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IT is in the two
closely-affiliated realms of science and philosophy that the
intellectual education and development of a nation may be said to
attain its higher levels. To this needs only to be added the equally
important moral and religious development to make the education
complete and the work of advancement satisfactory and perfect.
Without claiming for the Scottish people any superior excellence
over other civilized communities in these respects, it is enough now
to say that during the past two centuries their progress has been
manifest, and they have now reached these higher levels of modern
cultivated thought.
In the wide fields of
invention and discovery and of the natural and physical sciences the
sons of Scotland have ever marched with the vanguard in the grand
army of human progress. From James Watt, the constructor of the
steam-engine, and John Napier, the inventor of logarithms, and Colin
Maclaurin's great treatise On Fluxions, down to Sir David Brewster
the astronomer, Playfair the geometrician, Sir Roderic Murchison the
geographer, Sir Charles Lyell and Hugh Miller the geologists, and
from the early African travelers Mungo Park and Clapperton down to
her great missionaries Robert Moffat and David Livingstone in
Africa, Claudius Buchanan and Alexander Duff in India,--little
Scotland has borne her full share in the great work of scientific
investigation and discovery, and in the still greater work of the
world's evangelization. Her sons of science, her Christian
civilizers, her heroic missionaries, have "stood before kings; they
have not stood before mean men."
In the advancement of
the inductive sciences, as well as in that of intellectual and moral
philosophy, in Scotland, her great universities bore no
inconsiderable part. These ancient and honored seats of learning,
though never so richly endowed as those of England, were from their
early foundations the radiating centres of light and influence to
the whole Scottish people. Around them gathered the most learned and
noted men of the times. In them were educated the young men who
devoted themselves to scientific research or philosophic inquiry,
and who in after-life were called back, crowned with honors, to fill
the professor's chair in their alma mater, and from these centres of
learning to send forth to the world the matured results of their
investigations. Scotland has been highly favored with such seats of
learning, having had four of them from early times-----the two
principal ones in the two chief cities of the realm, the renowned
universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the other two in the
ancient cities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen, not so widely known, but
still ancient, honorable and influential in their share of the
scientific, classical, philosophical, literary and theological
training of the successive generations of her youth. Nor has she
from the foundation of these great schools ever been without an
influence, both direct and indirect, upon the world at large.
Through these schools, back to their origin, Scotland has been to a
large extent the educator of the youth of other Christian lands.
Into their academic halls from year to year have come the sons of
the wealthy, from England, from Ireland, from America, from all the
British dependencies abroad, and even from the Continent, to receive
the higher culture of science, theology, law, medicine, philosophy.
Especially in the earlier history of our own country, when
institutions of learning were in comparative infancy here, was this
educational influence of Scotland manifest in our pulpits and in all
the learned professions. Here, from the lips of the most eminent
professors, did many of our youth go to receive the finishing
instructions of their life-work. And thither still do some of them
go.
One of the
distinguished men first named, the celebrated mathematician and
philosopher Colin Maclaurin, was successively connected with three
of these noted schools. He studied at Glasgow, where he took the
degree of Master of Arts at the age of fifteen. He then obtained the
mathematical chair at Marischal College, Aberdeen, at the age of
seventeen. At nineteen he was made a fellow of the Royal Society. In
1725, at the age of twenty-seven, he was elected professor of
mathematics at Edinburgh, where his lectures contributed much to
raise the character of that university as a school of science. A
controversy with Bishop Berkely led to the publication of his
Treatise out Flexions.
Of all the Scottish
savans of the last century, the one who has probably acquired the
widest and most enduring fame was Adam Smith, the author of the
celebrated treatise on The Wealth of Nations. Before this book
appeared he had already won a high reputation as an acute thinker in
his chair of logic, and afterward of moral philosophy, at the
University of Glasgow, having published two important works—The
Theory of the Moral Sentiments and a Dissertation on Languages. The
appearance of his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations at once established his higher fame. It constituted a new
departure in economical science. It revolutionized the public
opinion of the world on many questions of trade and commerce. It
broke down a thousand ancient prejudices and gave a new impulse to
thought and a new direction to commercial enterprise. It
demonstrated how both individuals and nations could grow rich
without despoiling or interfering with each other. It entitled the
author to rank as a pioneer—if not, indeed, the very founder—of
political economy as a separate branch of human knowledge. He raised
it to a position which it has never lost—of being one of the most
important of all the modern sciences. His profound treatise became a
text-book of instruction in many of the higher schools and colleges
of all lands. It gave to the doctrine of free trade a prominence
which it has held to this day among the deep problems of political
economy. After all the advances of a century, the name of Adam Smith
still stands as an authority among the greatest thinkers of the
world.
