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The traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, commonly known as ‘the design argument’, aims to ground belief in God’s existence in empirical evidence drawn from the world around us. The most telling items of evidence to which this argument appeals are biological organs that serve specific functions superbly well. The eye, to cite a frequently used example, serves the purpose of seeing so impressively, it seems impossible that it could have arisen by chance. Rather, it must have been brought into existence for that purpose by an intentional designer, which is to say, God.

David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, it is widely accepted, constitute an exhaustive and devastating critique of this argument. The characters engaged in dialogue debate a very modest version of the conclusion that the design argument might be held to sustain, namely, ‘That the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man’. Yet ultimately, even this very limited claim is found to be wanting. The design argument, which had widespread appeal in Hume’s own day, is wholly lacking in cogency, it seems.

In the Dialogues, the character who articulates and defends the design argument is Cleanthes. The character who undermines it is Philo. Somewhat strangely, however, in the opening paragraphs of the final part of the work Philo, the sceptic, suddenly seems to endorse the very conclusion he has been attacking. He remarks to Cleanthes:

Is this really a volte-face? Is Philo in the end unpersuaded by the arguments he himself has made? The quoted passage has often been interpreted in this way, but there is at least one interpretation that makes the reversal a little less dramatic. Possibly, Philo is here giving voice to a lingering psychological doubt. The key lies in the word ‘inexplicable’ and in the phrase ‘at all times’.

Philosophy has been taught and written in Scotland since the fifteenth century. The purpose of this series is to publish new scholarly work on any and every aspect of the history of Scottish philosophising, from John Mair to John Macmurray. Scotland’s most celebrated philosophical achievements remain those produced by Hume, Smith, Reid and their contemporaries in the eighteenth century. It is, however, no longer possible to believe that the Scottish Enlightenment had no indigenous roots. Nor is it possible to believe that there was no significant philosophy produced in Scotland once the Enlightenment was over.

There is no single set of intellectual concerns distinctive of and unique to philosophy as it has been taught and written in Scotland. Historical study of Scottish philosophy must be, to a significant extent, study of the changing nature of philosophy itself. It should be open to the idea that the preoccupations and methods of philosophers today may not be those of philosophers in the past. It should also concern itself with philosophical connections and intellectual affinities between Scotland, England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, and, where appropriate, between Scotland and America.

James Harris

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In Part 4 of his highly acclaimed book The Democratic Intellect, George Elder Davie tells a dramatic and riveting story about the decline of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in the course of the nineteenth century. A central role in the story is given to James Frederick Ferrier, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews from 1845 until his death in 1864. The Democratic Intellect was published in 1961, but Davie’s fascination with Ferrier, he tells us, had begun nearly thirty years earlier in 1936, when he first read about Ferrier in Torgny Segerstedt’s book The Problem of Knowledge in Scottish Philosophy. As a result, he found himself

Davie’s estimate of Ferrier was not eccentric. Ferrier’s contemporary, Principal John Tulloch, a scholar of great distinction and philosophical acumen, concludes a long commemorative essay, ‘Professor Ferrier and the Higher Philosophy’, with this fine tribute.

Fifty years on, the estimate of Ferrier’s distinction had not diminished. In 1911, the University of St Andrews marked its 500th anniversary with a special publication – Votiva Tabella. The chapter on philosophy was written by G. F. Stout, then Professor of Logic and Metaphysics. He says this of Ferrier.

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Andrew Seth (latterly Seth Pringle-Pattison) occupied the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh from 1891 to 1919. The Chair itself had a distinguished history. Seth succeeded his teacher Alexander Campbell Fraser, who had himself succeeded his teacher Sir William Hamilton. Together the tenure of these three philosophers in the Edinburgh Logic Chair extended over more than eighty years, and all of them were held in high esteem by their philosophical contemporaries and their students. None of them, however, has attracted much attention in the history of modern philosophy. Even their contribution to the history of philosophy in Scotland is largely overshadowed by the towering figures of the previous century. Alexander Broadie’s History of Scottish Philosophy (2009) is uniquely comprehensive, yet while his discussion of Hume, Smith and Reid extends to 175 pages, his discussion of Hamilton and Pringle-Pattison is confined to twelve. Fraser (who figured so prominently in the previous chapter) is merely mentioned.

