How The Scots Invented The Modern World Part 2

Then he turned to the other members. "We want neither men nor sufficiency of all manner of things to make a nation happy," he cried, and then in a mighty wail, "Good G.o.d, what is this! An entire surrender." Overcome with emotion, Belhaven broke off his speech, pleading that he was unable to finish.

The house sat, stunned. Then another figure, leaner and much older, rose to speak. It was Lord Chancellor Polwarth, newly honored by the Queen with the earldom of Marchmont, the same man who had cast the final vote sentencing Thomas Aikenhead to death eleven years earlier. Now he had a slight smile on his lips. "Behold, he dreamed," Lord Marchmont sneered, with a glance at Belhaven, "but lo: when he awoke, behold it was a dream." The remark broke the spell. The house voted, and Article One pa.s.sed by thirty-two votes. "A good plurality," wrote the Earl of Mar, and added, "but fewer than we expected."

The next two articles also pa.s.sed, after bitter wrangling. Then debate began on Article Four, providing for "full freedom and intercourse of Trade and navigation." Andrew Fletcher had largely held his fire until now. He had moved to protest the use of royal troops to suppress the disturbances on October 23, saying that the rioters had been the true voice of the Scottish people. He had quarreled with his ostensible leader, the Duke of Hamilton, who had turned out to be a huge disappointment and a weak reed in organizing opposition-but then Fletcher was always quarreling with the Duke of Hamilton.

Now Fletcher came into his own. The treaty's economic provisions, the heart of the union, raised Fletcher, as one friend put it, to "a vast heat." The prospects for Scotland of access to English markets seemed to him dim. "For my part, I cannot see what advantage a free trade to the English plantations [in America] would bring us, except a further exhausting of our people, and the utter ruin of all our merchants. . . ." The union, he thundered, "would certainly destroy even those manufactures we now have."

Nor was it clear to him how foreign trade, which he contemptuously described as "the golden ball for which all nations of the world are contending," would benefit Scotland as a whole. "Our trade cannot increase on a sudden," Fletcher argued, and there would be no money left after the rich and well-born had taken their share to spend on extravagant houses and clothes in London. Scotland's own geographic advantages would play against her. "The wholesomeness of our air, and the healthfulness of our climate," he had written, "afford us great numbers of people, which in so poor a country can never be all maintained by manufactures, or public workhouses, or any other way" than the one Fletcher had proposed fourteen years earlier: slavery. "Besides," he added, "the natural pride of our commonalty, and their indisposition to labor, are insuperable difficulties, which the English have not to contend with in their people." In short, the English might find a way to make commerce pay as a source of national wealth; the Scots, Fletcher believed, never could. Hence, growth through union was an illusion.

With or without the help of bribes, the vast majority in the Parliament understood that the real illusion was Fletcher's: that formal independence could be maintained without economic strength. Treaty supporters understood that Scotland's material poverty and failing economy were powerful reasons to support support union. The future for Scotland, and the world, lay in the sea lanes of trade and empire. "This nation being poor," said William Seton of Pitmedden, a former treaty commissioner, "and without force to protect its commerce, cannot reap great advantage by it, till it partake of the trade and protection of some powerful neighbor nation, that can communicate both these." Article Four pa.s.sed overwhelmingly, 156 to 19. Fletcher himself was so disappointed and furious at the final vote that he stormed out of the house. union. The future for Scotland, and the world, lay in the sea lanes of trade and empire. "This nation being poor," said William Seton of Pitmedden, a former treaty commissioner, "and without force to protect its commerce, cannot reap great advantage by it, till it partake of the trade and protection of some powerful neighbor nation, that can communicate both these." Article Four pa.s.sed overwhelmingly, 156 to 19. Fletcher himself was so disappointed and furious at the final vote that he stormed out of the house.

The next two months were anticlimax, as Parliament made its way through the rest of the twenty-five articles, approving each after wearying and inconsequential debate with the symbolic touch of the Sceptre of State. By the first of the year of 1707, the Crown's ministers began to talk of being "in sight of land." Then, in January, they came to the last great barrier to final approval. This was Article 22, which abolished the Scottish Parliament and fixed representation in the new British Parliament at sixteen Lords and forty-five Commons, a ten-to-one advantage for the English members. To opponents, no provision of the treaty seemed to symbolize Scotland's reduced status in the new union as much as did Article 22. "The Scots deserve no pity," Fletcher had warned, "if they voluntarily surrender their united and separate interests to the Mercy of an united Parliament," where the Scots would have only forty-five elected members. The very principle of representative government for which both Scots and English had fought and died, first in the Civil War and then in 1688, seemed under attack.

It was going to be a fierce debate, and to lead it Queensberry had chosen his right-hand counsel, John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair. Stair was, as John Prebble has put it, "witty, wise, and ambitious." The son of Scotland's most distinguished jurist, both he and his father had been savagely persecuted by the Stuarts. Then the son, realizing there were advantages to going with the flow, switched sides. He became Lord Advocate, and finally Secretary of State for Scotland.

A man constrained by few principles or much sense of humanity, Stair, more than anyone else, was responsible for the hideous events in Glencoe on February 13, 1692, when the pro-Orange Campbells had slaughtered thirty-seven of their pro-Jacobite neighbors, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, including women and children ("'tis strange to me," he wrote callously when the news of the ma.s.sacre set off shock-waves in the Scottish Parliament, "that means so much regret for such a sept of thieves").4 The ensuing scandal had forced his resignation from the secretaryship, but his loyalty to William and Mary earned him the t.i.tle Earl of Stair in 1700. The ensuing scandal had forced his resignation from the secretaryship, but his loyalty to William and Mary earned him the t.i.tle Earl of Stair in 1700.

As a public figure, Stair was viewed by ordinary Scots with alarm, even fear. Rumors had it that he and his family were possessed by the devil. His sister Sarah was said to be able to levitate over walls at will. His mother was popularly believed to be a witch, and when her daughter Janet married against her will, her mother had (according to scandalmongers) cursed her: "Ye may marry him, but sair ye shall repent it!" On the wedding night, terrible screams were heard from the bridal chamber. When the door was opened the next morning, the daughter was found dead, bathed in blood, with the groom raving in the chimney corner, hopelessly insane.

