Scotland's Neglected Enlightenment

Popular discussion often implies that the Enlightenment in Scotland drew much of its originality from the rich cultural life of Edinburgh in the eighteenth century. That the largest and most cosmopolitan town in Scotland should have been the scene of some of the Enlightenment's most striking manifestations is hardly surprising, but confining the genius of the age geographically in this way detracts from its influence over the rest of Scotland. Examination of the contribution of Glasgow provides a salutary balance.

A more general misconception is linked to the view that the Enlightenment was not deeply rooted in Scottish soil; the belief that, indirectly at any rate, the Enlightenment owed much to the stimulus given by the Union of Parliaments in 1707 to the introduction of a wider and different culture. Two explanations of this stimulus reach a similar conclusion. The first starts from the standpoint that before the eighteenth century Scotland generally was riven by political faction and theological disputation. The universities, which were to be the source of so much enlightened thought, perhaps especially in Glasgow, have been variously described in this period by distinguished writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the homes of a 'monkish rabble' and 'the unreformed seminaries of a fanatical clergy' until they were transformed in the eighteenth century, allegedly under the influence of forces which emanated from outside Scotland. The second explanation of the stimulus suggests that the loss of the political and parliamentary opportunities which followed led to the cultivation of civic virtue in both intellectual endeavour and in economic improvement, an explanation which does not require the assumption of a barbaric Scotland before the eighteenth century, but which still implies a sharp transformation in Scottish intellectual life in it.

Implied in both explanations is the existence of serious cultural deficiencies in Scotland before the Enlightenment. This view can be countered by drawing attention to earlier events which indicate a less sharp and radical break with the past. A specific example underlines the contrast. James Dalrymple, 1st Viscount Stair, student and subsequently a regent in the University of Glasgow, published his Institutions of the Law of Scotland in 1681, providing a pioneering exposition of the law from first principles, while during his lifetime his son was embroiled in the intrigues which led to the massacre of Glencoe in 1692. Recognition that indigenous change was already taking place in Scotland does not deny that new forces were becoming more powerful in the eighteenth century but it sets them in a longer-term perspective.

Glasgow showed these changes early. Given the domination of the previous century by so much theological disputation and by wrangles over church order, the contrast was most remarkable in that field. Some looked on the developments as indicative of the growth of deplorable theological laxity, which should be suppressed as quickly as possible; others thought they were the signs of freer, enlightened thought and should be welcomed.

At the centre of the controversy was John Simson, professor of divinity from 1708 to 1740. He and his supporters maintained that they were merely developing the orthodox position more fully. 'Our knowledge of divinity has not yet and is not yet arrived at perfection, and the Spirit is not restrained now more than formerly.' Simson believed he was advancing the fundamental principles of Protestantism. He deemed new insights rational and defensible but thought they should be tested, not only by scripture but also by reason, which others thought encouraged highly dangerous heretical tendencies. Even if the fundamentals of the faith seemed to remain unaltered, the application to theological reasoning of methods which physical scientists had found so fruitful gave no guarantee that they would not lead ultimately to the rejection of the final authority of scripture as traditionally expounded and its replacement by fallible human judgements. That was the ultimate rock over which the disputes broke.

Simson was accused before the General Assembly of the Church of Scot- land of heretical teaching and, in 1729, was prohibited from exercising his ecclesiastical functions. The General Assembly was not keen to encourage the new approach to an understanding of the faith, but, indicative of the support he gained in academic circles in Glasgow, Simson still continued to enjoy the emoluments of his office, and even proposed erecting a byre in the college, presumably as his suspension gave him greater time for outside pursuits. The principal of the university was left to continue the teaching of divinity for minimal reward, so that the only person who gained from the prohibition in material terms was probably Simson himself. Academic tenure was not easily terminated in the eighteenth century, not even for an alleged heretic.

