THE PRIMACY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY: DUGALD

STEWART AND THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

By

Jennifer Maree Tannoch-Bland, B.A., Hons.1A

School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts

Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2000
 Abstract

Dugald Stewart was an influential teacher and philosopher during the final years
of the Scottish Enlightenment. Until recently he has been seen as merely a significant
expositor of Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy. This thesis does not attempt to
assess the novelty of Stewart’s writings in relation to his Scottish predecessors such as
Reid: rather, it offers a detailed historical study of aspects of his work, placing them in
the political and cultural context of the period following the French Revolution.
Two questions stimulated this thesis. First, what prompted Stewart, a moral
philosopher who was not an experimental philosopher, to write a major work on
methodology? Second, why was there a gap of twenty-two years between the first
volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) and the second
(1814), which contained his methodological treatise? I aim to answer these questions
by offering a contextual intellectual history of some important aspects of Stewart’s
work.
The thesis argues that Stewart faced a new problem: he had to deal with attacks
on moral philosophy – the core subject of the Edinburgh University curriculum – some
of which were produced by institutional and political factors affecting the Scottish
universities, others by the rising authority of the experimental physical sciences. I
consider a selection of Stewart’s writings in the light of this problem.
In 1804 Stewart’s own student, Francis Jeffrey, gave public voice to the charge
that the science of mind (which constituted the central part of Scottish common sense
philosophy) was outdated, unscientific and useless. Thereafter, Stewart was engaged in
what he saw as an urgent task – the defence of the very status of philosophy and the role
of the philosopher. The thesis considers some of his major works (and other writings)
from this perspective: Philosophical Essays (1810) contained his first direct retort to
Jeffrey; Stewart’s treatment of methodology in Elements of the Philosophy of the
Human Mind, Volume 2 (1814) and his section on intellectual character in Volume 3
(1827) are viewed as two significant components of his attempt to reassert the primacy
of moral philosophy and the role of the moral philosopher.
 CONTENTS
Page

Acknowledgements i

Statement of originality ii

Abbreviations iii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1

Chapter 2 Stewart and the Scottish Enlightenment 30

Chapter 3 Authority of moral philosophy 63

Chapter 4 Politicisation of philosophy 88

Chapter 5 The Stewart-Jeffrey debate 117

Chapter 6 Experimental responses 136

Chapter 7 The methodologist 152

Chapter 8 Re-fashioning the moral philosopher 190

Chapter 9 Conclusion 219

Appendix 223

Stewart's Works 225

Primary and Nineteenth-Century Bibliography 228

Secondary Bibliography 238

 i

Acknowledgements

My first thanks must go to my supervisor Associate Professor Richard Yeo for

his intellectual generosity and calm guidance. Dr Dieter Freundlieb was painstaking in
a final reading and in early engagement with my work on Stewart's methodology, for
which I thank him. I also benefited from my association with members of Griffith
University's School of Humanities.
Thanks also are due to the Australian Government for the generous Australian
Postgraduate Award With Stipend which sustained me throughout the course of my
studies, to Griffith University for a HECS Scholarship for the duration, and to the
Faculty of Arts for a research allowance which assisted me to undertake research in
Edinburgh, Canberra and Sydney, and to present a conference paper in Auckland. I am
grateful also to the Australasian Association for History, Philosophy and Social Studies
of Science for a student bursary, which assisted with conference expenses. As well,
Griffith's School of Humanities provided me with teaching work, invaluable for both the
remuneration and the academic experience.
In Edinburgh my research was greatly assisted by knowledgeable staff at Special
Collections, Edinburgh University Library, and at the National Library of Scotland.
Closer to home, I wish to thank Griffith University Library Staff for their consistently
cheerful and competent assistance, and Staff at University of Queensland Library who
ensured that Stewart’s volumes were kept current and on the shelves for me.
I take this opportunity to acknowledge the special roles played by Dr Patricia
Dobrez of the Australian Catholic University and Dr Livio Dobrez of the Australian
National University who, in the early days of Bond University, played a major role in
stimulating my interest in intellectual life.
Final thanks go to my family for their unreserved support of my decision to
study for a doctorate, especially my generous son Colby who was materially affected by
the decision, to the many friends who continue to enrich my life, and especially to
Catherine Gordon for her fierce support and sense of humour.
 ii

Statement of Originality

This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university.
To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously
published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis
itself.

Signed : . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jennifer Tannoch-Bland
 iii

Abbreviations

AUP Aberdeen University Press

BAAS British Association for the Advancement of Science
CUP Cambridge University Press
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
ER Edinburgh Review
EUL Edinburgh University Library
EUP Edinburgh University Press
NLS National Library of Scotland
OUP Oxford University Press
PUP Princeton University Press
UCP University of Chicago Press
I-XI Vols I – XI of Stewart’s Collected Works (1854-60)
 1

Chapter 1

Introduction
 2
In histories of the Scottish Enlightenment, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) is
usually portrayed as its dying light, sometimes its ‘last major thinker’, or ‘the most
important transmitter of the Scottish Enlightenment to the nineteenth century’ (Howe
1997:51; Oz-Salzberger 1995:107,317). He occupies a place in the line of Scottish
philosophers from Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), David Hume,
Thomas Reid, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar to
Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton and James Ferrier. He is regarded as the
‘populariser’ of common sense philosophy,1 the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, its
founder.2 He is also recognised as the first comprehensive chronicler of European
philosophy for a British audience, and the first historian of the Scottish Enlightenment
(Corsi 1988; Haakonssen 1994; Wood 1993).
Although I am studying Stewart as a major representative of the Scottish
common sense school of philosophy, I do not attempt a full biography or intellectual
history of his works. My focus is more on Stewart’s perception of the current status of
moral philosophy than on his entire intellectual career. The thesis is not an appraisal of
his philosophy, or a detailed assesssment of his relationship to Reid’s prior work.3 It
aims to offer some explanation for the anomalies that emerge when we read Stewart in
light of the standard presentation of him; and, more positively, to seek an intepretation
of his published texts that understands them as public acts. One key to understanding
Stewart’s work on methodology and his later reflections on intellectual character is that
they were written in an attempt to reassert the authority of moral philosophy and to
defend the role of the moral philosopher in the light of the growing prestige of the
experimental sciences. This opens up the possibility of talking about the public role of
the moral philosopher in this period, as embodied in Stewart’s case. Through studying
Stewart’s works in particular historical situations, the thesis raises the significance of
the challenge to the intellectual authority of moral philosophy from the physical

