The idea of a philosophical method is more commonly associated with Descartes than it is with Pascal. In his Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences, first published in 1637, Descartes asserts that, in order to be successful, the search for philosophical and scientific truths has to obey a fixed set of guidelines. In contrast, Pascal generally uses the term method ironically and pejoratively. In the Provincial Letters the various techniques used by the Jesuits to twist the precepts of conventional morality are often referred to as a method. In the Pensées, the word method is almost entirely absent. There exists one work, however, where Pascal uses the term in a non-pejorative way: a small, unfinished treatise written around 1655 and entitled Mathematical Mind (De l'esprit géométrique). In a bold claim reminiscent of Descartes' Discourse on Method, Pascal presents the treatise as 'the method for mathematical [i.e., methodical and perfect] demonstrations' (OC i i , 155). More generally, he presents mathematical reasoning as the model that one should emulate in every intellectual activity. A study of Pascal's philosophical method must thus begin with an analysis of Mathematical Mind.

The first commentary on the Pensées, before the Port-Royal edition was even published, is to be found in the Logique de Port-Royal (1662), the manual of logic edited by the theologians of Port-Royal, Arnauld and Nicole, who sought to establish a synthesis between Augustine, Descartes and Pascal. This attempt was significant because of the very nature of Pascal's thought and of the philosophy he attributes to his unbelieving interlocutor in the Pensées: that philosophy is inspired by Gassendi, particularly by Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations (French translation by Clerselier, 1647). Not that Gassendi was himself an unbeliever: despite R. Pintard's efforts to read irony and hypocrisy between the lines, most modern interpreters accept that Gassendi was an orthodox believer, but his philosophy inspired a number of notorious unbelievers, among whom Cyrano de Bergerac is the most prominent. Not that Pascal could have read Cyrano: the chronology of their writing and publication made that impossible. But Pascal did perceive, in the alliance between the philosophy of sociability - honnêteté - theorised by Méré and the sceptical philosophy inherited from Montaigne and modernised by Gassendi, a major threat to Christian doctrine, and he deliberately elaborated his apologetic arguments in order to resist that threat. The very structure of the apologetic argument in the Pensées requires that the unbeliever be led from principles he recognises and adopts to acceptance of the Christina doctrine which he initially refuses. Pascal thus attributes Gassendist principles to his unbeliever and builds his apology on those foundations.

The term 'art of persuasion' is one used by Pascal himself in a section of his De l'esprit géométrique. Although he is careful to stress that it is not within his remit to speak of divine truths (OC II , 171), many of the questions he poses in De l'esprit géométrique about how people are most effectively convinced by particular arguments form a fundamental part of the persuasive design of his Pensées. At every juncture Pascal seems to refuse oversimplification, constantly attempting to view issues from many different angles. Therein lies the great originality of the Pensées. Far from being a traditional apologia of the Christian religion, it not only confronts but also assumes many of the ideas held by those sceptics and non-believers at whom the work is generally thought to be targeted.

Much critical attention has been paid to Pascal’s use of persuasive language. Indeed, the way in which he both has recourse to rhetorical techniques and reacts against traditional rhetoric exemplifies the difficulties of his persuasive task. Arnauld and Nicole write in their Logique of ‘the late M. Pascal who knew as much about true rhetoric as anybody has ever known’, and this is indicative of their belief that much of the rhetoric which was taught at the (primarily Jesuit) schools in France was false. Far from being anti-rhetoric per se, those at Port-Royal were opposed to what they deemed to be the abuse of rhetoric. It is this abuse that Pascal himself contrasts with the notion of true eloquence in his statement in the Pensées that ‘la vraie ´eloquence se moque de l’éloquence [true eloquence has no time for eloquence]’ (L 513/ S 671).

There is no single context for the Scottish Enlightenment but there are several which were important. Let us start with the most basic, Scotland's geography, which made Scots poor but which also endowed them with the means of improvement and posed questions which the enlightened studied and sought to answer.

Of Scotland's 30,000 square miles less than 10 per cent was arable land in the eighteenth century. Somewhat more was comprised of grazing land of varying quality (more or less 13 per cent) and perhaps 3 per cent made up forest which was cuttable; perhaps a bit more was usable in some fashion. The possible uses of this land were determined by altitude, by the kinds of soils, and by the micro-climates, of which Scotland has many. Scotland was and would remain a poor country. Agricultural improvement, to produce both more food and the materials for industries (such as wool), was a concern which was recognised in the seventeenth century and grew in importance throughout the eighteenth century.

Physical geography informed the country’s prospects in other ways. Scotland has long coastlines and Scots were an ocean-going people, but the river systems they possessed were not as useful for inland navigation as were those in England or France because of the short distances to the fall lines.

Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment did not invent aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty, the sublime, and related categories, but they did make a highly significant contribution to it. The two most important writers in the field were Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, though others, such as George Turnbull, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, Allan Ramsay (the painter), Henry Home (Lord Kames), Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison, were significant writers on the subject. Indeed, the sheer number of truly inventive works on aesthetics was a distinctive feature of the Enlightenment in Scotland. In section one I offer some critical reflections on Hutcheson's work, paying particular attention to the role that the doctrine of the association of ideas plays in his thinking. Hume's work on aesthetics owes a great deal to Hutcheson's though he reaches different conclusions. Section two explores Hume's conclusions regarding the existence and identification of the standard of taste. In the writings of the two men moral and aesthetic categories are often combined. A particularly interesting exercise in the combination of these categories is to be found in the writings of George Turnbull, regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen between 1721 and 1727, and section three contains a discussion of his contribution to this field. In the final section I consider the views of George Turnbull and his pupil George Campbell on truth in the arts. Aesthetic theory in the Scottish Enlightenment is a field filled with a rich variety of good things, and in this chapter I shall cover only a small area of this field and shall attend to only a very few of the thinkers who made a significant contribution.

Three features stand out in the legal theory of the Scottish Enlightenment: the engagement of the legal profession generally in such theorising; a strong interest in history and law, leading on to investigations of a proto-anthropological and proto-sociological nature; and the move away from an emphasis on legislation to one on development of the law through the formulation of new rules through the decision of specific cases. In all of these there was a complex interplay between legal theory and legal practice. Some of this was common to legal theorising in general in the period; some, however, was distinctive to the Scottish Enlightenment, arising not only out of the particular circumstances of the Scots lawyers themselves (particularly of the bar, the Faculty of Advocates), but also out of certain developments in ethics in Scotland.

To explore these features it is necessary to examine the development of thinking about law under the impact of the natural law tradition, focusing not so much on the natural law theories in detail, but rather on the institutionalisation among lawyers of an approach to law that valued natural law theorising in legal education and practice. This chapter will thus examine the intellectual culture that had arisen among Scots lawyers by 1700 and their education, showing how, through the eighteenth century, their training came to privilege learning in natural law in some form or another over an older legal humanism.

COMMON FEATURES

Natural jurisprudence in the Scottish Enlightenment was first of all a theory of justice. Understood in this way, there are at least a couple of characteristics which give Scottish natural jurisprudence a specific difference from other major schools of thought and lend it a certain coherence for a century or more. One of them is that justice was not seen as a particular state of affairs or condition of the world in general. Scottish justice is not directly a matter of the distribution of goods or relations between classes of people. Nor is justice a formal quality of law in the abstract, a criterion for whether a rule in some sense really is 'valid law'. To put it more directly, eighteenth-century Scottish natural jurisprudence is neither Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, Kantian nor utilitarian. In several of its expressions, it does have features in common with the empirical and naturalistic sides of Aristotelianism and utilitarianism, but neither suffices to characterise it. The common feature of the various Scottish theories of natural jurisprudence is that justice is to be treated as a characteristic of the individual person. Of course, a society – or a world – consisting of people with this feature is just, but that quality derives from the individuals making up the collective, and in the same way the justice of just law is a matter of the character of the individuals who adhere to such law.

In other words, for the Scottish theorists, justice was primarily a personal virtue. By virtue they meant two things, the propensity to a certain type of behaviour, and the ability to appreciate the moral worth of such behaviour both in oneself and in others.

INTRODUCTION

Scottish Enlightenment discussions of the human mind and its powers developed from areas of investigation that on the face of it could hardly have been more disparate. Among them were angelology and scientific methodology. I shall comment on perceived relations between these various fields and shall then discuss some of the salient features of the studies on the mind and its powers. I shall pay particular attention to the fact that philosophers writing on the human mind saw themselves as natural scientists in exactly the sense in which physicists, botanists and physiologists were natural scientists. For they were all investigators of the natural world, a world which includes not only bodies, human and otherwise, but also human minds, and they all sought to work within the methodological constraints that characterise good natural science.

PNEUMATOLOGY AND NATURAL SCIENCE

Under the heading ‘pneumatology’, theologians had for centuries written on the nature of spirits, divine, angelic and human. It was, however, common for such writings to focus on angels, the good ones and the bad. In the Scottish universities through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century angels slipped down, and in some cases off, the agenda of pneumatological studies as the focus shifted to humans, and pneumatology was transformed into the systematic study, particularly the philosophical study, of the human mind because that is the kind of mind into which we have the most insight.

