Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-xtvcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-19T00:08:43.417Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

24 - The Scottish Enlightenment

from THEMES AND MOVEMENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Joan H. Pittock
Edited by
H. B. Nisbet  and
Claude Rawson
H. B. Nisbet
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Get access

Summary

‘Among the ancients’, wrote Robert Eden Scott, the first Professor of Moral Philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen, ‘Criticism was chiefly cultivated as an art, and consisted rather in practical rules than in scientific investigation: it is to the Moderns, and those too of a very late date, that we owe a philosophical investigation of that science of Rhetoric, and an analysis of those faculties of the mind, upon which peculiar effects are produced, by literary composition, in its various kinds.’ ‘Philosophical investigation’ was the occupation of Scottish academics, ministers and lawyers in the heyday of the Enlightenment. It was rooted in the Scottish system of higher education, and it flowered in the concern for professional status, communal interests and national identity which evolved from the religious, political and cultural events of the recent past.

A strong sense of changing times, embodied in the Act of Union in 1707, of the superior refinement and politeness of metropolitian society, and of the need for efficiency in communication and consensus not only between countries but among regions (forcing to the periphery the issue of the large Gaelic-speaking population), determined the priorities of inquirers pursuing those ‘inner formative forces’ which for Cassirer distinguished the mind of the Enlightenment. Forces such as feeling, sympathy and taste, inherent in the writings of Shaftesbury and his popularizer Addison and grafted on to the stock of humanist speculation congenial to the religious temper of Scotland were expanded by Francis Hutcheson in the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (17Z5). These found their way into the critical principles of Smith, Hume and their contemporaries.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 546 - 559
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, Ian, Two Studies in Romantic Reasonings: Edinburgh Reviewers and the English Tradition, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 49 (2 vols., 1976).Google Scholar
Alison, Archibald, Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1790).Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis, Works, ed. Spedding, J.Ellis, R. L. and Heath, D. D. (14 vols., London, 1857–74).Google Scholar
Beattie, James, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London and Edinburgh, 1783).Google Scholar
Blackwell, Thomas, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735).Google Scholar
Blackwell, Thomas, Letters on Mythology (London, 1747).Google Scholar
Blair, Hugh, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh, 1763).Google Scholar
Blair, Hugh, Essays on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Edinburgh, 1783); ed. Harold, F. Harding (2 vols., Carbondale, 1965).Google Scholar
Brunius, Teddy, David Hume on Criticism, Figura 2, Studies Edited by the Institute of Art History, University of Uppsala (Uppsala, 1952).Google Scholar
Campbell, George, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (2 vols., London and Edinburgh, 1776).Google Scholar
Campbell, R. H., and Andrew, Skinner, The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Glasgow, 1982).Google Scholar
Carter, J. J., and Pittock, J. H. (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen, 1987).Google Scholar
Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951).Google Scholar
Davie, George E., The Scottish Enlightenment, The Historical Association General Series 99 (London, 1981).Google Scholar
Dwyer, John, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987).Google Scholar
Emerson, Roger, ‘Scottish universities in the eighteenth century, 1690–1800’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 157 (1977).Google Scholar
Fergusson, Robert, The Poems of Robert Fergusson, (Edinburgh, 1773); ed. McDiarmid, M. P.Scottish Text Society vols. 21 and 24 (Edinburgh and London, 1954–6).Google Scholar
Fordyce, David, Dialogues concerning Education (2 vols., London, 1747; 3rd edn London, 1757).Google Scholar
Fussell, Paul, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar
Gerard, Alexander, An Essay on Genius (London and Edinburgh, 1774).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerard, Alexander, An Essay on Taste (London and Edinburgh, 1758); 3rd edn (London and Edinburgh, 1759).Google Scholar
Graham, Henry G., Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1901).Google Scholar
Hipple, Walter J., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale IL, 1957).Google Scholar
Hook, Andrew (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2 (Aberdeen, 1987).Google Scholar
Horner, Winifred J. (ed.), The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric (Columbia and London, 1983).Google Scholar
Howell, W. B., Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, 1971).Google Scholar
Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene, F. Miller, rev. edn (Indianapolis, 1987).Google Scholar
Hutcheson, Francis, Essays on the Nature and Conduct of our Passions and Affections (Glasgow, 1728).Google Scholar
Hutcheson, Francis, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow, 1725).Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (London, 1775).Google Scholar
Kames, HenryHome, Lord, The Elements of Criticism (2 vols., Edinburgh1, 1762); 4th edn (2 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1769).Google Scholar
Lehmann, William C., Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment (The Hague, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacQueen, John, The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature, Progress and Poetry, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1982).Google Scholar
McGuirk, Carol, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (Athens OH, 1987).Google Scholar
Mooney, Michael, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric (Princeton, 1985).Google Scholar
Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988).Google Scholar
Pittock, J. H., The Ascendancy of Taste (London, 1973).Google Scholar
Pittock, J. H., and Wear, A. (eds.), Interpretation and Cultural History (London, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramsay, Allan, The Ever Green (Edinburgh, 1724).Google Scholar
Richards, I. A., The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York, 1936).Google Scholar
Rollin, Charles, The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, or an Introduction to Languages, Poetry, Rhetoric, History, Moral Philosophy, Physick, and with reflections on TASTE; and Instructions with regard to Eloquence of the Pulpit, the Bar, and the Stage, 2nd edn (London, 1737).Google Scholar
Scott, Robert Eden, Elements of Rhetoric for the Use of the Students of King's College (Aberdeen, 1802).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols., London, 1708–14).Google Scholar
Sher, Richard, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Princeton and Edinburgh, 1985).Google Scholar
Simonsuuri, Kirsti, Homer's Original Genius. Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (Cambridge, 1979).Google Scholar
Simpson, Kenneth, The Protean Scot: the Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen, 1981).Google Scholar
Smith, Adam, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Bryce, J. C. (Oxford, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tytler, Alexander Fraser, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Kames (Edinburgh, 1807).Google Scholar
Wallace, Karl, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric (Chapel Hill, 1948).Google Scholar
Waszek, Norbert, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel's Account of ‘Civil Society’ (Dordrecht, Boston, London, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×