The mathematical and
physical sciences in Scotland during the same century were well
represented at her universities by the distinguished names of Robert
Simson, James Hutton and John Playfair, whose learned researches,
given to the public in many forms of publication, contributed not a
little to the general advancement of knowledge at home and abroad.
The present century
has furnished a bright cluster of scientific names in Scotland,
contributing their full share to that exalted estimation in which
scientific pursuits are now held in all civilized nations. Of these
was Hugh Miller, a self-taught man from the stone-quarries and a
master of pure English diction, author of the Old Red Sandstone and
the Testimony of the Rocks, the devotee and the martyr of scientific
investigation. He brought to the elucidation of these studies a
fresh and brilliant literary ability almost as untutored and
spontaneous as that of his immortal countryman Robert Burns. Seldom
has science in any country been made so clear, and so attractive to
the popular mind as in his learned yet fascinating pages. Another
eminent scientist of Scotland contemporary with Hugh Miller was Sir
Charles Lyell, whose popular geological writings and extended
geological tours in many lands did much to develop his favorite
science. The honor of knighthood was conferred upon him in
recognition of the great services he had rendered to the cause of
scientific knowledge.
In this honored class
stand the great names of Sir David Brewster and Sir Roderic
Murchison of Edinburgh, well worthy, in the value and extent of
their scientific labors, to be associated with the illustrious names
of Michael Faraday and Sir John Herschel of the same period in
London. Perhaps no two men of the tines have conferred greater
lustre upon British science than these two distinguished North
Britons. Sir David Brewster--inventor of the kaleidoscope, editor of
the Edinburgh EncyclopOdlia and the Philosophical 7ourzal, author of
numerous scientific volumes covering a wide range of knowledge—lived
long to adorn his native land by his rare virtues of character and
by his contributions to science. "We love to think of him," says a
contemporary, "as the experimental philosopher who combined in so
extraordinary a degree the strictest severity of scientific argument
and form with a freedom of fancy and imagination which lent
picturesqueness to all his illustrations and invested his later
writings especially with an indefinable charm." While he lived no
intelligent visitor of Edinburgh from abroad missed seeing the
genial and accomplished Sir David Brewster. Scarcely less
distinguished is the far-famed geologist and geographer Sir Roderic
Murchison, the friend of Livingstone, president of the Royal
Geographical Society and of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science. No man living, perhaps, has contributed more
by his studies and his pers,,nal exertions to promote geographical
science in Great Britain and to enkindle a spirit of adventure among
the scientific explorers in distant lands.
Another distinguished
representative of the most recent Scottish science is Professor
William Thomson of the University of Glasgow, one of the ablest of
living mathematicians and natural philosophers. He is the author of
many learned works and of some brilliant discoveries in submarine
telegraphy, to which he has devoted much research. His name is
intimately associated with the successful solution of the great and
once-difficult problem of connecting the two continents by the
Atlantic cable. By his long-continued experiments and investigations
he contributed—perhaps more than any other one man—to the ultimate
accomplishment of that great scheme of interoceanic communication
which now so wonderfully binds the world together in thought, and so
magnificently illustrates the triumph of modern science. Whatever of
good this practical realization of one of the great ideas of our
most recent science may yet bring to the final triumph of Christian
civilization among all nations, it is not without significance that
Scotland, through her ancient university and her learned professor,
has labored in the problem. In the coming glory Scotland, though
small among the world's great potentates and dominions, will be
entitled to her share.
