Hume’s philosophical writings have long been studied closely for the elegance with which they articulate an enduringly appealing philosophical position, and they have been mined intensively for the contribution they can make to contemporary philosophical debate and inquiry. They have also been studied in historical context – both the context of Hume’s less obviously philosophical writings and the cultural milieu within which they arose. So extensive has the literature on Hume become, we may wonder whether there is any prospect of genuinely fresh illumination. A topic that exercised commentators and interlocutors in Hume’s own day, and for a good part of the nineteenth century as well, was Hume’s place in a much larger context – the Scottish intellectual tradition. Was his version of the “science of man,” despite its skeptical implications, an inevitable development of this trajectory of thought, or was it an aberration born of the fact that Hume had, intentionally or by default, relinquished something fundamental to it? Interest in the subject faded, but the fact that it was once so keenly debated gives us reason to think that it might be worth returning to now.
A problem confronting anyone who wants to resuscitate that debate is that intellectual traditions are generally easier to allude to than to articulate clearly or analyze cogently. What sustains the identity of an intellectual tradition over time? How much consistency and coherence must it have? How much of this coherence must it retain before we have to say that it has turned into something else? So intractable can these questions be, it is sometimes hard to avoid the suspicion that “intellectual tradition” is just a rather grand way of referring to a conventional clustering of authors and/or ideas which may, or may not, benefit from being read and examined together. Since the difficulties these questions raise are not easily resolved and cannot legitimately be circumvented, we may be tempted to abandon talk of “intellectual traditions” altogether.
To do so, however, is to give up on an important possibility. By placing writers in a much larger historical context, we may come to a better appreciation of both their originality and their dependence on frameworks of thought from which, initially, they seem to break away. Novelty can only be evaluated against the background of continuity. It is the potential of just such illumination that makes the questions worth persisting with in the case of David Hume, the depth and originality of whose philosophical ideas have been debated almost from their first appearance.
There is a case to be made for thinking that if we confine ourselves to Scotland, we can indeed identify an intellectual tradition within which we might plausibly seek to relate to Hume. The identification of this tradition rests upon solid, if rather less than conclusive, grounds. To begin with, somewhat unusually, there is an identifiable institutional base that may be said to have sustained Scottish intellectual life over a very long time, namely the universities of Scotland. From the foundation of St Andrews in 1411–1413 until their relatively rapid integration into the state-sponsored British-wide system that came into existence after World War I, the Scottish universities took a lead in Scotland’s intellectual life. This is an unusually long period, possibly unmatched elsewhere. Second, these institutions – five eventually – were remarkably integrated. Though geographically dispersed, they pursued the same curriculum (more or less) and amended it in tandem, and educated each other’s teachers. In response to both religious reformation and new intellectual trends, they underwent similar re-organizations. Third, they were all expected to play the same social role in their vicinity, namely the education of the professional classes, chiefly clergy, but also (especially later) lawyers and physicians, and they generally did so. Consequently, the intellectual leadership of the country was, for the most part, university educated. Fourth, across these many centuries, philosophy played a strikingly prominent role in the curriculum and in the scholarly agenda of these universities. Scotland’s most prominent and influential intellectuals were either philosophers themselves – from John Mair (?1465–1550) through Adam Smith (1723–1790) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796) to Edward Caird (1835–1908) and Alexander Bain (1818–1903) – or they were theologians, social theorists, and educationalists grounded in philosophy – from John Knox (?1513–1572) and Andrew Melville (1545–1622) through Lord Kames (1696–1782) to Herbert Grierson (1866–1960). Finally, the tradition was linked, not by unanimity of doctrine, but by self-consciousness. The expression “Scottish philosophy” may be said to have been coined late in the day (when James McCosh published The Scottish Philosophy in 1875), but this simply signals the fact that historical continuity is primarily to be recognized with hindsight. “The Scotch Metaphysics” had been the subject of criticism and defense long before that.