The sensational story of "the Dalrymple curse" became the original for a novel by Sir Walter Scott and memorable to generations of operagoers as the Mad Scene in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia di Lammermoor. Although the story is false (in fact, Janet Dalrymple died of a natural illness two weeks after her marriage), the myth of a curse gave Stair a certain intimidating presence among his colleagues-all except, of course, Andrew Fletcher, who at one point in the debate offered to tie Stair to his horse's tail and drag him through the streets of Edinburgh (he was forced to apologize for the remark the next day). Although the story is false (in fact, Janet Dalrymple died of a natural illness two weeks after her marriage), the myth of a curse gave Stair a certain intimidating presence among his colleagues-all except, of course, Andrew Fletcher, who at one point in the debate offered to tie Stair to his horse's tail and drag him through the streets of Edinburgh (he was forced to apologize for the remark the next day).

It was Stair who helped Queensberry draw up his list of pliant Scottish commissioners for the original signing of the treaty. It was Stair who proposed the original strategy for getting the treaty past the Parliament, by offering up the mola.s.ses first, especially freedom of trade, before getting down to the sulfur, which meant Article 22. Now it was this extraordinary and amoral man, the very opposite of William Carstares in public reputation and integrity, who rose to carry the treaty over its final hurdle.

His argument was characterstically direct and unsentimental. All this talk of principle would get Scotland nowhere. The real issue was who paid the bills. The only way to draw any sensible comparison between the two kingdoms in representative terms, Stair explained, was not how many members each Parliament had before union, but how much each was willing to pay in taxes. The English would begin by paying into the new British Treasury thirty-five times the amount of revenue the Scots would pay. From that perspective, he concluded for his colleagues, the English were ent.i.tled to a thirty-five-to-one advantage in members. Take ten-to-one, he told them; at that rate, union comes cheap.

The debate was furious and emotional. Stair stood like a rock, however, answering every objection and insult and in the end, on January 7, Article 22 pa.s.sed by forty votes. Stair left Parliament House exhausted but exultant, and threaded his way past the usual hostile crowds to his Edinburgh lodging. He retired early and never woke up. When his servant opened the door to his room early the next morning, he found his master dead in bed, a victim of a stroke. He was fifty-eight years old.

The treaty of union had claimed its first martyr. Supporters and his family printed up a broadside in his memory, decorated with black borders and skulls, declaring that "The Union shall perpetuate his name, as long as there's an ear or mouth in fame!" Opponents pointed to the Dalrymple curse, and suggested a different epitaph: Stay, pa.s.senger, but shed no tear.

A Pontius Pilate lieth here.

On January 14 the final article of the treaty was pa.s.sed. The opposition had played every card they had, including threatening to walk out, all to no avail. On the sixteenth, the members entered Parliament House to approve the treaty as a whole. The final vote was 110 to 69. Queensberry touched it with the Sceptre of State, and the kingdom of Scotland ceased to exist. "Now there's an end of an old song," said Lord Seafield, with a singular lack of appropriate solemnity for an event that marked the end of a kingdom and an epoch. But he and the rest of the treaty supporters were thinking not of the past, of Belhaven and Fletcher's "dream" of a free and independent Scotland that had never existed. They were thinking of themselves, and the future.

There was, however, one final bit of comedy to be played out. When the members rea.s.sembled at Parliament House to sign the final treaty, the furious crowd outside immediately turned on them and the members were forced to flee. They tried to meet again at a nearby tavern, and then at a small summer house behind Moray House in the Canongate. Each time, someone spotted them and raised the hue and cry to other townspeople, and the terrified members had to run for their lives. Finally they pretended to give up and go home; then, one by one, they found their separate ways to a cellar in High Street directly opposite the Tron Church. There, with hushed tones and frequent glances out the window, they signed the doc.u.ments and slipped out the door. Everyone took Queensberry's cue and left for London that night. Rumors said the Edinburgh mob was planning to meet Queensberry's carriage as it left the city in the morning. No one was in the mood to take any chances.

As they made their way to London, the wrangling began about money. Some treaty supporters found themselves richly recompensed. The Marquis of Queensberry walked away with 12,000 pounds. Lord Marchmont received 1,100 pounds. Campbell of Cessnock received 50 pounds, which seems paltry until one realizes that one English pound was equal to twelve Scottish, so that he was actually pocketing the equivalent of 600 Scottish pounds. The Earl of Glasgow secured the Register's Office for life and an annual grant of 1,200 pounds sterling. Many Darien investors received compensation for what they had lost, under a special provision (Article 15) of the treaty. But others received little or nothing of what had been promised. Inevitably there was bad blood and jealousy afterwards, and no one, except perhaps Queensberry, could say he had been rewarded above and beyond what his vote had cost him in honor and integrity in the eyes of posterity.

Things looked a little brighter from London. On March 4 the treaty pa.s.sed both houses of Parliament at Westminster. If public opinion despised the treaty in Scotland, it found more supporters south of the Tweed, especially in London. Scotland was now secure from a Stuart takeover, it was a.s.sumed; the Protestant succession was safe, and Scotland's subordinate role to English political and mercantile interests was now a matter of law.

But in Scotland even treaty supporters had little cause for celebration. They had taken a huge plunge into the unknown, and a great gamble; no one knew what would actually happen. On May 1, 1707, the day the treaty came into force, the Earl of Mar received a letter from a friend in Edinburgh. "The tune of our musick bells this day was," he wrote, "'Why should I be sad on my wedding day?'"

Andrew Fletcher was, as usual, more caustic. "They may dance around to all Eternity," he said of the treaty's supporters, "in this Trap of their own making."

But Fletcher and the other doomsayers were wrong. Instead of becoming a trap, the Act of Union launched an economic boom. In the span of a single generation it would transform Scotland from a Third World country into a modern society, and open up a cultural and social revolution. Far from finding themselves slaves to the English, as opponents had prophesied, Scots experienced an unprecedented freedom and mobility. For the first time, the term growth growth began to apply to Scottish society, in every sense of the word. "What the Revolution had begun," declared the first number of the began to apply to Scottish society, in every sense of the word. "What the Revolution had begun," declared the first number of the Edinburgh Review, Edinburgh Review, referring to Scotland's first initial burst of creativity and energy after 1688, "the Union rendered compleat." referring to Scotland's first initial burst of creativity and energy after 1688, "the Union rendered compleat."

It is a judgment that, for almost two decades after the treaty signing, would have seemed ridiculous. Supporters of union had been gambling on the future. In a very short time, that future looked pretty bleak.

The first blow came in 1708, when London's Parliament abolished the Scottish Privy Council. This made even William Carstares, the man who had saved the treaty in the General a.s.sembly, blink. By taking away the Privy Council, Parliament had deprived Scots of the one remaining intermediary body between them and the government in London. From that moment, the notion of a separate Scottish political interest had ceased to exist.

