Scottish Enlightenment
Among the fields that rapidly advanced were philosophy, political economy, engineering, architecture, medicine, geology, archaeology, botany and zoology, law, agriculture, chemistry and sociology.
The lawyers and the divines, together with the professors, intellectuals, medical men, scientists and architects formed a new middle class elite that dominated urban Scotland and facilitated the Scottish Enlightenment.
Although some estate holders improved the quality of life of their displaced workers, enclosures led to unemployment and forced migrations to the burghs or abroad.
[10] The aims of a network of parish schools were taken up as part of the Protestant programme in the 16th century and a series of acts of the Privy Council and Parliament in 1616, 1633, 1646 and 1696 attempted to support its development and finance.
[12] Historians are now divided over whether the ability of boys who pursued this route to social advancement was any different than that in other comparable nations, because the education in some parish schools was basic and short, and attendance was not compulsory.
[12] By the end of the century, the University of Edinburgh's Medical School was arguably one of the leading centres of science in Europe, boasting such names as the anatomist Alexander Monro (secundus), the chemists William Cullen and Joseph Black,[17] and the natural historian John Walker.
[20] In France, the Enlightenment was based in the salons and culminated in the great Encyclopédie (1751–1772) edited by Denis Diderot and (until 1759) Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1713–1784) with contributions by hundreds of leading intellectuals such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Rousseau (1712–1778)[21] and Montesquieu (1689–1755).
One of the first and most important in the city was the Political Economy Club, aimed at creating links between academics and merchants,[24] of which noted economist Adam Smith was a prominent early member.
[27] Historian Jonathan Israel argues that by 1750 Scotland's major cities had created an intellectual infrastructure of mutually supporting institutions, such as universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums and masonic lodges.
The Scottish network was "predominantly liberal Calvinist, Newtonian, and 'design' oriented in character which played a major role in the further development of the transatlantic Enlightenment".
A few about Edinburgh in east Lothian & in the Merse by reading David Hume's books & by their conversation & connexions with him & his friends, to whom you may add a scatered Clergyman or two here & there in other parts of [the] Country who has happened to get his education among that set of people; are all you can reckon upon & it is no way difficult to account for their forsaking the faith … & loving a present World & the mode of thinking fashionable in it."
[31] Also influenced by Shaftesbury was George Turnbull (1698–1748), who was regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and who published pioneering work in the fields of Christian ethics, art and education.
[32] David Hume (1711–76) whose Treatise on Human Nature (1738) and Essays, Moral and Political (1741) helped outline the parameters of philosophical Empiricism and Scepticism.
[33] Hume's argument that there were no efficient causes hidden in nature was supported and developed by Thomas Brown (1778–1820), who was Dugald Stewart's (1753–1828) successor at Edinburgh and who would be a major influence on later philosophers including John Stuart Mill.
[34] In contrast to Hume, Thomas Reid (1710–96), a student of Turnbull's, along with minister George Campbell (1719–96) and writer and moralist James Beattie (1735–1803), formulated Common Sense Realism.
[38] Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, helping to develop the Habbie stanza as a poetic form.
[39] The lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) made a major contribution to the study of literature with Elements of Criticism (1762), which became the standard textbook on rhetoric and style.
He produced an edition of the works of Shakespeare and is best known for Sermons (1777–1801), a five-volume endorsement of practical Christian morality, and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783).
Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian, he published "translations" that were proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics.
[50] His "theorem" that "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market" has been described as the "core of a theory of the functions of firm and industry" and a "fundamental principle of economic organization.
[63] Unlike England or other European countries like France or Austria, the intelligentsia of Scotland were not beholden to powerful aristocratic patrons and this led them to see science through the eyes of utility, improvement and reform.
Joseph Black (1728–99), physicist and chemist, discovered carbon dioxide (fixed air) and latent heat,[66] and developed what many consider to be the first chemical formulae.
David Ure then minister to East Kilbride Parish was the first to represent the shells 'entrochi' in illustrations and make accounts of the geology of southern Scotland.
[73] Representative of the far-reaching impact of the Scottish Enlightenment was the new Encyclopædia Britannica, which was designed in Edinburgh by Colin Macfarquhar, Andrew Bell and others.
[83] Gavin Hamilton (1723–98) spent almost his entire career in Italy and emerged as a pioneering neo-classical painter of historical and mythical themes, including his depictions of scenes from Homer's Iliad, as well as acting as an informal tutor to British artists and as an early archaeologist and antiquarian.
[84] Many of his works can be seen as Enlightenment speculations about the origins of society and politics, including the Death of Lucretia (1768), an event thought to be critical to the birth of the Roman Republic.
[88] In the mid-eighteenth century, a group of Scottish composers began to respond to Allan Ramsey's call to "own and refine" their own musical tradition, creating what James Johnson has characterised as the "Scots drawing room style", taking primarily Lowland Scottish tunes and adding simple figured basslines and other features from Italian music that made them acceptable to a middle-class audience.
[94] In traditional historiography, the Scottish Enlightenment was long identified with abolitionism due to the writings of some of its members and the rarity of enslaved people in Scotland.
However, academic John Stewart argues that due to the fact that many members of the Scottish Enlightenment were involved in supporting slavery and scientific racism (a consequence, he argues, of Scotland's disproportionate involvement in the Atlantic slave trade), "the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual [Scottish] Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.
These plays include references to many of the figures historically associated with the movement and satirise various social tensions, particularly in the field of spoken language, between traditional society and anglicised Scots who presented themselves as exponents of so-called 'new manners'.
