What makes the Scottish Enlightenment so important? When you mention the Enlightenment to most people, it conjures up images of glittering aristocratic salons lit by scores of candles, of scandalous wit and cultivated laughter, of bewigged philosophers and critics pressing their progressive ideas on various European autocrats. Voltaire visiting Frederick the Great at Sans Souci; Denis Diderot editing the Encyclopédie and urging Catherine the Great of Russia to outlaw the use of torture and the knout; Jean-Jacques Rousseau scandalizing polite society in the years leading to the French Revolution. Indeed, the famous names of the French Enlightenment seem to dominate almost every discussion of culture in the eighteenth century.
This is a mistake. The Scottish Enlightenment may have been less glamorous, but it was in many ways more robust and original. More important, it was at least as influential. In fact, if one were to draw up a list of the books that dominated the thinking of Europeans in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Scottish names stand out. Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Essays Political, Literary, and Moral. William Robertson’s History of Scotland and History of the Reign of Charles V. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind. And at the top of the page, Francis Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy and Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man.
It is an impressive list. If one had to identify two themes that most of these works share, they would be “history” and “human nature.” Indeed, it is the Scots who first linked them together. The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the “Scottish school,” as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.
At the same time, they also insisted that these changes are not arbitrary or chaotic. They rest on certain fundamental principles and discernible patterns. The study of man is ultimately a scientific study. The Scots are the true inventors of what we today call the social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, history, and, as mention of the name Adam Smith makes us realize, economics. But their interests went beyond that.
The Scottish Enlightenment embarked on nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge. It sought to transform every branch of learning—literature and the arts; the social sciences; biology, chemistry, geology, and the other physical and natural sciences—into a series of organized disciplines that could be taught and passed on to posterity. The great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment never lost sight of their educational mission. Most were teachers or university professors; others were clergymen, who used their pulpits and sermons for the same purpose. Some, like Hutcheson, Ferguson, and Thomas Reid, were both. In every case, the goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it. From the Scots’ point of view, the advancement of human understanding was an essential part of the ascent of man in history.
This attitude produced one great achievement that would live on long after the Scottish Enlightenment itself had all but departed from the scene. In fact, to this day most of us have it on our bookshelves or on our computer disks. We and our children use it almost daily. It is called the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the first volume of which appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. Its editors intended it to be a complete summary of scientific and human knowledge, incorporating the latest discoveries as part of a coherent and graspable whole. It worked. While the French Enlightenment’s version, Diderot’s Encyclopédie, is today merely a historical curiosity, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has continued to grow, develop, and change over two centuries—just as its first editors had intended.
The editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica also regarded their handiwork as a British encyclopedia—not an English encyclopedia, or even an Scottish one. They, like all the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, saw themselves as Britons, members of a new, modern community created by the Act of Union. Some even dropped the term “Scots” altogether, and began referring to themselves as “North Britons.” It was not as strange a locution as it sounds. In their minds, the Act of Union of 1707 had closed a door on an earlier era, on Scotland’s cramped, crabbed, and violent past. The key question for Scots now had to be, where do we go from here?
It was Hutcheson and Kames who first laid out the contours of this new cultural landscape. Their disciples and followers—Smith, Hume, Robertson, and the rest—would fill in and embellish the areas they initially staked out. A new mental world was taking shape in Scotland’s cities and universities, very different from that of medieval Scotland or the austere fundamentalism of the Reformation Kirk. At its center lay not God any longer, but human beings. Human beings considered as individuals but also as the products, even the playthings, of historical and social change: in other words, human beings as we understand them today.
I
Francis Hutcheson was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, but in the “other” Scotland, the Ulster settlements of northern Ireland. In 1606 two Scottish noblemen, Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton, arranged an amnesty for the Irish rebel Con O’Neill in exchange for a third of his vast property holdings in counties Down and Antrim. They then encouraged tenants from other parts of Scotland to settle there and establish farms. James I realized this could be a useful way to pacify the Catholic Irish in the neighboring territory. In 1610 he set aside nearly half a million acres across six counties, promising land to any settler willing to take the Oath of Supremacy (meaning they recognized James as the head of the English Church, which automatically excluded any Catholics). The settlers came in two great waves: first Highlanders from the Western Isles, then Lowlanders and some English emigrants financed by merchants in London (hence the name of the town where many made their homes, Londonderry). However, it was the Scots who predominated, and who left their stamp on the six counties of Protestant Ulster. Today Americans call their descendants “Scotch-Irish,” but we must consider them Scots in every significant respect. In truth, they are the first representatives of the great Scottish diaspora that changed the rest of the world.
The Ulster Scots were genuine legatees of John Knox, with their fundamentalist religious zeal, their aggressive egalitarianism, and “their love of education and their anxiety to have an educated ministry,” in James McCosh’s famous phrase. Two of those ministers were Francis Hutcheson’s grandfather and father. John Hutcheson was pastor of Armagh when his son Francis was born in 1694. Francis received his first education at his grandfather’s house. It seemed only natural and proper that he follow in their footsteps as a minister.