Then in 1709 came the introduction of the English liturgy for use in Anglican church services in Edinburgh. The very use of the word liturgy conjured up visions of Catholic Ma.s.s, Popery, and the Scarlet Woman of Rome for devout Scots. The Edinburgh Town Council and the Court of Session both issued bans against the practice, but the House of Lords- in London-overturned them. Anglicanism was now here to stay, and in 1712 another blow fell when Parliament-again, operating from London-pa.s.sed an Act of Toleration for all Episcopalians in Scotland, ending the Kirk's claim to a monopoly over official religious life.

Even in London, some began to turn against the treaty, especially when opposition English Tories realized it was Scottish MPs' support that had kept successive Whig governments in power. In 1713 a bill was introduced in Parliament to dissolve the union. Ironically, it was Lord Seafield, who had declared the treaty "an end of an old song" as it was touched with the scepter, who now moved to undo the treaty in the House of Peers. In the end, supporters rallied and the dissolution bill was defeated by four votes-so slender was the thread that finally held the two kingdoms together!

Nor were the hopes that union would secure a Protestant succession borne out.

Queen Anne, the last Stuart, had no children or heirs. To keep a Protestant on the throne, Parliament had arranged for the crown to pa.s.s to her taciturn German cousin the Elector George of Hanover. After a long illness, Anne died on August 1, 1714. Her physician was John Arbuthnot, a Scot from Kincardineshire with a medical degree from St. Andrews. He now watched with disgust as courtiers, politicians, and civil servants scrambled to find themselves places in the government of the new king, George I. "I have an opportunity calmly and philosophically to consider that treasure of vileness and baseness that I always believed to be in the heart of man," he wrote to his friend Alexander Pope.

One of the big losers in the scramble was the Earl of Mar, who was forced to surrender his powerful and lucrative post as Secretary of State for Scotland. Like most aristocrats, English or Scottish, he was helpless without his pensions or royal favor. Desperate for money, he stayed at Court for an entire year waiting for a chance to ingratiate himself with George I, but without success. Finally, when they met at a royal function in August of 1715, the king ostentatiously turned his back on Mar and refused to speak to him. Mar left England in a fury. He called on his friends and dependents to join him on his traditional annual stag hunt in the glens and forests around Braemar, overlooking the river Dee. After the hunt, Mar and the others drank a hot punch of whisky, honey, and boiling water, which their servants had brewed up in a rock outcropping. As they drained their cups, Mar spoke.

He told them, "That tho' he had been instrumental in forwarding the Union of the Two Kingdoms in the reign of Queen Anne, yet now his eyes were opened and he could see his error . . ." He swore to his amazed friends that he now would work to undo that "cursed Union" and make the Scots "again a free People, and that they should enjoy their ancient liberties." A few days later he raised the banner of the exiled James Stuart as rightful ruler of Scotland and England. Union" and make the Scots "again a free People, and that they should enjoy their ancient liberties." A few days later he raised the banner of the exiled James Stuart as rightful ruler of Scotland and England.

At one fell swoop, John Erskine, sixth Earl of Mar, had united two political causes, opposition to the Union and support for the Catholic James Stuart, or James the Pretender. Mar was not in contact with James, who was living in France; news of the rising came as much a surprise to James as to everyone else. But the rash gesture worked. Although Mar was a Lowland lord and had no clan to command, Highlanders from the west and east rose up to meet him. Gordons, Frasers, Campbells of Breadalbane and Glenlyon, Mackenzies, Macleans, and MacDonalds of Clanra.n.a.ld offered their swords and lives to Mar and the Stuart cause.

By October the Earl of Mar had an army of ten thousand infantry and cavalry, far larger than the ragtag bunch Prince Charles would a.s.semble during the more famous Jacobite revolt in 1745. Virtually all of Scotland north of the Firth of Forth was in open support for James, along with large sections of the Presbyterian Lowlands and even northwest England. Gentlemen from Renfrewshire armed with pistols and breastplate rode side by side with Highland chiefs with broadsword and tartan. James became so confident the revolt would succeed that he landed with his entourage at Peterhead on December 22 and made plans for his coronation at Scone.

However, by then Mar had blown his chance. At Sheriffmuir on November 13 he met the much smaller loyalist forces commanded by the Duke of Argyll. By strange coincidence, each army managed to rout a large part of the other.

There's some that say that we wan, And some that they wan, And some say that nane wan at a' man; But one thing I'm sure, That at Sheri f-muir, A battle there was which I saw, man.

In fact, the old song was wrong. Argyll won the battle by keeping his head and holding his ground with his remaining soldiers. Mar did not. He pulled back to his base at Perth and waited for French reinforcements that never came. As Argyll's forces grew in strength, Mar and James were forced to evacuate Perth. On February 3, 1716, James Stuart went sadly back into exile in France with the humiliated Mar.

The Jacobite revolt of 1745, "the Forty-five," is more famous than the one in 1715. However, "the Fifteen" was far more serious, in that it delivered a severe shock to the political cla.s.s of both England and Scotland. Only the Earl of Mar's hesitations and incompetence had saved the situation. The Fifteen added a new and bitter division within Scotland, between Jacobites and "Whigs," or those who supported the House of Hanover. It also left an air of tension and uncertainty. No one knew just when James the Pretender might come back, and whether the whole political edifice of Great Britain might someday come crashing to the ground.

Even the new economic arrangements, the centerpiece of the pro-union public relations campaign, still looked bad a decade after the treaty. As Fletcher and others had predicted, it killed off domestic industries that had previously relied on tariffs and restrictions for their survival. One was the Scottish wool industry, which could not compete with its cheaper and more efficient English counterpart. Linen, once Scotland's most important manufacture, took a severe beating, as did brewing and papermaking.

Even more ominously, Scots were also paying more, a lot more, in taxes. The English were used to paying high customs and duties even on domestic products, and excise taxes on the basic necessities of life. The Scots were not. Taxes on linen, on paper, and on salt all warmed Scottish resentment against the union, and led many, even in the Presbyterian Lowlands, to look favorably on the rebels of the Fifteen. The last straw came in 1725, when Parliament imposed a heavy duty on malt, a crucial ingredient in brewing beer-and in making uisge beatha, uisge beatha, or whisky. Glasgow exploded in revolt, the most serious popular violence to occur in Scotland in the entire century. or whisky. Glasgow exploded in revolt, the most serious popular violence to occur in Scotland in the entire century.

