Introduction: Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

 1. Introduction

At the height of the late eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish moral philosophers developed innovative breakthroughs in the understanding of human nature, ethics, and political economy from the ethos of improving the human condition in society. The concepts born from this enlightened generation, which included prominent figures such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, James Beattie, and Dugald Stewart among others, were not restricted to the metropolises of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and nor were their ideas confined to Scotland.1 The transnational diffusion of Scottish philosophical writings, particularly in North America, England, and France, testified to the wide appeal of Scottish Enlightenment thought. Of the distinctive ideas associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, Alexander Broadie suggests that the so-called Scottish School of Common Sense dominated late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy and was ‘among Scotland's most successful invisible exports’ of the time.2 From its distinct Scottish origin and some disagreement over the term ‘common sense’, Common Sense philosophy gradually became known in the transnational Republic of Letters as Scottish philosophy.3 The Introduction explores important parts of Thomas Reid's Common Sense philosophy which influenced the later development of the Scottish School of Common Sense. In doing so, this introductory article briefly examines the intellectual heritage that the articles of this collection build upon.

2. Thomas Reid and the Development of Common Sense Philosophy

The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transnational enthusiasm for Common Sense philosophy did not imply that other philosophical systems were not practiced or important in Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. For present purposes, Scottish theorists of these systems and the institutions they occupied bear mentioning. If not for the writings of David Hume, whose mitigated skepticism largely spurred Thomas Reid's response to modern philosophical skepticism, the Scottish School of Common Sense probably would not have developed. In addition to Hume's significant contribution as the so-called ‘Newton of the moral sciences’ in furthering the pneumatological and epistemological understanding of human nature as an empirical science, his friends and fellow members of the ‘Select Society’ differed from Hume's use of the Cartesian system by appealing to a version of Stoicism.4 The ‘Moderate’ and important Scottish Enlightenment moralist, Adam Ferguson, for example, drew heavily from Stoicism in examining sociological considerations of man in civil society and in teaching the subject at Edinburgh University from 1764 to 1785. While Hume's questionable religious convictions had prevented his earlier ambition to secure the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University, the teaching of moral philosophy became the chief occupation of prominent Scottish Enlightenment moralists.5 At the same time, the interests of the Church of Scotland and Calvinism underpinned Scottish moralists’ entwined treatment of ethics and religion. Moreover, this relationship could be explained by the fact that many Scottish professors of moral philosophy were often ordained ministers or served as Ruling Elders in the General Assembly.6

Scotland's age of improvement also produced Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations (1776) of which his political economy largely informed transatlantic notions of modernity at this time and continued to do so in later generations. Unlike Hume, Smith was more sensitive to religious concerns in testing his ideas as the professor of logic at Glasgow University from 1751 to 1763 whilst socializing with Glasgow merchants.7 While Smith is best known for his contribution to modern economics, his applied ethics was also widely read and considered important among his contemporaries. Moreover, his applied ethics, particularly in treating ‘sympathy’ as the source of moral sentiments and his use of the ‘impartial spectator’, built upon the thought of Hume. As Knud Haakonssen and Mark Spencer have shown, the writings of Hume and Smith found an eager audience in North America as well as throughout the wider world.8 The Scottish literati, as shown through the friendship of Smith and Hume, personally knew one another and exchanged ideas through the mediums of literary and philosophical societies and as correspondents. The social aspect of this intellectual culture was important to the development of Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. Of course, this brief overview of two prominent Scottish moralists who were challenged in different ways by the intellectual disciples of the Scottish School of Common Sense does not do justice to their individual philosophical contributions or the complex circumstances in which they lived and flourished as men of letters. But knowledge of their success and the contexts in which they worked is necessary to properly understand the religious and intellectual circumstances that gave rise to the development of Common Sense philosophy in Aberdeen.