If the move away from the traditional authority of scripture was evident even amongst the theologians, where it was most likely to persist, it was much more conspicuous amongst the secular thinkers. The contrast from earlier generations is clear in a remarkable line of distinguished philosophers, which was Glasgow's greatest contribution to the Enlightenment. The hotbed of genius which was appropriated by Edinburgh had its intellectual foundations in the work in Glasgow. Glasgow led; Edinburgh followed.

A common methodological approach can he seen throughout the succession. Whatever their interests, the Newtonian success in the physical sciences of explaining many observations of complex phenomena by a limited range of basic principles was deemed to be of wider application. Adam Smith, Glasgow's most illustrious contribution to the Enlightenment, expounded the methodology fully. He held that there was a 'natural' propensity in all men 'to account for all appearances from as few principles as possible' and so the objective of philosophy should be to find 'the connecting principles of nature', even though nature 'seems to abound with events which appear solitary and incoherent'. If Newton could explain the operation of the physical world by the law of gravity, might not the principles which govern men's social relations be drawn from similar observations of social behaviour?

The question and its methodology broke from the revealed authority of the past, but, if the links with the past were broken, the pioneering work of the Glasgow philosophers forged links with the future as it led to the secular and seemingly scientific foundations of so many of the separate disciplines of the social sciences which emerged subsequently.

The pioneering figure in the philosophical succession at Glasgow was the much neglected Gershom Carmichael. He was one of the university's last group of regents, who took students through the entire course for their degrees, and, when that generalist system of instruction gave way to specialisation in 1727, he became the first professor of moral philosophy. Carmichael's interests were to have a profound influence on the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment in Scot- land. His main scholarly contribution was his edition of Pufendorf’s De Officio Hominis et Civis, in which, though mainly concerned with jurisprudence, Carmichael's notes show a bias towards ethics. The jurisprudential link ensured that the Enlightenment in Scotland drew substantial inspiration from Roman and Stoic thought as it was transmitted throughout Europe in later years on the broad stream of the civil law. Methodologically, the system of natural law was to provide the basis for later developments in the methodology of the social sciences. Politically, it had a more immediate effect by its emphasis on the importance of civil and religious liberty in any society.

Carmichael's transmission of these European influences was fundamental to the later flowering of the Enlightenment but his contribution has been overshadowed by that of his pupil and successor, Francis Hutcheson, who held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1730 to 1746. Hutcheson retained the jurisprudential interest of Carmichael and developed the doctrine of natural law in the context of an empirical study of historical and social relations. More generally, his teaching and writing offered a comprehensive philosophy of practice from the work of Shaftesbury and was the model which others followed and developed. Hutcheson maintained that virtue was found in the benevolent affection, but, while resisting the view that all human action was self-interested, he still recognised the human preference for pleasurable rather than for painful courses of action and provided an optimistic resolution of this conflict by his belief that benevolence was in man's self-interest.

Hutcheson's influence on the youthful Smith was always generously acknowledged, as in the fulsome tribute paid to 'the abilities of and Virtues of the never to be forgotten Dr Hutcheson', when Smith became rector of the university fifty years after he had first come under Hutcheson's spell as one of his students. Smith's magisterial contribution was to take Hutcheson's work to greater depth, not only in ethics, in which his achievements are often neglected, but in economics, with the intention of pushing his investigations further into a crowning work on jurisprudence, which he never survived to complete and publish. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, some twelve years after Smith resigned his chair in the university, where he taught from 1751 to the end of l 763, to take up the post of tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, a move which ensured his economic independence for the remainder of his life. The two-and-a-half years continental travel which the tutorship involved, and the wider influential contacts it brought, helped Smith's thought to mature but the foundations had already been well laid in his days at Glasgow. The optimistic influence of Hutcheson was obvious in Smith's economic ideas The basic principle of self-interest did not lead to disharmonious social relations but was the ultimate motivation for the increase of wealth, or, to use the term so common in the eighteenth century, of opulence.