In the recent
authorship of Scotland the duke of Argyle has won a distinguished
position by several popular works which have been greatly admired on
both sides of the Atlantic. His Reign of Law and his Primeval
Man--mainly contributions to science, but written in a profound
philosophic spirit—have passed through many editions, and certainly
take rank with the ablest works of our times on subjects of this
kind. He is a thinker and a scholar, showing on every page a
thorough mastery of the intricate and important subjects he
discusses. His volumes are replete with strong, sound,
discriminating thought presented in a style of great clearness,
reminding one of the lucid pages of his countryman Hugh Miller. It
is refreshing to find the broadest scientific culture of the age
thus combined in an author who at every step fills us with a
conviction of his deep earnestness in the quest of truth and of his
judiciousness in the statement of his opinions. The noble author
deserves well of his country, and by these volumes has made rich
contributions to the cause of popular science and philosophic truth.
At its first appearance a competent critic pronounced Primeval Man
"the most clear, graceful, pointed and precise piece of ethical
reasoning which had been published for a quarter of a century." "Its
great end is to show that it is impossible to pursue any
investigation of man's history from the purely physical side. Its
reasoning seems to us absolutely conclusive against the upholders of
the natural-selection theory."
In his work on the
Reign of Law the accomplished author has discussed some of the most
abstruse and perplexing problems which divide the ablest speculative
thinkers of our times. The great aim of the volume is to show that,
while law reigns supreme in all the universe throughout mind and
matter, its supremacy does not exclude a divine Lawgiver: "Creation
by law, evolution by law, development by law—or, as including all
these kindred ideas, the reign of law—is nothing but the reign of
creative force, directed by creative knowledge, worked under the
control of creative power and in fulfillment of creative purpose."
We scarcely know a
finer passage in our recent literature than that which occurs at the
close of this able discussion, where the author vindicates the
presence and agency of God in all parts of this law-governed
universe. He says:
"The superstition
which saw in all natural phenomena the action of capricious deities
was not more irrational than the superstition which sees in them
nothing but the action of invariable law. Men have been right, and
not wrong, when they saw in the facts of nature the variability of
adjustment even more surely than they saw the constancy of force.
They were right when they identified these phenomena with the
phenomena of mind. They were right when they regarded their own
faculty of contrivance as the nearest and truest analogy by which
the construction of the universe can be conceived and its order
understood. They were right when they regarded its arrangements as
susceptible of change, and when they looked upon a change of will as
the efficient cause of other .changes without number and without
end. It was well to feel this by the force of instinct; it is better
still to be sure of it in the light of reason. It is an immense
satisfaction to know that the result of logical analysis does but
confirm the testimony of consciousness and run parallel with the
primeval traditions of belief It is an unspeakable comfort that when
we come to close quarters with this vision of invariable law seated
on the throne of Nature we find it a phantom and a dream—a mere
nightmare of ill-digested thought and of God's great gift of speech
abused. We are, after all, what we thought ourselves to be. Our
freedom is a reality, and not a name. Our faculties have, in truth,
the relations which they seem to have to the economy of nature.
Their action is a real and substantial action on the constitution
and course of things. The laws of nature were not appointed by the
great Lawgiver to baffle his creatures in the sphere of conduct,
still less to confound them in the region of belief. As parts of an
order of things too vast to be more than partly understood they
present, indeed, some difficulties which perplex the intellect, and
a few also, it cannot be denied, which wring the heart. But, on the
whole, they stand in harmonious relations with the human spirit.
They come visibly from one pervading Mind and express the authority
of one enduring kingdom. As regards the moral ends they serve, this
too can be clearly seen—that the purpose of all natural laws is best
fulfilled when they are made, as they can be made, the instruments
of intelligent will and the servants of enlightened conscience."
These able
contributions to natural science are the more important as coming
from one who has thus made good his position both as a scientist and
as a philosopher. They inspire us with confidence both by their
research and by their conservatism. They illustrate how the widest
scientific culture of the age is still consistent and harmonious
with all those fundamental ethical principles that underlie the
Christian system, and that distinguish the Scottish philosophy as a
philosophy of sound reason and common sense. While the noble writer
is at home in the fields of physical science and does not shrink
from discussing the deepest ethical and philosophical problems, yet,
true to the genius of his country, he ever stands on solid ground
and is never carried off to the dreamlands of an uncertain
metaphysical speculation. He can look back upon an illustrious
ancestry of stern, heroic, fighting men. lie has here fought a
higher and better battle.
