyond our reach. There are limits toour knowledge of the physical world, and to our knowledge of the mind, but there is akind of philosophical ‘madness’ in confusing the one with the other.In place of the theory of ideas, Reid postulates a distinction between sensation andperception. His formulation of this remains obscure, and has been adapted to serve theinterests of different modern theorists. Sensation is an affection or feeling of the mind,quite unlike any physical quality: it can exist only in a sentient being. (Thus the sensationwe feel from impact with a hard body is merely a sign. It has nothing about it thatcorresponds literally to the compactedness of the particles of that body.) But it ‘suggests’,or brings about a ‘conception and belief of, an external reality. The notion of suggestionis taken from Berkeley’s philosophy of vision, but Reid rejects any idea that it is anacquired association: there is no way such an association could arise if it is not inherent inour make-up, although he does allow that the way we learn to judge specific sizes, shapesand distances by sight takes time. Perception is the awareness we have of the existence ofexternal objects by our senses.Reid’s work is imbued with a pleasant wit. Of the principal items that make up his
Philosophical Works, his
Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), in which he first stressesthe distinction between physical and mental enquiry, is a minor classic, while his
Essayson the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), completed after his move to, and retirementfrom, Glasgow, is a comprehensive study on a grand scale. Of the other members of theAberdeen circle, the moralist and belletrist James Beattie (1735–1802) made most noisein his day by his fast-selling
Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, whichincurred the censure of Kant. This attack on scepticism, largely targeted at Hume, isvaguely concerned more with the criteria than the nature of truth: he vacillates betweenconceiving truth as something eternal, and as a variable property (‘certain truth’,‘probable truth’) of individual judgements. We attain truth in proportion to the degree towhich we believe what the ‘constitution of human nature determines’ us to believe.Sometimes this comes from reasoning or evidence; sometimes (where those can addnothing to what is already there) ‘by an instantaneous, instinctive, and irresistibleimpulse; derived neither from education nor from habit, but from nature’. This, again, is‘common sense’, upon whose axioms all proof is founded and to which all truth isconformable.76 Beattie does not follow Reid deeply into the theory of perception, and hiswork is coarser in tone, sniping at the ‘irreligion’ and ‘licentiousness’ he sees ensuing,once the defences of common sense are breached by philosophical scepticism.The common-sense tradition itself, by its apparent preoccupation with the anatomy ofthe mind, came to be criticized on similar grounds, by a logic that is now difficult toreconstruct. It was left to Reid’s most gifted student, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), aninspirational teacher who was professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh from 1785 butceased to be active after 1810, to redeploy this philosophy just as the infiltration ofKantian ideas (still ill understood) began to have its impact; but Stewart’s most originalwork was in political economy.77 The ‘Dissertation’ which he contributed to the fourthand later edition Supplements to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1816 was a historyof metaphysics since the Renaissance, and included research into documents now lost. Asa historian Stewart could not shake off the standpoint of the ‘Scottish’ philosophy, andindeed used the history of philosophy as a means of vindicating that tradition. In doing sohe helped perpetuate certain stereotypes that have outlasted his own philosophy. One isthe view that Hume subscribed to a ‘constant conjunction’ analysis of causation whichdenied any necessitation in nature. Stewart willingly endorsed this, as a death-blow toSpinozism.78 He also approved Hume’s demonstration that there can be no proof ofuniversal causation or of the uniformity of nature, since this gave the common-sensephilosophy its needed opening. So when there was opposition to a mathematicalappointment at Edinburgh in 1805 because the nominee, John Leslie, had endorsedHume’s supposedly irreligious view of causality in natural philosophy, Stewart wasactive in his support. (So were the