The Problem of the Scottish Enlightenment

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The Problem of the Scottish Enlightenment Gerard Carruthers The Scottish Enlightenment has long been entombed in cultural and political prejudice. Notwithstanding the appreciation of the epistemological achievements of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith et al., suspicion voiced by historians, literary critics, politicians and even journalists, continues to attach itself to the ‘grand project’ of eighteenth century Enlightenment in Scotland. At bottom, the case against the Enlightenment is that it is the major motor in Scotland, after the Union of Parliaments in 1707, in the self-conscious embrace of ‘modern’, ‘civilised’, and ‘progressive’ values, as the nation sought to show itself worthy of its new partnership with economically dynamic, England, with its wider markets and its growing overseas empire. The Enlightenment, then, is read as a product of the Scottish drive towards the British super-state, with material prosperity as the main motivation. What are these markers of ‘modernity’ of ‘progressive civilisation’ with which the Enlightenment is damningly associated? A few highprofile exemplars are telling: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), allegedly the text that theorises specialism and the division of labour, the foundation text of freemarket economics, is seen to confirm the appetite for capital accumulation in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Edinburgh becomes a self-consciously metropolitan centre from the1760s as it boasted of being the ‘Athens of the North’, creating the New Town according to elegant, neo-classical principles – and, in the process, trampling upon authentically ‘native’ culture.

Enlightenment activists, such as David Hume and James Beattie, for instance, are notorious in their attempts to expunge ‘Scotticisms’ from their writing, drawing upon southern authorities as they revise their prose. Most generally, the Scottish philosophy of the Enlightenment is seen to be ‘moral philosophy’, conducted largely by moderate Church of Scotland clergymen, intent on codifying the righteous behaviour appropriate to the rise of a new responsible bourgeois class in Scotland. Cultural engineering, Capitalism, Anglocentricity and narrow morality are all aspects

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associated with the Scottish Enlightenment and which have been trotted out by several generations of commentators and scholars wielding a political and cultural nationalism that is informed by a combination of equally sentimental Marxism and one-nation Toryism, both of these ideologies i turn sustained by a common organic, or systematic, outlook that is inadequate to describing the much more random amplitude of cultural history.

The Enlightenment is not what its most influential twentieth century cultural commentators – David Craig, David Daiches and Tom Nairn – say it is: essentially a failure of Scottish culture to manage itself properly, as the Enlightenment pays too little respect to nativist cultural traditions and pursues a spurious cosmopolitanism. Let us examine the charges made against the Enlightenment (all of which, when taken together, add up to the proposition that the Enlightenment unnaturally alters the identity of Scotland; — that it makes Scotland go in a different direction to that in which it ought to have gone).

Charge one: the Enlightenment is the product of an anxiety to be like the English and (in a related though somewhat contradictory clause of this charge) that the thinking of the Enlightenment, whether in history, philosophy, science or whatever is enabled by the Union of 1707 which allows a previously backward nation to support a class of cheery, optimistic scholars, it otherwise would have lacked. Recent historiography, quite rightly, has challenged the idea that the Enlightenment in Scotland was propelled by the ‘English’ influence after 1707. The supposedly ‘dark’, unenlightened, ‘superstitious’ and ‘fanatical’ Scot of the seventeenth century, however, was largely an English stereotype.

In reality, once the Scots like the English, Irish and Welsh got themselves clear of the ‘English Civil War’ and its consequences, they began – from as early as the 1680s – to reform their universities, drawing, certainly, upon Dutch and other continental influences to make these institutions, places of liberal learning.