The economic background to Smith's days in Glasgow encouraged this optimistic analysis. Provost Andrew Cochrane was guilty only of pardonable exaggeration when he attributed the city's rise to 'four young men of talents and spirit who started at one time in business and whose example gave success to the rest'. Between Smith's days as a student in the 1730s and his return as a professor in the 1750s, overseas trade, especially in tobacco, recorded a marked increase and the serious deepening of the Clyde was started to allow ships to reach the heart of Glasgow. The days of the heavy-industries, even of the large-scale expansion of textile production, were in the future, with all the problems of concentrated population and public health which they brought. The gloomier side of the industrial revolution, which Smith did not ignore but only foreshadowed, was mostly in the future. It was easy to be an economic optimist. Self-interest did not seem to be leading to disharmonious social relations but only to greater opulence.

Although the Glasgow of his day seemed to provide grounds for his optimism, Smith's economic analysis implied a criticism of the source and nature of its prosperity. In a rare use of the term by which he is probably most remembered, Smith held that the self-interest of the individual led, as though by an invisible hand, to direct the employment of capital to more rather than to less productive uses, and so he promotes the interest of society by promoting his own. To Smith the least productive use was in the carrying trade, following after agriculture, manufacturing industry and internal trade, but there was a seeming paradox in the Glasgow of his day, for the source of its wealth was undoubtedly the carrying trade. Moreover, because self-interest was the most effective way of encouraging the optimum distribution of stock, any restrictions on its unfettered exercise were to be deplored, so he castigated roundly the various restrictions on trade which had proved so beneficial to Glasgow's merchant community.

Smith's intellectual criticism was to prove a solvent of many traditional policies and institutions but was not destructive of the cohesion of the society which he and Hutcheson valued. Lack of personal rancour, a reluctance to engage in public disputation by leading figures, was a feature of the pioneering days of the Enlightenment in Glasgow, perhaps a. reaction from the rancour and intolerance of only a few years earlier and which still persisted in some clerical circles. Differences of opinion did not harm personal friendships between the enlightened academics and practical men of affairs, each of whom appreciated the other's virtues.

Hutcheson and Smith made conspicuous efforts to avoid engendering disputes. They took greater care than Hume, or even Kames, not to rouse the hackles of the ecclesiastical authorities, though their toleration of and support for John Simson show that they were of the same liberal cast of thought. This characteristic of the Glasgow succession, at least in its early days, may have deprived its university of the unusual distinction of having Hume as well as Smith among its professoriate. Just as Hutcheson had been unhappy about Hume being appointed at Edinburgh, so Smith felt the public would not be in favour of Hume at Glasgow 'and the interests of the society will oblige us to have some regard to the opinion of the public'. The Enlightenment in Glasgow was discreet if it was anything.

Circumspection in such practical affairs did not detract from the advocacy of personal and political liberty, but those who did so with such circumspection were not looked on as being any challenge to the social order. Their views were embedded in a political philosophy which was deeply concerned with the maintenance of property rights and its critical, even revolutionary implications were not evident in a society which was stable and increasingly prosperous for those aspiring to rise from commercial to landed status. Conditions changed with the excesses of the French Revolution and the apparent dangers from the growing industrial population, so that Smith's pupil, John Millar, professor of civil law at Glasgow for forty years from 1761, was more suspect when he propounded his views on civil liberty. With Millar the direct philosophical succession may be taken to have ended. It had made its own critical contribution both in laying the foundation of many of the social sciences which grew in the nineteenth century and in contributing to the growth of political liberalism.

The contribution of the philosophical tradition of Glasgow to the Enlightenment can be underestimated, partly because its long-term influence was not confined to Scotland but spread to assume European, and even wider international dimensions, and partly because of how some subsequent commentators seek to define the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment in terms of achievements in the creative arts and to push the philosophical achievements to the periphery. A controversial assertion may then be advanced, that some commentators subordinate the international intellectual contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment, for example to the emergence of the social sciences, to the more parochial works of Scottish literature, reflecting the introspective tendency of the Scot to limit his interest to the output of his own kailyard than to how the kailyard fertilised cultivation elsewhere.

