“The Scottish Alternative” — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part I: Foundations

SELF-EVIDENT The Road to 1776 Article 12 of 22

“Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”— Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767¹

Glasgow

In the autumn of 1730, a professor began to lecture at the University of Glasgow in a language his students could understand without translation.

This was not, on its face, a revolution. The man was thirty-six years old, Irish by birth, the son of a Presbyterian minister in County Down, and he had spent the previous decade running a dissenting academy in Dublin because his connections had made a Scottish pulpit difficult to obtain. He had been elected to the Chair of Moral Philosophy the year before and delivered his inaugural lecture, on the natural sociability of human beings, in November 1730. That lecture was in Latin, as convention required.²

The teaching was not. Francis Hutcheson lectured in English, and the University of Glasgow records the practice as something he introduced. Students came from Ireland and from dissenting families in England to hear him. The change sounds administrative. It was not. A lecture in Latin is addressed to a guild — to men who have been trained to receive it, in a tongue that marks them off from the people among whom they live. A lecture in English is addressed to whoever is in the room.³

Consider what had been happening in the room next door for the previous century and a half. The argument for English liberty had been an argument among lawyers, conducted in a specialist idiom, resting on a specialist authority. Sir Edward Coke told the king that the common law would control him, and the proof was precedent — what ancestors in like case had usually done. The Levellers wrote a constitution and could not get it adopted. Algernon Sidney went to the scaffold over a manuscript. The men who made the Convention Parliament in 1689 argued about whether James had abdicated or deserted, and settled on a word. Every one of those arguments took the form: here is what our law has always been, and here is why you are bound by it.

Hutcheson was about to ask a different question, and to ask it out loud, in English, to a room of young men who had not been trained to receive it. Not what an English lawyer could prove about the ancient constitution. What could be said about human beings.

The answer he gave — and the answers his students and his rivals and his skeptical countryman David Hume gave over the next forty years — would change the terms of the argument for liberty more thoroughly than any statute had. And the strangest of those answers, the one that took longest to see and has proved hardest to absorb, was this: that the most important things human beings possess were not designed by anyone at all.

The Kingdom That Should Not Have Produced This

Scotland in 1730 was poor. It had been poorer still a generation earlier, and the reasons were recent and specific.

Readers of this series have seen Scotland appear before. The Convention of Estates that met in Edinburgh in 1689 produced a Claim of Right more radical than anything the English Convention would write — it declared that James had forfaulted the crown, which is to say that he had breached a contract and, by doing so, lost his title. This was in contrast to the English formula of an abdication that nobody could quite pinpoint. Then came Killiecrankie and Dunkeld, and in February 1692 the killing of members of the MacDonalds of Glencoe by soldiers who had accepted their hospitality. The men Hutcheson taught in 1730 had fathers who remembered all of it.

Then came Darien. Between 1698 and 1700 the Company of Scotland attempted to plant a trading colony on the isthmus of Panama. The colony failed, comprehensively, of disease and hunger and Spanish hostility and English non-cooperation. Estimates of the loss vary and the most dramatic of them should be handled carefully, but the figure most often cited is in the region of four hundred thousand pounds, and the investment had been broad — small groups of ordinary people had banded together to meet the minimum subscription. A poor country had put a substantial part of its available capital into the sea and lost it.⁴

The Union of 1707 followed. It is important to describe it accurately, because the popular account is a national grievance and the documentary record is a divided kingdom.

On January 16, 1707, the Scottish Parliament ratified the Treaty of Union and voted itself out of existence. The official list of the vote, preserved in the parliamentary records, names 110 approvers and 67 opposed; some accounts give the figure as 69.⁵ Article 15 of the treaty provided the Equivalent — £398,085 10s sterling, ostensibly compensation for Scotland assuming a share of the English national debt, and in practice also the means of paying off the creditors and shareholders of the Company of Scotland, who were to receive the majority of it.⁶ Outside the chamber, there were riots in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Inside it, a majority of the members of a parliament elected on a restricted franchise voted yes.

Whether they were bought is a genuine dispute among historians, and it should be stated as one. Roughly twenty thousand pounds was sent north for distribution by the Earl of Glasgow, and the largest share, over twelve thousand pounds, went to the Duke of Queensberry, the Queen’s Commissioner. Those payments are documented. Whether they changed any votes is not established. The bribery thesis descends largely from the memoirs of George Lockhart of Carnwath, a committed Jacobite opponent of the Union, and Christopher Whatley among others has argued that the Equivalent was a Scottish negotiating demand rather than an English inducement — the Scots had proposed it years earlier, and English refusal to grant it had helped collapse the union talks of 1702.⁷ Robert Burns supplied the line that most people know, about being bought and sold for English gold, in 1791, eighty-four years after the fact.

The honest summary is the one the previous article arrived at and this one will keep: a divided kingdom, whose own parliament approved a union amid heavy pressure, hard bargaining, and widespread popular opposition. Not a nation with a single will that was overridden. A country that disagreed with itself, under duress, and whose representative body said yes.

The economic payoff was not immediate. Access to English colonial markets eventually transformed the Clyde, but “eventually” is the operative word, and for the first two decades after 1707 the Scottish economy showed little of the promised improvement. The generation that made the Scottish Enlightenment grew up in a country that had gambled its future on a bargain that had not yet paid.

The Kirk

The Church of Scotland was the second condition.

Torphichen Kirk

The Kirk had a stake in universal literacy that no merely political institution would have had, because Presbyterian theology required that ordinary people read Scripture for themselves. Legislation in 1696 aimed at a schoolmaster in every parish, and by the late seventeenth century the Lowlands had a largely complete parish school network, though the Highlands did not.