Though Broadie’s treatment is modest, wider-ranging histories of philosophy, as could be expected, invariably give these figures even less attention, often none at all. When Hamilton does figure, it is largely as a historical curiosity, notable chiefly as the subject of J. S. Mill’s devastating Examination, and a figure whose own work no longer has any interest for contemporary philosophy. The case of Pringle-Pattison is a little different because in several places he has been accorded special status as a forerunner in the development of ‘personalism’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us that in the first half of the twentieth century ‘personalism’ came to designate a variety of philosophical schools that grew out of a reaction to the de-personalising elements in Enlightenment rationalism, Hegelian Idealism, and materialist psychology. Personalist philosophical systems are so called because they focus on ‘the person’ as the most fundamental explanatory principle of reality, and the leading representative of British idealistic personalism, the entry goes on to note, was Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison. This claim is elaborated at slightly greater length in the Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, where, under the heading of ‘Personal Idealism’, Pringle-Pattison is allocated a section in the chapter on ‘British Idealist Philosophy of Religion’. Broadie is more emphatic.

This book is the result of several years of reading and reflection in an area of the history of philosophy that has generally gone almost entirely unexplored. For this reason, it cannot address an established readership – since no such readership exists. Accordingly, it seemed best to present the results of my reading and reflection in a series of free-standing essays, each with a distinctive focus that may catch the newcomer’s attention. Written on the reasonable assumption that readers interested in philosophy are likely to know little or nothing of the period, the style is sometimes rather elementary. While each essay is meant to be independent of the rest, they all touch on larger and recurring themes, even those that are focused on a single philosopher. Inevitably, the relative independence of each essay means that the same material recurs in several different chapters. I have tried to avoid straightforward repetition, and noted interconnections between chapters here and there. But the nature of the subject matter puts a limit on how far this is possible. The opening essay is autobiographical and relates the story of how I came to study nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy in the first place. In telling it, I hope very much that I have avoided any self-indulgent element. The second essay, on Sir William Hamilton, is a substantially revised amalgamation of two previously published essays. An earlier version of the essay on religion and evolution appeared in the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. A version of the chapter on Thomas Carlyle was circulated in the ‘Occasional Papers’ of the Carlyle Society. Chapter 9 reuses a small amount of material from my contribution on the Gifford Lectures to the three-volume History of Scottish Theology edited by David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliot. The remaining material is new, and several of the essays, especially Chapters 8, 9 and 10, are an attempt to make good what I now see to be important omissions from Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2015).

The book might be called an ‘act of piety’, in the proper and best sense. That is to say, it is the acknowledgement of a debt owed, and a tribute due, to historical forebears who are at risk of being neglected.

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It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which Thomas Carlyle was lionised in the last years of his life. No fewer than 119 eminent people signed the list assembled by David Masson in celebration of his eightieth birthday. It included prestigious scientists (Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley), poets (Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning) and novelists (George Eliot and Anthony Trollope), as well as almost all the professors of philosophy in Scotland. This was in 1875, despite the fact that after the death of his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle in 1866, Carlyle published very little. The little he did publish, however, was avidly seized upon by the reading public. What might be considered his ‘last word’, the anti-reform pamphlet Shooting Niagara, published in 1867, sold 4,000 copies in just three weeks. The London house he had occupied for forty years became a place of pilgrimage for a constant stream of people from the highest social, political, literary and even royal circles. They all wanted to see ‘the Sage of Chelsea’ and hear the long monologues on cultural and political themes that had become his trademark.