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Since 1961 and the publication of George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect, emphasis has grown upon the idea of Presbyterian civic humanism as a seedbed for the Enlightenment in Scotland. Very broadly, this is the idea that ‘virtue’, ‘learning’ and ‘citizenship’ were all inherent as connected entities in the Presbyterian mindset. Without necessarily having to argue an entirely cogent path, it is appropriate to suggest that from the time of Knox, down through George Buchanan, liberal education, with a strong emphasis upon both private morality and the social good, was a long-held Presbyterian aspiration that could only really flourish from the 1680s (the same could be said for university education in England) with the beginnings of settled tolerance for confessional diversity throughout Britain. One of the most telling exemplars of Presbyterian civic humanism is the ‘father of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Francis Hutcheson. An Ulsterman who became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1729, he was deeply touched by the events of the seventeenth century in developing his theory of the ‘moral sense,’ the idea that morality did not depend upon reason, though reason could and should be built on top of moral apprehension, but was intuitive. In the 1710s and 1720s, Hutcheson is the among the boldest as well as the first British thinkers to insist on the idea of universal benevolence, a concept that could not be acknowledged by competing politico-religious factions in the British Isles for most of the seventeenth century. One interesting result of this insistence was the attempt by the Presbytery of Glasgow to accuse Hutcheson of heresy when he held that ‘heathens’ could have access to a complete sense of goodness even if they had never been exposed to the gospel. Hutcheson was an orthodox Calvinist in so far as he held that God had deeply ordained human nature with a moral input rather than an input of reason, primarily. He was less orthodox, clearly, in substituting ‘morality’ for ‘faith’. Hutcheson was never successfully charged with heresy in Glasgow, and this is seen, rightly, as a marker of a more moderate religious climate emerging in Scotland. But the thawing of rigid ‘faith’ was not something that needed to happen only in Scotland at this time: it was a more general British problem, including the grudging agreement of the Church of England at this time to begin to allow greater freedom to dissenters, a process that was to take another 100 years to reach anything like completion. Hutcheson’s reading of his own Ulster-Scottish Presbyterian heritage; his close observation of the English political scene, where his erstwhile intellectual mentor the Earl of Shaftesbury, a man of genuine but sometimes compromised liberal principles had become embroiled in stoking up the Popish Plot and arguing that some groups could not have the same rights as others; and Hutcheson’s time in Dublin where he took the view that Catholics were being denied proper rights; – all show Hutcheson’s ‘moral sense’ philosophy, and the tenacity with which he held it, emerging from a widely-informed British Isles context. Rightly, Hutcheson was held up as an icon by the non-sectarian United Irishmen movement of the 1790s. Rightly, Hutcheson’s work on ‘rights’, where he held that the body politic, like the body human, ought to contain the fibre of universal moral

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rights and duties, is seen as an influence upon the framing of the American Constitution.

If revised notice of a generous Presbyterian impetus at the root of the Scottish Enlightenment is rightly taken, we should be careful about emphasising this energy to the exclusion of all else. We should take cognisance of a very strong dash of atheism in the figure of David Hume, who has been seen in some accounts of the Enlightenment as an awkward greatness who has to be made culturally Presbyterian or even written off as ‘untypical’. David Hume, in fact, is the greatest cosmopolitan figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The roots of his education are in the literature and philosophy of the ancient classical world (the ‘humanities’ as Hume’s case shows, capable of being as prized in Presbyterian Scotland as elsewhere); his atheism though became particularly developed in his exposure to France and its emerging culture of Enlightenment. His prose also, about which Scottish literary critics have been both lazy and over-excited, is the result of studying neo-classical rhythms that are, if anything, more to do with French than English poise. Any other national literature would be delighted to have an essayist as intellectually and stylistically capable as Hume, but not in Scotland it would seem. It is remarkable how his essays are excluded from the canon of Scottish literature, when fine, but lesser essayists are easily accommodated within courses on English literature.

This is where Hume’s lists of ‘Scotticisms’ – which he wanted to excise only from his prose for the sake of the most universal clarity – have been an unfortunate red herring. Apparently, he

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retained a broad ‘Scotch’ accent, vocabulary and idiom in his speech, but for his published prose he ‘chose’ (although there was no real ‘choice’ about it, except for the alternatives of French or Latin), English. His wider market, including not only his British but also his Scottish market could cope more readily with English than any other prose language. Hume’s was a practical and totally understandable choice.

Commentators who compare unlike with unlike, however, construct his ‘sin’ of ‘adopting’ English: by setting his medium against poetry in Scots where such linguistic choice remained viable. Hume, the greatest philosopher produced by the British Isles, brought to bear on his essays an intellect that was both as urbane and as iconoclastic as could be found anywhere in Europe. When taken into account, his essays on the justifiability of suicide, or on the observation of the ferocity of the animal world (as a supposed subset of God’s creation), are as far away from the image of the ‘conservative’ Scottish Enlightenment as could be wished.

Hume as a historian berated, in general terms, the tendency towards ‘fanaticism’ in European history, in the seventeenth century and earlier. However, another movement in tandem with this ‘civilised’ historiographical impulse of the Enlightenment was to be found in its interest in understanding psychology.