Yet even then a fundamental truth was beginning to dawn on the more farsighted Scottish merchants and members of the landowning cla.s.s. The reason the English willingly paid more taxes was they got better government for their money. Since the midseventeenth century the English state had evolved into a powerful, purposeful bureaucracy, generating stability and efficiency across the political landscape. It kept public order and enforced the law; it provided usable roads for transport and communication between the capital, London, and the outlying counties; it supplied patronage jobs for local landowners and town patricians; it fed and equipped a standing army of nearly 100,000 men to protect British interests on the Continent and abroad; it maintained a navy that defended the lanes of sea traffic and trade from Newfoundland to Calcutta.

By the Act of Union, Scotland found itself yoked to this powerful engine for change, which expanded men's opportunities at the same time as it protected what they held dear: life, liberty, and property. It was a revelation. One result was that in the eighteenth century, enlightened Scots never worried about too much government. On the contrary, they had learned to see the benefits of strong state power and to see how too little of it, as before the Union, could hold back social and economic change.

And here, the fact that Scotland was very much the junior partner in this union also turned out to be an advantage. The new Parliament largely ignored Scotland; outbursts such as the malt riots and the threat of Jacobitism apart, the government in London paid little attention to what was happening north of the border. Scots ended up with the best of both worlds: peace and order from a strong administrative state, but freedom to develop and innovate without undue interference from those who controlled it. Over the next century, Scots would learn to rely on their own resources and ingenuity far more than their southern neighbors would. Scottish merchants and capitalists, like their American counterparts, recognized the advantages of a laissez-faire private sector far earlier than did the English or other Europeans.

A strong government that leaves well enough alone: this was the dual, seemingly contradictory, nature of the British state as it became part of life in post-union Scotland. Scots became used to these dualities, and learned to accept them as basic reality, just as the Union itself involved a fundamental duality: "a ship of state with a double-bottomed hull," as Jonathan Swift put it. They also learned to think in a new way as a result of the Union: in terms of the long term.

"In the long term," wrote the English economist John Maynard Keynes, "we are all dead." The Scottish Enlightenment learned a different lesson from the changes brought by union with England. Its greatest thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, understood that change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits. "Over time," "on balance," "on the whole"-these are favorite sentiments, if not expressions, of the eighteenth-century enlightened Scot. More than any other, they capture the complex nature of modern society. And the proof came with the Act of Union.

Here was a treaty, a legislative act inspired not by some great political vision or careful calculation of the needs of the future, or even by patriotism. Most if not all of those who signed it were thinking about urgent and immediate circ.u.mstances; they were in fact thinking largely about themselves, often in the most venal terms. Yet this act-which in the short term destroyed an independent kingdom, created huge political uncertainties both north and south, and sent Scotland's economy into a tailspin-turned out, in the long term, in the long term, to be the making of modern Scotland to be the making of modern Scotland Nor did Scots have to wait that long. Already by the 1720s, as the smoke and tumult of the Fifteen was clearing, there were signs of momentous changes in the economy. Grain exports more than doubled, as Scottish agriculture recovered from the horrors of the Lean Years and learned to become more commercial in its outlook. Lowland farmers would be faced now not with starvation, but with falling prices due to grain surpluses. Glasgow merchants entered the Atlantic trade with English colonies in America, which had always been closed to them before. By 1725 they were taking more than 15 percent of the tobacco trade. Inside of two decades, they would be running it.

A wide range of goods, not just tobacco but also mola.s.ses, sugar, cotton, and tea, flooded into Scotland. Finished goods, particularly linen textiles and cotton products, began to flood out, despite the excise tax. William Mackintosh of Borlum saw even in 1729 that Scotland's landed gentry were living better than they ever had, "more handsomely now in dress, table, and house furniture." Glasgow, the first hub of Scotland's transatlantic trade, would soon be joined by Ayr, Greenock, Paisley, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. By the 1730s the Scottish economy had turned the corner. By 1755 the value of Scottish exports had more than doubled. And it was due almost entirely to the effect of overseas trade, "the golden ball" as Andrew Fletcher had contemptuously called it, which the Union of 1707 had opened.

Fletcher himself had died in 1716. He played no part in the Fifteen. His att.i.tude toward Jacobite and Whig was "a plague on both their houses." Almost his last words were, "Lord have mercy on my poor Country that is so barbarously oppressed." Ironically enough, he died in the oppressor's capital, in London-on his way home from Europe, where he spent most of the years after the Union treaty. Someone had asked him when he left Scotland, "Will you forsake your country?" He answered, "It is only fit for the slaves who sold it." How strange that the laird of Saltoun, who had once been prepared to turn a large portion of his fellow countrymen into slaves, should use that word to describe the Scots who had repudiated his retrograde vision for the kingdom. How strange, too, that a man who claimed to despise trade and traders should choose to spend so much of his life in large, cosmopolitan cities- London, Paris, Amsterdam-that were built by mercantile wealth. It was precisely that wealth which he had hoped to deny Scotland, for the sake of an abstract and austere ideal of liberty. It was that wealth which Scotland's urban centers now enjoyed by being part of Britain, and which promised to create a new and very different Scotland.

Yet the Act of Union could not by itself force that change to come about. Instead, the next crucial stage of Scotland's emergence into the modern world did not come from outside influences, but from deep within two of its own inst.i.tutions: its universities and its law courts.

CHAPTER THREE.

The Proper Study of Mankind I The proper Study of Mankind is Man.

-Alexander Pope It was an eighteenth-century Englishman, Alexander Pope, who said it. But it was a pair of Scots, Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames, who proved it.

As the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment, they are a study in contrasts. One was a clergyman and teacher, considerate of his students, diffident and soft-spoken, who nonetheless inspired a generation of Scottish intellectuals-"the never to be forgotten Hutcheson," as his most famous pupil, Adam Smith, called him. Kames was a lawyer and a judge. Tough and outspoken, he was a formidable presence in the rough-and-tumble world of the Scottish legal system who rose to the Scottish equivalent of the Supreme Court. Kames had to write his influential books on the origins of law and society-there were more than twenty of them-in between court sessions. His view of the world was pragmatic, worldly, even cynical, compared with that of the high-minded Hutcheson. But together they revolutionized the Scottish intellect, and created a new understanding of human nature and society that has lasted down to today.