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Carlyle spent the first thirty-eight years of his life in Scotland. Self-employed for more than a decade, he had been trying to gain recognition and acceptance as a writer and thinker. In 1834, when the struggle was beginning to succeed, he and his wife left the isolation of Craigenputtock, a small farm in Dumfriesshire, and moved to Chelsea, then a suburb on the edge of London. Their new location did not change things immediately, but the tide finally turned in Carlyle’s favour when he published his history of The French Revolution in 1837. Thereafter he steadily came to be accorded immense intellectual stature, and towards the end of his life was held worthy of receiving the highest academic awards and political honours (most of which he declined).

The Cambridge edition of his Collected Works runs to thirty volumes, and the peak of this literary achievement was a six-volume biography of Frederick the Great. Carlyle devoted thirteen years to its composition, an enormous endeavour undertaken at considerable personal cost, especially to his wife. When it was finally published, it proved a huge success and made him rich. The first two volumes appeared in 1858 to critical acclaim.

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In the Introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume remarks that it does not take ‘such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the sciences … The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision’ (Hume 2007: 3). This state of things, he thinks, warrants a new and different approach.

The study of philosophy had been a marked feature of education in the Scottish universities for over 300 years before Hume wrote this. Nevertheless, with a striking military image, he set philosophy in Scotland in a new direction. His intellectual project, variously called the science of man, the science of human nature or the science of mind, soon became the remit for philosophers in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, with St Andrews following at a rather greater distance in time.

Hume’s Treatise, after a slow start, effectively shaped Scottish philosophy for almost 150 years. One enduring issue across this long period was the question of whether, as Hume hoped, this new approach to the topics that had been the mainstay of philosophy since ancient times could result in genuine intellectual advances. Did the science of human nature as it was pursued by the Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries secure real progress, and if so, in what did that progress consist?

In seeking answers to these two questions, it is worth noting at the outset that for Hume and his contemporaries the terms ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ were interchangeable. One important feature of the development of Hume’s project over the century that followed his death was the gradual differentiation of these terms.

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It is widely agreed that eighteenth-century Scotland was remarkable for its philosophical fertility. From the early years of the century almost to its close, a line of notable philosophers engaged each other in debate on many of the main topics of philosophy, and in the course of it wrote books that have remained important texts in the history of the subject. The philosophers were not alone. They were simply the most prominent group within a larger community of intellectuals engaged in social, historical, literary and scientific inquiry.

For the most part, this intellectual activity took place in three locations, and centred on four small university colleges – two in Aberdeen, one in Edinburgh and another in Glasgow. (Scotland’s most ancient university – St Andrews – seems to have played little part in this intellectual ferment.) For most of the century, the University of Edinburgh was renowned for its medical sciences, while Aberdeen and Glasgow were especially notable for their philosophical prowess. In Aberdeen George Turnbull and George Campbell at Marischal College, and then Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid at King’s, set philosophical inquiry in new directions. In Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson assumed the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1726. His student Adam Smith later occupied the same Chair, in which he was succeeded by Aberdeen’s Thomas Reid. Though Hutcheson was venerated as the ‘Father’ of this remarkable line, it was Reid who came to be identified as the founder of a distinctive philosophical school – ‘the Scottish School of Common Sense’. The name was derived from Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind upon the Principles of Common Sense, completed while he was still at Aberdeen.

Another key contributor to this philosophical ferment was David Hume. Though he never held a university post, despite applications to Glasgow and Edinburgh, Hume provided the single most important stimulus to the philosophical debates of the period. Just as on the continent of Europe he awakened Immanuel Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’, so in his native land the sceptical conclusions of his Treatise of Human Nature became a challenge to the holders of university Chairs, and the esteem in which Reid’s Inquiry was held resulted primarily from the belief that it contained a conclusive answer to Hume.