The stadialist impulse found in Scottish commentators such as Adam Ferguson, most famously in his Essay on Civil Society (1767), where the mentality of a culture was estimated in accordance with its stage of development as a society, began to extend a measure of objective understanding to earlier, more ‘primitive’ ages in history. And this effect was compounded by universalist Enlightenment theories of morality. If the most celebrated European version of the latter was to be found in Rousseau’s idea of the ‘Noble Savage’, Scotland had its own influential eighteenth century tradition of a ‘moral sense’ innate to humanity and essentially unchanged by cultural or historical location, as first cogently described by Francis Hutcheson. We have, most famously, William Robertson’s partially sympathetic treatment of the native Americans. We have also Mary Queen of Scots (who had not even been an icon for the Jacobites), coming in from the cold. Previously, the last word in dark, devious, Catholic femininity, Mary was rehabilitated by the work of William Tytler so that she was seen as someone to be admired personally and politically in some measure.

At the same time, Enlightenment historians began to see the Covenanters, to some extent, as heroic champions of basic contractarian and democratic rights. Another Enlightenment commentator, James McIntosh, could suggest the Covenanters as forerunners of the revolutionaries in France. Both these manoeuvres ‘reclaiming’ Mary at one extreme, and the Covenanters at the other bring back previously marginalized, ‘dark’ ‘primitive’ aspects of historic Scottish identity, and represent one of the most profound usages of the term, ‘Enlightenment’ in Scotland. If the Enlightenment represents here, as elsewhere, sympathetic plurality rather than constructing any one-dimensional tradition of Scottish identity – then so much more is it to be applauded.

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The retrievalism of Scottish Enlightenment historiography is largely aided also by Adam Smith’s concept of ‘sympathy’. Smith should be remembered as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), as much as for his Wealth of Nations. His wide intellectual project encompassed not only analysing the mechanics of economic markets, but also the affective bonds of human society, which he took to be the primary, ‘mechanism’ for the organisation of any culture before trade, business, or anything else could be fairly exercised. Putting oneself in the place of one another (the objective ability to be subjective) seems such an obvious concept to the modern world, but it is largely the invention of the Enlightenment, and Adam Smith arguably played a bigger part in the promulgation of this concept than anyone in Europe.

Smith’s influence is felt in the rise of a psychological school of criticism in Shakespeare studies (the familiar ‘character study’ in British school examinations in literature, owe more at root to the thinking of Adam Smith than any other individual). If this might seem to confirm an unhealthy ‘British’ reach (Scotland has never been entirely comfortable with the ‘British’ reach of its Enlightenment activists), then we might turn to the figure of Robert Burns: putting himself in the place of his cotter father, or of a Jacobite, or of a Covenanter, or of an African slave, all of which he does, is a result of Smith’s concept of ‘sympathy’ rather than the supposed attitude of rural Ayrshire common sense. We might also turn to the best novel in the canon of ‘Scottish literature’, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In this novel, the inhabiting of the mind of Robert Wringhim, demented Calvinist tortured by the burden of his own sinfulness and, at the same time, by his own supposed assurance of salvation, represents one of the great acts of ‘negative sympathy’ precipitated at least as much by Smithian psychology as by the folk influences that impact upon the book.

That it is worth looking at the flawed environmental formation of Wringham is a Smithian premise informed also by the anthropological lens pioneered by Adam Ferguson; that Ringham might be lured into the fanatical idea that he can do what he likes because of predestination, but that his ‘moral sense’ is never entirely extinguished (albeit that it collides tragically with his fanaticism) is an idea that can be traced back through Smith to Hutcheson. That we as readers of the novel are asked to, and trusted to, use our common sense to pick our way through the psychological morass of the novel is a result of psychological and historical confidence engendered by the Scottish Enlightenment. Hogg’s novel demonstrates the Enlightenment in Scotland, as elsewhere in Europe, ushering and accompanying its nation into a sophisticated modernity.

If one problem is the simplistic collective reputation of the Enlightenment in Scotland as a culturally nefarious phenomenon, this serves also to obscure a much more diverse movement of Enlightenment ideas. Part of the current writer’s research involves uncovering ‘marginal’ figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as the radical Catholic priest, Alexander Geddes (see The Drouth Summer 2004). Many such ‘satellite’