What makes the Scottish Enlightenment so important? When you mention the Enlightenment to most people, it conjures up images of glittering aristocratic salons lit by scores of candles, of scandalous wit and cultivated laughter, of bewigged philosophers and critics pressing their progressive ideas on various European autocrats. Voltaire visiting Frederick the Great at Sans Souci; Denis Diderot editing the Encyclopedie Encyclopedie and urging Catherine the Great of Russia to outlaw the use of torture and the knout; Jean-Jacques Rousseau scandalizing polite society in the years leading to the French Revolution. Indeed, the famous names of the French Enlightenment seem to dominate almost every discussion of culture in the eighteenth century. and urging Catherine the Great of Russia to outlaw the use of torture and the knout; Jean-Jacques Rousseau scandalizing polite society in the years leading to the French Revolution. Indeed, the famous names of the French Enlightenment seem to dominate almost every discussion of culture in the eighteenth century.

This is a mistake. The Scottish Enlightenment may have been less glamorous, but it was in many ways more robust and original. More important, it was at least as influential. In fact, if one were to draw up a list of the books that dominated the thinking of Europeans in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Scottish names stand out. Adam Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments A Theory of Moral Sentiments and and Wealth of Nations. Wealth of Nations. David Hume's David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature Treatise of Human Nature and and Essays Political, Literary, and Moral. Essays Political, Literary, and Moral. William Robertson's History of Scotland and History of the Reign of Charles V. Adam Ferguson's William Robertson's History of Scotland and History of the Reign of Charles V. Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society. Essay on the History of Civil Society. John Millar's John Millar's The Origin of The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks. the Distinction of Ranks. Thomas Reid's Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind. Inquiry into the Human Mind. And at the top of the page, Francis Hutcheson's And at the top of the page, Francis Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy System of Moral Philosophy and Lord Kames's and Lord Kames's Sketches of the History of Man. Sketches of the History of Man.

It is an impressive list. If one had to identify two themes that most of these works share, they would be "history" and "human nature." Indeed, it is the Scots who first linked them together. The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the "Scottish school," as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.

At the same time, they also insisted that these changes are not arbitrary or chaotic. They rest on certain fundamental principles and discernible patterns. The study of man is ultimately a scientific scientific study. The Scots are the true inventors of what we today call the social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, history, and, as mention of the name Adam Smith makes us realize, economics. But their interests went beyond that. study. The Scots are the true inventors of what we today call the social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, history, and, as mention of the name Adam Smith makes us realize, economics. But their interests went beyond that.

The Scottish Enlightenment embarked on nothing less than a ma.s.sive reordering of human knowledge. It sought to transform every branch of learning-literature and the arts; the social sciences; biology, chemistry, geology, and the other physical and natural sciences-into a series of organized disciplines that could be taught and pa.s.sed on to posterity. The great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment never lost sight of their educational mission. Most were teachers or university professors; others were clergymen, who used their pulpits and sermons for the same purpose. Some, like Hutcheson, Ferguson, and Thomas Reid, were both. In every case, the goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it. From the Scots' point of view, the advancement of human understanding was an essential part of the ascent of man in history.

This att.i.tude produced one great achievement that would live on long after the Scottish Enlightenment itself had all but departed from the scene. In fact, to this day most of us have it on our bookshelves or on our computer disks. We and our children use it almost daily. It is called the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the first volume of which appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. Its editors intended it to be a complete summary of scientific and human knowledge, incorporating the latest discoveries as part of a coherent and graspable whole. It worked. While the French Enlightenment's version, Diderot's the first volume of which appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. Its editors intended it to be a complete summary of scientific and human knowledge, incorporating the latest discoveries as part of a coherent and graspable whole. It worked. While the French Enlightenment's version, Diderot's Encyclopedie, Encyclopedie, is today merely a historical curiosity, the is today merely a historical curiosity, the Encyclopaedia Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica has continued to grow, develop, and change over two centuries-just as its first editors had intended. has continued to grow, develop, and change over two centuries-just as its first editors had intended.

The editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica also regarded their handiwork as a also regarded their handiwork as a British British encyclopedia-not an English encyclopedia, or even an Scottish one. They, like all the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, saw themselves as Britons, members of a new, modern community created by the Act of Union. Some even dropped the term "Scots" altogether, and began referring to themselves as "North Britons." It was not as strange a locution as it sounds. In their minds, the Act of Union of 1707 had closed a door on an earlier era, on Scotland's cramped, crabbed, and violent past. The key question for Scots now had to be, where do we go from here? encyclopedia-not an English encyclopedia, or even an Scottish one. They, like all the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, saw themselves as Britons, members of a new, modern community created by the Act of Union. Some even dropped the term "Scots" altogether, and began referring to themselves as "North Britons." It was not as strange a locution as it sounds. In their minds, the Act of Union of 1707 had closed a door on an earlier era, on Scotland's cramped, crabbed, and violent past. The key question for Scots now had to be, where do we go from here?

It was Hutcheson and Kames who first laid out the contours of this new cultural landscape. Their disciples and followers-Smith, Hume, Robertson, and the rest-would fill in and embellish the areas they initially staked out. A new mental world was taking shape in Scotland's cities and universities, very different from that of medieval Scotland or the austere fundamentalism of the Reformation Kirk. At its center lay not G.o.d any longer, but human beings. Human beings considered as individuals but also as the products, even the playthings, of historical and social change: in other words, human beings as we understand them today.

I.

Francis Hutcheson was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, but in the "other" Scotland, the Ulster settlements of northern Ireland. In 1606 two Scottish n.o.blemen, Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton, arranged an amnesty for the Irish rebel Con O'Neill in exchange for a third of his vast property holdings in counties Down and Antrim. They then encouraged tenants from other parts of Scotland to settle there and establish farms. James I realized this could be a useful way to pacify the Catholic Irish in the neighboring territory. In 1610 he set aside nearly half a million acres across six counties, promising land to any settler willing to take the Oath of Supremacy (meaning they recognized James as the head of the English Church, which automatically excluded any Catholics). The settlers came in two great waves: first Highlanders from the Western Isles, then Lowlanders and some English emigrants financed by merchants in London (hence the name of the town where many made their homes, Londonderry). However, it was the Scots who predominated, and who left their stamp on the six counties of Protestant Ulster. Today Americans call their descendants "Scotch-Irish," but we must consider them Scots in every significant respect. In truth, they are the first representatives of the great Scottish diaspora that changed the rest of the world.

