It is a striking fact that while Scottish philosophy of the eighteenth century is studied to the point of being a major academic industry, Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century is not only neglected but virtually unknown. Hume, Reid and Hutcheson are names familiar to almost all philosophers; Hamilton, Ferrier and Bain to hardly any. Evidence for this sharp contrast between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy lies in this startling statistic: the Philosopher's Index currently lists over 4,000 publications relating to the first three names, fewer than 40 relating to the next three.

Why should this be the case? Why should one period of Scottish philosophy be so perennially interesting and intensively studied and that which followed it have fallen so completely into oblivion? In this chapter I aim to offer a partial answer to this question, an answer couched in terms of the story of Scottish philosophy itself. The nineteenth century, I shall argue, saw the unravelling of the great philosophical project that had animated the eighteenth.