Thomas Reid's Common Sense philosophy emerged in the last half of the eighteenth century as a formidable alternative to modern philosophical skepticism. As a Presbyterian minister and later as a regent at King's College, Aberdeen from 1751 to 1764, when confronted with David Hume's mitigated skepticism, Reid claimed that Hume's ‘reasoning appeared to me to be just: there was, therefore, a necessity to call in question the principles upon which it was founded, or to admit the conclusion’.9 From this conviction, he countered Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) with An Inquiry into the Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Dugald Stewart later remarked that Reid's ‘leading design was evidently to overthrow the modern system of skepticism; and at every successive step of his progress, new and unexpected lights break-in on his fundamental principles’.10 Reid's efforts in vindicating his ‘principles of common sense’ and ridiculing the foundations of modern philosophical skepticism (described by him as the ‘Ideal Theory’) were not intended to comprehensively examine every philosophical theme or predetermine future philosophical conclusions. Instead, he sought to establish a new empirical system based on Francis Bacon's inductive method for future inquiries in the science of mind. Scottish philosophy offered a sophisticated approach to pneumatology and epistemology whilst being compatible with Calvinistic principles; Reid's philosophy, at the same time, was also deeply indebted to the early Enlightenment writings of Francis Hutcheson on innate cognitive ideas, George Turnbull on empiricism, and Samuel Clarke on natural religion.

Paul Wood suggests that in understanding Reid's philosophy ‘we must first recognize that Reid was as much a man of science as he was a moralist’.11 His earlier studies at Marischal College from 1722 to 1726 under the direction of George Turnbull introduced Reid to the concept of approaching moral philosophy as an experimental science. Turnbull taught:

I was led long ago to apply myself to the study of the human mind in the same way to the study of the human body, or any other part of Natural Philosophy: that is, to try whether a due inquiry into moral nature would not soon enable us to account for moral, as the best of Philosophers teach us to explain natural phenomena.12

Like Turnbull, Reid's enthusiasm for Bacon's inductive method later played a central part in his Common Sense philosophy to the extent that Reid suggested that ‘he who philosophizes by other rules, either concerning the material system, or concerning the mind, mistakes his aim’.13 By drawing philosophical conclusions on the evidence of introspective reflection and the external observation of human nature, Reid rebutted the reasoning of David Hume, Rene Descartes, Nicholas Malebranche, John Locke, and George Berkeley, as prominent theorists of the so-called ‘Ideal Theory’. Reid's use of the scientific method, however, did not imply that he failed to draw a distinction between moral laws and the laws of nature.14 According to Robert Callergard, neither ‘the activity and passivity of things, nor final or efficient causes, are within the reach of the kind of “Newtonian” physics that Reid defends’.15 Hume also sought to establish ‘an experience-based science of human understanding’ through the use of Bacon's inductive method or as what he preferred to term the ‘experimental method of reasoning’.16 Contrary to Hume's mitigated skepticism in the understanding of human nature (best shown in Book One of Treatise), Reid identified that progress in this science required establishing governing maxims and delineating self-evident or ‘common sense’ principles as a foundational starting point for future work. Reid's notion of self-evident principles also appealed to the earlier lessons of his regent. Turnbull claimed that

no being can know itself, project or pursue any scheme, or lay down maxims for its conduct; but so far as its own constitution is certain; and constant; for so far only, are things ascertainable; and therefore so far only, can rule be drawn from them.17

Similar to Turnbull, Reid argued that ‘principles of common sense’ supported arguments for the existence of a benevolent deity. Thus, Reid's Common Sense philosophy expanded upon Turnbull's earlier belief that ‘human nature and the ways of God to man vindicate, by delineating the general laws to which the principal phenomena in the human system are reducible, and shewing [sic] them to be wise and good’.18 This religious and philosophical conviction was predicated on the belief that God designed the mind with innate faculties and limited powers for its cultivation toward perfection.