evangelical party in the Church, who accepted Hume’sproof that faith was beyond reason.) Stewart contended, indeed, that Hume’s analysis wasnot only commonplace, but had been commonplace before Hume.79 But this needsqualification. What Stewart favoured was the view of Clarke and Berkeley that the activeagents are minds, and what is popularly conceived as agency in nature is no more thanconstant conjunction according to the laws of a lawgiver. As Reid had already expressedit, ‘We perceive no proper causality or efficiency in any natural cause; but only aconnection established by the course of nature between it and what is called its effect.Antecedently to all reasoning, we have, by our constitution, an anticipation that there is afixed and steady course of nature: and we have an eager desire to discover this course ofnature’.80Stewart’s deputy after 1810, Thomas Brown (1778–1820), had also contributed to theLeslie controversy, with a tract on the ‘nature and tendency’ of Hume’s doctrine. Hesupports a constant-conjunction account of cause, but also endorses Hume’s view thatwhatever account is given of physical causation applies equally to mental causation. Hedenies that we have any distinct sense of mental power. However, that the relation ofcause and effect is not discoverable a priori, or by reason, but is an object simply of‘belief (that is, a belief with regard to future contingencies), he sees as compatible withthe common-sense appeal to an ‘instinctive principle of faith’.81Brown’s defence of Hume called forth the talents of the principal woman writer tohave a place in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment—Lady Mary Shepherd(1777–1847), daughter of the third Earl of Rosebery. After a book on causality shepublished another primarily on perception, where additionally she addresses the views ofBerkeley, Reid and Stewart.82 She is anxious to obviate any threats to theism, whetherfrom a revisionist view of causation or from doubts about material existence, and sheseeks to restore to human reason whatever Hume had attributed to associative instinct andothers to common sense. Try to conceive an effect that was not necessarily linked to (inShepherd’s terms, ‘inherent in’) its cause. Can it, then, begin its own existence? But suchbeginning is an action, and an action can only be the action of something alreadyexisting. An effect is a difference occurring in an existing situation, but it cannot begin ofitself if there is nothing to ‘make’ a difference: by ‘reasoning upon experiment’, whetherin laboratory study or ordinary life, we establish a difference in the attendantcircumstances. Single experiments are often sufficient, except to narrow down thecircumstances in which the cause is operative, since it is contradictory to conceive thatthe course of nature might change.83 However, the factors we observe are strictly effectsor signs of the underlying reality, and it is the latter that is subject to the laws of nature:Hume’s mistake in conceiving laws of nature as generalizations from experienceundermines his strategy over miracles.84 Her second book tries to show why we mustaccept that there are efficacious but unknown causes that do not have the character ofmind. Mind, she holds, supplies the conditions for sensation in general, but only whenthere is something else that acts upon it does sensation actually occur.85The common-sense tradition had also involved itself in moral theory. The intellectualpowers were traditionally paired with the active (or ‘active and moral’) powers in thatanalysis of human nature which was the propaedeutic to moral instruction; and thetextbooks and lecture courses of the day all surveyed the nature of human action, the roleof appetite, desire, affection and passion, the nature of the moral faculty, the principlesthat influence moral conduct, and those that regulate it. This was considered anessentially scientific enterprise. The language of a ‘moral sense’ is retained, if by some,like Stewart, apologetically. Reid equates it with conscience, and introduces it into thediscussion of the sense of duty, rather than, as in Hutcheson, the sense of good. Hisaccount echoes his account of ‘common sense’:All reasoning must be grounded on first principles. This holds in moralreasoning as in all other kinds. There must, therefore, be in morals, as in allother sciences, first or self-evident principles, on which all moral reasoning isgrounded, and on which it ultimately rests.Thus there is no reasoning with someone who does not acknowledge the Golden Rule:you can appeal