There is reason, then, to hold that over five centuries or so, there existed in Scotland an intellectual tradition shaped by philosophical thinking, sustained by educational institutions, and realized in the wider community through the role of those institutions. It is easy to exaggerate, and to romanticize this idea, as arguably George Davie did in his celebrated book The Democratic Intellect (1961). Over these same centuries there was radical disagreement between figures who may, on equally good grounds, be said to be members of the tradition. This is especially true in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and during the period of (what came to be known as) the Scottish Enlightenment, when theological and philosophical debate was intense. Furthermore, the universities were almost continuously subject to political manipulation, and even at the best of times the success with which they fulfilled their appointed social role varied greatly. Still, the idea of a Scottish intellectual tradition is not groundless, and easier to lend substance to than in many other contexts. The question here is whether it is substantial enough to provide a context that casts additional light on the intellectual endeavors and achievements of Hume.
On the face of it, the answer, it seems, must be “No.” The institutional and educational dimensions that appear to sustain the idea of a centuries-long intellectual tradition are real enough, but they fail to take account of a radical break within its history. This break may be marked, without too much distortion, as concurrent with the Act of Union in 1707, when Scotland and England became one country. This was the point at which an intellectual shift from Reformation to Enlightenment thinking took place. However uncertain the precise boundaries between “Reformation” and “Enlightenment” may be, it is highly plausible to think that the change they constituted is so significant that the idea of their being transcended in a single intellectual tradition sustained by the Scottish universities becomes almost fanciful.
This rupture, it is to be noted, is not between pre- and post-Reformation Scotland, where, given the intensity of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant, the continuities are perhaps surprising. The ancient Scottish universities were characteristic foundations of the medieval Christian Church, devoted to the seven liberal arts of the medieval curriculum. Their purpose was the teaching of theology as preparation for priesthood, as well as supplying experts in canon and civil law, and their method was that of Aristotelian scholasticism. The Reformation brought great changes, including the addition of two more self-consciously Protestant universities (Edinburgh and Marischal College in Aberdeen) and “new” foundations for the other three. Nevertheless, a great deal stayed the same – the teaching of theology and the education of the clergy remained central. After a flirtation with the logic of Ramus, Aristotelianism reasserted itself in Protestant scholasticism, and the universities generally resisted the innovations of Cartesianism that were proving popular elsewhere. As institutions, both the old and the new universities, small though they all were, continued to be politically and socially important.
This is a simplified picture, but it serves to underline how very much more radical the differences were that came about at the time of the Enlightenment. Under the influence of Gersholm Carmichael, George Turnbull, and especially Francis Hutcheson, moral philosophy, reconceived along (vaguely) Baconian/Newtonian lines and shaped by ideas of “the law of nature and nations,” took center stage in place of dogmatic theology, whose key topics were no longer debated by the leading professors. The heterodox Presbyterians in the first half of the eighteenth century (of whom Hutcheson was a leading light), and the “Moderates” of the second half (led by the historian William Robertson), sidelined the ardent Calvinists and generally ignored the theological issues by which they were animated. As the eighteenth century wore on, there was an astonishing outburst of intellectual activity in the study of mind and society in all their aspects, alongside the flowering of both conjectural history and historical studies. None of this has any very evident foundation, or even precursor, in the life of the medieval and reformed universities.
If a distinctive tradition may be said to have developed out of all this intellectual ferment, it was the “Scottish School of Common Sense,” inspired by Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), and first identified as such by Joseph Priestly, Reid’s arch critic. It was Reidian common sense, subsequently defended first by Dugald Stewart and then by Sir William Hamilton, that spread to America, and was identified in France as the “philosophie ecossaise” by Victor Cousin. Once again this is a simplified picture, but accurate enough so far as it goes. Its adequacy for present purposes is a matter to be returned to.
If we are persuaded that, contrary to the unifying factors cited earlier, there is good reason to regard Scottish intellectual history as importantly divided in this way, it seems relatively easy to make a case that leaves Hume out of both halves. With respect to the intellectual culture of the pre- and post-Reformation universities, there is the obvious fact that in a lifetime of authorship, Hume shows no interest at all in the content of the theological debates that animated intellectual debate in Scotland right up to the time he was born. Though he wrote extensively about religion and cannot be classified unqualifiedly as an atheist, his most enduring interest is in its nature and effects. His posthumously published, and subsequently famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, deals directly with theological questions, but these are the questions of natural, not revealed, theology. His essays show a familiarity with the Bible but no inclination to use it. The most we can say by way of continuity is that they also show Hume shared his Presbyterian contemporaries’ distaste for “Romish” religious practices.