1
Arthur Kenyon Rogers (1923:12), Norman Daniels (1974:120), Anand C. Chitnis (1976:175) and Bruce
Lenman (1981:95) use the term ‘populariser’ in the sense that Stewart reached a wide public and was the
chief disseminator of the Scottish common sense philosophy. Neither they nor I claim that he reached a
popular, in the sense of mass, or low-brow audience.
2
Selwyn Grave records that ‘the philosophy of common sense became “Scottish philosophy” and
schooled several generations of Scotsmen’. Its history in Scotland ‘began at Aberdeen with Thomas
Reid’s teaching at King’s College and his papers to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society’. As well,
through Victor Cousin’s influence on French education, it became ‘part of the “official” philosophy of
France’. It was also established in America, and impressed philosophers of some distinction in Italy and
Belgium (Grave 1960:1-10).
 3
sciences, and analyses Stewart’s re-affirmation of the cultural role of the moral
philosopher in the Scottish context.

Eminence, obscurity and influence

Stewart held the Chair of Mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to
1785. More importantly, he held the Chair of Moral Philosophy for 25 years from 1785
to 1810. He designed and taught the first separate course in political economy in
Britain, at Edinburgh University, from 1800 to 1809. Stewart was known as the most
popular lecturer of his day, with students crowding his classes in unprecedented
numbers, overflowing into the gallery. He ‘regularly attracted even larger numbers’
than his predecessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy, Adam Ferguson (Sher
1990:123).4 Through his lectures he influenced a generation of students who were to
become men of position in Great Britain, among them the founders of the Edinburgh
Review (Fontana 1985; Winch 1983) and others who became influential in London
political and social circles. Several pupils left testimonials to the beneficial impact their
professor had made on their lives (Bourne & Taylor 1994; Napier 1879). The tributes of
such students leave no doubt about the role Stewart played in their lives.5 Moral
philosophy was a compulsory subject for James Mill, a Divinity student, and yet:
All the years I remained about Edinburgh, I used, as often as I possibly could, to
steal into Mr Stewart’s class to hear a lecture, which was always a high treat . . .
The taste for the studies which have formed my favourite pursuits, and which
will be so till the end of my life, I owe to him. (Chitnis 1986:127)

Having later heard Pitt and Fox ‘at their best’, Mill maintained that ‘I have never heard
anything so eloquent as some of the lectures of Professor Stewart’ (Phillipson 1983:89).
Another student, Henry Cockburn (later Judge), said that Stewart, ‘one of the greatest of
didactic orators, . . . breathed the love of virtue into whole generations of pupils’. His
lectures were ‘magic . . . like the opening of the heavens’; there was ‘eloquence in his
very spitting’ (Cockburn 1874[1856]:21-3).6
Historians of the Scottish Enlightenment have confirmed these attitudes. In the
words of James Lorimer, author of The Universities of Scotland (1854), ‘he was the

3
Rather, I draw on secondary sources to reveal how Reid is read and how Stewart is seen in relation to
Reid.
4
While Stewart was still substituting for Ferguson, Professor Dalzel attested that ‘the students even like
him better than Ferguson’ (quoted in Chitnis 1986:21).
5
Some, including Alexander Campbell, the musician and author, and Lord John Russell (1831) (prime
minister), were inspired to write odes (Dc.6.111.ff.1-2;Dc.6.111.f.11:EUL).
 4
centre in Edinburgh circles of all what was distinguished in literature, science, or
intellect, while as a public lecturer he was, and has remained, without a rival’. Nicholas
Phillipson, who interprets Stewart’s relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment,
describes him as ‘a pedagogue of genius who became the most influential philosophy
teacher in the West outside Germany’. Stewart, and through him Reid, ‘ruled supreme
in the class room’ (Phillipson:83-5,88). His books enjoyed enormous popularity in the
United States,7 and largely through his texts, the Scottish common sense philosophy
dominated the American curriculum into the late nineteenth century, making it possible
for men like Thomas Jefferson to find Stewart ‘enlightening’ (Schneider 1957:158-65).8
He was also studied in ‘France, Switzerland, parts of Germany, Italy and in Oxford,
Cambridge and after 1826 in the new University College of London’ (Phillipson:83-
5,88). He was described in Public Characters of 1800-1801 as a man of ‘most profound
metaphysical genius’ (Phillips 1801:287).9 His name was so familiar that Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in an ‘Essay on Method’ (1809) referred to ‘Bacon and Stewart’ without
explanation (Coleridge 1969:490). P.-P. Royer-Collard, professor of the history of
philosophy in the Sorbonne from 1811-14, used the Scottish philosophy of common
sense as a way of attacking the scepticism and materialism of Condillacisme. Stewart
was well known as the author of the first of the ‘Preliminary Dissertations’ to the
Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1815 and 1821. His influence in
London circles was such that a single letter from him opened many doors (Yeo 2001a:
chapter 10). In the late 1820s even Goethe praised Stewart’s philosophy (Lehmann
1971:164). In the 1830s, once Theodore Jouffroy had translated Reid and Stewart, the
doctrines of common sense philosophy became, through Victor Cousin’s influence on
French education, part of the official academic philosophy of France (Madden 1986;
Phillipson :83-4).10 In short, he was ‘the most powerful exponent of philosophic culture