Meanwhile, the concept of ‘common sense’ in describing ‘mother wit’ or an intuitive sense did not originate with Reid. Francis Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy (1755) had previously popularised this belief in Scottish moral philosophy. Often considered as the father of the Scottish moral philosophy, Hutcheson focused his moral theory on the natural virtues of humankind and the moral-sense cognitivism in evaluating sentiments and ideas.19 Hutcheson wrote that ‘to each of our powers we seem to have a corresponding taste or sense, recommending the proper use of it to the agent, and making him relish or value the like exercise of it by another’.20 The universal existence of these cognitive powers in human conduct suggests a moral truth or ‘realism’ to this belief. Reid later expanded upon this philosophical concept of ‘realism’ in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). There Reid drew from Hutcheson's example of the ‘moral sense’ in illustrating the active powers of the so-called ‘moral faculty’. Reid remarked that ‘the testimony of our moral faculty, like that of the external senses, is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reason to rely upon it’.21 Yet, Reid differed from Hutcheson by suggesting that people did not merely sense moral qualities but were morally obligated to cultivate morals as duties to themselves, others, and God. Contrary to orthodox Calvinism, Reid believed that the perfection of the divinely inspired ‘moral faculty’ provided the primary source for moral behavior.

In addition to questions regarding the primary source of morality, Reid's fundamental treatment of ‘causation’ also relied heavily upon natural religion and its relation to the innate ‘active powers of the mind’.22 Of the various subjects discussed, the controversial debate over liberty and necessity generated the most attention in Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy from its consequences on interpretations of revealed religion.23 This debate involved the extent of God's influence in causes and effects and whether agents acted out of necessity or possessed the free will to determine a particular action. Reid argued that ‘the name of a cause and of an agent, is properly given to that being only, which, by its active power produces some change in itself, or in some other being’.24 The fingerprint of Samuel Clarke's sermons on natural religion could be found in this important area of Reid's thought.25 According to R. F. Stalley, ‘Reid's endorsement of Clarke's argument shows that for him too, the idea that we are free agents is bound up with the idea that motives are not causes’.26 Reid suggested that the concept of necessity reduced all human actions to the exclusive determination of God and, therefore, denied any human independence in choosing to act or refrain from action. According to Reid, if the system of necessity existed ‘there can be no moral government, nor moral obligation [and] there can be no display of moral attributes’.27 He likened the concept of necessity to a mechanical engine or compass where people had no choice in obeying or transgressing secular and religious laws.

Reid concluded that it was improbable that God would create humankind without the ability to merit moral rewards or punishments for virtuous or vicious conduct respectively. For this reason, Reid advocated that God designed the human species with limited active powers to be agents of cause. He wrote that ‘it has pleased the Almighty to bestow upon some of his creatures, particularly upon man, some degree of active power, and of reason, to direct him to the right use of his power’.28 The significant connection between the liberty to act or refrain from an action and the ability to reasonably determine God's moral design of that power, for Reid, represented humankind's ‘moral liberty’.29 Reid argued that humans are ‘not merely a tool in the hand of the master, but a servant, in the proper sense, who has a certain trust, and is accountable for the discharge of it’.30 The provision of a limited free will designed ‘after the image of God’ came with the moral obligation to make virtuous choices through the faculty of reason.31 Although ‘moral liberty’ rendered benevolent interactions that merited approbation from others possible, Reid believed that God ultimately judged an agent's use of ‘moral liberty’. In this respect, he noted that humankind ‘must finally render an account of the talent committed to him, to the supreme Governor and righteous Judge’.32 The notion that God created humankind with the ‘moral liberty’ to fulfill His benevolent design and judge how an agent responded to immoral ‘passions or appetites’ demonstrated Reid's marriage of limited free will and religious faith.33 Reid did not claim to understand the entirety of God's purpose for creating humankind with limited freedom or the other faculties of mind, but he suggested that the cultivation of these innate powers better served God and benevolent affections between people than the philosophical concept of necessity.34 Of course, Reid's philosophy was more nuanced and far-reaching than this selective analysis of these important philosophical themes. Nevertheless, his philosophical system and his treatment of these subjects in combating modern philosophical skepticism, particularly the writings of Hume, became important to the intellectual disciples of the Scottish School of Common Sense. The flexibility for creativity in Reid's philosophical system gave rise to innovative adaptations across the following century that responded to radically different circumstances within and beyond Scotland.

3. Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

This special issue, ‘Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World’, examines the historical and philosophical significance of Scottish philosophy during the late Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods, with a focus on its use in Scotland and North America. Jane Rendall's article offers a detailed analysis of how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women authors, with special attention to the writings of Elizabeth Hamilton and Maria Edgeworth, appealed to Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy in creating practical programs of early education. 35 In the context of what was seen as a transitional period of both women's rights and progressive Whiggish beliefs, these programs encountered praise as well as Evangelical opposition for their treatment and engagement in the science of mind. Rendall has shown Stewart, Edgeworth, and Hamilton as collaborators in the Scottish School of Common Sense who shared a vision of social progressive improvement that involved a significant yet somewhat guarded contribution from English and Scottish women writers.

The decline of Scottish philosophy and the subsequent rise of mechanical theories during the late 1820s did not occur without opposition. Ralph Jessop's article explores how the prominent Common Sense theorists Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) countered the alleged melancholy effects from mechanical theories of mind. 36 The scope of this piece also looks forward to the thought of William James (1842–1910) who, as Jessop argues, appealed to the earlier thought of Carlyle and Hamilton in his opposition to medical materialist psychology. Jessop shows how the thought of these significant, yet often marginalized, theorists of the Scottish School of Common Sense is best understood through Jürgen Habermas's distinction between communicative and instrumental rationality.

Scottish moral philosophy's central place in university curricula on either side of the Atlantic occupies my article on how Scottish philosophy influenced American higher education in an institutional context at the College of New Jersey (which later became Princeton University). 37 This article compares the administrations of John Witherspoon (who served from 1768 to 1794), Samuel Stanhope Smith (who served from 1795 to 1812), and James McCosh (who served from 1868 to 1888) at Princeton and examines their use of Scottish philosophy in restructuring the curriculum and reforming its institutional purpose. Meanwhile, Witherspoon's legacy at Princeton profoundly influenced the nineteenth-century creation and reception of Smith's and McCosh's systematic use of Scottish philosophy as an engine for didactic Enlightenment.

In league with my discussion of Scottish philosophy in a North American pedagogical context, Cairns Craig's article explores how Scottish immigrants, with special attention to the thought of John Clark Murray (Canada), James McCosh (the United States), and Henry Laurie (Australia), wrote histories of Scottish philosophy whilst teaching moral philosophy abroad.38 Craig has shown that Murray and McCosh shared the task of constructing the history of Scottish philosophy (albeit with a different treatment of ‘Scottish Idealism’) by emphasizing the works of William Hamilton and the problematic placement of Hume, as a way to support the distinctiveness of their respective theories and, at the same time, adapt the Scottish School of Common Sense tradition to the national contexts in which they taught.

This collection re-evaluates the significance of Common Sense philosophy during its supposed decline. The tension between Scottish philosophy and the rise of early nineteenth-century Romanticism as well as ‘Idealism’, popularised by the German theorist Immanuel Kant, gradually eclipsed the dominance of Scottish philosophy. While the transnational diffusion of Scottish philosophy between 1760 and 1790 has continued to attract scholarly attention, little is known of its use within and beyond Scotland during the long nineteenth century.39 The special issue takes an important step toward addressing the role of Scottish philosophy in its nineteenth-century transatlantic contexts.

Notes

1 For further reading on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, see Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985); Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, edited by Jennifer Carter and Joan Pittock (Aberdeen, 1992); Paul Wood, The Aberdeen Enlightenment (Aberdeen, 1993); The Glasgow Enlightenment, edited by Andrew Hook and Richard Sher (East Lothian, 1995).

2 See Alexander Broadie, A History of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2009), 3.

3 See Selwyn Grave, The Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford, 1960), 1–10.

4 See Alexander Broadie, ‘The Human Mind and its Powers’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, 2003), 61–65; Roger Emerson, ‘The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The “Select Society of Edinburgh”, 1754–1764’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 114 (1973), 291–330.

5 See Richard Sher, ‘Professors of Virtue: The Social History of the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair in the Eighteenth Century’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), 87–126.