James Dunbar commented that humans are sociable long before they are rational. In this chapter we shall explore the implications, both negative and positive, of that remark. The negative implications of Dunbar's remark concern the fact that certain prominent accounts of the role of reason in society must be rejected if Dunbar is correct. In particular, a major theme of writings on society and politics from the middle of the seventeenth century up to and beyond the end of the Enlightenment concerned the question whether, or to what extent, society and civic life were a product of people reasoning about what would be best for them. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean- Jacques Rousseau all wrote on this question and it was impossible for anyone else dealing with the topic to proceed as if these three had not spoken. The Scottish response to the three was in the main strongly hostile, and in the first section of this chapter their reaction will be considered. The positive implications of Dunbar's remark concern the way in which our being social affects us as individuals, and concern also the principles that produce and sustain social coherence. These implications are importantly linked in the writings of the Scots and constitute one of the most salient and characteristic features of their thought. It is to these positive implications that the remainder of the chapter will be devoted.

WAS THERE A SOCIAL CONTRACT?

The claim that humans are social before they are rational means that it is wrong to explain human social living as the product of reason, that is, of a process of calculation.

The historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment has had an unparalleled influence on the way history has been understood in the United Kingdom, North America and throughout the erstwhile British Empire. It is to the Enlightenment that we owe the ideas of historical progress, of state development through time and, ultimately, the whole teleological apparatus which for many years sustained what was known as the school of Whig history: the analysis of the past not on its own terms, but in the light of what it could contribute to an account of progress towards the present. In the last century historiography has diversified from this model, but the teleological vision still exercises a hold on both the popular imagination and some areas of historical scholarship, particularly in the narrative history still dominant in media programmes and school textbooks. When, for example, some of the new British History traces the past foundations of our country 'for the sake of the present' and its contemporary anxieties over Britishness rather than 'making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century', then in Herbert Butterfield's words, we are partaking in 'the subordination of the past to the present', and this vision was central to the Enlightenment. When in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), Butterfield argued of the past that 'their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us' he was striking not only at posterity's condescension, but at issues which lay at the heart of the complex world of the historiography of David Hume (1711-76) and William Robertson (1721-93) among others.

INTRODUCTION

In 1954 A. L. Macfie gave a lecture to the revived Scottish Economic Society on the subject of the 'Scottish Tradition in Economic Thought', which has produced a considerable debate. While it seems doubtful that a tradition can be identified, there is ample evidence of a particular Scottish approach to the study of the social or moral sciences in the eighteenth century, which laid great stress on socio-economic aspects. In particular, Macfie noted the emphasis on the history of civil society, a procedure which has been neatly described by Donald Winch as involving 'the pursuit of the origins and development of civil society from rudeness to refinement by means of a form of history in which universal psychological principles and socio-economic circumstances played twin illuminating roles'.

The impact of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois (1748) has been noted by numerous commentators. For example, Terence Hutchison has confirmed that ‘the great significance of L’Esprit des lois for the development of political economy in the eighteenth century, and after, lay in its fundamental methodological approach, which is especially important in Scotland’. A second major influence on Scottish writers at the time is represented by Isaac Newton, whose ideas were disseminated much earlier than was at one time supposed.

THE BROAD PICTURE

Hippolyte Taine relates the following story: on an autumn morning in 1811, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, newly appointed professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, is strolling along the banks of the Seine, thinking over the content of his teaching. He is dissatisfied with the philosophy of Condillac and his followers, the Idéologues, which seems to him too sceptical and materialistic. He happens to pass a bookshop where a title catches his eye: Recherches sur l'entendement humain d'après les principes du sens commun, par le docteur Thomas Reid (the first translation, published in 1768, of Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense). He opens the book, reads a few pages and his mind is filled with light. Taine concludes: 'He had just bought and founded the new French philosophy.' Among Royer-Collard's first students was Victor Cousin, , dedicatee of Sir William Hamilton’s The Works of Thomas Reid.

This anecdote might be too nice to be true – in fact, Thomas Reid was already known to the French – but we can draw a lesson from it. When we study the impact or influence of one nation upon another, of one philosophical tradition upon another, we cannot ignore the various accidents and circumstances which intervene in the causal connections of a sequence of events. We have to consider the role played by translations (and the ability of the translator), the reception given by philosophical or literary journals, the import of the message in such and such intellectual contexts, the position of people, the pliability of doctrines, the ability of a philosopher to assimilate a new idea or a new way of ideas, and so on.

The Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable intellectual flourish that lasted for much of the eighteenth century, was an event of great importance for western culture. During it scientific, economic, philosophical and other advances were made which had an immediate impact in Europe, America and beyond, and the impact is still felt. The seminal writings of the time are discussed by scholars who return to them in search of insights that can then be put to work in ongoing debates. Hence, though there is an antiquarian interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, interest in it is by no means solely antiquarian, as witness the numerous references we find to Hume, Smith, Reid and other Enlightenment thinkers in present-day discussions of contemporary issues. In this book the historical circumstances of the Scottish Enlightenment will be described; and thereafter attention is focused on the leading ideas, without however losing sight of the fact that the Scottish Enlightenment is a historical event located in a set of historical circumstances that were essential to the movement's birth and growth. Attention is also focused on the highly social nature of the movement. The writers were held together by bonds of friendship; they argued and debated with each other, and created many clubs and societies designed to facilitate discussion. This aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is a crucial feature of it, and will be duly noted in the following pages. But these historical and social considerations would hardly hold our attention if it were not for the brilliant ideas that were the products of all this high-level clubbing.