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Scottish Enlightenment figures exist and here I want to provide a glimpse of another. James ‘Balloon’ Tytler (1745-1804) was a man of considerable learning and an adventurer who suffered periods as a confined debtor. Consistently shabby in his appearance and with a fondness for alcohol, he was described by Robert Burns as ‘an obscure, tippling though extraordinary body by the name of Tytler: a mortal, who though he drudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a sky-lighted hat, and knee-buckles as unlike George-by-the-grace-ofGod, and Solomon-the-son-of-David, yet the same unknown drunken mortal is author and compiler of three fourth of Elliot’s pompous Encyclopedia Brittanica.’ In 1776, Tytler became editor of a second, greatly enlarged edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1777-1784) contributing many essays himself across a wide range of topics. If not exactly a polymath, Tytler was accomplished in diverse fields. A son of the manse from Forfarshire, he had entered Edinburgh University in 1763 and became especially interested in chemistry while studying under William Cullen. Tytler shared a prominent personal intellectual influence, then, with the likes of James Watt and Erasmus Darwin, who came to be associated with the ‘Lunar Society’, a grouping broadly dissenting in religious outlook as well as being experimental scientists at the cutting edge of British technological change in the latter part of the century. Tytler in his scientific adventurism and his unorthodox religious mentality shares much in common, generally, with this type of individual. As a student in 1765, he had taken vacation employment as a surgeon of sorts aboard a whaling vessel that sailed to Greenland. His nickname was derived from the event in his life that has been most remarked upon, when, on 27 August 1784, Tytler became the first Briton to make a successful balloon flight, rising to 350 feet and travelling half a mile from Comely Gardens, to the North East of Holyrood in Edinburgh, to the village of Restalrig. Tytler’s flight caused something of a sensation at the time, not least it would seem, because some of those who formed the audience thought that the whole thing might be a confidence trick.

Tytler’s reputation in matters moral and religious was also open to scandalised interpretation.

Tradition has it that he was the author of Ranger’s Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh with a Preface by a Celebrated Wit (1775). This attribution seems to have come down via Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, an early nineteenth century antiquarian of tenacious inquisitive energy, though Tytler’s modern biographer, Sir James Fergusson, claims that ‘the whole tone of this nasty little book is foreign to Tytler’s nature. Sympathy for the unfortunate and a strong moral sense amounting to prudishness are discernible in many of his writings; and he was not the man to make fun of the outcasts of

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society as poor and as much exploited as himself.’

The attribution to Tytler, if wrong, perhaps has something to do with his early forsaking of the Church of Scotland and his adherence to the Glasites, one of many dissenting sects during the eighteenth century troubled by the notion of a state established church.

Unlike those various groups who saw themselves as the tradition-bearers of the Covenanters though, the Glasites instead saw the Covenanters as repulsively puritanical and practised a version of the early Christian church’s agape. Although this was celebrated with broth, the notion of a ‘love-feast’, and the more relaxed attitude to the body held generally by Glasites made the sect appear weird and wonderful to their contemporaries. Tytler was also an unusual man for his time being divorced by his wife who alleged his adultery and he was the father of a number of children in and out of wedlock. Ranger’s Impartial List is, in its preface at least, more than simply a rake’s guide to sixty plus prostitutes and their locations in Edinburgh.

It is a text that confronts the hypocrisy of society, not least in its unblinking adoption of the practical almanac genre, and, in its preface, it wittily wields the discourse of social sensibility: ‘If it be a true position that “Whatever is, is right,” why shall the victims of this natural propensity, the volunteers of Venus, the fairest, the most amiable of the creation be haunted like outcasts from society, be perpetually griped [sic] by the hand of petty tyranny? Do they not sacrifice their health, their lives, nay, their reputations at the altars of love and benevolence? Let the severest virtue reflect with me a little; and that they are of vast use to the community will surely be allowed.’

There is a sardonic propensity here, which alongside the encyclopaedic energy of the publication, that might be said to be in keeping with Tytler’s iconoclastic and combative streak. Sold for a shilling, one assumes to a ready market, the publication may also be one of Tytler’s many attempts to escape his persistently impecunious state.

Tytler long and laboriously practised his journalistic bent, some of it on a printing press that he had constructed himself. In 1774, he had launched The Gentleman and Lady’s Weekly Magazine, meant, generally, as a rival to the successful Tory periodical, Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine.

Featuring news, essays, much correspondence and poetry, the magazine lasted less than a year. In the same year Tytler produced on his home-made printing press, a theological work, Essays on the Most Important Articles of Natural and Revealed Religion, that was designed ultimately to refute the scepticism of David Hume, though this scheme was projected in a chapter that was never printed, but which regards the work of

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Thomas Reid and James Beattie, Hume’s philosophic opponents, as being as rationally dry as Hume. Here, Tytler, man of not inconsiderable intellectual and scientific drive, stands apart from the ‘official’ Enlightenment and allows us to glimpse a too little acknowledged alternative strand of the Enlightenment in Scotland. At least four other periodicals, in which Tytler was main mover, were launched after 1774, culminating in 1791 with The Historical Register or Edinburgh Monthly Intelligencer. Tytler’s outspoken reformist and pro-French slant in this journal may well have brought some kind of pressure to desist from publication which he did, rather abruptly in September 1792.