Hume was a student at Edinburgh University in the second decade of the eighteenth century. He was only 11 years of age (possibly as young as 10) when he entered the university, and this fact alone raises a question about how much induction into an intellectual tradition he could have received. In any case, the curriculum and teaching were still largely as they had been in the seventeenth century, and had little connection with the study of human nature that subsequently interested him. According to M A Stewart, “the mission of education in Hume’s day was to train students for virtuous living in a society regulated by religious observance” (Stewart 2005: 12). The educational method was largely rote learning, and even the “logic” course was geared to “the chief end of man” as specified by the Shorter Catechism and amplified by the Westminster Confession. We are largely ignorant about Hume’s studies at Edinburgh, but if this is true, there seems little reason to suppose that he absorbed anything that might have shaped or even colored his thought in later life. More importantly, perhaps, his own comments, published and unpublished, suggest that his view of his time as a student in Edinburgh was largely negative. In 1735, he advised a young friend not to bother going to college, writing in a letter,
There is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books … I see no reason why we shou’d go to an University, more than any other place, or ever trouble ourselves about the Learning or Capacity of the Professors.
(quoted in Harris 2015: 32)
In the Treatise he gives voice to a similar sentiment.
Our scholastic head pieces and logicians show no such superiority above the mere vulgar in their reason and ability, as to give us any inclination to imitate them in delivering along system of rules and precepts to direct our judgment, in philosophy.
(T 1.3.15.11; SBN 175)
It seems reasonable to conclude then that uncovering a meaningful intellectual continuity between Hume and Scottish philosophy before the Enlightenment is a doubtful enterprise. Initially, finding such a connection with Scottish intellectuals after the Enlightenment seems rather more promising. Hume, after all, has been heralded in many quarters as the archetypal thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment. Here too, though, problems arise. The chief difficulty is that the style of thinking peculiarly identified with Scottish philosophy – “the School of Common Sense” – was founded as, and widely conceived to be, an answer to Hume. It can hardly, then, have incorporated him. Kant, too, sought to answer Hume, and famously held that the Scottish philosophers had completely failed to appreciate the deep challenge the Treatise represented. “It is positively painful to see how utterly [Hume’s] opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie and lastly Priestly missed the point of the problem” (Kant 1783/1980: 6) This is more evidence of a gulf between Hume and his Scottish philosophical contemporaries, whose appeal to “common sense” Kant dismissed as the means by which “the most superficial ranter can safely enter the lists with the most thorough thinker and hold his own” (ibid.: 7). One hundred years later, in 1882, when Andrew Seth gave some influential lectures entitled “On the Scottish Philosophy,” he expressly subtitled them “a comparison of the Scottish and German answers to Hume.” James McCosh, in The Scottish Philosophy (1875) takes a broader view of the Enlightenment phase and does not confine it to “common sense,” but he still sees Hume as essentially a skeptical thinker operating outside the broad parameters of Scottish philosophy.
The conclusion seems to be that, despite first appearances perhaps, there is no single “Scottish intellectual tradition” within which philosophy had a central role. Scottish intellectual history clearly divides into two – 300 years of theological education which a training in philosophy was intended to serve, followed by 150 years during which philosophy was transformed into the study of mind and society guided by a conception of “common sense.” We cannot plausibly say that Hume’s thought owed much, if anything, to either phase. And indeed, Hume’s distance from the Scottish intellectual tradition could be said to be increased by his relationship to a wider world of letters. In a well-known footnote to his Introduction to the Treatise, Hume mentions five philosophers whose work he means to capitalize on. Only one of them – “Mr Hutchinson” – is a Scottish professor; the others are all English men of letters. It is here, indeed, that James Harris finds an important clue to Hume’s intellectual biography. Hume’s life-long aim, Harris contends, was to be a man of letters, someone who, after the fashion of Addison but with a little more rigor, would bring a “philosophical” voice to the public discussion of the topics of the day. This, however, should not be thought “philosophical” as we currently mean the term. The “philosopher” for Hume, if Harris is right, is someone who deliberately eschews partisanship in intellectual debate, drops all the rhetoric that goes with it, and strives to create an intellectual milieu in which profound disagreement is compatible with the free and easy exchange of ideas, all in the pursuit of truth and understanding.
