In a courtroom speech published in 1673, the lawyer George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh declared that he believed in witchcraft. Providence, he suggested, allowed witches to work their wiles on Earth, ‘to the end that the being of Spirits may not be deny'd’. However, he went on to argue that society overstated the extent of the Devil's dominion, and objected that ‘to kill one another, because we cannot comprehend the reason of what each other do, is the effect of a terrible distraction’. Over the decades that followed, increasing numbers of lawyers and judges fell in with his way of thinking. Executions for witchcraft declined. The last Scottish prosecution was in 1727, and witchcraft was decriminalised in 1736. After a period in which witchcraft was an ever-present menace for communities, magical forces were ebbing out of the sphere of everyday experience. Within philosophy, too, change was afoot; David Hume's 1748 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding offered a commentary on miracles that threatened to overhaul traditional conceptions of the supernatural world. The eighteenth century is associated with the development of a newly sceptical outlook towards stories of the supernatural, at least within educated society. This extended to ghosts. Sightings of apparitions were increasingly explained away in natural terms, or mocked by satirists. However, ghosts retained a cultural presence, and outside of the spheres of high Enlightenment discourse, educated men were prepared to speak for them.

The Complexities of Scepticism

To understand eighteenth-century scepticism regarding the supernatural, it is necessary to first understand that the vast majority of thinkers operated within a Christian framework. There was rarely any question of rejecting the supernatural altogether. Debate instead focused on the precise types of spirits in existence, and the degree of supernatural intervention in everyday life. The end of the witch-hunts is an important signifier in the story of how Scots engaged with the supernatural, but doubt about witches did not necessarily imply doubt about other categories of the supernatural. To illustrate the complex relationship between belief and scepticism, we can consider the curious case of Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713). Pitcairne was an Edinburgh physician and a Jacobite. His religious sentiments have been the subject of some scholarly speculation. In Edinburgh he was described as a deist, and ‘by many alledged to be ane Atheist’.