6
See Laurie (1902:219) re accolade by Dr. John Thomson. See Hollander (1966:34) for a list of
accolades about Stewart’s eloquence.
7
By 1824, his Outlines of Moral Philosophy was in its eighth American edition and had already sold over
7,500 copies (Phillipson:83). At the turn of the century Stewart was acknowledged to be the foremost
Scottish literary man residing in Scotland (Mackintosh was named as the foremost residing in England)
(Phillips 1801:288).
8
Stewart and Jefferson became close friends in Paris (Howe:69). For Jefferson’s marginalia in Stewart’s
Elements, follow link Dugald Stewart, 1982, to Thomas Jefferson, at American Library of Congress,
http://lcweb.loc.gov/catalog/. In America, philosophy and common sense became virtually synonymous
for much of the nineteenth century (Haakonssen 1990a:34).
9
In 1872 F. D. Maurice, in his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, claimed that early in the century ‘the
most honoured name in [British] philosophy was Dugald Stewart’ (Davie 1961:258).
10
Phillipson actually locates Jouffrey’s translations in the 1830s, but according to T. E. Jessop, he
translated the Outlines in 1826. Stewart’s Elements had been translated in French in 1808 by P. Prevost
of Geneva, and his Philosophical Essays in 1828 by Huret (Jessop 1938:179).
 5
in Great Britain’ (Metz 1950:31).11 At the same time his publications excited some
controversy, and this of course did nothing to diminish his public visibility.12
Given Stewart’s prominence during his lifetime, his later obscurity raises the
question: Why is Stewart so little studied by historians of British philosophy? By the
time John Stuart Mill (1867[1843]:104,127,150-1,406-8,483) wrote his Logic, Stewart
was relegated to passing references, which is curious given that later, in his
Autobiography, Mill granted that he had generalised Stewart’s position on axiomatic
reasoning (Mill 1971[1873]:109). Only then did Mill credit Stewart with providing the
leading idea of his theory of the syllogism (Anschutz 1969[1953]:135-6,148-50). So
faded was Stewart’s light that by 1875 the American common sense philosophy
professor and president of Princeton, James McCosh (a Scot), was able to report that
though Stewart studiously avoided controversy, he was ‘the model disciple’. Listing
Stewart’s ‘weaknesses’, McCosh found that
he has no ability for sharp analysis, and he looks on a high abstraction with as
great terror as some men do on ghosts. He studiously avoids close discussion,
and flinches from controversy; he seems afraid of fighting with an opponent,
lest it should exhibit him in no seemly attitudes. Seldom does he venture on a
bold assertion, and, when he does, he takes shelter immediately after behind an
authority. (McCosh 1966[1875]:282)
After finding Stewart, compared to Locke, Leibniz, Smith, Reid, Kant and Hamilton,
‘inferior to all these men in originality’, McCosh (282) warned that it would be unjust to
think him ‘devoid of originality’.13 Nevertheless, subsequent historians of the Scottish
Enlightenment have dismissed Stewart as offering no original contribution to
philosophy, though granting that he performed a prodigious service in summarising the
position of the Scottish common sense philosophers.14 (It would be interesting to

11
He was honoured with membership of the Philosophical Society of Paris and the Royal Academy of
Berlin (NLS:MS.5319, f.53).
12
In 1854, the year Hamilton began publishing Stewart’s Collected Works, Stewart was still in the public
mind. When the artist James Edgar painted his ‘Imaginary’ gathering of late eighteenth-century
Edinburgh luminaries in that year, professors Dugald Stewart, Hugh Blair and Adam Ferguson were there
(even James Playfair did not feature!), along with Henry Dundas, Robert Burns, Lord Monboddo and
others (National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh).
13
Following McCosh (302), historians generally have regretted Stewart’s uninformed criticism of Kant,
although a few, like Manfred Kuehn (1987), have suggested that Kantian philosophy may have been a
development of Hume and Reid. This is not relevant to that aspect of Stewart’s work which will be the
focus of this dissertation.
14
Rogers (12) claims that Stewart succeeded in ‘popularising philosophy rather than advancing it’.
Schneider (1967:xxii) asserts that ‘as is his wont, Stewart performs well in summarizing for his “school”’.
Daniels (120) credits Stewart with popularising Reid’s ‘epistemological and moral views’. Chitnis
(1976:175) claims that ‘Stewart’s great strength lay in his ability to popularise and transmit the work of
the previous generation of literati and to encourage philosophical generalising’. Keith Lehrer (1989:5)
calls Stewart a ‘famous follower’ of Reid. Lenman (1981:95) calls Stewart ‘no original thinker’ though
he ‘popularized the philosophical tradition of Reid’. Phillipson (88) reports that he ‘had no original
 6
explore the role that McCosh’s demolition of Stewart might have played in the
relegation of Stewart to historical obscurity.)
Stewart is usually seen in relation to Scottish, and not British, philosophy
(Chitnis 1986; Daniels 1974; Emerson 1990a; Grave 1960; Jessop 1938; Lehrer 1989;
Lenman 1981; Madden 1986; Metz 1950; Phillipson 1981; Schneider 1967; Wood
1985). But recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the
contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and
his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud
Haakonssen (1994). He is emerging as an influence on figures in British psychology,
physics, political economy, linguistics, evolutionary theory, science and religion,
education, and philosophy of science. For instance, Edward Manier identifies Stewart
as a member of Charles Darwin’s ‘cognitive cultural circle’ and argues that the
‘developmental and historical themes of Stewart’s philosophy of language are of the
first importance for an accurate interpretation of Darwin’s understanding of his own
theory’.15 In aesthetics, Andrew Hemingway (1989:29) places Stewart at ‘the beginning
of a new phase in the embourgeoisement of taste’. J. Charles Robertson argues that
Stewart set the tone for the ‘subsequent development, from Renouvier to James, of an
analytic psychology’.16 Haakonssen (1984;1996a) notes the importance of Stewart’s
contribution to political economy and identifies a thorough break with Smith.
Biancamaria Fontana sees Stewart’s political economy as central to the development of
nineteenth-century English political economy, and traces Stewart’s influence through his
pupils, who included the Young Turks of the Edinburgh Review, such as James Mill.17

