How the Scots Invented the Modern World (13 page)

This was Archibald Campbell, Lord Islay, later the fourth Duke of Argyll. He was a remarkable man in an age of remarkable men. His grandfather was the Earl of Argyll who had been Andrew Fletcher’s friend and who had lost the battle of Sedgemoor in 1685; his father was the Argyll who bested the Earl of Mar on the field at Sheriffmuir. Islay concentrated on politics rather than war, and rose to become the most powerful man in Scotland. He had strong connections both in the Lowlands and the Highlands—in the latter he was head of the great Campbell clan—as well as at Westminster and at Court. For forty years he used those connections ruthlessly to further the interests of his Whig allies and the House of Hanover.

But he was also a man with large intellectual and scientific interests. He was good friends with Robert Simson the mathematician, and a skilled amateur chemist. He provided generous patronage to Scotland’s universities, particularly the University of Glasgow, where his word was virtually law. Between 1722 and his death in 1761, Islay had his hand in no less than fifty-five university appointments, not only at Glasgow but also at Edinburgh. He completed the progressive transformation of Scotland’s universities that Carstares and Dunlop had begun. He created Glasgow’s chair of Practical Astronomy and its first chair in chemistry. He donated plants and materials for its bonatical gardens. Some of Scotland’s most distinguished scientific names, including Robert Simson, the chemist Joseph Black, and the medical theorist William Cullen, owed their careers in one way or another to Islay. Without him, in fact, Glasgow might never have played a major part in the Scottish Enlightenment.

His most important act in that regard was his support of Francis Hutcheson. Islay recognized how useful Hutcheson could be at Glasgow, as a voice for reform and Whig ideals, and as a thorn in the side of the hidebound traditionalists. He pressured the faculty and regents at Glasgow to give way, and so Hutcheson beat his two rivals (one of them Carmichael’s own son) for the post. It is a delicious irony that without the self-interested help of Islay, the most feared but also the most hated politician of his day, Hutcheson and his philosophy of moral altruism would never have enjoyed the sort of influence it did.

If the older generation of faculty resented his presence at Glasgow, Hutcheson never allowed it to become an obstacle to his teaching or writing. He carefully prepared his class lectures so that they never served as a cause for scandal. He turned out to be a brilliant teacher— so good, in fact, that his classes were always overbooked and he had to hire an assistant.

They were crowded for another reason. Hutcheson broke with ancient precedent and presented his classes on moral philosophy in English, rather than Latin. He may have been the first professor in Europe to teach in the vernacular, instead of the centuries-old language of academic learning. It not only expanded the range of students who could attend his class, but also introduced a note of informality and spontaneity into his lectures, which made their impact on hearers even greater. One of his students later described what taking a class from Hutcheson was like:

“He was a good-looking man, of engaging countenance. He delivered his lectures without notes, walking backwards and forwards in the area of his room. As his elocution was good, and his voice and manner pleasing, he raised the attention of his hearers at all times, and when the subject led him to explain and enforce the moral virtues, he displayed a fervent and persuasive eloquence which was irresistible.”

Hutcheson lectured on Natural Religion, Morals, Jurisprudence, and Government five days a week, and delivered a sermon every Sunday on “the excellence of the Christian religion.” Three days a week Hutcheson introduced another important innovation: discussing assigned readings directly with students, usually the ancient authors on morality such as Aristotle and Cicero. By his own example, and by exerting a gentle pressure on his colleagues, Hutcheson became a driving force behind curriculum reform at Glasgow. He pushed training in the Greek language and the ancient classics into the curriculum, as the foundation for polite learning. He helped to appoint other reform-minded colleagues to important chairs. Glasgow University soon gained a reputation for academic excellence and learning. English and Scottish observers considered its students better prepared and more intellectually engaged than those of Edinburgh—even though so many came from less than “the best families,” but rather from middle-class or even poor origins.

Hutcheson’s reforms at Glasgow served as the model for academic reform at the other Scottish universities later in the century. But through it all, Hutcheson never lost sight of his main goal: “to change the face of theology in Scotland,” as he put it. He wanted to turn his fellow clergymen away from the hard, inflexible dogmas of John Knox and refocus their energies on the moral questions their parishioners faced every day. Hutcheson wanted the Presbyterian faith to take on a more humane, comforting face. It caused controversy. “I am already,” he wrote to a friend in 1742, “called New Light here. I don’t value it for myself, but I see it hurts some ministers who are most intimate with me.” Nonetheless, within the Kirk he managed to create a lobbying group that later become known as the Moderate Party. It included colleagues such as William Leechman, whom Hutcheson brought in as Professor of Theology, former students such as Alexander Carlyle and Matthew Stewart (whose son Dugald would become the University of Edinburgh’s most famous teacher), and ministers such as William Robertson and Hugh Blair, who chose Hutcheson as their professional role models.

All of them embraced Hutcheson’s main point, that the message of Christianity was above all a moral message. The pulpit was not a place to inspire fear and terror, but to uplift and inspire. Church should be the school of men’s consciences and a place to cultivate a disinterested benevolence and affection for our fellowmen. It becomes, in fact, a training ground for Shaftesbury’s polite culture. Unlike their French counterparts, the great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment never saw Christianity as their mortal enemy—not even Hume, the self-proclaimed skeptic. For the clerical disciples of Hutcheson, Church and Enlightenment were natural allies, in much the same way as science and the humanities were not pitted against each other, but were two halves of the same intellectual enterprise.