The Ulster Scots were genuine legatees of John Knox, with their fundamentalist religious zeal, their aggressive egalitarianism, and "their love of education and their anxiety to have an educated ministry," in James McCosh's famous phrase. Two of those ministers were Francis Hutcheson's grandfather and father. John Hutcheson was pastor of Armagh when his son Francis was born in 1694. Francis received his first education at his grandfather's house. It seemed only natural and proper that he follow in their footsteps as a minister.

By then the Ulster Scots community had been through much. In the decades before Hutcheson's birth, they had endured ma.s.sacre by dispossessed Irish Catholics, including the wholesale murder of men, women, and children at Portadown in 1641, and paid them back in kind. Many had signed the National Covenant, and backed the Parliamentary forces against Charles I. They had submitted to Cromwell's rule, and defied James II and the French at the gates of Londonderry in 1687. Like life in America's frontier West, life in Ulster had hardened and toughened its inhabitants into a tight-knit community. They felt surrounded by hostile forces, not only the native Irish but the Anglican officials of a "foreign" government in London. Thrown back on their own resources, Ulster Scots clung fiercely to their independent status and Scottish ways, including their Presbyterian faith.

But that faith was already changing. What was called "the new light" was spreading within the ranks of the Scottish clergy from England and Holland, and found support in Ulster. Like English Lat.i.tudinarians, some ministers had begun to question the harsh dogmas of old-style Calvinism, such as the proposition that man was innately sinful and the belief that every human being is predestined from birth for either heaven or h.e.l.l. What had happened to the notion of human beings being made in the image of G.o.d, they wanted to know, and of changing one's life by accepting Jesus as Savior? We don't know whether young Francis was exposed to any of this "new light" when he attended James McAlpin's academy in County Down. But we do know John Hutcheson opposed any dilution of the old-time religion, and that later he and his son differed sharply over what direction the Presbyterian faith in Ireland should take. If Francis Hutcheson had begun to rethink his faith that early, he would get more food for thought when he arrived to study in Glasgow in 1711.

Glasgow lay across the water from the Ulster counties, and dominated western Scotland. The former medieval market town, set in the Clyde Valley, was a very different city from Edinburgh. Residents and visitors all agreed it was much more attractive. While Edinburgh was cramped, dirty, and soot-stained from thousands of foul-smelling coal fires (giving it its half-affectionate nickname of "Auld Reekie"), Glasgow was s.p.a.ciously laid out in a graceful cruciform, defined by its four princ.i.p.al streets meeting in a central intersection. Daniel Defoe called it one of the most beautiful and cleanest cities in Great Britain. An international port city for more than a hundred years before the Act of Union, Glasgow had dispatched its ships regularly to European markets and to the Scottish settlements in the New World, in Nova Scotia (which James I sponsored), and in New Jersey. Before the Act of Union, and even before Darien, Perth Amboy was a regular stop for Glasgow merchants picking up goods and dropping off settlers in America.

In 1684 broadsides circulated in Glasgow calling for volunteers to "Province of New-east-Jersey in America," where, they said, the woods were filled with deer and elk, the sea with fish, the banks with oysters and clams. Winter ran only two months out of the year, the broadside a.s.sured readers, and natives were very few and "a help and encouragement, [rather] than anyways hurtful or troublesome." Eventually the English took over Perth Amboy and merged it into their own colonial administration, closing it to all but English merchants. Even this did not deter Glasgow merchants, who continued to do brisk business along the New Jersey coast-as smugglers.

The freewheeling, entrepreneurial character of Glasgow communicated itself to its university. The university's students numbered four hundred in 1700 (compared to around six hundred at Edinburgh), and included not only Ulstermen like Hutcheson, but a regular contingent of Englishmen from the south. The university was also much older than Edinburgh's-and suffered less interference from the local merchants or the Kirk. Whereas Edinburgh's Kirk-dominated town council appointed the majority of faculty professorships (they still controlled eighteen out of twenty-six in 1800), and voiced its approval or disapproval on the rest, at Glasgow pay and hiring remained in the hands of the university regents. This became important in the years after 1688. The winds of change were beginning to blow through the university when Hutcheson arrived.

When William III came to the throne, the b.l.o.o.d.y persecutions and tensions of the Killing Time came to an end. Raised a Calvinist himself, William gave the Kirk the independence it had fought for, throwing out the bishops and recognizing the authority of the General a.s.sembly. But William also insisted that the old fire-breathing, antimonarchical Covenant theology was out. Blotting out the Covenant's legacy among a clergy scattered across the country was difficult. An easier place to start was in the ministry's own training grounds, the universities. As his instrument to do this, the king chose his former chaplain and the man who would save the Act of Union, William Carstares.

Carstares did not become Princ.i.p.al of Edinburgh University until 1703. But his brother-in-law William Donlop had occupied that post at Glasgow since 1690. Donlop succeeded in appointing a series of regent professors who would undermine the power of the militants, while Carstares later did the same at Edinburgh. Together they recast the curriculum of Scotland's universities. Professorships sprang up in new fields such as history, botany, medicine, and law. The educational monopoly that the old-style Calvinist curriculum had once enjoyed was broken.

This also had important consequences. As the new century proceeded, young Scotsmen with brains and ambition learned to shy away from theology, as too controversial a field and too politically charged. Instead they turned their energies to other subjects: mathematics, medicine, law (Carstares set up the first chair in civil law at Edinburgh in 1710, and Glasgow followed suit in 1712), and the natural sciences- or natural philosophy, as it was called. The Carstares reforms laid the groundwork for the scientific side of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the appearance of such towering figures as Joseph Black in chemistry and William Cullen in medicine.

It also meant that for Scottish intellectuals, the study of science, medicine, mathematics, and even engineering was at least as important as literature, philosophy, history, and the arts. The enlightened man was expected to understand both. The notion of an intellectual conflict between science and the humanities, what the English writer C. P. Snow later termed the "two cultures," would have made no sense to an enlightened Scot.

Of course, all this lay in the future. Francis Hutcheson was starting at Glasgow on the traditional path, toward a master's degree in theology. But even here, new influences were making themselves felt. One of his first professors was John Simson, a new appointment as Professor of Sacred Theology and a Carstares-Donlop favorite. He was in fact Donlop's brother-in-law. It was a good thing, too, because he needed all his princ.i.p.al's help in his running battles with the Glasgow Kirk. Although he was detested by hard-line conservatives, Hutcheson and many others of the "Irish" contingent at Glasgow felt irresistibly drawn to him.