On the strength of these considerations, it seems that there is little to be gained by trying to consider Hume against the background of something called “the Scottish intellectual tradition.” Yet the prospect of doing this to some real purpose is not as hopeless or pointless as the argument so far suggests. On the contrary, it is possible to find the roots of Hume’s ideal of “the philosopher” as Harris depicts it in the theological debates that exercised the Scottish universities in the seventeenth century, thereby forging a connection with the intellectual tradition that preceded him. Second, and looking to the trajectory of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century, there is a good case to be made for thinking that the “skeptical” consequences of Hume’s “science of mind” which prompted Reid’s Inquiry, represent one side of a tension within the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. This tension gradually played itself out in such a way that certain of its later proponents could with plausibility claim Hume as their true precursor. The aim of the next two sections is to explain and defend both these contentions, and thereby rescue the idea that setting Hume in the context of a long Scottish intellectual tradition has some illumination to offer us.
Any attempt to do this needs to be aware from the outset that in the history of ideas what most evidently appears to be the case is not wrong exactly, but nevertheless misleading. Deeper continuities that run counter to widely received wisdom can be discovered in surprising places and ways. Consider, for instance, the Cartesian origins of modern philosophy.1
Descartes is generally hailed as the founder of modern philosophy in virtue of the break he makes with the long medieval scholarly tradition in which theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy its handmaid. While it is true that he mentions God and gives him a role in his thought, his great accomplishment is to reverse the order of importance and put theology in a subservient role to philosophy, thereby establishing a new focus on intellectual accomplishment instead of spiritual formation. Before too long, of course, theology drops out of the picture entirely; philosophy comes back into its own and resumes (so to speak) where Plato and Aristotle left off.
This is something of a caricature, but not wholly mistaken, and there is some clear sense in which Descartes does indeed mark the start of “modern philosophy.” Against this background, however, it is startling to discover just how closely Descartes’ Meditations follow the pattern of the meditations of the mystics, notably the Interior Castle of St Theresa of Avila (which there is reason to think he knew). They even employ some of the same devices, the contrast between sleeping and waking, for instance, and satanically inspired illusion. We now think of the “evil demon” of Descartes’ “First Meditation” as just a kind of thought experiment, but there is no reason actually to suppose that Descartes himself lent the idea any less substance than Theresa. Similarly, when in the “Fourth Meditation” he fears that he might fall into “both error and sin,” the spirit of “modern philosophy” discounts the second, or treats it as a façon de parler, and concentrates on the first. But once again there is no reason to suppose that Descartes thought in this way, and good reason to think that he did not.
The same kind of observation can be made about Hume. While it is true that his writings self-consciously strike out in new directions and are easily read today as making a clear break with what went before, there are some striking continuities that are evident only when we look a little more closely. Hume, the previous section argued, had no interest in the theological issues that had dominated the world into which he was born. Given the existence of the Dialogues, with which he seems to have tinkered over many years, this cannot be quite right, though these were published posthumously, of course. More to the point for present purposes, however, are some of his other writings on religion. The essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” published in 1741, opens with this memorable sentence. “That the corruption of the best of things produces the worst, is grown into a maxim, and is commonly proved, among other instances, by the pernicious effects of superstition and enthusiasm, the corruptions of true religion” (E 73). The threefold classification in the last part of this sentence is not Hume’s invention, but well-known and widely used in the theological debates of the seventeenth century. Moreover, his concern here – to distinguish and analyze corruptions of religion – is the same concern that we can find among Scottish intellectuals writing 70 years before. Thus, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, a lengthy letter composed by Henry Scougal, Professor of Divinity at Kings College Aberdeen, first published in 1677, opens with precisely this aim, and broadly speaking the same ambition – to distinguish between true religion on the one hand and manifestations of religion that are mistakenly taken to be religion proper on the other.