The claim that Scotland was dramatically more literate than its neighbors is a nineteenth-century construction, and it is the point at which accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment habitually inflate — historians call it the democratic myth, the belief that any young lad could rise through parish school and university to high office. R. A. Houston subjected the literacy claim to close examination and found the hard evidence for Scottish exceptionalism thin, and argued that the claim owed a great deal to Scottish national self-perception. Parish schooling was basic, short, and not compulsory. Female literacy lagged. Highland provision was poor.⁸ What can be said with confidence is narrower and still significant: Scotland had a functioning network of parish schools in the Lowlands, and an educated clerical class produced by a system that trained ministers in philosophy before theology.

The Kirk also supplied something disconcerting to modern readers. On January 8, 1697, a twenty-year-old Edinburgh student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged at the Gallowlee, on the road between Edinburgh and Leith, for blasphemy. He had mocked Scripture in conversation. It was a first offence, for which the statute provided lesser penalties, and the prosecution pressed for death anyway to make an example. He was the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain.⁹ David Hume was born in Edinburgh fourteen years later.

That is the Kirk of the Scottish Enlightenment: an institution that put a schoolmaster in the parish and a rope around a student's neck, both within the same generation. It is not a background detail. It is the pressure under which Scottish moral philosophy was conducted, and it is why the theological caution in what follows is warranted.

The Universities

The third condition was structural. Scotland had five universities — St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and two separate institutions at Aberdeen, King's College and Marischal College. England had two.

Scotland's population was perhaps a fifth of England's. The ratio of institutions to people was therefore not close. And access appears to have been broader: Scottish universities were probably more open than their counterparts in England, Germany, or France, and they were shifting during exactly this period from the old regenting system, in which one master carried a class through the whole curriculum, toward specialized professorial chairs.¹⁰

Oxford and Cambridge in this period were, by common assessment, intellectually torpid and confessionally closed — a student had to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Glasgow and Edinburgh were neither. Add the compression of Edinburgh's Old Town, where a lawyer, a printer, a professor, and a merchant might live within a few hundred yards and drink in the same tavern, add the club culture that grew out of that compression, and the result is a set of conditions that a wealthier and better-ordered country did not possess.

None of this makes Scotland the inventor of the modern world, and the claim should be resisted wherever it appears. What the conditions explain is why a poor kingdom on the northern edge of Europe was able to sustain an unusual density of first-rate argument for roughly two generations. The arguments themselves still have to be examined on their merits.

Francis Hutcheson and the Moral Sense

Hutcheson's central question was one that our previous set of articles in the third arc of our series never quite asked, and it is worth stating in its eighteenth-century form before translating it.

Thomas Hobbes had argued that human beings are fundamentally self-interested, and that what looks like benevolence is still self-serving. Against this stood the rationalists, who held that moral truths are apprehended the way mathematical truths are — by reason, working on ideas. Hutcheson rejected both.

Francis Hutcheson Portrait by Allan Ramsay, c. 1745

His claim, following Shaftesbury, was that human beings possess a moral sense: a faculty of perception, analogous to sight or hearing, by which we perceive virtue and vice directly and are pleased or displeased by what we perceive. The technical weight is on the word sense. Hutcheson is not saying that we have moral opinions or that we reason our way to moral conclusions. He is saying that moral approval is something closer to what happens when you see a color. It arrives before the argument does.

The argument for this is empirical, and it is the part worth following. Consider, Hutcheson says, what happens when you read of a generous action performed by a stranger in a distant country, from which you can gain nothing whatever. You approve. The approval is immediate and it is disinterested — there is nothing in it for you. If Hobbes were right, this should not happen. If the rationalists were right, the approval should follow a chain of reasoning, and it does not. It precedes reasoning. Hutcheson had responded to Hobbes and to Pufendorf along these lines from early in his career, and he did so on the ground of what people actually observably do.¹¹

Two consequences follow, and both matter to this series.

The first is that morality becomes a subject for observation rather than deduction. If the moral sense is a real feature of human constitution, one investigates it the way one investigates any other feature — by looking at how human beings actually behave, across cultures and circumstances. This is the beginning of the move that defines the whole Scottish school: from arguing about what ought to follow from first principles to examining what human beings are actually like.

The second is that morality does not depend on prior instruction. And this is precisely what got Hutcheson into trouble.

The Charge

In 1738 the Presbytery of Glasgow proceeded against him for teaching two doctrines described as false and dangerous: first, that the standard of moral goodness is the promotion of the happiness of others; and second, that a person may have knowledge of good and evil without, and prior to, knowledge of God.¹²

Hutcheson had subscribed to the Westminster Confession twice — once as a licentiate of the General Synod of Ulster, and once on taking his Glasgow chair. He retained his post with the support of influential friends and of a group of his own students who published a Vindication defending him against an anonymous pamphlet that had catalogued the breaks between his lectures and orthodox doctrine. He later referred to the affair dismissively. But the charge itself tells us a detail about the pressure, and it warns against a mistake that is very easy to make about him.

The mistake is to read Hutcheson as a secular ethicist who found a naturalistic analog for divine command. He was nothing of the kind. His moral sense is God-implanted — the whole structure is conducted, as the Liberty Fund editors of his System of Moral Philosophy put it, within a general metaphysical assumption that human life is providentially arranged. The moral sense is evidence of a benevolent Creator who furnished His creatures with the equipment to perceive good. Hutcheson was a licensed preacher, the son of a minister, and a man whose popularity as a preacher survived his heresy charge intact.

What made the Presbytery uneasy was not atheism. It was the ordering of the structure. If a person can perceive good and evil prior to knowing God, then the moral life of a virtuous heathen is intelligible, and the necessity of revelation for basic moral competence is weakened. That is in a very real sense a diminishment of the rationale for what we today term interventionism. That is a serious theological claim, and the Presbytery was not wrong to notice it. It is simply not the same as a claim that Hutcheson was trafficking in any form of disbelief.

Numbers and Dignity

Hutcheson also produced a formulation that has been misattributed for two centuries. In the Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, published in 1725, he wrote that "that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery."¹³

That sentence predates Jeremy Bentham's birth by twenty-three years. But the resemblance is more superficial than it looks, and the qualifier that makes the difference sits in the same passage. Hutcheson has just written that in equal degrees of expected happiness, virtue is proportional to the number of persons the happiness reaches — and then, in a parenthesis, that "here the Dignity, or moral Importance of Persons, may compensate Numbers."

