The Enlightenment outlook inherited and expanded the Scientific Revolution’s legacy of extolling the material mastery of nature. Ultimately, this legacy developed into the modern anthropocentric ethics of utilizing natural resources. Recent scholarship has subjected the generalizing term “Enlightenment” to various criticisms, differentiating between various national outlooks or between radical and moderate Enlightenments. There is, however, a general sense in which the term remains applicable to the eighteenth-century broad battle with religious superstition and political despotism. Another important general element of the Enlightenment Weltanschauung, not always sufficiently emphasized, was the advocacy of the need to command the forces of nature and harness them for human benefit and progress. During the eighteenth century the translation of traditional anthropocentric cosmology into scientifically-based, practical material benefits, became an unprecedented cultural endeavor. At the same time, as we will see, new forms of consideration of both the natural environment and animals began subsuming older ones, all the while retaining a basic anthropocentric premise.

Since the rise of the modern environmental movement, particularly from the 1960s, philosophers have consistently been interested in clarifying the logical and ethical dimensions of the concept of anthropocentrism. The term “anthropocentrism” is a modern one, yet the concept, the notion that humanity stood at the apex of the material creation and that the creation was meant for human use, and conversely the critique of this outlook, have been a part of the western tradition since antiquity. We will therefore use this term here to refer to equivalent ideas before and during the long eighteenth century. The ancient and medieval Judeo-Christian cosmology based its anthropocentric outlook on divine sanction. The Scientific Revolution transformed, rather than replaced, this tradition. The result was the modern scientific anthropocentric ethics of technological mastery of natural resources. In our own time this has evolved, at least in some respects, into an environmental crisis, a development which would have truly surprised eighteenth-century intellectuals.

This chapter will examine this topic by concentrating on the views of the semi-forgotten figure of William Smellie, an important and highly learned printer, journalist, and editor in eighteenth-century Edinburgh.