It is then easy to degrade Glasgow's contribution ' to the Enlightenment. Alexander Carlyle had often jaundiced recollections of earlier days but he gave a particularly adverse account of the differences he found in Glasgow when he moved from Edinburgh to continue his studies there in 1743. '... they were far behind in Glasgow, not only in their Manner of Living, but in those Accomplishments and that Taste that belongs to people of Opulence, much more to persons of Education.' That may have been one reason why Lord Auchinleck thought the young James Boswell had better move from Edinburgh in 1759 and so away from the temptations of plays and actresses, though their absence in Glasgow may have been one reason which led him to run off to London the following year. Even Carlyle found his horizons widened when he was admitted to one of the societies of varying degrees of conviviality which increased in the eighteenth century, though still less so than in Edinburgh. The Glasgow merchants were not so narrow and uncultured as Carlyle implied, but their interests were primarily commercial. Glasgow did not have the same legal and clerical society as Edinburgh nor was it frequented by the landed fraternity. When Burns sought to make his mark on a more cosmopolitan society he went to Edinburgh and not to Glasgow, though the commercial links of his native Ayrshire were generally confined to the west. It is not surprising that the most important of Glasgow's societies was the Political Economy Club, founded and much supported by leading merchants. Even its Literary Society extended its activities to consideration of philosophical, political and commercial questions.

The cultural achievements of Glasgow during the Enlightenment may be defended from this type of criticism in two ways. The first is by drawing attention to some activities which did emerge in the mid-eighteenth century and which are often underestimated. Notable among them was the success of the Foulis brothers, Robert and Andrew, in their printing press. They worked closely with Alexander Wilson, Scotland's first truly distinguished type-founder, who became professor of astronomy in the university in 1760 and together they set a standard of educational and typographical excellence which gave Scotland its first press with a European reputation. Most notable were accurate texts of classical authors – Horace in 1744 and Homer in 1756-58, the latter in the Foulis' Double Pica Greek type. Even bolder, though much less successful, was their enterprise in the 1750s in launching an Academy of Arts, again within the university, to provide instruction in painting and drawing. A painter, an engraver and a sculptor were engaged, but the venture was a financial failure. Only limited support came from the commercial fraternity and not enough to save it. Consequently, the Academy of St Luke in Edinburgh was a more potent influence from its foundation in 1729 but the Foulis Academy did produce David Allan, who became a pioneering painter of common life, an interest to be taken further and more effectively by Wilkie in a later generation. Allan's aspirations were complementary to those of the vernacular poets and some of his most effective illustrations were of the songs of Burns. More generally, Glasgow's fame as a centre of the visual arts had to await the nineteenth century.

The second defence of Glasgow's apparent deficiencies in the creative arts is indirect and more provocative. It is the suggestion that the bias of the pioneers of the Enlightenment in Glasgow should take priority because it harmonised well with the intellectual interests of the Scot. There was traditionally a national interest in speculative theology and philosophy – some might even regard it as a genetic strain – to which the intellectual rigour of Calvinism appealed, and which was broken only in the nineteenth century under the twin influences of romantic thought and liberal biblical criticism. The Enlightenment in Glasgow was in the same tradition.

Even if the contribution of Glasgow to the Enlightenment is underestimated, it was not narrow, but its breadth had its own characteristics. Their nature can be linked to philosophical interests. The swamping of the more abstract issues of epistemology by the analysis of man in society set in a richly historical and institutional framework gave a practical bent to thought. Even the classical sources used showed this bias. The use of Roman more often than Greek authorities has been explained because the Scots 'were painting a broad practical sketch of society, expressing all the important balances, not exposing the roots. For these slightly superficial surveys the Roman tests were invaluable models'.

The institutional life of Glasgow at the time encouraged this wide, practical bias. It arose from the way the social structure of Glasgow influenced an aspect of Scottish intellectual life in the eighteenth century, intellectual activity was confined to a small elite living in close physical proximity to each other, mostly in the central lowlands. In Edinburgh this elite dominated the city's life, but in Glasgow the merchant community was soon established in a dominating position and the life of the entire community was being transformed by the commercial and industrial changes which were beginning even as Hutcheson and Smith were teaching there.