philosophy to his name’. Grave credits Stewart, though his writing lacked Reid’s ‘penetrating simplicity’,
with having ‘consolidated the school’s position’ (Grave 1967:157). Metz (31) maintains that ‘his only
service in point of theory consisted in the fact that he tried to systematize his master’s doctrine’. Oz-
Salzberger (107), whose focus is Adam Ferguson, sees Stewart as Ferguson’s ‘famous disciple’.
15
Stewart’s ‘account of the etymological development of such words as “beauty” provided . . . for the
linguistic representation of family resemblance in a series of objects when no quality is “common to any
three objects in the series” ’. Stewart ‘pointed the way’ and ‘set a standard which Darwin was willing to
extend to every aspect of mind’ (Manier 1978:38-9). Bruce Mazlish (1989:41) claims that it was ‘the
reading of Dugald Stewart’s Life of Adam Smith some weeks before reading Malthus that prepared Darwin
to be receptive to the latter’s population theory’.
16
Robertson (1976:42) is referring to Stewart’s assertion that the systematic examination of the evidence
of our own consciousness ‘will lead in time to the general principles of the human constitution, and will
gradually form a science of mind not inferior in certainty to the science of body’ (Italics Robertson’s).
Ekbert Faas (1988:7,37,47) sees Stewart’s three-volumed Elements as the founding literature of modern
psychiatry, and mental scientists as ‘the first to propose psychiatry as a new metaphysics or general
framework for most scientific and speculative endeavours’.
17
Fontana claims that John Stuart Mill’s account of his sources is misleading, since his own method was
directly influenced by Stewart. Though by the 1830s Stewart was no longer the acknowledged point of
reference for debate, the framework of his approach was still very much influential. He supplied the basic
conceptual apparatus, and clearly articulated all the tensions of the debate (Fontana 1985:104-5).
 7
In a work that illuminates the epistemological conditions of early sciences of wealth and
society, Mary Poovey (1998:269-70) now also recognizes the importance of Stewart’s
classroom in the intellectual life of Britain: in her words, he ‘opened the potential for a
new mode of philosophical knowledge, which generated not certainty but hope’.18 Hans
Aarsleff locates Stewart’s contribution to linguistics in his ‘remarkably astute
examination of Locke’; and Graham Richards (1992:117) claims that, prior to 1850,
Stewart alone approached a modern pragmatic view of language.19 According to Peter
Jones and Andrew Skinner (1992:66-7), Stewart’s account of universals (for which
Smith was the source) foreshadowed Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances.
Edward H. Madden (1986:48) claims that Stewart was outdone on the importance of
meaning analysis only in the twentieth century by various strands of analytic philosophy.
In Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, Richard Olson (1975:109) claims that it was
Stewart who set the stage for the value of hypothesis to science. Larry Laudan agrees,
recognising Stewart as ‘the leading English-language philosopher at the turn of the
century’, and in his role as a methodologist, regards him as a shaper of philosophy of
science as we know it today.20 According to Pietro Corsi, ‘the influence of Stewart was
of primary importance to [the] early reflections on science’ of Baden Powell, Savilian
professor of geometry at Oxford, and he was a major figure for Cardinal John Newman,
Edward Copleston, Richard Whately, Nassau William Senior, William Whewell,
Richard Jones, James Mill and John Stuart Mill (Corsi 1987; 1988:42-47). From this
selection of studies it seems clear that Stewart did exert an influence on key figures in
British philosophical circles.

18
Poovey identifies Stewart’s work as the last site at which moral philosophy and political economy
overlapped.
19
It was Stewart who, in demonstrating that Locke had been misrepresented on many fronts, was able to
argue that Locke ‘should not be held accountable for Condillac’s opinion that “our ideas are nothing more
than transformed sensations”, a claim which more than any other . . . to the nineteenth century constituted
the essence of “Locke’s system” and clear proof of his sensualism and ultimate materialism’. Stewart also
argued that Leibniz confirmed ‘the substance of Locke’s doctrine’. Stewart argued correctly but against
convention, and few paid attention to his refutation of the false interpretations of Locke on innate ideas
and on the power of moral judgement (Aarsleff 1982:128-38).
20
Laudan sees the early nineteenth-century about-turn on hypothesis as central to the emergence of
modern philosophy of science (Laudan 1981:10-15).
 8
However, no attempt has been made to conduct a systematic study of Stewart’s
work, his context and his contribution to early nineteenth-century culture.21 It might
seem odd that it is in a book about Baden Powell that Corsi discusses Stewart; yet he
sees Stewart as a key methodological figure who influenced major British philosophers.
Lamenting the ‘almost general neglect of Stewart’s influence on early nineteenth-
century English philosophy’, Corsi calls for ‘a comprehensive historical assessment of
British philosophy in the early decades of the nineteenth century’, beginning with
Stewart and addressing ‘the complex issue of his legacy’ (Corsi 1988:176-7). I take this
literature and Corsi’s assessment as my starting point: recognizing that Stewart did
make important methodological pronouncements, I argue that he made them in the
context of his defence of moral philosophy. This thesis does not attempt to trace
Stewart’s philosophical development or to answer Corsi’s call for a comprehensive
study of Stewart’s legacy, though both are important projects. I will not be judging
Stewart as a philosopher, or evaluating his standing vis-à-vis other philosophers. The
philosophical integrity of his answers is not my concern.22

Historiography
One reason given for Stewart’s neglect is that he was not a ‘major’ philosopher;
but recent debates in the historiography of philosophy reveal a friction between history
of philosophy and intellectual history. Much history of philosophy has been written by
philosophers interested in the position taken by certain major or classic authors on what
are seen to be the important and perennial philosophical issues.23 Some intellectual
historians, viewing history of philosophy as anachronistic – interested in past
philosophers only in so far as they fulfil present criteria and needs – have attempted to
avoid the presentist orientation of the history of philosophy by bringing it into more
dialogue with history.24 Arguing that a history of philosophy encompassing only those
thinkers identified as ‘great’ by nineteenth-century historians is an unbalanced one,

21
It is interesting to note the contrast with major German philosophers of the late-eighteenth and early-
nineteenth centuries. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were highly controversial figures, almost ‘stars’, and
have continued to generate scholarly interest.
22
My training is not in philosophy, so this thesis is not an attempt at philosophical adjudication or the
resurrection of Dugald Stewart as an ‘important’ philosopher. Nor am I expert in moral philosophy, so
this thesis is not about Stewart’s moral philosophy. These are important concerns, but they are not the
business of this thesis.
23
See for instance History of Philosophy Quarterly, a journal specialising in papers manifesting a strong
interaction between contemporary and historical concerns: it calls for papers either addressing topics on
the agenda of current discussion, or using present concepts to illustrate historical questions.
24
See for instance British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
 9
some have objected to intellectual history depicting a series of steps made by great
philosophers on the path to universal truth.25 Historians of philosophy, on the other
hand, have had no patience with intellectual historians’ professed neutrality on issues of
philosophical validity. But, according to Rorty, Schneewind & Skinner (1984:6-13),
such a facile opposition of intellectual history and history of philosophy results from
treating history and philosophy as names of natural kinds. This involves the belief that
the past is the dominion of history and that timeless problems are the domain of
philosophy, whereas in fact no idea is uncontaminated by language, and no past is
uncontaminated by our understanding. The political philosopher, Quentin Skinner
(1969; 1988; 1996), is part of the initiative to move away from the presentist approach.
His work is a response to those who find the relevance of classic authors like Plato to be
in their answers to supposedly timeless questions, whereas these are in fact twentieth-
century philosophical concerns.26 I see this thesis as dependent on such work.
Skinner (1969), along with W. H. Greenleaf (1968) and J.G.A. Pocock (1972),
occupy one response position in these debates, emphasising the need to understand past
texts in relation to the (essentially linguistic) contexts in which they were composed.27
In his essay, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’(1969), Skinner was
rejecting a cluster of prevailing approaches: Lovejoy’s ‘histories of ideas’ that traced the
morphology of ideas over time; the concentration of intellectual biographers on classic
works; and the Leavisite belief in the text itself as the ‘sole necessary key to its own
meaning’. He argued that the classical theorists not only failed to enunciate the
doctrines attributed to them in the traditional, internalist history of philosophy, but could
not have done so: there were limits to the kinds of statements it was possible for an actor
to make in a given historical period.
One dissenter from this view, Preston King (1995:209-233), argues that the
contextualism of Skinner and Pocock, in claiming that ultimately we cannot know the
past, is tantamount to the sins of postmodern historicism. This seems to me to be an