By then the Ulster Scots community had been through much. In the decades before Hutcheson’s birth, they had endured massacre by dispossessed Irish Catholics, including the wholesale murder of men, women, and children at Portadown in 1641, and paid them back in kind. Many had signed the National Covenant, and backed the Parliamentary forces against Charles I. They had submitted to Cromwell’s rule, and defied James II and the French at the gates of Londonderry in 1687. Like life in America’s frontier West, life in Ulster had hardened and toughened its inhabitants into a tight-knit community. They felt surrounded by hostile forces, not only the native Irish but the Anglican officials of a “foreign” government in London. Thrown back on their own resources, Ulster Scots clung fiercely to their independent status and Scottish ways, including their Presbyterian faith.
But that faith was already changing. What was called “the new light” was spreading within the ranks of the Scottish clergy from England and Holland, and found support in Ulster. Like English Latitudinarians, some ministers had begun to q
uestion the harsh dogmas of old-style Calvinism, such as the proposition that man was innately sinful and the belief that every human being is predestined from birth for either heaven or hell. What had happened to the notion of human beings being made in the image of God, they wanted to know, and of changing one’s life by accepting Jesus as Savior? We don’t know whether young Francis was exposed to any of this “new light” when he attended James McAlpin’s academy in County Down. But we do know John Hutcheson opposed any dilution of the old-time religion, and that later he and his son differed sharply over what direction the Presbyterian faith in Ireland should take. If Francis Hutcheson had begun to rethink his faith that early, he would get more food for thought when he arrived to study in Glasgow in 1711.
Glasgow lay across the water from the Ulster counties, and dominated western Scotland. The former medieval market town, set in the Clyde Valley, was a very different city from Edinburgh. Residents and visitors all agreed it was much more attractive. While Edinburgh was cramped, dirty, and soot-stained from thousands of foul-smelling coal fires (giving it its half-affectionate nickname of “Auld Reekie”), Glasgow was spaciously laid out in a graceful cruciform, defined by its four principal streets meeting in a central intersection. Daniel Defoe called it one of the most beautiful and cleanest cities in Great Britain. An international port city for more than a hundred years before the Act of Union, Glasgow had dispatched its ships regularly to European markets and to the Scottish settlements in the New World, in Nova Scotia (which James I sponsored), and in New Jersey. Before the Act of Union, and even before Darien, Perth Amboy was a regular stop for Glasgow merchants picking up goods and dropping off settlers in America.
In 1684 broadsides circulated in Glasgow calling for volunteers to “Province of New-east-Jersey in America,” where, they said, the woods were filled with deer and elk, the sea with fish, the banks with oysters and clams. Winter ran only two months out of the year, the broadside assured readers, and natives were very few and “a help and encouragement, [rather] than anyways hurtful or troublesome.” Eventually the English took over Perth Amboy and merged it into their own colonial administration, closing it to all but English merchants. Even this did not deter Glasgow merchants, who continued to do brisk business along the New Jersey coast—as smugglers.
The freewheeling, entrepreneurial character of Glasgow communicated itself to its university. The university’s students numbered four hundred in 1700 (compared to around six hundred at Edinburgh), and included not only Ulstermen like Hutcheson, but a regular contingent of Englishmen from the south. The university was also much older than Edinburgh’s—and suffered less interference from the local merchants or the Kirk. Whereas Edinburgh’s Kirk-dominated town council appointed the majority of faculty professorships (they still controlled eighteen out of twenty-six in 1800), and voiced its approval or disapproval on the rest, at Glasgow pay and hiring remained in the hands of the university regents. This became important in the years after 1688. The winds of change were beginning to blow through the university when Hutcheson arrived.
When William III came to the throne, the bloody persecutions and tensions of the Killing Time came to an end. Raised a Calvinist himself, William gave the Kirk the independence it had fought for, throwing out the bishops and recognizing the authority of the General Assembly. But William also insisted that the old fire-breathing, antimonarchical Covenant theology was out. Blotting out the Covenant’s legacy among a clergy scattered across the country was difficult. An easier place to start was in the ministry’s own training grounds, the universities. As his instrument to do this, the king chose his former chaplain and the man who would save the Act of Union, William Carstares.
Carstares did not become Principal of Edinburgh University until 1703. But his brother-in-law William Donlop had occupied that post at Glasgow since 1690. Donlop succeeded in appointing a series of regent professors who would undermine the power of the militants, while Carstares later did the same at Edinburgh. Together they recast the curriculum of Scotland’s universities. Professorships sprang up in new fields such as history, botany, medicine, and law. The educational monopoly that the old-style Calvinist curriculum had once enjoyed was broken.