The dignity of persons may outweigh the count. That parenthesis is the whole distance between Hutcheson and the utilitarianism his phrase is usually enlisted for. A calculus in which numbers can be overridden by the moral standing of the individuals concerned is not a calculus that permits a majority to dispose of a minority. Hutcheson should not be made a precursor Benthamite, and we do not read the phrase without the parenthetical.

The Political Inheritance

Hutcheson's political thought connects Arc III to the American arc directly, and this is where he becomes consequential for the road to 1776.

He held that every human being is born free. He argued, following his own teacher Gershom Carmichael — who had argued against Pufendorf that no one may enslave another, because human beings are not among the objects over which God permitted the human race dominion — that no just war confers a right to enslave a defeated population, that a slave is not property, and that the children of slaves are born free. He grounded political authority in consent, and he defended the right of resistance in terms this series has heard before: a state is a society of free men united under one government for their common interest, and when rulers break the trust, the people's right of resistance is unquestionable.¹⁴

He then applied this to colonies. Colonial subjects have the same right to beneficial government as anyone else. If they are oppressed instead, they may justly overthrow their oppressor.

That argument was reprinted in colonial America and circulated widely. Hutcheson's student Francis Alison, from County Donegal, carried his teaching to Pennsylvania and founded a school at New London whose pupils included men who would later sign the Declaration of Independence.¹⁵ The line from a Glasgow lecture room to Philadelphia is not a metaphor in this case. It is a direct chain of known and named teachers and known and named students.

And the most famous of those students was a boy from Kirkcaldy who arrived at Glasgow in 1737, sat in Hutcheson's classroom, and later referred to him as never to be forgotten. Adam Smith would eventually hold Hutcheson's chair. What he did with the inheritance is the next article's business.

David Hume and the Limits of Reason

In 1734 a young man of twenty-three left Scotland for France, settled eventually at La Flèche in Anjou, and set about writing a book that would attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects. He had planned it earlier still. Books 1 and 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature were published anonymously in 1739; Book 3, "Of Morals," in 1740.¹⁶

By his own later account, in the short autobiography he wrote in the last year of his life, no literary attempt was ever more unfortunate. The Treatise, he said, fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.¹⁷

The phrase is Hume's own and it is not quite accurate. The Treatise was reviewed, unkindly, and it did enough to fix his reputation as an atheist and a skeptic for the rest of his life — which is more of a murmur among zealots than he allowed. But the disappointment was real, and the consequences were concrete. When the Chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy at Edinburgh fell vacant in the mid-1740s, Hume applied, and organized clerical opposition defeated him. In 1751 he stood for the Chair of Logic at Glasgow and was turned down again; that post went to Adam Smith. In 1754, as Keeper of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, he ordered several books judged indecent and unworthy of a learned library, and a move was made to dismiss him. In 1756 an attempt was made in the General Assembly to excommunicate him. It failed.¹⁸

David Hume, generally regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, never held an academic post in his life.

He is also a problem for this series.

What Hume Denied

Previous articles built a case. Nature grants rights; those rights precede government; government exists by consent to secure them; when it destroys them the people may resist. Sidney died for a version of that argument. Locke published it. The Declaration would restate it.

Hume did not accept it in that form.

He denied that reason is the foundation of moral judgment at all, holding instead that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, serving and obeying them.¹⁹ He denied that justice is a natural virtue. And in the essay "Of the Original Contract," published in 1748, he took apart the contractual account of political obligation with more care than his reputation usually credits.

The essay is narrower and more interesting than "Hume rejected consent theory," and the distinction matters.

Hume begins by granting the origin story. Trace government back far enough, he says, to its first origins in the woods and deserts, and nothing but the consent of roughly equal men could have subjected them to any authority. If that is what is meant by an original contract, it cannot be denied that all government is at first founded on contract. He is not being sarcastic. He simply observes that this charter was never written on parchment, that it preceded writing, and that being so ancient and obliterated by a thousand changes of government, it cannot now be supposed to retain authority over anyone.

Then the historical claim. Almost all governments now existing, or of which any record survives, were founded originally on usurpation or conquest or both, without any pretence of fair consent. Look at the actual record of how states came to be, he says, and ask where the mutual agreement is.

Then the argument against tacit consent, which is the sharpest thing in the essay. Locke had held that by living under a government one might leave, a person tacitly consents to it. Hume answers that implied consent can only exist where a man imagines the matter depends on his choice — and most people, born under established governments, believe they owe allegiance by birth and expressly disclaim any such choice. Then the image that has outlived the argument around it: can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has free choice to leave his country, knowing no foreign language or manners, living day to day on small wages? We may as well assert that a man freely consents to the authority of a ship's master by remaining aboard, though he was carried on while asleep and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves.

Here is the part that gets left out. Having demolished the account, Hume writes:

"My intention here is not to exclude the consent of the people from being one just foundation of government where it has place. It is surely the best and most sacred of any. I only pretend that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent; and that, therefore, some other foundation of government must also be admitted."²⁰

Consent is the best and most sacred foundation of government. Hume says so, in the essay that is supposed to refute consent theory. What he denies is that consent has often actually occurred, and therefore that it can carry the whole weight of explaining why anyone is obliged to obey anything.

His replacement is interest. Allegiance and the keeping of promises stand on the same footing: both are observed because human society cannot be maintained without them. Ask why we must obey government, and his answer is that society could not otherwise subsist — an answer, he notes pointedly, that anybody can understand without first being trained in a philosophical system.

A series that has spent four articles building a Lockean case has just met a Scotsman who took that case apart. He should not be conscripted, and the Skeptic's Case below returns to what he costs. But the machinery he built to replace the contract is the reason he belongs in this arc at all.