25
Ironically, Stewart provided this model in his ‘Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political
Philosophy’ (1815), where he omitted discussion of some who had flourished in the past because,
‘however celebrated among their contemporaries, they do not seem to form essential links in the History
of Science’ (I:59).
26
He argues, instead, that the classic texts, far from instructing us on ‘timeless’ truths, address their own
quite alien problems, but that they can reveal to us the way in which our own ‘truths’ may be mere
‘contingencies of our peculiar history and social structure’ (Skinner 1969:52-3).
27
David Boucher (1985) offers a survey and analysis of revisionist methods for studying the history of
ideas.
 10
exaggeration of the contextualist claim that we have to look for ways to get outside our
present-centred worldviews, in order better to understand the past. For contemporary
contextual historicists, values are the product of certain historical conditions and have
played a given role in the historical process, but unlike Marx, they do not moralise over
the past, or over the future. King charges that contextualism, by ‘morally neutering
history, has helped to make the history of thought (appear) irrelevant to contemporary
moral issues and crises’. He implies that the attention to lesser known texts and figures
‘clutters up the stories we seek to tell’ (King:232). Suzanne Marchand expresses a
similar concern when she claims that, since Michel Foucault popularised the equality of
all discourse, ‘it is hard to know when and where to stop contextualizing’, and it is
‘getting harder to know what is relevant and what is not . . . [and] how to construe
“influence”’ (Marchand 1995:89-90). Despite these reservations, if we seek to construct
what William Bouwsma (1981) terms ‘the history of meanings’, we have no choice but
to continue to seek to trace personal, religious, political, economic and societal links, to
study texts in relation to these links, and to ask questions of the texts and their contexts.
Intellectual history can be seen as exploring the role that thought itself plays in enabling
people to understand, and to change, the world in which they live (Colton 1981).
Notwithstanding the differences among intellectual historians and the crisis some see in
their discipline (Bouwsma 1981; Kelly 1990; Toews 1987), few deny that by including
the marginalised, those previously unheard, or popularisers in accounts of the history of
ideas, the discipline has gained overall.
This thesis attempts to contextualise some of Stewart’s works and to recover, to
some extent, the intentions of the author. For this reason, it depends on the work
discussed above. Noting the extent to which Stewart departed from the position of his
mentor, Reid, I have examined some of the contextual aspects of his works with an eye
to discovering what Stewart may have been doing in saying what he did (Pocock 1972;
Skinner 1969). This approach is based on Skinner’s use of Austin’s speech-act theory,
and the idea of retrieving the ‘illocutionary force’ of a text. Austin was concerned to
find
a means of recovering what the agent may have been doing in saying what was
said, and hence of understanding what the agent may have meant by issuing an
utterance with just that sense and reference. (Q.Skinner 1988:260)28

28
I have drawn on Skinner’s exposition in Tully (1988), where he has the opportunity to respond to his
critics.
 11
Wittgenstein had understood that ‘words are also deeds’, but Austin distinguished
between ‘what we may be doing in saying something from what we may bring about by
saying something’. To separate these questions, he introduced a neologism, proposing
that we speak of the ‘illocutionary as opposed to the perlocutionary force of utterances’.
Skinner stresses that ‘to speak with a certain illocutionary force is normally to perform
an act of a certain kind, to engage in a piece of deliberate and voluntary behaviour’. The
illocutionary dimension of language thus involves the ‘intentions of the agent’
(Q.Skinner 1988:260-61). Skinner’s methodological relevance for my work consists in
his concentration on retrieving authorial intention.29 Dieter Freundlieb (1980:436) has
pointed out that illocutionary redescriptions do not explain speech acts, and Skinner
concedes that what is explained is the ‘character of the utterance’ and not the agent’s
motives; but he insists that the illocutionary redescription of an utterance as a particular
type of act brings us much closer to understanding motives. Moreover, he claims that
recovering the illocutionary description of a speech act constitutes ‘an indispensable
step along the road to explaining why the act in question was performed’ (Q.Skinner
1988:266-7). Thus seeking the illocutionary force of a text is a necessary, but not
sufficient, activity if we want to understand an author’s motives.
According to King, good historical reconstruction emerges despite, rather than
because of, the method of contextualism, which he sees as intrinsically irrational. He
presents the process of contextualising the text as an endless and impossible one which
demands that succeeding contexts must in turn be contextualised. Thus all contexts are
texts, and a contextual analysis is no sounder than a textual analysis (King:209-10). He
exaggerates Skinner’s view of context as an adjunct to determining the meaning of texts.
Since the historian’s object is to clarify or improve understanding, King allows that all
historians are always interested in various contexts; the problem lies with
‘methodological ideologues’ who elevate the context over the text. King, I think
unfairly, characterises historical contextualists as claiming that the ‘historical
investigation of contexts centrally determines the meaning of texts’ (King:217). It
might be more helpful to see contextualism as a response to the banishment of
contextualism and hermeneuticism by textual analysis.30 In other words, contextualism