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In 1855, at the unusually early age of thirty-one, John Tulloch was appointed Principal of St Mary’s College, the Divinity Faculty of the University of St Andrews. In the same year, he was awarded the Burnet Prize for an essay entitled ‘Theism: The Witness of Reason and Nature to an All-Wise and Beneficent Creator’, published as a book shortly afterwards by William Blackwood and Sons. Tulloch’s essay was interesting in at least two respects. At St Andrews, as well as Principal, he occupied the Chair of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, and his essay signalled a move away from the doctrinaire and rather narrow Calvinistic theology of his predecessors towards a more liberal ‘rational theology’. This more liberal theology lay at the heart of Tulloch’s influential contribution both to the Church of Scotland as it emerged from the trauma of the ‘Disruption’ in 1843, and to the study of theology in the Scottish universities. On the other hand, Tulloch’s liberalism in theology conceded nothing to recent trends in philosophy. His defence of theism had the rising tide of Positivism in its sights no less than dogmatic Calvinism. Auguste Comte’s six-volume Course on Positive Philosophy had been published between 1830 and 1842, and enthusiastically welcomed by John Stuart Mill, who tells us that while the main elements of his System of Logic were formulated by the time he read Comte, ‘his book was of essential service to me in some of the parts that still remained to be thought out’ (Mill 1971: 126). Mill regarded Comte’s subsequent Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity (1851–4, four volumes) with considerably less favour, though he did pick up on the expression ‘religion of humanity’ in his posthumously published essay ‘The Utility of Religion’. In Scotland, Alexander Bain became the standard bearer of a version of positivism when, with Mill’s support, he was appointed Regius Professor of Logic in Aberdeen in 1860.

Tulloch was Principal of St Mary’s for over thirty years. It was a period that witnessed the publication of a number of remarkably influential books. Most notable was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859, and followed in 1871 by The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

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The question of Hume’s relationship to Scottish philosophy is somewhat problematic. The term ‘Scottish philosophy’, of course, did not gain much currency until 1875, almost a century after Hume’s death, when James McCosh published The Scottish Philosophy. McCosh included Hume in his list of forty-nine Scottish philosophers, giving him the longest chapter in fact, because, interestingly, he thought the content of Hume’s Treatise was not widely enough known. Yet he makes it clear that Hume, to whom he refers as ‘the Scotch sceptic’, is not to be regarded as belonging to ‘the Scottish philosophy’. Rather, ‘it has been the aim of the Scottish school, as modified and developed by Reid, to throw back the scepticism of Hume’ (McCosh 1875: 158). Hume’s role, in other words, is as a stimulus, not a contributor, to ‘the Scottish School’. Ten years later Andrew Seth gave expression to the same idea when he subtitled his Balfour Lectures on Scottish Philosophy ‘A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume’. This formulation clearly excludes Hume from the Scottish School, whose principal architect Seth took to be Reid.

Hume’s Treatise preceded Reid’s Inquiry by about twenty-five years, but it is plain that McCosh and Seth did not think of Scottish philosophy as a development that built upon Hume’s Treatise. It was, rather, a reaction to it. This is indeed how, since the late eighteenth century, many people have seen Hume’s relationship to Scottish philosophy, and there is evidently considerable plausibility to the view. Yet there are also important considerations to be brought against it. To begin with, while a key feature characterising Scottish philosophy is the assertion of a radical division between Reid and Hume, that is not how Reid himself regarded matters. Certainly, he and his circle in Aberdeen found Hume’s Treatise a stimulus to their thinking, as Reid expressly acknowledges in a letter to Hume dated 18 March 1763:

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In 1968, at the age of nineteen, I left my native Ireland to become an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews. I knew very little about Scotland, and almost nothing about its universities. I had expected to attend Trinity College Dublin, but circumstances called for a change of plan. I chose St Andrews only because a history teacher I liked was a St Andrews graduate. For this reason, I applied to study History, with English, but discovered when I arrived that admission was to a Faculty, not a subject. This required me to take a year-long course in either ‘Logic and Metaphysics’ or ‘Moral Philosophy’, and the choice had to be made in those few minutes with an ‘Adviser’ that each entering student was allocated. ‘Logic and Metaphysics’ meant absolutely nothing to me. ‘Moral Philosophy’ was almost equally opaque, but I thought I had some understanding of the term ‘moral’, so I chose that. Within six weeks, happily, I had discovered that Moral Philosophy was the perfect subject for me. Consequently, I switched my attention and allegiance, took only one course in History, none at all in English, and in the end went on to devote no less than five decades to studying and teaching philosophy.