Justice as Convention

Hume's account of justice is contained in Book 3, Part 2 of the Treatise, and it turns on a technical term that is almost always misread.

He divides the virtues into the natural and the artificial. Natural virtues — generosity, compassion, gratitude — win our approval directly, without reference to any human institution. Artificial virtues produce approval, in his phrase, by means of an artifice or contrivance arising from the circumstances and necessities of mankind.²¹ Justice, by which Hume means respect for property, is artificial. So is fidelity to promises.

Artificial here does not mean fake, arbitrary, or imposed. It means made — arising from human practice rather than from unmediated natural sentiment. Hume states the point himself, and the sentence should be quoted whenever the misreading appears: though the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary.²²

Why is justice not natural? Because, Hume argues, no natural motive accounts for it. Human beings have limited generosity and inhabit a world of moderate scarcity — enough goods to be worth fighting over, not enough to make fighting unnecessary. Self-interest alone will not produce respect for others' property. Neither will benevolence, which is strongest toward those we know and weakest toward the strangers whose property rights we must nonetheless respect. Public benevolence will not do it either, since a particular just act may serve nobody's visible interest and remain obligatory anyway — the classic case being the secret repayment of a loan to a miser who will do no good with it.

So where does it come from? From convention. And Hume's account of what a convention is furnishes this arc with its central mechanism.

A convention, for Hume, is not an agreement. It is not a meeting, a promise, a compact, or a decision. It is a mutual adjustment of expectations that arises gradually, acquires force by slow progression, and is reinforced by repeated experience of the inconvenience of transgressing it. Nobody proposes it. Nobody votes on it. It is not the execution of any design.

His illustrations are the passage this article has been walking toward:

"Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho' they have never given promises to each other. … In like manner are languages gradually establish'd by human conventions without any promise. In like manner do gold and silver become the common measures of exchange."²³

Review that quotation slowly, because it contains an entire tradition in three examples.

Two rowers coordinate without speaking. Neither commands; neither obeys; the coordination is real and the boat moves. Language — the most intricate rule-governed system human beings possess, with its grammar and its irregular verbs and its capacity to express anything sayable — was established by convention, without any promise, without a designer, without a founding assembly. No committee invented English. And money: gold and silver became the common measures of exchange and came to be accepted as sufficient payment for goods worth a hundred times their own use-value, not because a sovereign decreed it but because each person accepted them expecting others would.

Property, Hume argues, works the same way. The rules of possession stabilize because each person's interest in security is best served by a general rule that constrains everyone including himself, and that recognition spreads by experience rather than by proclamation.

He restated the whole account, more elegantly, in the second Enquiry: two men pull the oars of a boat by common convention for common interest, without any promise or contract; thus gold and silver are made the measures of exchange; thus speech and words and language are fixed, by human convention and agreement.²⁴

The Order Nobody Designed

Set Hutcheson and Hume side by side and something appears that neither of them fully spelled out and that Adam Ferguson would name most memorably.

Human beings possess institutions of enormous sophistication that no human being invented. Language has structure without a legislator. Money has value without a decree that could have created it. Property rules have shape without an author. Manners, customs, the common law itself, the practices that make trade possible among strangers — all of these exhibit intricate functional organization, and in every case the organization is the residue of countless individual actions taken for reasons that had nothing to do with producing it.

Ferguson put it in the sentence at the head of this article. Nations stumble upon establishments which are the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.²⁵ His fuller passage is worth having: the man who first said he would appropriate a field and leave it to his heirs did not perceive that he was laying the foundation of civil law and political establishments; the man who first ranged himself under a leader did not perceive that he was setting the example of a permanent subordination.

A strong caution about vocabulary is owed here. The term spontaneous order is coined later than these men and none of them used it. So is emergence, so is social science, so is evolutionary in its modern sense. Reading those words back into the eighteenth century is false. What the Scots actually said — that societies arrive at establishments nobody designed, that languages and money and property rules are the result of human action but not of human design, that conventions arise by slow progression rather than by agreement — is more careful than the modern vocabulary and needs no upgrade.

What follows from the insight is a claim about knowledge, and it is the claim this whole arc turns on.

If law, language, money, and manners are the accumulated deposit of millions of individual adjustments across centuries, then no single mind ever contained the information they embody. The order is smarter than any of the people who produced it, precisely because it was produced by all of them and designed by none. It follows that a person who proposes to redesign such an institution from the ground up, on a plan, is proposing to substitute what one mind can hold for what no mind could hold.

That is a warning about the reach of intelligence. It is not a warning against thinking. Hume and Hutcheson and Ferguson were reformers themselves and had no interest in a doctrine of leave-everything-alone. But it establishes a presumption, and the presumption runs in a particular path: that inherited practice may contain reasons its inheritors cannot articulate, and that being unable to state the justification is not proof that none exists.

The Difference in Method

This is the point at which the Scottish approach and the French approach genuinely part, and the difference is best kept to method, since the political consequences of the divergence are a later story in this series.

The characteristic French Enlightenment procedure was to begin from clear first principles and deduce what institutions ought to look like — to hold society up against reason and rebuild what failed the test. Descartes had supplied the model, in philosophy, of demolishing everything doubtful and reconstructing from a foundation that could not be doubted. Applied to society, the method is enormously attractive: it promises that a sufficiently clear thinker can identify what is wrong and specify the remedy.

The Scots proceeded the other way. They began with observation of what human beings actually do — in this country and that one, in commercial societies and rude ones, now and in antiquity — and worked toward generalizations about human constitution. Hutcheson argued for the moral sense from what people are observed to approve. Hume argued for convention from the behavior of rowers and merchants and speakers of languages. Ferguson wrote a history of civil society rather than a blueprint for one.

The difference is not that one side reasoned and the other did not. Hume's analysis is as rigorous as anything produced in Paris. The difference is what reason was pointed at. The French method pointed reason at institutions and asked whether they could be justified. The Scottish method pointed reason at human beings and asked what they were actually like — and one of the things it found was that human beings routinely produce arrangements wiser than their understanding of them.