29
While Skinner (1996:7-8) concentrates on the ‘dimension of linguistic action’ rather than the
‘dimension of meaning’, he is concerned with meaning, seeing himself as exploring ‘a further and
discriminable aspect of the hermeneutic enterprise’.
30
Boucher (2) sees contextualist ‘revisionism’ in terms of such a reaction, and Skinner (1969:3) identifies
literary criticism and the position of F.R. Leavis as problematic.
 12
is a reinstatement of the modest claim that historical investigation adds to what we
know about texts.
A constructive criticism of the speech-act theory is offered by Haakonssen
(1996a:10-14), who notes that its proponents allow no role for the locutionary function
of language. He suggests that we should take it as a matter for exploration that given
utterances have identifiable objects of reference, and argues that it is part of the
intellectual historian’s task to write the history of the utterance not only as performance
but also as a reference. Haakonssen concedes that there is value in histories of
‘mentalities’, psycho-histories, marxist histories, and contextualist histories, all of which
have served to correct ‘Whig’ historiography. In fact the ‘contextualist fashion’ has
made historians of ideas more honest in terms of resisting anachronism. But he insists
that there remains a need for a history of ideas that understands ideas as intellectual
phenomena with their own logic, and advocates methodological pluralism, not
necessarily on the part of the solitary scholar, but within the discipline of intellectual
history.

Stewart’s Context
Early in the nineteenth century Stewart’s was ‘the most honoured name in
[British] philosophy’ (Davie 1961:258). Born into the academic silk of Edinburgh, he
held high academic office, commanded great respect, admiration and loyalty, had a large
social circle, and became a leading philosophical writer. But, in fact, after the French
Revolution he was censured, tacitly repressed for political reasons. So there is a sense
in which he was marginalised. We have already seen that he was most definitely a
populariser; and in fact is usually represented by secondary sources as a mere
populariser. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise the sense in which this role is
understood: although he reached a wide public and was the chief disseminator of the
Scottish common sense philosophy, his audience was an upper-class and educated,
rather than a popular, one. Francis Jeffrey, Stewart’s pupil, supporter and tenacious
critic, said of the first volume of Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human
Mind that it had ‘been more read than any other modern book on such subjects’ (Jeffrey
1810:171). The phrase, ‘on such subjects’, helps us to define the audience as readers of
philosophical literature, and thus reveals the way in which Stewart was both a popular
and non-popular writer. He had no intention of reaching ‘the multitude’, and thought
that the only way he could, inadvertently, do so was through being taken up by
 13
‘inflammatory writers’ (X:lxxiii).31 Thus Stewart’s status as an historical actor is
somewhat ambiguous. Today he is a little-known historical figure, and his texts are not
readily available as are, say, those of Hume, Locke or Kant, but he was celebrated in his
lifetime, influencing philosophical education in France and the United States of
America. Still, that celebrity was complicated by his tenuous status as a Whig in
Edinburgh during the Dundas despotism.32
How does this affect an explanation of his general neglect by intellectual
historians? Did the repression he suffered have any consequences for his treatment by
posterity? Perhaps what he had to say is no longer relevant. Perhaps he introduced no
new or important ideas. But Stephen Gaukroger (1986:68) warns that unless we can
understand how philosophical topics have been generated and disputed and have then
declined, we will not fully understand why some issues still command our attention, and
by what right. In other words, if we are to understand how we have come to think as we
do, we must attend to crucial concerns of the past that have simply died out. While I do
not address such concerns of the past, many of Stewart’s concerns are in this category. I
suggest that an account of a once celebrated but tacitly alienated and now neglected
disseminator can enrich our account of the Scottish Enlightenment, and of British
philosophy.
Stewart was writing at a significant historical moment: the convergence of the
French Revolution, the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, the second scientific revolution
(comprising great advances in chemistry, and new disciplines of biology and geology),
the dissolution of Scottish education, the end of the Scottish Enlightenment and the
emergence of strong scientism. In Britain, materialism and scepticism were seen as
threats to religion, producing a revival of revealed theology and evangelicalism
(Gascoigne 1989:237-269; Hilton 1988). Stewart was a Scottish Whig at a time when
Whigs were being tried for sedition in Edinburgh. He promoted mental philosophy at a
time when it was under serious threat on the grounds that it was non-experimental,
outdated, and of no use. He defended the hypothetical method ‘in an age which took the
view that, where hypotheses were concerned, indirect evidence was no evidence at all’
(Laudan 1981:115). In the very act of promoting common sense philosophy he reshaped
it, so that what he popularised was something other than Reid’s doctrine. At a time

31
Abbé Coyer in 1755 noticed that words used to refer to the population at large, a category which once
included respected citizens, now designated the lower orders (Hundert 1986:143).
32
The term refers to the political management of Scotland in the 1790s by the Tory, Henry Dundas.
 14
when ‘natural philosophy’ had differentiated into a variety of subjects and disciplines,
he defended the role of the philosopher in face of the increasing importance of the
experimental sciences. When the Scottish educational system was under threat, he
defended the moral philosophy curriculum. When an orthodox Baconianism prevailed
in Britain, he revised the notion of Baconian induction to include hypothesis, Reid’s
instinctive inductive principle, Humean causality, the design argument, and final causes.
When public controversy raged in Edinburgh over the separation of church and
education, he entered the fray in print and in person.33 It is not surprising that his works
were the subject of controversy.
None of this fits easily with the popular notion, exemplified in McCosh, that
Stewart cringed in the face of conflict; he was renowned, and even lampooned, for his
aversion to controversy.34 Even Cockburn, who sang his praises heartily and thought
that Stewart’s was ‘the great era in the progress of young men’s minds’, noted that he
‘shrank, with a horror which was sometimes rather ludicrous, from all polemical matter’
(Cockburn 1874[1856]:19-20). Stewart himself asserted he had dropped all references
to the slave trade from his lectures as soon as it had become a topic of ‘popular
discussion’ (X:lxxiv). His good friend, Sydney Smith, related in a letter to Lady
Holland how he had enjoyed himself at Stewart’s expense, by playing on his terror of
conflict.35 This thesis will explore not only the ways in which his work was
controversial, but also his responses to controversy, responses which seem less
perplexing when we discover something of the illocutionary force of his texts.
Although Corsi claims the domain of controversy to be the most rich in potential
insights (André 1992:284), I have not chosen Stewart’s texts for analysis on the basis of
their known ‘controversial’ value. I have looked to the domain of controversy, in