to his sense of interest, but not his sense of duty.To reason about justice with a man who sees nothing to be just or unjust, orabout benevolence with a man who sees nothing in benevolence preferable tomalice, is like reasoning with a blind man about colour, or with a deaf manabout sound.86But we may reason about specifics, for example for and against particular familyarrangements. By this time, however, the focus of interest in moral psychology hadshifted to the analysis of agency, and to theattempt to understand human power as theability to act in conformity with judgement.87It was outside the common-sense tradition that Scottish moral philosophers in theeighteenth century made their strongest mark. Adam Smith (1723–90) at Glasgow andAdam Ferguson (1723–1816) at Edinburgh—both of whom would become widelytravelled scholars with an international circle of acquaintance—carried the analysis ofhuman nature well beyond its customary applications in the moral sphere.88 Breaking thetaboo on the analysis of self-interest, Smith made a landmark contribution to the study ofthe workings and place of economic forces in society, albeit with a normative purpose—the defence of freedom of action, including freedom of competition and freedom of trade.However, although he advocated governmental regulation only in matters relating to theprotection of society, he did not deny the duty of government to provide basic publicservices. Where Smith’s researches into moral and economic conduct led him into twocomplementary studies, Ferguson had space to integrate the subjects into a single work,in which he saw the existence of moral sentiment as foundational to society. Ferguson’swork is always informed by a strong sense and knowledge of history, whether real orconjectural, and particularly in his conscious rehabilitation of the social ideals ofantiquity, which he forcefully distinguished from modern book-learning about them.In his own moral theory, Smith had laid great weight on the classical notion ofsympathy as the source of social ties.89 Hume had already revived this idea, in seeking amore convincing mechanism than the instinctive philanthropy of Hutcheson. Smithconsidered that we are endowed by nature with a twofold sympathy which is reflected inmoral judgement. We may sympathize with agents who act from a virtuous motive, andthereby approve their conduct. We may also sympathize with the gratitude of the personwho benefits from the virtuous conduct (or if it is not virtuous, we may sympathize withtheir resentment). This is not the same as simply sharing their sentiments, although wenaturally seek to do so. It is an exercise of imagination, and can therefore vary in degreefrom individual to individual.90 But it can also be trained, in the way that we naturallyadapt to the responses of others. (This does not entail blind conformity: we can be out ofstep with popular sentiment where we have a better, or worse, command of the facts ofthe case.) But if it were simply a matter of thinking ourselves in other people’s shoes thiswould not explain how we can also assess our
own actions. We do this by becoming‘impartial spectators’, seeing ourselves as others would see us, if they were fully apprisedof the facts. Society therefore serves as a mirror through which we come to scrutinize ourown conduct. And in the interaction generated by the operation of sympathy we learn todevelop two characteristics essential to the moral life—self-command, and compassion orsensibility.
NOTESThe following abbreviations are used in the notes:D David Hume
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, in [11.42].E David Hume
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in [11.43].HHC M.A.Stewart and J.P.Wright (eds)
Hume and Hume’s Connexions [11.122].PSE V.Hope (ed.)
Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment [11.96].SPSE M.A.Stewart (ed.)
Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment[11.104].1 Sher [11.103], 329–76, offers an excellent bibliographical guide to this wider field.2 One form of this idealism is found in the 1690s in the political pamphleteering of AndrewFletcher (1655–1716), a Scottish correspondent of Locke, whose experience in exile led himto favour a Dutch type of confederacy for Britain. Fletcher’s extolling of a mythic ‘Gothic’past in which there was sufficient balance of political power to ensure the liberties of thesubjects is a forerunner of early Enlightenment attitudes. But he represented an idiosyncraticnationalism that was out of line with the anglicizing stance of most eighteenth-centuryScottish intellectuals.3 There were five universities. St Andrews, Glasgow, and King’s College, Aberdeen, were latemedieval papal foundations. Edinburgh and Marischal College, Aberdeen, were localpolitical creations of the post-Reformation period. Present information is sparsest oneighteenth-century St Andrews.4 There were, additionally, foundational studies in classical languages, seen also as a source ofmoral instruction; and mathematical training became increasingly important as a requisite fornatural philosophy. During the eighteenth century, civil history, often considered as anextension of natural history, came to be regarded as a significant source of data for the studyof morals.5 George Campbell [11.22] runs somewhat against this trend. His work is distinctive forfounding its discussion of eloquence and the grounds of conviction in the study of ‘humannature’, and for three chapters on logic, both formal and informal.6 Duncan’s popular tutorial manual [11.27] provides an example of this synthesis.7 J.P.Wright, ‘Metaphysics and Physiology’, SPSE, 251–301.8 R.B.Sher, ‘Professors of Virtue’, SPSE, 87–126.9 R.L.Emerson, ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, SPSE, 11–36.10 M.A.Stewart, ‘The Stoic Legacy in the Early Scottish Enlightenment’, in M. J.Osier (ed.),Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 273–96. See also the editors’ introduction to Smith [11.72], 5–10. Stoicism had already attractedsome seventeenth-century Scots, like the emigré radical Robert Ferguson in his SoberEnquiry into the Nature, Measure and Principle of Moral Virtue of 1673 (Allan [11.87],115–18).11 Hutcheson [11.49], introduction.12 John Locke, An Essay concerning Humane Under standing, 4th edn, 1700, IV. xix. Humedeveloped further the associationist psychology on which Locke based his analysis. SeeC.Bernard, ‘Hume and the Madness of Religion’, HHC, 224–38.13 It is significant that as history comes to be established in the Scottish curriculum, it is asynthesis of classical and biblical sources.14 Simson [11.69], 3–5, 12–13, 20; see also ‘Mr. Simson’s Answers to Mr. Webster’s Libel’ inThe Case of Mr. John Simson, 1715, pp. 254–63. For contemporary criticism see James Hog,A Letter to a Gentleman concerning the Interest of Reason in Religion, 1716; John McLaren,The New Scheme of Doctrine contained in the Answers of Mr. John Simson, 1717, ch. 12;Alexander Moncrieff, Remarks on Professor Simson’s First Libel and his CensureConsidered, 1729, pp. 43–59.15 M.A.Stewart, ‘Rational Dissent in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in K. Haakonssen(ed.), Enlightenment and Religion (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).Cf. Wishart [11.85], 221–6.16 J.Moore and M.Silverthorne, ‘Natural Sociability and Natural Rights in the Moral Philosophyof Gerschom Carmichael’, PSE, 1–12.17 Turnbull [11.74]; Wallace [11.83]. See M.A.Stewart, ‘George Turnbull and EducationalReform’, in Carter [11.90], 95–103; and M.A.Stewart, ‘Berkeley and the Rankenian Club’,Hermathena 139 (1985): 25–45.18 Dudgeon, The State of the Moral World Considered, 1732 and A Catechism Founded uponExperience and Reason, 1739, in Works [11.25]. Cf. Carabelli [11.112], 197–206. Raphael[11.145], 36, suggests that Adam Smith was also a deist. So, almost certainly, were some ofthe philosophically minded scientists in the later part of the century, like William Cullen(1710–90) and James Hutton (1726–97).19 Turnbull [11.80], ch. 9. Turnbull’s examples reappear in George Wallace [11.82], 42.20 Reid [11.62], 162.21 Porterfield [11.57], 214–33. Rejecting Berkeley’s view that our judging of distance by sightis due to ‘custom and experience’, Porterfield sees as the only alternative anacknowledgement of ‘an original connate and immutable Law, to which our Minds have beensubjected from the Time they were first united to our Bodies’. Such a law is already implicitin Berkeley’s appeal to touch; and if we accept it in relation to one sense, it is more, not less,economical to accept it for a second. So, he supposes, the mind ‘traces back its Sensations’through the retina along the ‘perpendicular Lines’ described in optics—never addressing thedifficulties Berkeley found in this suggestion. The language of ideas obscures the fact thatBerkeley must hold that vision causes us only to imagine, not detect, a tangible distance.Porterfield’s analysis of the problem led Reid to his distinction between sensation andperception, discussed below.22 Wishart [n.86]. Patrick Hardie of Aberdeen, the first Scot to mention Berkeley in