It is easy to deem this development of the Glasgow of the nineteenth century as something apart from the Enlightenment, and certainly Glasgow of three years was no heavenly city but one where most of its inhabitants knew nothing about the ideas of the previous century which had helped to produce their problems. Demolishing the Old College, where the great figures of the eighteenth century had lived and taught, to make way for the railway may be thought to represent a fundamental change in cultural values. It has then been so easy for the Enlightenment to be appropriated by Edinburgh. There were, however, links to this more popular image of modern Glasgow. The more obvious one came from the plea for personal and political freedom, especially freedom of trade, from which the city and its neighbourhood gained in the nineteenth century and for which its earlier rise through the privileges of mercantilism had made it ready and able to exploit. An indirect link came from the practical and applied cast of mind nurtured by the Enlightenment.

It is then no surprise that there was close personal friendship between the academics of Glasgow, its internationally renowned merchants, and its scientific and engineering geniuses. The classic instance is in the association of James Watt, the mathematical-instrument-maker within the university, with others in the development of the steam engine, particularly with Joseph Black, lecturer in chemistry, whose discovery of the principle of latent heat may be held to have been a prerequisite of Watt's idea of the separate condenser which was fundamental to the later success of his engine. The intellectual tradition pioneered at Glasgow led less directly to a series of specific industrial inventions and more to the encouragement of a new method, a rational evaluation of change, which by itself did not lead to the growth of skills in those industries which required a high level of abstract scientific knowledge, but which supported the applied industrial tradition which evolved in the growth of an engineering, or, to take an example from a totally different field, a medical tradition.

In the early nineteenth century the generations immediately after the Enlightenment produced a galaxy of talent among both engineers and medicals. By 1840 Glasgow had a chair of engineering. Even Lord Kelvin, Glasgow's most distinguished physical scientist of the nineteenth century, applied his talent in traditional as well as more modern industries. It is then necessary to try to avoid the misinterpretation which assumes that the pioneering intellectual achievements of Glasgow in the eighteenth century came to their full fruition in Edinburgh, especially in the literary work in which the capital undoubtedly led, and that the industrial Glasgow, which evolved at the same time, was socially and intellectually miles different. They grew apart in this way in the nineteenth century as the links between the cultural and the industrial walks of life were weakened to the detriment of both.

Although Glasgow pioneered an empirical scientific method, it lost the initiative in science and medicine to Edinburgh and largely through its own fault. Glasgow's scientists and medicals moved to Edinburgh in a steady stream, to a large extent because the faculty was unwilling to see their rights, privileges and, above all, their emoluments shared or affected in any way by new disciplines. A string of distinguished lecturers in chemistry – Cullen, Black, Robison – all ended their careers in Edinburgh; Cullen and Black after periods in medical chairs in Glasgow, the more adventurous Robison after a sojourn in Russia.

One of the ironic features of the eighteenth century was that, in spite of all the enlightened pleas for the liberty of the individual, and the highly critical comments that were passed on the restrictive practices of others, the distinguished members of the University of Glasgow showed every tendency to retain such privileges as they possessed. Their ambivalence was a reflection of their age. It led to criticisms of what was being achieved, sometimes from those with personal axes to grind. In the long run good came from the most outstandingly vituperative of all, John Anderson, professor of oriental languages and subsequently of natural philosophy – his election to the latter helped by his own vote – who regarded his colleagues as such drones, triflers and even drunkards that he bequeathed his non-existent estate to form a new and better university. It had a chequered history but from it emerged in due course the University of Strathclyde, so that both of Glasgow's universities of 1990 grew from the fertile soil of the eighteenth century, from its strange mixture of enlightened philosophy and personal aggrandisement, perhaps providing confirmation of the working of an invisible hand.