Of course, there are unmistakable differences between Scougal and Hume, not least their tone. Scougal is a devout Christian wishing to offer others spiritual guidance. He quotes the Scriptures with reverence and verges on religious mysticism. There is no trace of Christian devotion in Hume, none of his writings are intended to offer spiritual guidance, and when he makes express mention of religious practices it is often with an element of mockery. Yet, once again, the gap between the two writers is not as wide as these evident differences would lead us to suppose. Scougal is interested in clarifying the nature of true religion so that he can commend it, and this, we might think, makes his endeavor radically different to Hume’s. Yet, though in this short essay Hume is far more concerned to uncover the invidious consequences of “superstition” and the only slightly less iniquitous nature of “enthusiasm,” and says almost nothing positive about “true religion,” in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he declares that religion is a “species of philosophy.” This remark appears in the same section in which he seems to contrast religious believers with religious philosophers, and reserves his criticism for the latter.
The religious philosophers, not satisfied with the tradition of your forefathers, and doctrine of your priests (in which I willingly acquiesce) indulge a rash curiosity, in trying how they can establish religion upon the principles of reason; and they thereby excite, instead of satisfying, the doubts which arise from diligent and scrutinous enquiry.
(EHU 11.10)
Scougal, at the outset of his little book, discounts those who place religion in “the understanding, in orthodox notions and opinions,” thereby rejecting just the kind of intellectualism in religion that Hume is also discounting.
How does this passage about religious philosophers square with the description of religion as a “species of philosophy”? Hume’s own view of religion, a subject by which he was fascinated throughout his life, will never be determined for sure; he was too cautious to be emphatic about this. We may suppose that the parenthetical remark in this passage about acquiescing in Christian doctrine is not to be taken seriously, but there are other places where a similar judgment would be much less certain. Commentators on the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion who identify Hume with the skeptical Philo have often been puzzled by the volte-face that Philo seems to make at the start of the final section. But we might see this as another warning against the presumption of reason in matters religious. James Harris has made an impressive case for thinking that Hume’s purpose in the Dialogues is not primarily one of advancing a (negative) conclusion about God (Harris 2015: 445–456). Rather, the Dialogues are a literary illustration, a demonstration perhaps, of how, in an ideal world, philosophical discussion would go. Differences of opinion, even of the deepest kind, would not be converted into point scoring, or lead to personal animus and division. In the Dialogues, we might say, we find civility dramatized. On this account, to be a “philosopher” is to engage in a certain style of thought and discussion, one that is marked by humility and open mindedness, and may therefore be contrasted with both unthinking “superstition” and dogmatic “enthusiasm.”
Hume means to commend philosophy so conceived, and since he describes religion as a “species of philosophy” he can be seen to be far closer in thought to Scougal than first appearances suggest. The “true religion” Scougal means to commend is also to be contrasted with both the unreflective practicality of mere conformity to religion and the enthusiasm of the zealot. In his thought on these matters, Scougal seems to have drawn on the Cambridge Platonists, who strove, against the more ardent Puritans of their time, to create a space within Christian orthodoxy where untrammeled philosophical reflection and debate could take place. But Scougal had Scottish forebears also in this matter. Half a century before his time, the “Aberdeen Doctors,” most notably John Forbes of Corse, had taken just such a position against the zealotry of the Covenanters, and while they lost the battle and were deposed from their posts at Aberdeen, they cannot be said to have lost the argument. Just a generation or so later, their successors, of whom Scougal was the most gifted, sought to occupy similar ground. It does not seem an abuse of language to describe this as claiming a rightful place for “philosophy.”