At the time, students could not study ‘Philosophy’ at St Andrews. There was no such honours degree, so having discovered this new intellectual enthusiasm, I had to take joint honours – ‘Logic and Metaphysics & Moral Philosophy’. The two halves of this degree proceeded quite independently, with odd consequences occasionally. For instance, I studied Books 2 and 3 of Hume’s Treatise a year before I studied Book 1. The division even found physical expression. Edgecliffe, a matching pair of fine Victorian houses on the Scores overlooking St Andrews Bay, housed two departments with separate entrances and separate classrooms. None of this struck me as strange, since I knew no different, but I was taught almost exclusively by Oxford-trained philosophers to whom, clearly, the division seemed absurd. Accordingly, there were occasional meetings when Bernard Mayo, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, solicited the support of students in his efforts to merge the two subjects and departments into one. Nothing came of this, though such a merger had taken place in Edinburgh some years before.

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Chapter 10 concluded with the claim that Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison brought the Scottish philosophical tradition to a close. This contention is not universally accepted. Though there has been little discussion of the issue, a few commentators have extended the tradition considerably past this point by identifying John Macmurray (1891–1976) as a representative of Scottish philosophy. All the philosophers considered in previous chapters, even those who lived into the twentieth century, were essentially products of nineteenth-century Scotland. Macmurray, by contrast, was a philosopher of the twentieth century. What he does have in common with, for example, Hamilton, Bain, Ferrier and Caird is the fact that, having been acclaimed in his own time, his copious publications have been remarkably neglected by both contemporary philosophical discussion and the history of philosophy. Accordingly, this final chapter has a twofold purpose. First, in light of the conclusion of the previous chapter, it will aim to identify Macmurray’s relation to the Scottish philosophical tradition. Second, in the course of doing so, it will try to recover something of his significance as a thinker.

According to Alexander Broadie in A History of Scottish Philosophy, it is a mistake to confuse the Scottish philosophical tradition with the ‘Scottish School of Common Sense’.

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‘Hegelianism and its Critics’ was the title of an article by Andrew Seth, published in the journal Mind in 1894. Seth was writing in response to a two-part article in Mind by Henry Jones, published the previous year, which was itself a response to previous articles by Seth in the Philosophical Review. Seth’s article was preceded by a short piece by R. B. Haldane, and followed by a comment from David G. Ritchie, both of which also appeared in Mind under similar titles. These vigorous and extended exchanges can be regarded as the focal point for an argument about the place and role of Hegelianism, and Idealism more broadly, in the trajectory of nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy. This chapter will trace the genesis of the argument, identify its key points, and seek to assess its wider philosophical significance.

Kant knew about philosophy in Scotland well in advance of Scottish philosophers knowing much about him. Yet even before Kant’s death, selections from his works had been translated into English by a Scot, John Richardson. Since Richardson was very familiar with Hume, he may have been a Scottish graduate, but his continuing Scottish connections were tenuous. He spent most of his life in Germany, his translations and ‘recensions’ of Kant were published in London, and his efforts seem to have had little or no impact in Scotland (or anywhere, for that matter). It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that accurate English translations of some of Kant’s works were widely available, two of the most enduring being by Scottish graduates. J. W. Semple’s translation of Kant’s Metaphysic of Ethics, with commentary, first appeared in the 1830s, but attracted a much larger readership when it was reprinted in 1867. This was on the initiative of Henry Calderwood, recently appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, who wanted his students to learn about Kant’s moral philosophy. J. M. D. Meiklejohn’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1856. For a long time, it served as the standard text and was the version included in the Everyman’s Library. Eventually Meiklejohn was displaced by the work of another Scottish philosopher, Norman Kemp Smith, whose translation is still regarded as authoritative.