33
Unless otherwise stated, all personal details are derived from John Veitch’s ‘Memoir’ (X).
34
Winch (44) records that the Edinburgh Reviewers, despite their tributes to his influence, ‘poked gentle
fun at his foibles, notably his timidity and abiding fear of being misrepresented’.
35
It was Christmas 1808, and Smith wrote as follows: ‘Poor Dugald Stewart is extremely alarmed by the
repeated assurances I made that he was the author of Plymley’s Letters - generally so considered to be’.
Peter Plymley’s Letters (1808) dealt with the Irish question, and had a keen readership amongst all
parties. They were highly critical of Britain, for all its vaunted compassion, justice and liberality, as being
blind to its own oppressive behaviour in Ireland. Amongst many other provocations, they likened Britain
to a pious, charitable and publicly generous man who comes home and beats his wife and children (Bell
1980:79-82). In fact Smith himself was the author (DNB:528). Stewart deplored ‘inflammatory writers’,
and expressed an anxious desire to prevent the ‘evil’ of encouraging ‘political discussions among the
multitude’ (X:lxxiii). When Smith carried Stewart’s science of mind to London, Horner, who heard Smith
lecture, reported a ‘very affectionate, and very eloquent passage about Dugald Stewart, which produced
great effect’ (Bourne & Taylor:361). Stewart was simultaneously the object of fun, affection and respect.
 15
particular the Stewart-Jeffrey debate, to explain the apparent disjunction between these
two images – Stewart as moral crusader, and Stewart as cringing coward.

To seek to include Stewart in the history of philosophy is not inclusivism for its
own sake. Even as a populariser he was, in his day, ‘the most celebrated philosophy
teacher in the Western world’ (Phillipson 1983:88). In his ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to
the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1815 & 1821), he set the tone for the subsequent
development of history of philosophy in the English speaking world.36 He wrote
extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology,
and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. An attempt to discern
some of Stewart’s concerns, projects, assumptions, aims, and constraints involves the
notion of authorial intent, and to seek to understand what he was doing in writing
deepens our understanding of the place or role of philosophy and the philosopher in this
troubled period.
Whereas it has generally been thought that Stewart’s separate course of lectures
on political economy served to make that subject independent of moral philosophy
(Winch:512), Salim Rashid questions whether this was Stewart’s intent. When Stewart
became the ‘first professor to deliver a highly popular and influential course of lectures
on political economy at any British university’, David Hume, James Steuart and Adam
Smith had already departed from established Scottish academical tradition and followed
the English in treating political economy as largely an independent subject. But Stewart
realised that even the political economy of these three men, and that of the French
physiocrats, was too narrow in scope in that it was confined to wealth and population or
the resources of the state. Since economy was the most important aspect of political
life, Stewart believed that political economists should keep the ultimate ends of social
life in view. In other words, moral philosophy must guide political economy (Rashid
1987:145,151). What is relevant here is Rashid’s contention that Stewart offered a
separate course in political economy in order to reintroduce the primacy of moral
philosophy.
Consciously breaking with the English and with the most eminent of his Scottish
predecessors in the field, Stewart advocated a wide scope for political economy, so that

36
Haakonssen (1994:viii) observes that it was the common sense view of early modern philosophy and
Kant’s simultaneous creation of a useful past, together, which ‘determined the understanding of the
history of philosophy until our time’. In the English language, Stewart was the author who brought this
common sense view to a large audience.
 16
under this rubric he dealt with many (moral philosophical) topics that Smith treated as
extraneous to political economy (Rashid:151).37 It seems that Stewart, far from
knowingly undertaking a course of action that would weaken the intellectual authority of
moral philosophy, was seeking through this course of lectures to strengthen moral
philosophy by emphasising its importance as a framework for the consideration of
economic policy. Rashid (1985:257) claims Stewart as the ‘grandparent’ of political
economy on the grounds of his methodological innovation.38 Not only did Stewart
demonstrate originality in his use of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the physiocrats, he
also
independently arrived at most of Malthus’ population views; he reformulated
Adam Smith’s views on the division of labour so as to anticipate E. G.
Wakefield and Charles Babbage . . . criticised the material embodiment concept
of wealth well before Nassau Senior and pointed out the futility of an absolute
measure of value as clearly as Samuel Bailey. (Rashid 1987:154)
Between 1790 and 1800 Stewart’s advocacy of the physiocrats hurt his reputation
because the physiocrats were seen as inciting revolution. Between 1800 and 1810 his
anti-Bullionist ideas meant that he was of little use to the Whigs. His own modest and
unassuming nature precluded self-promotion. For instance, he professed himself to be
mainly following the Wealth of Nations, even though he freely criticised many of
Smith’s positions and, in fact, produced an original synthesis. His lectures were not
published until 1858, by which time all his original points had been rediscovered.
Finally, his insistence on the truth of Free Trade and on Adam Smith’s sanctity on this
point may have deflected attention from the differences between Stewart and Smith
(Rashid 1987:154-55).
Rashid has demonstrated that it is too easy, and plainly misleading, at least in the
history of political economy, to say that the reason for Stewart’s neglect is that he was

37
Rashid does not challenge the historiography that sees Smith as a moral philosopher. He does not paint
Smith as a proto-economic rationalist, but he points out that Smith had already treated political economy
as an independent subject. There were items he dealt with under headings other than political economy,
and these items were retrieved by Stewart and brought under the heading of political economy. Smith
took the authority of moral philosophy for granted, and simply in logical terms treated political economy
as a separate subject. Stewart continued this tradition, but the intellectual and institutional climate had
changed - moral philosophy could no longer be taken for granted. Since many of his political economy
students were not students of moral philosophy (Jeffrey for instance studied law), he emphasised the
importance of moral philosophy within an independent course on political economy. Smith, in contrast,
taught political economy in his moral philosophy course.
38
Elsewhere, Rashid (1987a:260) claims that ‘Stewart gradually came to see little originality in Smith’s
contribution’.
 17
not a major thinker. Though Stewart departed significantly from Reid’s common sense
philosophy, and made an original contribution to the philosophy of science and to
mental philosophy, the value of his contribution has been overlooked. His science of
mind proved to be a lost cause, and the details of his outmoded views are perhaps of
minor interest today; but we have histories of phrenology and phrenologists, so the fact
that the science of mind has been discredited is not sufficient explanation for his
neglect.
I suggest that there are several reasons why Stewart has remained largely hidden
from history. First, his endorsement of certain philosophes in his Elements (1792) drew
hostile censure from powerful people after the French Revolution. Second, in
steadfastly remaining a Whig during the Dundas despotism, he became the target of
suspicion and boycott. Some Tories would not expose their sons to his influence,
forbidding attendance at his lectures (Cockburn 1874[1852]:49). Third, Stewart
claimed in his Elements to be writing for students, and indeed his works became
textbooks; this tended to deflect attention from the original features of his thought.
Fourth, just as he claimed to be promoting Smith’s political economy, in the science of
mind he purported to be continuing Reid’s important and foundational work. In casting
himself as a mere populariser, Stewart set the tone, and historians from McCosh
onwards have, until recently, seen no reason to dissent. Fifth, unlike other British
philosophers of his era, there was no nineteenth-century biography of Stewart offered to
the public (apart from John Veitch’s brief ‘Memoir’ in the Collected Works). This was
because the material for such an undertaking did not exist. In 1837 his son and
biographer, under the influence of a coup-de-soleil suffered in India, burned Stewart’s
journals, his unpublished works and the largest part of his correspondence, along with
his own detailed Account of the Life and Writings of his father, ‘which abounded in
anecdotes, and notices of the many distinguished men of the end of the last, and first
quarter of the present [nineteenth], century, with whom Mr. Stewart was on terms of
intimacy’ (Veitch 1858:iii).39 Sixth, at the height of his fame he was a lecturer rather