There is no doubt that the Scottish philosophers and theologians of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were orthodox Calvinists, where Hume was not even a Christian. It is also true what they taught and studied was directed at knowledge of God, whereas his philosophical orientation was to human nature, history, and society. But even here, the difference is not as radical as it might seem. Scougal, like Calvin before him, believes that human nature as we encounter it in experience is oriented to the divine, and is interested in how the natural basis of religion is related to the light of revealed truth and free grace. Consequently, he thinks it essential to devote two short sections to “What the Natural Life Is” and “The Different Tendencies of the Natural Life.” At the start of the Natural History of Religion, Hume identifies two distinct questions about religion as being of “the utmost importance,” the first being its “foundation in reason” and the second “its origin in human nature.” Hume thinks that religion is rooted in more basic emotions, chiefly hope and fear, while the Calvinists believed that religious sentiments are themselves basic to human nature. The difference is important, but it is nonetheless easy to see that both sides are parties to the same debate.
Anyone reading Scougal and Hume could not fail to be struck by the great differences of tone and content. These are undeniable, and we should be wary about overestimating the continuities between Hume and the Scottish thinkers of the seventeenth century. There are the similarities I have detected, and they are not inconsequential, but little, if any, direct link can be established. Scougal’s book went through a great many editions and was widely read for a hundred years or more, but I know of no evidence that Hume read it, or even knew of it, still less that he was acquainted with the contest between the Covenanters and the Aberdeen doctors. At the same time, it is impossible to prove a negative. Ideas are often “in the air” and transmitted by means that may not lend themselves to documentation. The main point here, however, is to counter another assumption that is too easy to make – that Hume’s writings constitute a radical break with an intellectual tradition to which they owed nothing.
Let us turn now to the question of Hume’s relationship to the post-Enlightenment Scottish intellectual tradition. As was observed earlier, the general presumption has been that he was importantly out of step with his philosophical contemporaries in Scotland. His relationship with Adam Smith, who found in him an inspiration, was cordial, while for others, notably James Beattie, Hume was a bête noir, a dangerous skeptic and infidel. Smith’s alliance and Beattie’s hostility were both atypical. The most influential responses came from those who admired his “genius” but were both deeply critical of the assumptions underlying his philosophical writings and resistant to their implications. Relatively early on, Francis Hutcheson expressed his reservations and declined to support Hume’s candidature for the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh. Twenty years later, George Campbell subjected Hume’s arguments to close scrutiny in a Dissertation on Miracles (1762) that Hume himself described as “ingenious.” In 1764, Thomas Reid published his Inquiry in the Human upon the Principles of Common Sense. Neither writer exhibited anything like the hysteria of Beattie’s Essay on the Nature an Immutability of Truth, first published in 1770. Reid, in fact, openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Hume. Nevertheless, together with his later two sets of Essays, Reid’s Inquiry came to be widely regarded as having produced a definitive answer to Hume, and as a consequence to have set mental philosophy on a path that could leave the puzzles and problems of the Treatise behind.
Regardless of the merits of the arguments Hume’s critics brought against him, in succeeding decades their intellectual triumph seemed complete. In the universities Reid’s deployment of common sense was taken as standard, and in Edinburgh especially it found hugely influential champions, first in Dugald Stewart, who had studied under Reid for a year, and then in Sir William Hamilton, who produced the first complete edition of Reid’s works in 1848. In America, Samuel Stanhope Smith, President of the College of New Jersey (subsequently Princeton University) established Reid’s works as the main philosophical texts in liberal arts colleges, and in France, as noted earlier, Victor Cousin gave an influential series of public lectures on Philosophie Ecossaise in which Reid was the key figure. In all these places, the dominant themes identified with “the Scottish School” were those of Reid and Common Sense.
Meanwhile, Hume as a philosopher virtually disappeared. His History of England was reprinted multiple times, in innumerable abstracts and editions, but no fresh editions of his philosophical works appeared for most the nineteenth century. The Treatise was reprinted in London in 1811, but had to wait a further 70 years before Selby-Bigge’s edition was published in 1888. The Enquiries disappeared for even longer. A second edition having been published in 1751, they were not reprinted until 1861, and a scholarly edition, again edited by Selby-Bigge, only came out in 1892. The Dialogues in their proper form were effectively out of print for 130 years. (See Jessop 1938). Hume may be said to have been restored to the Scottish intellectual pantheon by his inclusion in the “Famous Scots” book series, but these did not start to appear until 1898. This was more than a century after his death. The celebrated Blackwood’s Philosophical Classics series followed suit with a volume devoted to him in 1901, but this was 20 years after the volume devoted to William Hamilton had been published.