A tradition that believes reason can specify the right arrangement will be tempted to impose the specification. A tradition that believes reason can only ever grasp part of what an inherited arrangement is doing will be more cautious about replacement. Both traditions fed into 1776. Which fed into what, and what happened where the other one prevailed, are questions the next two articles take up.

The Honest Reckoning

The greatest philosopher of the English language wrote a footnote about race, and it is among the most-cited racist passages in the Enlightenment canon. It should be dated precisely, because the chronology is worse than the summary version.

The essay "Of National Characters" first appeared in 1748. The footnote was not in it. Hume added the note to the edition of 1753 and 1754, for reasons that are not recorded. It asserted that he was apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men — for there are, he says, four or five different kinds — to be naturally inferior to the whites; that there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion, nor any individual eminent in action or speculation; that no such uniform difference could occur across so many countries and ages if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. It ends with a sneer about a man of parts and learning in Jamaica, admired, Hume supposed, for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.²⁶

Now the revision history, which the prompt to be gentle with Hume usually skips.

In 1770 the note was moved to the endnotes and lightly altered. James Beattie published a sustained and devastating attack on the note that same year. Hume then prepared a final edition of his works, corrected before his death in 1776 and published in 1777. In that last revision he changed the note — and what he changed is telling. He narrowed the claim from all non-white peoples to Africans specifically, and he softened "there never was a civilized nation of that complexion" to "there scarcely ever was." He did not withdraw it. He had read Beattie, and he revised, and he let it stand.²⁷

What that revision means is a live scholarly dispute — John Immerwahr and Aaron Garrett read the evidence differently, and the argument about how much weight the 1777 changes will bear is not settled.²⁸ What is not in dispute is the sequence: added deliberately, defended by silence, criticized directly, revised, retained.

Nor was this an isolated eccentricity in an otherwise clean environment. Glasgow's eighteenth-century wealth came substantially from tobacco, and the tobacco came from plantations worked by enslaved people. The Tobacco Lords built the townhouses and endowed the public buildings, and the university sat inside that economy and drew on it. The room where Hutcheson lectured about the natural freedom of every human being was, in the most literal financial sense, underwritten in part by men who were growing rich on the denial of it.

The counterweight is real and it does not cancel the debt. Gershom Carmichael had argued before Hutcheson that no one may enslave another. Hutcheson argued that every human being is born free, that no conquest confers a right to enslave, that a slave is not property, that the children of slaves are born free. Smith would attack slavery on moral and economic grounds, and John Millar after him. Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist organizer, later observed that it did the University of Glasgow great honor to have produced three professors who bore public testimony against the trade before any public agitation of the question.²⁹ In 1788 the university sent one of the earliest anti-slavery petitions from the west of Scotland.

Both things are true. The Glasgow moral philosophers made the intellectual case against slavery earlier and more clearly than almost anyone in Britain, and they made it in a city being built with the profits of slavery, in a university partly sustained by them, while the greatest mind of their generation put his authority behind the proposition that Africans were naturally inferior and left it there after being shown exactly what was wrong with it.

The temptation is to reach for the resolution — to say that the tradition contained the resources for its own correction, and that Hutcheson's argument eventually won. The second half of that is true and the first half is a way of stepping around the first fact. Hume's footnote was not an inconsistency the tradition later ironed out. It was published under the name of the man who taught Europe to be skeptical about received opinion, and it functioned, within his own lifetime, as one of the founding texts of the defense of slavery. Universalist language did not prevent it. Universalist language was available in the same city, in print, from a professor Hume knew.

What the record shows is that a philosophy capable of demolishing the intellectual foundations of arbitrary power did not automatically extend that demolition to everyone, and that the extension had to be argued for, by particular people, against the interests of their neighbors. That is a fact about how moral progress actually works. It is not a comfortable one, and it did not happen by itself.

The Skeptic's Case

The First Objection: Hume Is a Problem for This Series

The strongest objection to this article is that it has spent significant ink (or pixels) admiring a man whose arguments cut the ground out from under the case this series has been building since the beginning of the English arc.

Consider what has been claimed so far. That there is a natural law prior to civil law, discoverable by reason. That human beings possess rights antecedent to government. That legitimate authority rests on consent. That a ruler who violates the trust forfeits the title, and the people may resist. Cicero, Aquinas, the resistance theorists, the Levellers, Sidney, Locke — the whole line converges on it.

Hume rejected essentially all of it. Moral distinctions are not derived from reason. Justice is not a natural virtue but an artifice arising from circumstance and necessity. Political obligation does not rest on consent, because consent has scarcely ever occurred and cannot bear the weight. Rights are not metaphysical furniture antecedent to convention; property is constituted by the conventions of justice, not protected by government after existing independently of it. The natural-rights foundation this series has laid, Hume regarded as unnecessary at best.

And a libertarian series cannot quietly enlist him. It cannot cite Hume for spontaneous order in one paragraph and Locke for natural rights in the next as though they were colleagues on a shared project. They disagreed about the foundations, and Hume thought Locke's foundation was a fiction — a benign fiction with good political consequences, he conceded, but a fiction.

That objection is correct as stated, and the honest response is to concede its terms rather than mute them.

Here is what can be said. First, the disagreement is narrower than it appears in one specific place: Hume did not deny that consent confers legitimacy. He said it is the best and most sacred foundation where it exists. His quarrel is with the historical claim and with the attempt to make tacit consent do work it cannot do — and the tacit-consent problem is a real problem that Lockeans have been answering ever since precisely because Hume identified it correctly.

Second, and more important: a tradition that can only survive by excluding its strongest internal critic is not a tradition, it is a catechism. Hume is the test case. If the case for liberty is sound, it should be able to absorb the man who thought its foundations were mistaken and its conclusions largely right. Hume favored limited government, secure property, commerce, religious toleration, and the rule of law, and he got there without natural rights. That two independent routes arrive at similar destinations is evidence about the destination, not a scandal.