6 See Lawrence Williams, ‘“Pulpit and Gown”: Edinburgh University and the Church, 1760–1830’, in Scottish Universities: Distinctiveness and Diversity, edited by Jennifer Carter and Donald Withrington (Edinburgh, 1992), 87–95.

7 See Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New York, 2011).

8 See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2002), xxii; Mark Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester, 2010).

9 See Alexander Campbell Fraser, Thomas Reid (Edinburgh, 1898), 20–26; Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh, 1764), iv.

10 Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid’, in Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, LL.D., of William Robertson, D.D., and of Thomas Reid, D.D. (Edinburgh, 1811), 452–53.

11 Paul Wood, ‘Thomas Reid and the Culture of Science’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, edited by Terence Cuneo and Rene van Woudenberg (Cambridge, 2004), 71.

12 George Turnbull, The Principles of Moral Philosophy: An Enquiry into the Wise and Good Government of the Moral World in Which the Continuance of Good Administration, and of Due Care about Virtue, For Ever, is Inferred from Present Order in all Things, in that Part Chiefly Where Virtue is Concerned (London, 1740), iii.

13 Reid, Inquiry, 3.

14 For further reading on Reid's use of the inductive method, see Peter Anstey, ‘Thomas Reid and the Justification of Induction’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 12 (1995), 77–93; Larry Laudan, ‘Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought’, in The Methodological Heritage of Newton, edited by Robert Butts and John Davis (Toronto, ON, 1970), 103–31.

15 Robert Callergard, ‘Reid and the Newtonian Forces of Attraction’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 3 (2005), 140.

16 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford, 2009), 114–15.

17 Turnbull, Principles of Moral Philosophy, 3.

18 Turnbull, Principles of Moral Philosophy, 1.

19 Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996), 66.

20 Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols (London, 1755), I, 59. This work was published posthumously in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. Elements of Hutcheson's moral philosophy resembled those of his earlier professor's, Gershom Carmichael, who he succeeded as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University in 1729. In addition, Hutcheson heavily influenced the thought of Adam Smith, who later taught moral philosophy at Glasgow, from 1752 until Reid's 1764 appointment.

21 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1788), 238.

22 For a more in-depth discussion of Reid's treatment of causation and freedom see William Rowe, Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 49–93.

23 For further reading on the debate over necessity and liberty in eighteenth-century Britain see James Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (Oxford, 2008).

24 Reid, Active Powers, 276.

25 As a Presbyterian minister at New Machar, Reid read Clark's Boyle Lectures to his congregation on several occasions; see Paul Wood, ‘Thomas Reid and the Tree of the Sciences’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 2 (2004), 128.

26 R. F. Stalley, ‘Reid's Defence of Freedom’, in Thomas Reid: Context, Influence and Significance, edited by Joseph Houston (Edinburgh, 2004), 44.

27 Reid, Active Powers, 309.

28 Reid, Active Powers, 309.

29 Reid, Active Powers, 310.

30 Reid, Active Powers.

31 Reid, Active Powers.

32 Reid, Active Powers.

33 Reid, Active Powers, 84.

34 Reid, Active Powers, 310–11.

35 Jane Rendall, ‘‘Elementary Principles of Education’: Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and the Uses of Common Sense Philosophy”, History of European Ideas, 39 (5), 605–12.

36 Ralph Jessop, ‘Resisting the Enlightenment's Instrumentalist Legacy: James, Hamilton, and Carlyle on the Mechanisation of the Human Condition’, History of European Ideas, 39 (5), 631–49.

37 Charles Bradford Bow, ‘Reforming Witherspoon's Legacy at Princeton: John Witherspoon, Samuel Stanhope Smith and James McCosh on Didactic Enlightenment, 1768–1888’, History of European Ideas, 39 (5), 650–69.

38 Cairns Craig, ‘Scotland's Migrant Philosophers and the History of Scottish Philosophy’, History of European Ideas, 39 (5), 670–92.

39 George Davie's seminal work on nineteenth-century Scottish thought offers an important contribution to the understanding of this period, but this ambitious and groundbreaking work does not comprehensively cover the use of Scottish philosophy or its significant use in the nineteenth-century United States. See George Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1999).