Yet Hutcheson’s most lasting impact lay outside his immediate profession. It touched students such as Adam Smith, who arrived to study at Glasgow in 1737 and quickly fell under Hutcheson’s spell. He sat in on the great man’s lectures on moral philosophy from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning three days a week, and then attended his main course on the philosophy of law and politics. There, Smith and other listeners would discover that the underlying principles of all human behavior were part of an “immense and connected” moral system governed by the dictates of natural law. That included “
oeconomicks,
or the laws and rights of the several members of a family,” as well as “
private
rights,
or the laws obtaining in natural liberty.”

The crucial element in each, the part that enabled everything else to move, was always the same: liberty. Human beings are born free and equal. The desire to be free survives, even in the face of the demands for cooperation with others in society. Society acknowledges it as a natural right, which it must leave intact. That right is
universal;
in other words, it applies to all human beings everywhere, regardless of origin or status.

As nature has implanted in every man a desire of his own happiness, and many tender affections towards others . . . and granted to each one some understanding and active powers, with a natural impulse to exercise them for the purposes of these affections;
’tis plain each one has a natural right to exert his
power, according to his own judgement and inclination, for these purposes, in all such industry, labor, or amusements, as are not hurtful to
others in their persons or goods. . . .

Hutcheson took this basic principle of liberty out beyond the political realm. He not only endorsed Lockean ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He challenged other forms of oppression, which Locke and even Shaftesbury had ignored.

One was the legal subjection of women. Hutcheson defined rights as universal, and did not recognize any distinction based on gender. The other, even more important, was slavery. “Nothing,” he said, “can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all rights.” In fact, Hutcheson’s lectures, published after his death under the title
A
System of Moral Philosophy,
were “an attack on all forms of slavery as well as denial of any right to govern solely on superior abilities or riches.” They would inspire antislavery abolitionists, not only in Scotland but from London to Philadelphia.

Francis Hutcheson had created a new political and social vision, one that went far beyond Locke or any comparable English thinker: the vision of a “free society.” He is Europe’s first liberal in the classic sense: a believer in maximizing personal liberty in the social, economic, and intellectual spheres, as well as the political. But the ultimate goal of this liberty was, we should remember, happiness—which Hutcheson always defined as resulting from helping others to be happy.

Freedom’s ends are not selfish ones, he believed; they are in truth governed by God, through our moral reasoning. Hutcheson never worried about the dangers of letting people do or say whatever they wanted, because in his mind a free society enjoys a firm and permanent backstop, our innate moral sense, which enables us to distinguish the vicious from the virtuous, and the decent from the obscene, just as our intellectual reason enables us to sort out truth from falsehood. “The nature of virtue,” Hutcheson wrote, “is thus as immutable as the divine Wisdom and Goodness.”

Hutcheson’s doctrine of happiness, then, had two faces. It involved, on one side, gratification of the self through a joyous and contented life. When Thomas Jefferson added “the pursuit of happiness” to his list of inalienable rights of man in the Declaration of Independence, he was emphasizing this side of Hutcheson’s legacy. On the other, it was also intensely altruistic. No man stands alone, was the message his students absorbed. Hutcheson constantly enjoins us to get out and become involved in the lives of our fellow human beings. Our willingness to do so becomes the measure of who we are. His statement on this point— “action is best, which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number”—would also ring down through the next two centuries, underpinning the utilitarian philosophy of two later Scots, James and John Stuart Mill.

That was what Francis Hutcheson taught his contemporaries: the desire to be moral and virtuous, and treat others with kindness and compassion; the desire to be free, including political freedom; and the desire to enjoy our natural rights in society, as civil rights, are
universal
desires. And why do human beings want them? Because these are the things that lead to human “happiness.”

But this raised a problem for his disciples. If those desires are really so universal, why do so many societies deny people those very things? Why, given the variety of political and social systems in history, have there been so few that have delivered on Hutcheson’s vision of a free society?

When Hutcheson died in 1746, he left no answer. He had been a philosopher, not a historian. He had concentrated on describing how things ought to be, rather than explaining how they actually were. It would take another Scotsman, based in Edinburgh rather than Glasgow, to do that.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Proper Study of Mankind II

The faculties of the mind have been explored, and the affections of the heart; but there is still wanting a history of the species in its progress from the savage state to its highest civilisation and improvement.

—Lord Kames

Henry Home was the son of a landed gentleman from Kames, in Berwickshire. His mother was the granddaughter of Dr. Robert Baillie, Principal of Glasgow University and an enthusiastic Covenanter in the 1640s. “I furnished to half a dozen of good fellows muskets and pikes,” Baillie wrote the year the National Covenant had spread like wildfire across the south Lowlands, “and to my boy a good broad sword.”

Home, who later took the title Lord Kames,
⁶
may have inherited his ancestor’s fire and spirit, but the Kirk’s legacy of pessimistic moral austerity left no discernible trace. Instead, he was raised an Episcopalian and learned early on the importance of a good income, as well as the pride and pleasure of being a gentleman farmer (especially when others do the heavy lifting). He attended no school or university, but was tutored at home. Since he showed a predilection for books and learning, it was decided that the perfect profession for this heir to a modest country fortune was the law.

In 1712, just the year after Francis Hutcheson arrived at Glasgow, sixteen-year-old Harry Home set off for Edinburgh to start his legal education in the chambers of John Dickson, a so-called writer of the Signet, or what the English would call a solicitor. This was more than just a matter of terminology; it reflected a genuine difference between the legal systems of the two countries, and even a difference in the mentality of those who took up the study and practice of the law.

Scottish law had developed very differently from its English counterpart. They sprang up at almost the same time, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But as time went on, the outlook of English lawyers and judges became increasingly insular. They looked to the custom and precedent of their own past to settle virtually every dispute—hence the term
common law
, meaning common to the kingdom of England.