Let us turn now to
survey another field of Scotland's authorship and influence, closely
allied to that of the natural sciences. It is that of the higher
intellectual and moral philosophy, or, as it may be called,
metaphysical speculation. This elevated region of abstract logical
thought, which the educated men of all civilized ages and races have
cultivated just in proportion as they have advanced in knowledge,
has not lacked attraction for the Scotch. If knowledge is power,
then thought is power, philosophy is power; for philosophy has to
deal with thought and with knowledge as its essential elements. If,
as has been said, the world is governed by ideas, then philosophy
governs the world of thinking men; for it is philosophy that
classifies our ideas, systematizes our science and gives direction
to all the great energies and enterprises of educated men. In this
realm of pure reason, this wide domain of intellectual, moral and
metaphysical philosophy, Scotland may be said to have created an
independent school of her own whose power, almost omnipotent at
home, has extended its modifying influences over all other Christian
lands.
In the olden times,
as we have seen, the Scots were great fighters and dealt hard blows;
in more recent times they have been content to fight the higher
battles of the mind. They have been great thinkers, deep thinkers,
hard thinkers. They have well cultivated the reasoning faculties and
sharpened them by use. They are dialecticians and logicians of the
first order. In no country in the world has its dominant philosophy
had more to do with the living thought of its people. It has stamped
itself upon their character. It has been a potential factor in their
education. It has given a coloring to their whole literature. It has
gone into the ministrations of the pulpit as no other philosophy
ever did. In all her history Scotland has probably produced no one
thing which is more distinctly her own, which has exerted a stronger
influence over her leading minds or contributed more to make her
influence felt and respected abroad, than her indigenous,
strongly-marked and solid philosophy. It has never been a philosophy
of dreams and fancies, but a philosophy resting on the fundamental
experience and axioms of intuition and common sense, the observed
facts of human experience and the clear deductions of enlightened
reason. This philosophy, the matured growth of ages, has been taught
from generation to generation in the four great universities,
especially in the lawn and divinity schools, and has been
promulgated to the world not only by the leading reviews and
magazines, but in many profound systematic treatises.
By this philosophy,
both at home and in foreign lands, Scotland has spoken in a voice as
potential as it has been decided. There has never been much
ambiguity in her teaching. With a few exceptions like David Hume,
the Scottish philosophers have in the main uttered but one voice and
taught one great system. By it they have become educators to
mankind, and they have largely led the thinking of the
English-speaking race both in the Old World and in the New. There
can be no question that they Ied it through all the colonial period
of our own history, and that they still lead it both here and in
Canada, notwithstanding the large influx, during the present
century, of the more pretentious schools of German and French
philosophy. So far as this New World can be said to have any one
philosophy which it can claim as its own and call "American," it is
certainly in its fundamental principles much more closely allied to
Scotland than to Germany or to France. Philosophy, like all other
departments of human knowledge, is progressive and changes both its
teachers and its text-books from age to age, the old and imperfect
systems giving place to the new and improved methods. So has it been
in Scotland. Still, there is to-day no sounder philosophy in the
world than that which has been expounded in the writings of Reid and
Brown, Abercrombie and Dugald Stewart, the brilliant Sir William
Hamilton and our honored James McCosh. Many errors have from time to
time been exploded and cast off: the true philosophy is in the
substantial residuum of truth that remains.
Dr. McCosh is at this
time probably the ablest living representative of the Scottish
philosophy. No man is better qualified to expound it. His own
contributions to its elucidation have not been inconsiderable. In
himself he well illustrates that strong and sound educational
influence which we have been tracing in these pages, and which has
gone out from his native land over all the earth. He may well be
called a missionary not only of gospel truths, but of philosophical
thought. Since he came among us, and even before, he has been doing
in America that kind of educational work which his great countryman
Witherspoon did a hundred years ago. His Method of the Divine
Goverii men t, which gave hi in his early and world-wide reputation,
his Typical Forms, Intuitions of the Mind and Fundamental Truth, are
all thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Scottish philosophy, as
they are with sound Christian doctrine. These works form a part of
the best literature of the age, have been studied in many colleges,
have been read by the leading scholars of many lands, and their
principles have been inculcated from many pulpits.