print(1719), and perhaps the first to discuss him in the classroom, was an exception to the view ofBerkeley as a friend to religion: Wood [11.106], 38.23 Stewart, ‘Berkeley and the Rankenian Club’ (above, n. 17).24 Baxter [11.6], vol. 2, sect. II.25 On Steuart, see M.Barfoot, ‘Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early EighteenthCentury’, SPSE, 151–90. On Turnbull, see J.Laird, ‘George Turnbull’, Aberdeen UniversityReview 14 (1926–7): 123–35; Norton [11.120], ch. 4; Stewart, Turnbull andEducation’ (above, n. 17).26 Hutcheson, System [11.50], Bk. III. He first published these views in a Latin class manual,translated posthumously as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, 1748; but theunderlying theory of rights was already developed by 1728, in the second edition of theInquiry concerning Virtue [11.48], sect. VII. The political argument against hereditary guiltalso challenged the theological doctrine of original sin.27 C.Robbins,’ “When it is that Colonies may Turn Independent” ’, William and MaryQuarterly, 3rd series, 11 (1954): 214–51. In his System (vol. 2, p. 232), Hutcheson evenallows release from the obligation to comply with a policy implemented by consent, if itseffect is contrary to the one intended.28 These are reprinted as vols 1–2 of Hutcheson’s Collected Works, Hildesheim, Olms, 1990.29 Hume, Treatise [11.45], III. i. 2, which he could reasonably consider modelled onHutcheson’s remarks on beauty, Inquiry [11.48], sect. I.30 Hutcheson, System [11.50], 1:53. Cf. Illustrations [11.46], sect. IV. The difference betweenHutcheson and Hume here is a difference over their interpretation of the theory of secondaryqualities—whether in the mind or in the object—to which virtue and vice are beingassimilated.31 Archibald Campbell [11.19]. For Hutcheson, benevolence and self-love were conflictingmotives, the one moral, the other amoral. It required rational reflection and self-discipline tocultivate the one and counteract the other.32 The ultimate authority here would have been Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Asimilar orthodox defence of inspirational religion, seen as distinct from enthusiasm, wasdeveloped by Moncrieff (above, n. 14). The Miracles of Christ and his Apostles are to bebelieved, because contained in the Scriptures, and not the Scriptures because ofthem’ (Remarks, p. 56). Otherwise Moncrieff could not be sure why the miracle reports inJosephus were ridiculous, and those in the Gospels not.33 J.Moore, ‘Hume and Hutcheson’, HHC, 23–57; L.Turco, ‘Hutcheson nel terzo libro delTrattato sulla natura umana’, in M.Geuna and M.L.Pesante (eds), Passioni, interessi,convenzioni, Milano, Angeli, 1992, pp. 77–93. Norton [11.120], 87–92, stresses the‘providential dimension of Hutcheson’s thought’; contrast Hume, as presented in the sameauthor’s ‘Hume, Atheism, and the Autonomy of Morals’, in Hester [11.115], 97–144.34 M.A.Stewart and J.Moore, ‘William Smith (1698–1741) and the Dissenters’ Book Trade’,Bulletin of the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland 23 (1993): 20–27. For furtherdiscussion of Hutcheson’s ethics in relation to Hume’s, see S.Darwall, ‘Hume and theInvention of Utilitarianism’, HHC, 58–82.35 On Pringle see Stewart, ‘Stoic Legacy’ (above, n. 10).36 See A Letter from a Gentleman [11.40], a pamphlet hastily assembled by Henry Home,adapting material by Hume.37 English clerics were first off the mark. See Thomas Rutherforth, The Credibility of MiraclesDefended against the Author of Philosophical Essays, 1751.38 J.Passmore, ‘Enthusiasm, Fanaticism and David Hume’, in Jones [11.99], 85–107.39 For recent scholarship see Gaskin [11.113], ch. 8; Houston [11.116]; Jones [11.118], ch. 2;M.A.Stewart, ‘Hume’s Historical View of Miracles’, HHC, 171–200; D.Wootton, ‘Hume’s“Of Miracles” ’, SPSE, 191–229.40 Locke, Essay, IV, xv–xvi. On ‘proportioning assent’, cf. E, no.41 Hume is emulating the strategy adopted against transubstantiation by Tillotson, in a sermon‘The Hazard of being Saved in the Church of Rome’.42 E, 115n.43 E, 56n., 115; cf. 127.44 E, 122. Cf. George Campbell [11.21], 21–30.45 Hume used similar tests, elsewhere, to appraise the claims to inspiration made on behalf ofJoan of Arc and the claims to historical authenticity made on behalf of the Ossian forgeries.Another who felt the need to defeat whatever threatened established regularities was Pringle[11.58], who contested the evidence for meteorites.46 E, 121, 129.47 Carabelli [11.112], esp. ch. 3; M.Malherbe, ‘Hume and the Art of Dialogue’, HHC, 201–23;M.Pakaluk, ‘Philosophical