Third, the objection cuts the other way as well. If Hume is right that justice is a convention that arose because human beings needed it and discovered its necessity by experience, then the case for secure property rests on something harder to dislodge than a metaphysical premise a skeptic can reject. It rests on the observable consequences of not having it.

None of that makes Hume a Lockean, and this article does not claim it. He is in this series because he was right about how institutions arise, and he remains a standing objection to how the series grounds its own argument. Both statements should be allowed to stand.

The Second Objection: The Insight Proves Too Much

The second objection is conservative and it is Burke's, and it is more dangerous than the first because it accepts the Scottish premise entirely.

If institutions arise unplanned, embody accumulated wisdom no individual possesses, and encode reasons their inheritors cannot articulate, then the argument tells against reformers of every description. It tells against the French revolutionaries, certainly. It also tells against anyone proposing to dismantle a monarchy, disestablish a church, abolish an inherited privilege, or overturn a settled arrangement on the strength of an argument — including the American revolutionaries of 1776, and including libertarians in any century who propose to remove long-standing institutions because a principle condemns them.

Burke drew exactly this conclusion, and he was not being obtuse. A doctrine of the wisdom of unplanned institutions is, on its face, a conservative doctrine. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton: If you cannot see the reason for the fence, the argument runs, do not remove the fence.³⁰

Concede the force of it. The Scottish insight does not license a general presumption in favor of change, and a libertarian who cites spontaneous order to justify sweeping institutional demolition has misunderstood the argument he is citing.

But the objection overreaches at one specific point, and the point is worth locating precisely. The Scottish claim is that undesigned institutions accumulate information. It is not that whatever exists is undesigned. A great many institutions are designed — a monopoly charter, a corn law, an established church with statutory privileges, a licensing scheme, a standing army maintained by parliamentary appropriation. These are not the deposits of centuries of decentralized adjustment. They are somebody's plan, imposed and enforced.

The Scottish argument gives such arrangements no protection at all. If anything it convicts them, because they are precisely the case of one mind substituting its plan for the adjustments of many. Removing a designed intervention that suppresses an undesigned order is not the same operation as demolishing an undesigned order on a plan, though it can be made to look similar by describing both as change.

That distinction does real work, and it does not resolve every case. Some institutions are amalgamations of both. Reasonable people applying the same principle will disagree about particular fences. The conservative objection succeeds in establishing that spontaneous order is not by itself a libertarian argument, and that is worth conceding plainly. It fails to establish that the two are opposed.

The Third Objection: Universal Language, Particular Freedom

The third objection has been half-answered already in the Reckoning, and it deserves to be put at full strength anyway.

The Scottish Enlightenment produced a body of thought in universal terms — human nature, the moral sense of mankind, the rights of every man born free. It produced it in a country whose commercial revival ran through Glasgow's tobacco trade and the sugar economy, in universities sustained by that wealth, and its greatest figure wrote that Africans were naturally inferior. The objection is that the universalism was underwritten by a particular form of shackles, and that a philosophy which could be held comfortably alongside a slave economy was not doing the job its language claimed.

The strongest version goes further. It says the abstraction was itself the mechanism — that speaking of man in general made it easier not to look at particular men in chains at the end of the River Clyde, and that the moral sense was reliably silent about the people whose labor paid for the lecture hall.

The concession is substantial. The philosophy did coexist with the trade, for decades, in the same city. Hume's footnote is not deniable and neither is its influence. The universities did take the money.

What can be said against the objection is more refined than a defense and it is notable. The people who made the earliest sustained intellectual case against slavery in Britain were teaching in that same university, on the same corridor, funded by the same economy — Carmichael, then Hutcheson, then Smith, then Millar, in an unbroken teaching line, and Clarkson noticed it precisely because it was unusual. The abstraction was not only an evasion. In Hutcheson's hands it was the instrument: if every human being is born free, the argument applies to every human being, and the merchants of Glasgow could not exempt themselves from a premise stated that generally. The universal language was what made the particular indictment possible.

That is a defense of the argument, not of the men who failed to apply it. The failure is real, it lasted generations, and it was ended by people who had to fight for it. The most that can be claimed is that they fought with tools this tradition handed them.

The Road Continues

By the middle of the eighteenth century the terms of the argument had changed.

For a hundred and fifty years the case for English liberty had been made in the language of precedent and inheritance — this is our ancient law, these are the charters, here is what our ancestors did in like case. It was a powerful argument and it had accomplished a great deal, up to and including a statute. It also had a defect the previous article named: rights declared by a legislature remained in the keeping of the legislature that declared them, and the argument from precedent offered nothing to anyone whose precedents were different.

The Scots supplied a second language, and it was not built out of English history at all. It was built out of claims about human beings — that we possess a faculty for perceiving good, that our approvals precede our arguments, that our institutions are older and wiser than our accounts of them, that language and money and law and property arose because people adjusted to one another over centuries and not because anyone drew a plan. A claim in that form travels. It does not require the listener to be an heir of Magna Carta. It requires only that he be human.

What the Scots had not yet done was follow the insight into the ordinary business of getting and spending — to ask what an undesigned order looks like when the thing being ordered is an entire economy, and what happens when governments attempt to direct it. That work was begun by a student who sat in Hutcheson's classroom, spent years in conversation with Hume, and eventually held Hutcheson's chair, and it was carried further by a soldier-turned-professor who wrote the history of civil society and warned his readers about standing armies. Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson are next.

The Scottish alternative did not settle the question of where rights come from. Hume left that question in worse shape than he found it, and the American arc would answer it with Locke rather than with him. What the Scots contributed was different and it was indispensable: the discovery that free people are not the beneficiaries of a wise design but the participants in an order that nobody built, and that the case for leaving them free does not depend on trusting them to be wise. It depends on recognizing that no one is wise enough to do it for them.

