To introduce the theme of this essay, there are few statements more fitting than the caustic judgment of Albertus Magnus on those whom he considered the enemies of freedom in his day. Reproaching the petty obscurantism of the opponents of Aristotle's philosophy, he described these men, whose sole aim in reading books was to find something to condemn, as stagnant themselves in intellectual inertia, and seeking always to paralyze others into their own state. It was men like these, he said, who killed Socrates, and whose plots forced Aristotle to leave Athens with the words, “I shall not give the Athenians a second chance of sinning against philosophy.” In the world of learning, according to Albertus, such bitter, bilious men are like the liver in the body; “they try to inject their own bitterness into everyone else, and to prevent others from pursuing truth in the sweetness of society.”

Over a generation ago Lucien Febvre wrote a short article on the origins of the Reformation which he called “Une question mal posée.” Today the question remains just as “mal” as it ever was, and the modern historian who ventures forth into these eristic fields of study will find that time has in no way mitigated the full vigor of the historiographical and theological controversy that surrounds the Protestant Reformation. Some scholars have endeavoured to find the secret of the upheaval in the political machinations of unscrupulous princes and the dynastic ambitions of rival sovereigns. Others of a more social and economic bent prefer some variant of the school of economic determinism. The institutional historian tends to see the Reformation as part of the growth of the centralized national state while yet others say that the revolt was the result of corruption and abuse within the mother institution itself—the Catholic Church. Those who see the movement as part of the vast intellectual revolution of the era, hail the Protestant revolution as the “coming-of-age” of medieval Europe—the emancipation of the laity and the lay mind from the tutelage of the ecclesiastical. It is unnecessary to enumerate further. The only point which I have to contribute along these lines is to say that all of these suggested reasons fail to explain adequately three aspects of the Reformation which historians at least have tended to ignore.

In the spring of 1697 the Reverend John Higginson of Salem finished writing a laudatory “Attestation” for Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. Higginson was enghty-one. He had lived in New England for nearly seventy years, and sixty of them had been devoted to the ministry. He had, he worte, “seen all that the Lord hath done for his people” in the Puritan colonies and rejoiced that a younger colleague had recorded it in a volume of history and biography, because he was sure that the book was, in substance, purpose, and scope “according to truth” and would be of “maninfold advantage and usefulness”. In elaboration of this he listed in his “Attestation” some ways in which he thought the Magnalia would serve “great and good ends”.

In 1754 the English colonies were concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard and the river valleys leading thereto. To the west of this more-or-less densely populated strip lay a vast wilderness permanently inhabited only by Indians and dotted with the isolated military garrisons and trading posts of the French. Because of conflicting claims and a faulty knowledge of geography, neither England nor France had been successful in convincing the other nation of the validity of her territorial claims. Three wars—King William's (1689–1697), Queen Anne's (1702–1713), and King George's (1744–1748) had been fought in an effort to solve this troublesome question, but in 1754 the problem was much the same as it had been in 1689.

The Scottish Philosophy is no longer in good repute despite its proud reign in another day. Indeed, few, if any, schools of philosophy have been given such disdainful treatment by historians as Common Sense Realism; and few, if any, philosophers have had to suffer such ignominious re-evaluations as Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, who were once lionized as the founders of a great and enduring philosophical synthesis. Yet the very decisiveness of this reversal creates at least two challenging problems, one philosophical and the other historical. First, was the Scottish Philosophy as undistinguished as posterity has judged it to be? (To this I would answer with a qualified negative, but the subject is outside the purview of the present essay.) Second, why, when its ultimate rejection was so complete, did the Scottish Philosophy for over a century play such a large and variegated role in Western thought, being in its origins a forceful liberalizing religious movement, in France the near-official “middle-way” of the Restoration and July Monarchy, and in America the handmaiden of both Unitarianism and Orthodoxy? The account which follows is directed to this second question as well as to the factors in Scottish and American intellectual history which demonstrate the importance of asking it.