Today, Hume is by far the most famous of the Scottish philosophers and studied much more widely than Reid, while Hamilton and Dugald Stewart are virtually unknown. All the evidence suggests that this is a major reversal. Within a short time of his death, Hume ceased to stimulate much interest within the world of Scottish intellectual debate at home and abroad, except as Reid’s chosen foil. Still less, it might seem, did he influence the direction those debates took. Once again, however, this is not as straightforward a matter as it appears. The hegemony of Reid and Common Sense was neither as comprehensive nor as secure as its proponents sometimes claimed. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Dugald Stewart, who held the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, was the doyen of Scottish intellectual life, highly regarded and well known across Europe, and a protagonist of the philosophy of Reid and Common Sense. In 1810, however, he was succeeded in the Chair by Thomas Brown, and somewhat to Stewart’s consternation, Brown departed significantly from the orthodox camp.
It was Brown who observed, in a memorable remark, that the difference between Hume and Reid, though widely thought to be very great, could actually be interpreted in a way that made it very small.
Reid bawled out that we must believe in an outward world; but added in a whisper, we can give no reason for our belief. Hume cries out we can give no reason for such a notion; and whispers, I own we cannot get rid of it.
(quoted in Brown 2010: 19)
Brown’s own lectures took up themes from Hume, and though he was not uncritical, he was sufficiently in sympathy with their general thrust, that James Mill could later describe him as a “direct successor of Hume” (ibid.: 16). Brown argued that Reid and his followers had radically misunderstood Hume on causality, and indeed, so critical was he of Reid, that his posthumously published lectures incurred the wrath of Sir William Hamilton. The second of three hugely influential papers that Hamilton published in the Edinburgh Review – “Philosophy of Perception” – was a ferocious attack on Brown’s criticisms of Reid. Hamilton’s defense of Reid was by no means slavish. He identified deficiencies in Reid that he took it upon himself to remedy. But when, some years later and relatively late in his career, he was appointed to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, his enormous prestige made a version of Reidian common sense the philosophical orthodoxy once more – though not in every quarter.
In 1848, Hamilton’s edition of Reid’s Collected Works came out and was reviewed by, among others, Hamilton’s protégé James Frederick Ferrier. Ferrier, who is plausibly regarded as the most brilliant Scottish philosopher of the nineteenth century, held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews. In his review, Ferrier was highly complementary about Hamilton’s editorial labors but scathingly critical of Reid, the philosophy of common sense, and by extension Dugald Stewart. In attacking Reid, however, Ferrier did not mean to endorse Hume. On the contrary, he rejected the associationist psychology that Brown thought to be a strength of Hume’s account of mind. Ferrier himself aimed to turn the clock back to Berkeley, whose philosophical idealism, he claimed, Reid had blunderingly misunderstood. He also looked forward with enthusiasm to the lengthy “Supplementary Dissertations” which Hamilton appended to his edition of Reid as a place where real illumination was to be secured.
It is hard to say whether Ferrier was sincere in his assessment of Hamilton’s potential contribution to the philosophical topics of mind and knowledge. However this may be, not long after Hamilton’s death, criticism of his philosophical writings arose from three different quarters. These included some of Hamilton’s own students who were sympathetic to the “Scottish School,” proponents of the Hegelian Idealism that was arriving from the continent, and most famously, John Stuart Mill, whose Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) dealt a blow from which Hamilton’s great reputation never recovered (see Graham 2014a). The point about Mill’s Examination, however, is that it brought back into play one of Hume’s most important ideas – the association of ideas.