This is the road to 1776.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. Hutcheson argued that moral approval arrives before the argument does — that we perceive an act as generous or cruel prior to reasoning about it. Recall a moral judgment you formed immediately and defended afterward. Was the later reasoning a discovery of why you were right, or a justification of a conclusion already reached? What follows if it was the second?

2. Hume held that consent is the best and most sacred foundation of government, and that it has almost never actually occurred. Consider the government you live under. What did you consent to, specifically, and when? If the answer is that you have lived here and not left, does Hume's ship passenger describe your situation, or is there something his image leaves out?

3. Language, money, and the common law were not designed by anyone. Identify an institution in your own life — professional, civic, familial, religious — whose rules nobody wrote and everybody follows. What does it accomplish that a written rulebook would accomplish worse? What would be lost if someone rationalized it?

4. Hume revised the footnote and did not withdraw it, after reading a detailed refutation. Set aside the question of whether his philosophy survives the failure. Ask instead what it takes for a person to abandon a position he has published, defended, and been publicly corrected on — and whether you have ever done it.

5. The Liberty Test. The Scots argued that no individual mind contains the knowledge embodied in an inherited institution. Apply the test to that claim. Could one individual morally impose a redesigned set of rules on his neighbors, on the strength of his own understanding of what those rules are for? If not, can a group of individuals delegate to a government the authority to do what none of them could do alone? If the answer to both is no, then what remains of the case for redesigning an order that nobody built — and what does that leave for the reformer who sees a genuine injustice in the inherited arrangement and wants it ended?

Endnotes

1. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London, 1767), Part Third, Section II. Verified against the Eighteenth Century Collections Online page-image transcription of the printed text; the wording is identical in the fifth edition of 1782. Eighteenth-century typography has been rendered in modern form.

2. Francis Hutcheson, De naturali hominum socialitate (Glasgow, 1730), inaugural lecture delivered November 1730. On the sequence of election and installation, the University of Glasgow's own biographical record gives appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1729 and tenure of the chair from 1730 until his death; see University of Glasgow, University Story, entry for Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson succeeded Gershom Carmichael in the chair.

3. University of Glasgow, University Story, entry for Francis Hutcheson, which states that he introduced the practice of lecturing in English rather than Latin. The stronger claim found in some accounts — that he was the first professor at any Scottish university to do so — is more often asserted than demonstrated, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy hedges it. The narrower institutional claim is well attested.

4. On the Darien scheme and its cost, see Christopher A. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707 (Economic and Social History Society of Scotland, 1994). Loss estimates vary; the figure of approximately £400,000 is the one most commonly given, and the claim that this represented as much as a quarter of Scotland's liquid capital is an estimate rather than an established figure.

5. National Records of Scotland, PA6/36, the official list of the 110 approvers and 67 opposed in the vote of January 16, 1707. A number of secondary accounts give the minority as 69; the parliamentary list is preferred here.

6. Treaty of Union, Article 15. The sum is given as £398,085 10s sterling. Shareholders in and creditors of the Company of Scotland were to receive the majority share of it.

7. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold?, especially p. 33. The £20,000 dispatched for distribution by the Earl of Glasgow, and the £12,325 received by the Duke of Queensberry, are documented; the inference that these payments determined the outcome is contested. The bribery account descends substantially from the memoirs of George Lockhart of Carnwath, an avowed Jacobite opponent of the Union. Robert Burns's "A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation" dates from 1791.

8. R. A. Houston, "The Literacy Myth? Illiteracy in Scotland 1630–1760," Past and Present 96 (1982): 81–102; and Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On the "democratic myth" and the "lad o' pairts" as nineteenth-century constructions, see also R. D. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, 1750–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). The parish-school legislation of 1696 is the standard reference point for Lowland provision.

9. Aikenhead was indicted in December 1696, tried on December 23, 1696, and executed on January 8, 1697, at the Gallowlee on the road between Edinburgh and Leith. The prosecution proceeded under the Blasphemy Acts of 1661 and 1695; the 1695 statute provided lesser penalties for a first offence, and the death sentence was pressed regardless. See Michael F. Graham, The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

10. On the five Scottish universities — St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and King's College and Marischal College at Aberdeen, which remained separate institutions until 1860 — and on comparative openness of access and the shift from regenting to professorial chairs, see Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, and the survey literature on Scottish education in the eighteenth century. The population ratio between Scotland and England in this period is approximate.

11. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725), Treatise II. On Hutcheson's engagement with Hobbes and Pufendorf, see also Reflections on the Common Systems of Morality (1724) and the 1730 inaugural lecture, both in Thomas Mautner, ed., Francis Hutcheson: Two Texts on Human Nature (Cambridge, 1993), and the editor's introduction to Wolfgang Leidhold, ed., An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004).

12. The charges as recorded were that Hutcheson taught "two false and dangerous doctrines": that the standard of moral goodness is the promotion of the happiness of others, and that one may have knowledge of good and evil without, and prior to, knowledge of God. On the proceedings, the anonymous pamphlet Shaftesbury's Ghost Conjur'd (1738), and the students' Vindication of Mr Hutcheson (1738), see the Dictionary of Irish Biography, entry for Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson's teacher John Simson had himself been tried before the General Assembly.

13. Hutcheson, Inquiry, Treatise II, Section 3. Quoted from the Leidhold edition (Liberty Fund, 2004), which preserves the original capitalization. The qualifying parenthesis — "and here the Dignity, or moral Importance of Persons, may compensate Numbers" — appears in the same passage, immediately before the sentence quoted. Bentham was born in 1748.

14. On Hutcheson's political thought, natural freedom, rejection of slavery by conquest, and the right of resistance, see the editor's introduction to A System of Moral Philosophy (Liberty Fund) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry for Hutcheson, which cites the resistance formulation to the Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria (Glasgow, 1742), p. 292, rendered in English as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1747). On Carmichael, see Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael, ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), containing his Supplements and Observations upon Samuel Pufendorf's On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1724).