Types in Hume’s Dialogues’, PSE, 116–32.48 I owe these calculations to Ruth Evelyn Savage.49 M.A.Stewart, ‘An Early Fragment on Evil’, HHC, 160–70.50 Hume sometimes calls this minimal belief and the practice of virtue ‘true religion’. This isnot a body of doctrine, or a practice of worship. The same lip-service to the traditionalcosmological argument in Dialogues Part II is consistent with the speakers’ subsequentdisagreement over the ‘demonstrative’ formulation of such an argument in Part IX. SeeM.A.Stewart, ‘Hume and the “Metaphysical Argument A Priori”’, in A.J.Holland (ed.),Philosophy, its History and Historiography, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1985, pp. 243–70;E.J.Khamara, ‘Hume versus Clarke on the Cosmological Argument’, PhilosophicalQuarterly 42 (1992): 34–55.51 D, 45. Such associations were expressly repudiated by George Cheyne [11.23], 2, theScottish Newtonian from whom Hume drew the description.52 This formulation (D, 56) draws on another Scottish Newtonian, MacLaurin [11.53], 381, andforeshadows Reid [11.62], 460.53 D, 47, 50, 52, 58, 68–71. Hurlbutt [11.117] has introduced an influential misunderstandinginto Hume’s exegesis by suggesting a sense of ‘design’ in which the detection of designbecomes a premise of the Design argument. This reduces it to triviality. The argumentscrutinized by Hume takes as its premise the existence of a certain kind of order in nature,and seeks to show, by analogy, that order of this kind is evidence of design.54 D, 62–6, 84–5.55 D, 72–3, 78–9, 85–7. Cf. Hume’s account of polytheism, as a response to the diversity ofphenomena, Natural History [11.42], 139.56 D, 96–7, 102–3. This was always for Hume the main obstacle to theism; and as hiscorrespondence with Hutcheson shows, he had problems understanding what it could mean,on his own secular analysis of morals, to ascribe virtues to the Deity. An alternativeinterpretation of the preponderance of pain is found in Baxter [11.6], who used it as evidencefor a compensating immortality.57 D, 119–21.58 Hume himself disparaged one common application of this technique, the ‘contract’ theory ofsociety. Dugald Stewart later recommended the practice as offering a truer insight into thenature of human institutions than a correctly documented narrative history. He called it‘conjectural history’ and cited Hume’s Natural History as a paradigm. It is important to see,however, that Hume was speculating not on the first origins of religion, but on its recurrentorigin in human nature, wherever it occurs. Cf. S.Evnine, ‘Hume, Conjectural History, andthe Uniformity of Human Nature’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 589–606;R.A.Segal, ‘Hume’s Natural History of Religion and the Beginning of the Social ScientificStudy of Religion’, Religion 24 (1994): 225–3459 A similar picture of historical religion is found in Hume’s History. See Bernard (above, n.12).60 Hume used the same tactic, ironically, in concluding his discussions of miracles and ofimmortality.61 William Robertson, History of America, 1777, Historical Disquisition concerning theKnowledge which the Ancients had of India, 1791. In the appendix to the latter, Robertson’sdepiction of the ‘Stoicism’ of the Brahmins has Humean echoes.62 Hume, Essays [11.44], 590–98; Treatise [11.45], I. iv. 5. The essay is partly targeted againstJoseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, 1736.63 Wright [11.123], §16.64 Henry Home, Essays [11.39], 1st edn, 207–18.65 Ibid., Pt I, essays 1–2.66 He supports this by comparison of the different senses: because some involve contact withthe object sensed and others do not, we have intuitive evidence of the distinction betweenperception and the object perceived.67 Ibid., Pt II, essays 1–4, 7. For the Hume-Kames relationship, see Norton [11.120], ch. 4;Stewart, ‘Hume and the “Metaphysical Argument”’ (above, n. 50).68 On this Society, see Ulman [11.54]. In spite of the occasionally acerbic rhetoric, several ofhis critics relished the challenges posed for them by Hume’s philosophy. For a wider view ofAberdeen philosophical activity, see Wood [11.106]; Wood, ‘Science and the Pursuit ofVirtue in the Aberdeen Enlightenment’, SPSE, 127–49. The Aberdeen philosophersconstituted a loosely knit fraternity with varied interests. The herding of them into amonolithic ‘school’ derives from later German and French commentary, but has its roots inJoseph Priestley’s Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry, etc. of 1774. Priestley, an advocate ofDavid Hartley’s materialism, castigated