Mill, of course, is a major contributor to philosophical debate in the nineteenth century, and Cairns Craig has set out a very strong case for regarding him as essentially educated in, and continuing to work with, the Scottish intellectual tradition. “Mill’s method,” Craig contends, “can be seen to derive from Reid, even though his means – the association of ideas – derive from Hume. Mill’s achievements are thus built upon the foundations of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy” (Craig 2015: 100). At the same time, contra Brown, the opposition between Reid and Hume was a real one, so that Mill’s combination of Reid and Hume had an important tension within it. In a departure from Cartesian rationalism, both Reid and Hume applied Baconian empiricism to the problems of philosophy. This was key to the progress they expected to make. But unlike Reid, Hume, Brown, and Mill were, we might say, on their way to positivism, a trajectory, it can be argued, that was finally completed by Mill’s friend and collaborator, Alexander Bain. Bain held the Chair of Logic at the (newly united) University of Aberdeen from 1860 to 1880, and quite intentionally took psychology in a strictly associationist (and materialist) direction. Through Bain, via Brown and the Mills, it may be said, Hume’s continuing influence in the Scottish intellectual tradition showed itself in this more obviously positivistic version of the project of the “science of mind.”
Hume’s complete rehabilitation, by some accounts, was the work of another Scottish philosopher – Norman Kemp Smith. In a subsequently famous and highly influential two-part paper entitled “The Naturalism of Hume,” Kemp Smith exorcized Hume’s reputation as a skeptic by interpreting him as having advanced a wholly naturalized conception of reason. According to this interpretation, human reason is not opposed to feeling and instinct, as it is in Kant, but grounded in them. This is the fundamental insight of both Hume and “the science of human nature,” and if we understand it properly, it does not result in the skeptical paradoxes to which Reid thought Hume’s Treatise inevitably led.
Kemp Smith’s interpretation has been widely accepted. The difficulty with it is that Hume’s naturalism, on Kemp Smith’s account, does not simply resolve a longstanding tension within the Scottish intellectual tradition; it puts an end to that tradition. Effectively, Bain transforms psychology from a branch of philosophy into a positive science. Arguably, though, this is only one example of a recurrent phenomenon – the emergence of a number of social sciences that asserted their autonomy as the years went by.2 Thus, Adam Smith was both Professor of Moral Philosophy and a (possibly the) founding figure in positive economics,3 while Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) had a significant role to play in the development of sociology. In certain important respects, philosophy as Reid pursued it continued the pre-Enlightenment tradition more fully and faithfully than Hume. As these more strictly Humean sciences of human nature emerged, the philosophers of Scotland did not return to Reid or Hamilton; they turned elsewhere.
Should we conclude from this that it was Hume, finally, who had the last word in the debate with Reid and the Reidians? The answer turns on the adequacy of Kemp Smith’s interpretation, and here a doubt arises. Does the emergence of the social sciences represent the final vindication of naturalism, or its abandonment? In Hume’s Naturalism, H O Mounce makes a strong case for thinking that Kemp Smith failed to see that eighteenth-century naturalism could not be combined with the robust empiricism that Hume’s philosophy claimed to endorse.
The naturalist has no problem about the existence of the independent world, since the existence of such a world provides the setting for his whole philosophy. The empiricist, having characterized the mind, has great difficulty in showing how it can know an independent world… . The naturalism to which Kemp Smith refers is really present in Hume’s philosophy and constitutes its most profound aspects. But empiricism is also present and is incompatible with the naturalism.
(Mounce 1999: 6–7)
According to Mounce, the metaphysical naturalism Hume shared with his contemporaries cannot be made consistent with the epistemological or scientific naturalism that we find a century later in Comte and Mill. The empirical method of “observation and experiment” to which Reid no less than Hume subscribed is not positivistic, but implicitly relies on a teleological conception of nature. It is just such a conception that underlies the Scottish intellectual tradition over many centuries, rooted in Christian theism. To study the way the mind works is to study the way it is meant to work. On Mounce’s interpretation, Hume did not (even if he wanted to) break free of it. If this is true, then Hume’s ultimate influence did not lead to the fulfillment of the project of the Scottish Enlightenment, but to its demise.
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