15. Francis Alison, a student of Hutcheson from County Donegal, served as a Presbyterian minister at New London, Chester County, Pennsylvania, and conducted a school there whose pupils included George Read, Thomas McKean, and James Smith, all later signers of the Declaration of Independence. The frequently repeated claim that all three were members of a first class of ten students is reported in popular accounts and has not been verified here against a documentary source; the fact of their education under Alison is well attested.

16. Books 1 and 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature were published in 1739, Book 3 in 1740, all anonymously. Hume was born on April 26, 1711, and was in his late twenties at publication; he began the work in France, at Rheims and then La Flèche, in the mid-1730s.

17. David Hume, "My Own Life" (1777), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987). The full sentence reads: "It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." On the retrospective inaccuracy of the characterization, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry for David Hume, which notes that the Treatise attracted sufficient hostile attention to fix his reputation.

18. On the Edinburgh Chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy, see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry for David Hume; sources give the vacancy and contest variously as 1744 and 1745, and the chair went to William Cleghorn. Hume's Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh was published anonymously in response. On the Glasgow Chair of Logic in 1751, the 1754 move for his dismissal from the Advocates Library over an order of books, and the unsuccessful attempt at excommunication in 1756, see the Hume Society's biographical account. Hume resigned the librarianship in 1757, and the post went to Adam Ferguson.

19. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, T 2.3.3.

20. Hume, "Of the Original Contract" (1748), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller (Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 465–487. The block quotation is verified against the text of the essay. Spelling and punctuation follow modernized editions; the passages on the woods and deserts, on usurpation and conquest, on tacit consent, on the poor peasant or artisan, and on the vessel and the ship's master all appear in the same essay. A pinpoint page for the block quotation within the Miller edition has not been confirmed and is not asserted here.

21. Hume, Treatise, T 3.2.1.1 (SBN 477): virtues that "produce pleasure and approbation by means of an artifice or contrivance, which arises from the circumstances and necessities of mankind."

22. Hume, Treatise, T 3.2.1: "Tho' the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary." The paragraph number within the section has not been independently confirmed and is not asserted.

23. Hume, Treatise, T 3.2.2 (Selby-Bigge/Nidditch, SBN 490). The ellipsis in the quotation stands in place of intervening material on the gradual establishment of the rule concerning stability of possession.

24. Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Appendix 3, sections 7–8.

25. Ferguson, Essay, Part Third, Section II. The sentence restated here is the one given as this article's epigraph; the material that follows in the text above — on the man who first appropriated a field and the man who first ranged himself under a leader — appears in the same section, immediately preceding it.

26. David Hume, "Of National Characters," footnote added in the edition of 1753–1754 of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. The essay itself first appeared in Three Essays, Moral and Political (1748) without the note. Text as given in the 1753–1754 version.

27. On the revision history: the note was altered slightly in 1768, converted to an endnote with further minor changes and one substantive alteration in 1770, and substantially revised in the posthumous edition of 1777, which Hume corrected before his death in 1776. The 1777 version narrows the claim from all non-white peoples to Africans and softens "there never was a civilized nation of that complexion" to "there scarcely ever was." James Beattie's criticism appeared in An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (1770).

28. See John Immerwahr, "Hume's Revised Racism," Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992), and Aaron Garrett, "Hume's Revised Racism Revisited," Hume Studies, which challenges Immerwahr's reading of the 1777 changes. See also Emma Rothschild, "David Hume and the Seagods of the Atlantic," in Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 81–96. The dispute concerns the significance of the revisions, not their existence.

29. Thomas Clarkson's observation regarding three Glasgow professors who bore public testimony against the slave trade is quoted in the University of Glasgow's own historical accounts of the university and slavery. On Glasgow's tobacco wealth and its relationship to the institutions of the city, see Stephen Mullen's research on Glasgow and Atlantic slavery. The University of Glasgow petition against the slave trade dates from June 1788.

30. G. K. Chesterton, "The Drift from Domesticity," in The Thing (London, 1929). The compressed formulation given here is a paraphrase and not Chesterton's wording. His illustration is of a fence or gate erected across a road, which the reformer proposes to clear away without knowing its purpose; the reply is that the reformer should go away and think, and return when he can say what the fence is for. The principle is commonly called Chesterton's fence, and the popular one-line version — do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up — appears nowhere in Chesterton in that form.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. London, 1767. Liberty Fund and Cambridge editions available.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739–1740. Cited by the standard T book.part.section.paragraph convention; see the Clarendon edition, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, and the Selby-Bigge edition revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

Hume, David. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. 1751.

Hume, David. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Rev. ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987. Contains "Of the Original Contract," "Of National Characters," and "My Own Life."

Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 1725. Ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Rev. ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.

Hutcheson, Francis. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. 1728. Ed. Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002.

Hutcheson, Francis. A System of Moral Philosophy. Posthumous, 1755.

Hutcheson, Francis. A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1747. English version of the Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria (1742).

Carmichael, Gershom. Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael. Ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002.

Beattie, James. An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism. 1770.

Secondary Works

Anderson, R. D. Education and the Scottish People, 1750–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Chesterton, G. K. The Thing. London, 1929.

Garrett, Aaron. "Hume's Revised Racism Revisited." Hume Studies.

Graham, Michael F. The Blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: Boundaries of Belief on the Eve of the Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.

Houston, R. A. Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Houston, R. A. "The Literacy Myth? Illiteracy in Scotland 1630–1760." Past and Present 96 (1982): 81–102.

Immerwahr, John. "Hume's Revised Racism." Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992).

Mullen, Stephen. Research on Glasgow, the tobacco trade, and Atlantic slavery, University of Glasgow.

Rothschild, Emma. "David Hume and the Seagods of the Atlantic." In The Atlantic Enlightenment, ed. Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, 81–96. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Whatley, Christopher A. Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707. Economic and Social History Society of Scotland, 1994.