INTRODUCTION

To a modern readership the leading, and most provocative, figure writing in the philosophy of religion in eighteenth-century Scotland was David Hume. To Scots contemporaries too he was no doubt the most provocative, but he was far from leading. They sought to minimise his impact and played down his significance, and in the short term they succeeded. This was less because they had other major players than because the main traditions of thought ranged against Hume could count on enough broad support within their respective spheres to counteract a challenge that was not seen at the time particularly to tax their wits. If posterity has been less sure that they were entitled to be so complacent, it is important to be clear where the strength of opinion at the time actually lay. Accordingly, this chapter falls into three parts. The first explores the state of the subject before Hume wrote, distinguishing between an orthodox tradition for which theology was the primary science that could dictate terms of reference to philosophy, and a new, largely imported (English and Dutch), tradition of 'rational' religion that subjected the whole framework of religious belief to the same rational critique as other forms of knowledge and belief. Within the universities, this was part of a recognised adjustment of interests between divinity and arts faculties, but outside academia it generated bitter conflicts between conservative and progressive parties in the Kirk.

HUTCHESON AND MORAL SENSE

Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith were the main Scottish participants in the British debate on the foundations of morals. Here their moral theories will be outlined as three rival systems, and then Thomas Reid's critical attitude towards their theories will be discussed.

Francis Hutcheson (1694 1746) was the first Scottish philosopher to approach the problem of the foundations of morals in an original way. His strategy was to construct a unitary doctrine drawing both on Lord Shaftesbury's teachings on the relation between natural affection and morality, and on Locke's new empirical epistemology. In response to Hobbes's theory that human nature is fundamentally selfish and anti-social, Shaftesbury had argued that God provided human nature with a number of generous forms of affection, from family affection to a love for mankind, that naturally predispose men to live together. Human beings are also provided with a natural capacity to feel attraction to these affections and a dislike for the contrary ones. In Shaftesbury's works it is not clear whether moral distinctions derive from reason or sentiment, an omission that Hutcheson was to remedy.

From Locke, Hutcheson took the doctrine that men lack innate ideas, and that they derive their complex ideas of things and actions from experience, compounding, enlarging and abstracting from simple original ideas.

Over the past half century or so, there has been an outpouring of literature on the many ways in which Scottish thinkers influenced America in the period of the founding. For social and cultural historians, this literature has meant a deeper understanding of the 'outlying provinces' of the British Empire; for historians of ideas, it has meant a better understanding of the reception of Scottish thought in its time; and for political theorists, it has inspired a reinterpretation of the political vision represented by the founding of the American republic.

As a political philosopher, I am primarily interested in this last project. The Scottish influence has been used to counter an earlier picture of the founders, according to which they were putting into practice the natural-rights theories, and concomitant radical individualism, to be found in Hobbes and Locke. So the debate between the Scottish and the Hobbesian-Lockean view of the founders is part of a larger controversy over whether the political philosophy expressed in the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution is primarily a ‘liberal’ or a ‘civic republican’ one. Like most scholars who attend to the role of the Scots, I agree that the Hobbes-Locke picture, still very common in schools and popular literature, is badly misleading.

During the past thirty years the role of the natural sciences and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment has been hotly debated. Elaborating on the interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment advanced by Nicholas Phillipson, John Christie argued in a series of influential essays that the pursuit of natural knowledge was one of the 'major elements whose combination formed the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment'. Stronger claims for the importance of science and medicine were subsequently made by Roger L. Emerson, who contended that if we are properly to understand the origins and defining characteristics of the Scottish Enlightenment then we must see the cultivation of natural knowledge as being central to enlightened culture in eighteenth-century Scotland. On the other hand, following the lead of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), John Robertson recently insisted that the Scottish Enlightenment should be defined in terms of a core of related enquiries in moral philosophy, history and political economy, and that the natural sciences and medicine were peripheral to the intellectual preoccupations of enlightened savants in Scotland and in the Atlantic world more generally. Richard Sher likewise rejects Emerson's claims, and suggests that the Scottish Enlightenment can be more fruitfully defined in terms of the 'culture of the literati' which, for Sher, encompassed science and medicine but was not rooted in these fields. While it would be inappropriate here to enter into the complexities of this debate, we should recognise that the points at issue are far from trivial because they raise serious questions not only about how we characterise the Enlightenment as an historical phenomenon but also about how we conceptualise the genesis of our own world.