Simson directly challenged the harshest of the old Calvinist dogmas and offered to students a more reasonable view of man and divinity. The world around us is not the realm of the Devil; it reflects the purposes of its Creator, in its orderliness and bountiful gifts, its regularity and symmetry, and its startling beauty. Through it we can get a grasp of divinity that supplements, but does not replace, the one from the Bible. Like the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, Simson explained, nature reveals a beneficent G.o.d who watches over the fate of His creatures and provides for their needs and desires.

This was a far cry from the terrifying fire-and-brimstone vision of the world taught by John Knox's catechisms or the sermons from the average Kirk pulpit. Hutcheson welcomed its image of a more serene and compa.s.sionate Creator and an orderly, benign creation: it became the foundation stone of his own theology. But he was also troubled by the radical direction Simson's teachings sometimes seemed to take. Simson proposed that belief in Jesus as Savior was not necessary for salvation, and that even moral and upright pagans might be saved. He cast doubt on the Trinity and on Jesus Christ as the Son of G.o.d-Christian tenets that advanced English thinkers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton had also abandoned. At one point in a lecture, Simson was even supposed to have told his students that when they read the pa.s.sage from the Bible proclaiming Jesus "the highest G.o.d," they should read it "with a grain of salt."

No wonder Simson ran into such trouble with the Kirk authorities, who branded his teachings blasphemy. Simson's G.o.d of natural religion easily morphed into "nature's G.o.d" of the freethinking radical deist, who was only one remove (to an orthodox mind) from the outright atheist. Yet it was startling and amazing. Notions that had cost Thomas Aikenhead his life just fifteen years earlier were now being bandied about in theology cla.s.srooms-a measure of how much the intellectual atmosphere in Scotland had loosened up, even while Francis Hutcheson was still a student.

Hutcheson, the minister's child, could not accept his teacher's more radical teachings. Yet what troubled him about this racy, English-style natural religion was not just its detached view of G.o.d. He saw it overlapping with another troubling tendency, also stemming out of England, a kind of moral relativism. If G.o.d never did sacrifice His only son for our salvation, if He really is as distant and unconcerned about what happens to us here on earth as English deists claimed, then what happens to the moral law laid out for us in Scripture? It is, in that case, entirely contingent on personal belief. Otherwise, human beings are thrown back on their own resources, to find a way to survive in the jungle among their own brutal kind.

The figure of Thomas Hobbes loomed large and sinister in the minds of many thinkers at the beginning of the Age of Reason, and not just the young Hutcheson's. Hobbes's Leviathan Leviathan was the description of just how such a jungle struggle for power results in the creation of the State. Human beings, realizing there is no natural moral order or constraint on their own appet.i.tes, entrust sovereign power to a single master, in order to prevent an inevitable "war of all against all," as Hobbes put it. In many ways, Hutcheson's lifework was one continuous refutation of Thomas Hobbes and all he stood for. The notion of human beings as naturally selfish and vicious, requiring the constant whip hand of the absolute State; the idea of morality as a man-made, rather than divinely inspired, set of ethical conventions-morality as a "social construct," as our modern-day Hobbesian, the postmodernist, would say-were all deeply repellent to Hutcheson. was the description of just how such a jungle struggle for power results in the creation of the State. Human beings, realizing there is no natural moral order or constraint on their own appet.i.tes, entrust sovereign power to a single master, in order to prevent an inevitable "war of all against all," as Hobbes put it. In many ways, Hutcheson's lifework was one continuous refutation of Thomas Hobbes and all he stood for. The notion of human beings as naturally selfish and vicious, requiring the constant whip hand of the absolute State; the idea of morality as a man-made, rather than divinely inspired, set of ethical conventions-morality as a "social construct," as our modern-day Hobbesian, the postmodernist, would say-were all deeply repellent to Hutcheson.

Yet he also saw an irony: that moral relativists such as Hobbes ended up sounding like the fire-eating absolutists of traditional Calvinism. They both a.s.serted that human beings were innately depraved creatures, incapable of a generous or self-sacrificing action without coercive iron constraints-of the Kirk's G.o.dly discipline, said the one; of the absolute State, said the other. The same conclusion, by different means.

Hutcheson believed there had to be a middle way between these two extremes, one that preserved the notion of an unquestionable moral law governing men's actions, but without the austere tyranny of a jealous G.o.d. He found some of what he was looking for in the cla.s.ses of another professor, Gershom Carmichael.

If Hutcheson is the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment, then Carmichael can claim to be its grandfather. He was one of the first teachers in Scotland to discuss Isaac Newton in his lectures. As Professor of Moral Philosophy, Carmichael intoduced his students to the great natural-law thinkers of the previous century, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius and the German Samuel Pufendorf. Hutcheson came to listen as Carmichael lectured-or, more precisely, read aloud his written notes in Latin, the common form of university teaching in those days.

The subject was the human being as he actually is, stripped of all the trappings and programming from a mult.i.tude of cultures and contexts, including religion. What was left? What philosophers called "man in the state of nature." He was at once an abstraction (after all, no one had ever really met such a creature, even in the remote, primeval forests of Africa or America) and a starting point for inquiry and understanding. He was for the student of philosophy like the model skeleton who hangs on his peg in anatomy cla.s.s. He is on the one hand an artificial creation; no actual skeleton hangs together like that, and he corresponds to no person we know, either living or dead. His obvious unreality makes him, despite his macabre appearance, slightly ridiculous. Students give him absurd names and wheel him out for practical jokes and pranks.

But when cla.s.s begins, we realize he reveals something important, something concealed beneath the skin, muscle, and tissue. He reveals the hidden structure, the essential anatomical parts and relationships without which none of the rest could exist. He exposes to us our own essential reality, stripped of outward appearance-he shows the bones, the marrow, the core of things.

That is what Carmichael, like his predecessors Grotius and Pufendorf, was trying to do. Pufendorf in particular struck a responsive chord in the young Hutcheson. Man in nature carries with him the spark of divine reason, Pufendorf argued, allowing him to grasp nature's governing laws. This includes the moral laws. As human beings living in society, we have certain rights rights that we bring to the table with us from our natural state, such as the right to our own life and our property. But there are also certain that we bring to the table with us from our natural state, such as the right to our own life and our property. But there are also certain obligations obligations we have to observe. One of the most obvious of these is obeying the laws established through common consent. But the other is the moral law governing our private conduct toward others. Without a moral law, no community is possible. Without community, there is no protection for ourselves and the things we need to survive, i.e., our property. When we realize, Pufendorf wrote, that our own self-interest dictates that we treat others as ourselves, we are ready to live among our fellow men. we have to observe. One of the most obvious of these is obeying the laws established through common consent. But the other is the moral law governing our private conduct toward others. Without a moral law, no community is possible. Without community, there is no protection for ourselves and the things we need to survive, i.e., our property. When we realize, Pufendorf wrote, that our own self-interest dictates that we treat others as ourselves, we are ready to live among our fellow men.