Reid, Beattie and Oswald as a reaction-ary coterie,cut off from the mainstream. Of these, James Oswald (1703–93), whose interests werepredominantly theological, repudiated any association with Kames.69 George Campbell [11.21], 14–16, 22, 18.70 Ibid., 26, 33.71 Ibid., 45, 72–7.72 A fuller discussion of common sense occurs in Campbell [11.22], I. v. 3, where it is one ofthree sources of Intuitive evidence’ (evidentness). It is the basis upon which we recognizethat whatever has a beginning has a cause, that where the parts of something serve a commonend there was intelligence in the cause, and that there are other intelligent beings besidesoneself. If we have not implicitly recognized these and other principles—the third is perhapsthe most striking—we have nothing on which to base other knowledge.73 Reid, Intellectual Powers, VI. vi (Works [11.62], 452–61).74 Cf. Berkeley, Principles, §148.75 P.B.Wood, ‘Hume, Reid and the Science of the Mind’, HHC, 119–30.76 Beattie [11.10], 41, 142. Beattie left in manuscript a second, satirical, attack on scepticism.See King [11.107], ch. 5; E.C.Mossner, ‘Beattie’s “The Castle of Scepticism”’, TexasUniversity Studies in English 27 (1948): 108–45. For a reassessment of the relation of Reidand Beattie to Hume, see Somerville [11.108].77 K.Haakonssen, ‘From moral philosophy to political economy’, PSE, 211–32.78 Dugald Stewart [11.73], 1:441. For a searching critique of this reading of Hume, see Wright[11.123], ch. 4.79 Stewart [11.73], 3:417–24. Cf. I.D.L.Clark, ‘The Leslie Controversy’, Records of the ScottishChurch History Society 14 (1960–3): 179–97; J.G.Burke, ‘Kirk and Causality in Edinburgh,1805’, Isis 61 (1970): 340–54; Carabelli [11.112], ch. 12.80 Reid [11.62], 199.81 Brown [11.12], 2nd edn (1806): 44–7, 51–5, 80, 94.82 Another projected treatise on Berkeley has not been traced.83 Shepherd [11.67], 33–4, 39–43, 28.84 Shepherd [11.68], essay 8.85 Ibid., ch. 2.86 Reid, Active Powers, III. iii. 6 (Works [11.62], 590–1). A better picture of Reid’s substantiveethics is to be obtained from his manuscripts. See Practical Ethics [11.63], includingHaakonssen’s substantial introduction.87 Rowe [11.138].88 Smith [11.71]; Ferguson [11.28]. Hume, principally in his Essays [11.44], also worked ontopics in political economy. See A.S.Skinner, ‘David Hume: Principles of PoliticalEconomy’, in D.F.Norton (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993, pp. 222–54.89 Smith [11.72], I.i.1. For significant new scholarship on Smith the philosopher, see Skinner[11.146] and Jones [11.143],90 Smith learnt from Hume the constructive role of the imagination in the workings of the mindFor his application of this to scientific systems, see A. S.Skinner, ‘Adam Smith: Science andthe Role of the Imagination’, in W.B. Todd (ed.), Hume and the Enlightenment, EdinburghEdinburgh University Press, 1974, pp. 164–88; D.D.Raphael,’ “The True Old HumeanPhilosophy” and its Influence on Adam Smith’, in G.P.Morice (ed.), David Hume:
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A Passion for Ideas, Edinburgh, Polygon, 1994.11.93 *Grave, S.A.
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Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of PoliticalEconomy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1983.11.96 Hope, V. (ed.)
Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh, EdinburghUniversity Press, 1984.11.97 *Jessop, T.E.
A Bibliography of David Hume and of Scottish Philosophy fromFrancis Hutcheson to Lord Balfour, Hull, Brown, 1938.11.98 Jones, P. (ed.)
Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh,Donald, 1988.11.99——
The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh, EdinburghUniversity Press, 1989.11.100 Kuehn, M.
Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800, Montreal andKingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.11.101 *M’Cosh, J.
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Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 1750–1830, Princeton,Princeton University Press, 1975.11.103 Sher, R.B.
Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh,Edinburgh University Press, 1985.11.104 Stewart, M.A. (ed.)
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Dal sistema al senso commune: Studi sul newtonismo e gli illuministibritannici, Bologna, Il mulino, 1974.11.106 Wood, P.B.
The Aberdeen Enlightenment: The Arts Curriculum in the EighteenthCentury, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1993.
Additional Secondary Works on Individuals<c podzagolovok>Beattie</cpz>11.107 King, E.H.