In his volume
entitled The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository,
Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton, Dr. McCosh has given an
interesting sketch of the leading thinkers and writers of the school
for a period of about two hundred years. He has introduced the work
with a chapter on the characteristics of this philosophy, singling
out its three most prominent points. He styles it the philosophy of
observation, the philosophy of self-consciousness and the philosophy
and out of it rises against the sombre blue and the frosty stars
that mass and bulwark of gloom pierced and quivering with
innumerable lights. There is nothing in Europe to match it. Could
you but roll a river down the valley, it would be sublime. That
ridged and chimneyed bulk of blackness with splendor bursting out at
every pore is the wonderful Old Town, where Scottish history mainly
transacted itself, while, opposite, the modern Prince's street is
blazing throughout its length. During the day the castle looks down
upon the city as out of another world, stern with all its
peacefulness, its garniture of trees, its slopes of grass. The rock
is dingy enough in color, but after a shower its lichens laugh out
greenly in the returning sun while the rainbow is brightening on the
lowering cloud beyond. How deep the shadow which the castle throws
at noon over the gardens at its feet where the children play! How
grand where giant bulk and towery crown blacken against the sunset!
"Fair, too, the New
Town, sloping to the sea. From George's street, which crowns the
ridge, the eye is led down sweeping streets of stately architecture
to villas and woods that fill the lower ground and fringe the shore;
to the bright azure belt of the Forth, with its smoking steamer or
its creeping sail; beyond, to the shores of Fife, soft, blue and
flecked with fleeting shadows in the keen, clear light of spring,
dark purple in osophy in the University of Edinburgh. his subtle and
ingenious arguments against Christianity were satisfactorily
answered in his own day by many able writers both in Scotland and in
England, and they have since been answered a thousand times. Still,
it is not to be denied that by his writings he has for more than a
hundred years wielded an influence which has been as widely spread
as it has been pernicious. His example is an illustration of the
indestructible power of philosophic thought even when the philosophy
has been false and its teachings have been baneful. his writings
unquestionably had much to do in creating that skeptical and
anti-Christian public sentiment in France which brought in the
Revolution of 1789 with all its terrific results. To this day there
is scarcely a writer of former times who has done more to unsettle
all fundamental beliefs in Christian truth than David Hume. In this
case it is most sadly true that the influence of Scotland has been
enduring and as wide as the world. But in the great skeptic the
philosophy of Scotland is not to be held responsible for what one of
her gifted sons has done in her name.
It is not the purpose
of the present brief survey to describe the character and the work
of these eminent philosophers—not even of those who may be regarded
as the greater lights of the school. Reid, Stewart, Brown and
Hamilton may perhaps be taken as the truest representatives of the
school. If not the founders (for they followed a considerable line
of earlier writers), they certainly may be considered as the ablest
expounders of the Scottish philosophy. Dr. McCosh pronounces a just
eulogium on each of these great masters of the school, especially on
Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton. Of the former he says: "I
have noticed that in many cases Stewart hides his originality as
carefully as others boast of theirs. Often have I found, after going
the round of philosophers in seeking light on some absolute subject,
that in turning to Stewart his doctrine is, after all, the most
profound, as it is the most judicious." He tells us that at the time
when the metropolis of Scotland was the residence of many of the
principal Scottish families, and of persons of high literary and
social distinction, the house of Dugald Stewart became the centre
and bond of an accomplished circle, himself the chief attraction.
Young men of rank and fortune became inmates of his family, and
received impressions from his teaching and society which they
carried through life." "In his classes of moral philosophy and
political economy he had under him a greater body of young men who
afterward distinguished themselves than any other teacher that I can
think of. Among them we have to place Lord Brougham, Lord Palmerston,
Lord John Russell, Francis Horner, Lord Landsdowne, Francis Jeffrey,
Walter Scott, Sydney Smith, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers, James
Mill, Archibald Alison, and many others who have risen to great
eminence in politics, in literature or philosophy. Most of them have
acknowledged the good they received from his lectures, while some of
then have carried out in practical measures the principles which he
inculcated."