The first issue of July 1791 sees Tytler delighting over recent wondrous political events in France when Louis XVI had fled from the palace at Thuilleries: ‘The affairs of this kingdom, which have long been interesting to every one who wishes well the rights of mankind, and to the prerogatives of human nature, now present us with a piece of history scarce to be equalled in the annals of the world, viz. a great monarch attempting to run away from his people.’

In the same number turning his attention to England, Tytler seizes the moral high ground with regard to the ‘Church and King’ riots in Birmingham in 1791 (which had involved a loyalist mob wrecking of the home of pro-reformist, Joseph Priestley): ‘In our history of this country, so much famed for its politeness and civilization, the generosity and humanity of its inhabitants, we are sorry to begin with an account of riots the most disgraceful that ever stained the annals of any nation; – riots which shew the lower class of people of England to be yet in such an uncivilised and barbarous state, that on the slightest occasion they are ready to break through every bond of moderation, virtue and humanity, and, like the Goths and Vandals, inclined to lay waste and destroy, with headlong fury, every monument of art, and every trace of literature: nay, to add to the disgrace, to bury in oblivion even the memory of Liberty itself, on the NAME of which they plume themselves so much.’

During 1792 Tytler had joined the Friends of the People, but his two-page broadside, ‘To the People and their Friends’ published in Edinburgh in November argued that the organisation was being too cautious and conservative in its modus operandi. One can see why the pamphlet caused alarm, as it railed against the folly of petitioning parliament composed as this was of a ‘vile junto of aristocrats’. With typical boldness, Tytler draws on a Scottish tradition that has its roots explicitly in the Reformation: If the House of Commons is composed of the representatives of the people, these must be the servants of the people. Will you then be so absurd as to petition your own servants, or people

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who ought to be so? But the truth is that the Members of this House have become the masters not only of the people, but of the king also. How many petitions of late have been presented to the House of Commons, and how few to the King?

As the Popish priests absorbed the worship due to the Deity by stocks and stones and rascally saints, so have the House of Commons artfully drawn away the attention of the people of Britain from the king to themselves.

Appealing to the strongest item of Scottish historical pride, its muscular, demotic Protestantism, at the same time as partaking of a highly contemporary draught of anti-aristocratic fervour, it is easy to see why the official indictment against Tytler read his text as ‘inciting [the populace of Edinburgh] to break the public peace’ Tytler’s solution to the usurpation of the proper chain of communication between the people and the legislature, which he read in a self-interested and corrupt parliament, was to petition the king who ‘can dissolve Parliament, and call them together when he pleases’. This also presumably called to mind to the authorities the collocation of sovereign and people in France that Tytler had observed in the Historical Register, and Tytler’s case was not helped by the fact that he went on to mention the tax-withdrawing exigencies vouchsafed in the face of an unresponsive King enshrined in the Magna Charta. Even as it is shot through with historical learning and various discourses of civic responsibility minted from periods of the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution and the Enlightenment, Tytler’s text sharply shows us how threatening the concept of universal manhood suffrage appeared in the 1790s: ‘Let not money, or land, or houses, be thought to make a man fit for being an elector or representative; an honest and upright behaviour is the only qualification. Wealth has too long usurped the place and rights of virtue; let virtue now resume its own power and dignity, to the exclusion of every thing else.’

Charged with sedition by the authorities in Edinburgh over his pamphlet on 4 December 1792 and with his court appearance arranged for 7 January in the new year, Tytler chose to flee, first of all to Belfast (here he continued his writing career, notoriously attacking Thomas Paine’s deism), from where in 1795 he sailed to Salem, Massachusetts.

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Eking out an occasional living as a journalist and a writer on geographic theory, Tytler endured a less than happy time in America and, after a heavy drinking bout on 9 January 1804, he drowned in the Neck’s Gate water. The lineaments of Tytler’s career exemplify the perfervid, radically progressive, iconoclastic intellect and personal adventurism of the Scottish Enlightenment, phenomena still unrecognised in the turgid, culturally cringing mainstream historiography of Scotland.

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