James Beattie, Boston, Massachusetts, Twayne, 1977.11.108 Somerville, J.W.F.
The Enigmatic Parting Shot, Aldershot, Avebury, 1995.<c podzagolovok>Ferguson</cpz>11.109 Kettler, D.
The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson, Columbus, Ohio,Ohio State University Press, 1965.<c podzagolovok>Home (Kames)</cpz>11.110 McGuinness, A.E.
Henry Home, Lord Kames, New York, Twayne, 1970.11.111 Ross, I.S.
Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day, Oxford, Clarendon, 1972.<c podzagolovok>Hume</cpz>(Select list: see also bibliographies to Chapters 6 and 7 above)11.112 Carabelli, G.
Hume e la retorica dell’ideologia, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1972.11.113 Gaskin, J.C.A.
Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edn, London, Macmillan,1988.11.114 Hanson, D.J.
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Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument, rev. edn, Lincoln,Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1985.11.118 Jones, P.
Hume’s Sentiments, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1982.11.119 Leroy, A.
La Critique et la religion chez David Hume, Paris, Alcan, 1930.11.120 Norton, D.F.
David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician,Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1982.11.121 Penelhum, T.
God and Skepticism, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1983.11.122 Stewart, M.A. and Wright, J.P. (eds)
Hume and Hume’s Connexions, Edinburgh,Edinburgh University Press, 1994.11.123 Wright, J.P.
The Sceptical Realism of David Hume, Manchester, ManchesterUniversity Press, 1983.11.124 Yandell, K.E.
Hume’s ‘Inexplicable Mystery’: His Views on Religion,Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990.<c podzagolovok>Hutcheson</cpz>11.125 Blackstone, W.T.
Francis Hutcheson and Contemporary Ethical Theory, Athens,Georgia, University of Georgia Press, 1965.11.126 Leidhold, W.
Ethik und Politik bei Francis Hutcheson, München, Alber, 1985.11.127 MacIntyre, A.C.
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London, Duckworth, 1988.11.128*Scott, W.R.
Francis Hutcheson, his Life, Teaching and Position in the History ofPhilosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1900.11.129 Smyth, D. (ed.)
Francis Hutcheson, Supplement to
Fortnight 308, Belfast, 1992.<c podzagolovok>Oswald</cpz>11.130 Ardley, G.
The Common Sense Philosophy of James Oswald, Aberdeen, AberdeenUniversity Press, 1980.<c podzagolovok>Reid</cpz>11.131 Barker, S.F. and Beauchamp, T.L. (eds)
Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations,Philadelphia, University City Science Center, 1976.11.132 Dalgarno, M. and Matthews, H.E. (eds)
The Philosophy of Thomas Reid,Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1989.11.133*Daniels, N.
Thomas Reid’
s ‘Inquiry’: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case forRealism, New York, Franklin, 1974.11.134 Gallie, R.D.
Thomas Reid and ‘the Way of Ideas’, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1989.11.135 Lehrer, K.
Thomas Reid, London, Routledge, 1989.11.136 Manns, J.W.
Reid and his French Disciples, Leiden, Brill, 1994.11.137 Marcil-Lacoste, L.
Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid, Two Common-sensePhilosophers, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982.11.138 Rowe, W.L.
Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality, Ithaca, NY, CornellUniversity Press, 1991.11.139 Schulthess, D.
Philosophie et sens commun chez Thomas Reid (1710–1796),Berne, Lang, 1983.<c podzagolovok>Smith</cpz>11.140 Campbell, T.D.
Adam Smith’s Science of Morals, London, Allen and Unwin,1971.11.141 Haakonssen, K.
The Science of a Legislator, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981.11.142 Hope, V.
Virtue by Consensus, Oxford, Clarendon, 1989.11.143 Jones, P. and Skinner, A.S. (eds)
Adam Smith Reviewed, Edinburgh, EdinburghUniversity Press, 1992.11.144 Lightwood, M.B.
A Selected Bibliography of Significant Works about AdamSmith, London, Macmillan, 1984.11.145 Raphael, D.D.
Adam Smith, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985.11.146 Skinner, A.S. and Wilson, T. (eds)
Essays on Adam Smith, Oxford, Clarendon,1975.