In the brilliant Sir
William Hamilton the two centuries of Scottish philosophy may be
said to have reached the flower. Not that he was nearer the truth
than his predecessors—perhaps he was not so near as some of them—but
because of his originality and his learning. He had a genius for
philosophy and was certainly one of the greatest thinkers of his own
or any other age. In his thorough acquaintance with the
philosophical writers of all ages, ancient and modern, it would be
difficult to find his equal. Dr. McCosh speaks of him as the most
learned of all the Scottish metaphysicians. "When he was alive,"
says he, "he could always be pointed to as redeeming Scotland from
the reproach of being without high scholarship. Oxford had no man to
put on the same level. Germany had not a profounder scholar or one
whose judgment in a disputed point could be so relied on. No man has
ever done more in cleansing the literature of philosophy of
commonplace mistakes, of thefts and impostures. For years to come
ordinary authors will seem learned by drawing from his stores. For
scholarship in the technical sense of the term, and in particular
for the scholarship of philosophy, they (his predecessors) were all
inferior to Hamilton, who was equal to any of them in the knowledge
of Greek and Roman systems and of the earlier philosophies of modern
Europe, and vastly above them in a comprehensive acquaintance with
all schools, standing alone in his knowledge of the more philosophic
fathers, such as Tertullian and Augustine; of the more illustrious
schoolmen, such as Thomas Aquinas and Scotus; of the writers of the
Revival, such as the elder Scaliger; and of the ponderous systems of
Kant and the schools which ramified from him in Germany."
The influence of the
Scottish philosophy, regarded as a whole, both upon Scotland and
upon other countries, is admirably stated in the following striking
passage from Dr. McCosh's volume.: "The Scottish metaphysicians and
moralists have left their impress on their own land—not only on the
ministers of religion, and through them upon the body of the people,
but also on the whole thinking mind of the country. The chairs of
mental science in the Scottish colleges have had more influence than
any others in germinating thought in the minds of Scottish youth and
in giving a permanent bias and direction to their intellectual
growth. We have the express testimony of a succession of illustrious
risen for more than a century to the effect that it was Hutcheson,
or Smith, or Reid, or Beattie, or Stewart, or Jardine, or Mylne, or
Brown, or Chalmers, or Wilson, or Hamilton, who first made them feel
that they had a mind and stimulated them to independent thought. We
owe it to the lectures and writings of the professors of mental
science—acting always along with the theological training and
preaching of the country—that men of ability in Scotland have
commonly been more distinguished by their tendency to inward
reflection than inclination to sensuous observation. Nor is it to be
omitted that the Scottish metaphysicians have written the English
language, if not with absolute purity, yet with propriety and
taste—some of them, indeed, with elegance and eloquence—and have
thus helped to advance the literary cultivation of the country. All
of them have not been men of learning in the technical sense of the
term, but they have all been well informed in various branches of
knowledge (it is to a Scottish metaphysician we owe the Wealth of
Nations). Several of them have had very accurate scholarship, and
the last great man among them was not surpassed in erudition by any
scholar of his age. Nor has the influence of Scottish philosophy
been confined to its native soil. The Irish province of Ulster has
felt it quite as much as Scotland, in consequence of so many youths
from the North of Ireland having been educated at Glasgow
University. Though Scottish metaphysicians are often spoken of with
contempt in the southern part of Great Britain, yet they have had
their share in fashioning the thought of England, and in particular
did much good in preserving it, for two or three ages toward the
close of the last century and the beginning of this, from falling
altogether into low materialistic and utilitarian views; and in the
last age Mr. J. S. Mill got some of his views through his father
from Hurne, Stewart and Brown, and an active philosophic school at
Oxford has built on the foundation laid by Hamilton. The United
States of America, especially the writers connected with the
Presbyterian and Congregational Churches, have felt pleasure in
acknowledging their obligations to the Scottish thinkers. It is a
most interesting circumstance that when the higher metaphysicians of
France undertook, in the beginning of this century, the laborious
work of throwing back the tide of materialism, skepticism and
atheism which had swept over the land, they called to their aid the
sober and well-grounded philosophy of Scotland. Nor is it an
unimportant fact in the history of philosophy that the great German
metaphysician Emmanuel Kant was roused, as he acknowledges, from his
dogmatic slumbers by the skepticism of David Hume." |