This also had important consequences. As the new century proceeded, young Scotsmen with brains and ambition learned to shy away from theology, as too controversial a field and too politically charged. Instead they turned their energies to other subjects: mathematics, medicine, law (Carstares set up the first chair in civil law at Edinburgh in 1710, and Glasgow followed suit in 1712), and the natural sciences— or natural philosophy, as it was called. The Carstares reforms laid the groundwork for the scientific side of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the appearance of such towering figures as Joseph Black in chemistry and William Cullen in medicine.
It also meant that for Scottish intellectuals, the study of science, medicine, mathematics, and even engineering was at least as important as literature, philosophy, history, and the arts. The enlightened man was expected to understand both. The notion of an intellectual conflict between science and the humanities, what the English writer C. P. Snow later termed the “two cultures,” would have made no sense to an enlightened Scot.
Of course, all this lay in the future. Francis Hutcheson was starting at Glasgow on the traditional path, toward a master’s degree in theology. But even here, new influences were making themselves felt. One of his first professors was John Simson, a new appointment as Professor of Sacred Theology and a Carstares-Donlop favorite. He was in fact Donlop’s brother-in-law. It was a good thing, too, because he needed all his principal’s help in his running battles with the Glasgow Kirk. Although he was detested by hard-line conservatives, Hutcheson and many others of the “Irish” contingent at Glasgow felt irresistibly drawn to him.
Simson directly challenged the harshest of the old Calvinist dogmas and offered to students a more reasonable view of man and divinity. The world around us is not the realm of the Devil; it reflects the purposes of its Creator, in its orderliness and bountiful gifts, its regularity and symmetry, and its startling beauty. Through it we can get a grasp of divinity that supplements, but does not replace, the one from the Bible. Like the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, Simson explained, nature reveals a beneficent God who watches over the fate of His creatures and provides for their needs and desires.
This was a far cry from the terrifying fire-and-brimstone vision of the world taught by John Knox’s catechisms or the sermons from the average Kirk pulpit. Hutcheson welcomed its image of a more serene and compassionate Creator and an orderly, benign creation: it became the foundation stone of his own theology. But he was also troubled by the radical direction Simson’s teachings sometimes seemed to take. Simson proposed that belief in Jesus as Savior was not necessary for salvation, and that even moral and upright pagans might be saved. He cast doubt on the Trinity and on Jesus Christ as the Son of God—Christian tenets that advanced English thinkers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton had also abandoned. At one point in a lecture, Simson was even supposed to have told his students that when they read the passage from the Bible proclaiming Jesus “the highest God,” they should read it “with a grain of salt.”
No wonder Simson ran into such trouble with the Kirk authorities, who branded his teachings blasphemy. Simson’s God of natural religion easily morphed into “nature’s God” of the freethinking radical deist, who was only one remove (to an orthodox mind) from the outright atheist. Yet it was startling and amazing. Notions that had cost Thomas Aikenhead his life just fifteen years earlier were now being bandied about in theology classrooms—a measure of how much the intellectual atmosphere in Scotland had loosened up, even while Francis Hutcheson was still a student.
Hutcheson, the minister’s child, could not accept his teacher’s more radical teachings. Yet what troubled him about this racy, English-style natural religion was not just its detached view of God. He saw it overlapping with another troubling tendency, also stemming out of En
gland, a kind of moral relativism. If God never did sacrifice His only son for our salvation, if He really is as distant and unconcerned about what happens to us here on earth as English deists claimed, then what happens to the moral law laid out for us in Scripture? It is, in that case, entirely contingent on personal belief. Otherwise, human beings are thrown back on their own resources, to find a way to survive in the jungle among their own brutal kind.
The figure of Thomas Hobbes loomed large and sinister in the minds of many thinkers at the beginning of the Age of Reason, and not just the young Hutcheson’s. Hobbes’s Leviathan was the description of just how such a jungle struggle for power results in the creation of the State. Human beings, realizing there is no natural moral order or constraint on their own appetites, entrust sovereign power to a single master, in order to prevent an inevitable “war of all against all,” as Hobbes put it. In many ways, Hutcheson’s lifework was one continuous refutation of Thomas Hobbes and all he stood for. The notion of human beings as naturally selfish and vicious, requiring the constant whip hand of the absolute State; the idea of morality as a man-made, rather than divinely inspired, set of ethical conventions—morality as a “social construct,” as our modern-day Hobbesian, the postmodernist, would say—were all deeply repellent to Hutcheson.
Yet he also saw an irony: that moral relativists such as Hobbes ended up sounding like the fire-eating absolutists of traditional Calvinism. They both asserted that human beings were innately depraved creatures, incapable of a generous or self-sacrificing action without coercive iron constraints—of the Kirk’s godly discipline, said the one; of the absolute State, said the other. The same conclusion, by different means.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World Page 8