Later on, Hutcheson would be more critical of this approach. "All must be Interest and some selfish View," he wrote of Pufendorf's theory. But for now it opened up a tantalizing possibility. The Presbyterian worldview and the Hobbesian one were both wrong. Man is indeed a moral creature, not by accident but by design. He carries within him the means to learn how to be virtuous and helpful to others. One big question remained: How does he learn to take that crucial step? Does he learn it the hard way, that if he is going to get along he has to go along, as Pufendorf suggested? Or is there a simpler, more uplifting way, by which we learn that virtue can be its own reward?

Even after Carmichael's cla.s.ses, this remained unclear. So as Hutcheson graduated and returned to Ulster to take up his ministerial duties, he realized his education was still not complete. In fact, it was not until 1718 that it recommenced, when he set off south for Dublin.

Dublin was a city very much like Glasgow: mercantile, freewheeling, and culturally open-ended. It was the capital of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Ambitious Anglican Irishmen flocked there, hoping to find jobs working for the government or teaching at Trinity College or perhaps an undemanding sinecure with the Church of Ireland, whose intellectually alert and politically astute archbishop, William King, resided in Dublin.

Ulster Scots went, too, although the doors of Trinity College and St. Patrick's were closed to them. Compet.i.tion between the two religious groups was fierce but friendly. Unlike in Scotland, or even in Ulster, Anglicans and Presbyterians had learned to mix in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. Part of this was the need to close ranks against the Catholic Irish majority, whom the Penal Laws banned from civic life and certain professions (although somewhat later they would produce a thriving middle cla.s.s in Dublin). But much of it came from a common fascination with the new cultural and intellectual trends swirling over from England: the ideas of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton, and the suave aristocrat of English philosophers, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury.

Hutcheson had been asked down to help set up a Presbyterian college-style academy in Dublin. He soon fell in with this eager and exuberant crowd of intellectuals, churchmen, and scholars. At their center was Viscount Molesworth, aristocratic politician and political theorist, and a friend of Shaftesbury's. Molesworth took up the soft-spoken clergyman from Armagh, and at Molesworth's dinner table, Hutcheson met or at least learned about the leading intellectual lights in London and Dublin. One of these was Jonathan Swift, who addressed the sixth of his Drapier's Letters Drapier's Letters to Molesworth. Another he heard about but who had died five years earlier was Molesworth's friend and patron Shaftesbury, who was a student of John Locke and the most original moral thinker of his generation. Yet another was George Berkeley, later to become a bishop, whose radical philosophical views (Berkeley believed that sense perceptions were all we could know about the world, and that we couldn't be certain there were other objects out there at all) provoked and dismayed his contemporaries. But the real bone of contention between Berkeley and the Molesworth circle, which now included Hutcheson, was political. to Molesworth. Another he heard about but who had died five years earlier was Molesworth's friend and patron Shaftesbury, who was a student of John Locke and the most original moral thinker of his generation. Yet another was George Berkeley, later to become a bishop, whose radical philosophical views (Berkeley believed that sense perceptions were all we could know about the world, and that we couldn't be certain there were other objects out there at all) provoked and dismayed his contemporaries. But the real bone of contention between Berkeley and the Molesworth circle, which now included Hutcheson, was political.

Berkeley had auth.o.r.ed a pamphlet called Pa.s.sive Obedience, Pa.s.sive Obedience, which argued that rebellion, even against a tyrant, was contrary to G.o.d's will. It was a direct slap in the face to the 1688 revolution that had toppled James II. In fact, many people suspected Berkeley of pro-Stuart sympathies, which probably cost him the post of dean of St. Paul's in Dublin. Molesworth, like Shaftesbury and Locke, believed firmly in the principles of 1688, and in the idea of political liberty. They were Whigs (Shaftesbury's father had even been founder of the Whig Party), not just because they were strong Protestants but because they believed, contrary to Berkeley, that men were born with a desire to be free, in their own lives and in their political arrangements. which argued that rebellion, even against a tyrant, was contrary to G.o.d's will. It was a direct slap in the face to the 1688 revolution that had toppled James II. In fact, many people suspected Berkeley of pro-Stuart sympathies, which probably cost him the post of dean of St. Paul's in Dublin. Molesworth, like Shaftesbury and Locke, believed firmly in the principles of 1688, and in the idea of political liberty. They were Whigs (Shaftesbury's father had even been founder of the Whig Party), not just because they were strong Protestants but because they believed, contrary to Berkeley, that men were born with a desire to be free, in their own lives and in their political arrangements.

That notion became a ruling pa.s.sion for Hutcheson. Later friends and students all described his deep commitment to the ideal of political liberty and his "just abhorrence of all slavish principles." In one of his last works, The System of Moral Philosophy, The System of Moral Philosophy, Hutcheson, as an admiring reviewer wrote, "boldly a.s.serts the rights of resisting in the people, when their fundamental privileges are invaded." In fact, it is through Hutcheson that the old doctrines of right of resistance and popular sovereignty, espoused by Knox and Buchanan, merge into the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment, although in a more sophisticated and refined form. Hutcheson, as an admiring reviewer wrote, "boldly a.s.serts the rights of resisting in the people, when their fundamental privileges are invaded." In fact, it is through Hutcheson that the old doctrines of right of resistance and popular sovereignty, espoused by Knox and Buchanan, merge into the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment, although in a more sophisticated and refined form.

Refined and and refinement: refinement: these were important words for the Scottish Enlightenment. They went together with another term that Hutcheson picked up in Dublin, when he turned to the writings of Molesworth's patron, Lord Shaftesbury. That word was these were important words for the Scottish Enlightenment. They went together with another term that Hutcheson picked up in Dublin, when he turned to the writings of Molesworth's patron, Lord Shaftesbury. That word was politeness. politeness. Shaftesbury took a term a.s.sociated with the world of jewelers and stonemasons (as in "polished" stones and marble) and elevated it to the highest of human virtues. Being polished or polite was more than just good manners, as we might say. Politeness for Shaftesbury encapsulated all the strengths of a sophisticated culture: its keen sense of understanding, its flourishing art and literature, its self-confidence, its regard for truth and the importance of intellectual crit