39
Matthew was the son of Stewart’s first marriage to Helen Ballantyne, his childhood sweetheart who
died in 1787 after four years of marriage. Some remnants of Stewart’s correspondence, and that of his
second wife Helen D’Arcy Cranstoun, daughter Maria, and son Matthew, are held in the NLS. Helen
ordered certain of her own correspondence burned just prior to her death (Romilly 1905:11). Original
copies of Stewart’s letters to Reid were probably burned around the time of Reid’s death (Paul Wood,
personal communication). Stewart’s library has since 1910 been housed in Special Collections, EUL
(items prefixed ‘DS’). M. Stewart (1829) represents a brief precursor of the destroyed memoir. For a list
of the unpublished works destroyed, see (VIII:ix-xvi).
 18
than an author, and it is difficult to recapture the historical significance of someone
whose contemporary influence was through the oral medium. Biancamaria Fontana has
done exactly this in the history of political economy, and it remains for this to be done
for Stewart in the history of philosophy generally. Finally, Stewart’s fear of controversy
informed a prolix literary style that may have deterred historians of ideas.

Moral philosophy and the physical sciences

Corsi (1988:43) has claimed that Stewart’s three-volume Elements of the
Philosophy of the Human Mind attempts to ‘vindicate the superiority of the philosophy
of the human mind, and of philosophers, over the physical sciences and the scientists’.
This attitude of Stewart – the consistent elevation of (metaphysical) philosophy over
(physical) sciences – is noted also by Simon Schaffer (1991:213) and Donald Winch
(123). I am interested in the different form this assertion took in each volume, since this
is a clue to understanding what Stewart was doing in each text, and in other texts. By
considering selected texts as public acts, this study seeks to recover, to some extent,
their illocutionary force – that is, something of Stewart’s unstated intentions in writing
what he did when he did.
Examination of Stewart’s works in the light of the common presentation of him
reveals anomalies and raises questions. Whereas the rejection of the hypothetical
method was central to Reid’s common sense philosophy, Stewart, in the second volume
of the Elements (1814), insisted on hypothesis as a stage in induction. Why did this
publication involve a twenty-two year incubation period? Why did Stewart depart from
Reid on such a key point? Though he was reputed to shrink from controversy, Stewart
endorsed the French philosophes at a time of political upheaval in France and reaction in
Britain, criticised the English universities for their Aristotelian logic, refused to resile
from his Whiggism at a time when Whigs were being tried for sedition in Edinburgh,
and publicly defended the independence of the university from the clergy in Edinburgh.
Why, if he so abhorred contention, did he take these positions?
Undoubtedly, Stewart was the famous follower of Reid and the populariser of
common sense philosophy. I want to argue that he was, importantly, also doing
something quite different. During the Scottish Enlightenment the science of man, and in
particular the science of mind, was the highest study of all, and intellectual authority
belonged to its high priests, the professors of moral philosophy. Because Stewart was
writing at a different time from Reid, the pressures were distinct. When Reid was
 19
writing in 1764 the superior status of moral philosophy could be assumed, and even in
1792 in Volume 1 of the Elements Stewart was content to state this supremacy. But, as I
have noted, there is an intriguing twenty-two year gap between this and the second
volume of the Elements. This could have something to do with the fact that, by the time
he published his Philosophical Essays in 1810, the second volume of his Elements in
1814 and the third in 1827, the status of moral philosophy could no longer be taken for
granted. In the intervening years Stewart had been forced to recognise the rising
intellectual authority of the physical sciences and the effect this had on the standing,
both institutional and philosophical, of moral philosophy. His own pupil, Francis
Jeffrey, later Lord Jeffrey, had given public voice, in the Edinburgh Review, to the
charge that mental philosophy (which constituted the central part of Scottish common
sense philosophy) was outdated, irrelevant, unscientific and useless. Over a period of
almost thirty years Stewart engaged in what he saw as an urgent task – the defence of
the very role of philosophy and the philosopher in the light of the growing impact of the
experimental sciences. Stewart’s methodology represented a significant departure from
Reid’s common sense philosophy, and this can be viewed in the context of the Stewart-
Jeffrey controversy, which, I suggest, was symptomatic of the shifting locus of
intellectual authority in the decades around the turn of the century in Scotland. I argue
that one way to understand Stewart’s methodology is to see it as an attempt to reassert
the primacy of moral philosophy.
I aim to demonstrate that Stewart, although constrained to disguise some of his
more controversial ideas, was much more than a passive follower. His presentation of
common sense philosophy was not Reid’s, though the world took it to be so – Stewart
having presented it as such. And while he appeared to some contemporaries to be
locked into eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thought, especially in the area of
moral philosophy, in fact his work on scientific methodology might be construed as the
beginning of what Laudan calls ‘the philosophy of science as we know it’ (Laudan:11).
That is, it may signal the start of an understanding of science as explanation and
validation, through verification of hypotheses, rather than as inductive discovery. In the
second volume of his Elements (1814), Stewart was attempting to bridge the gap which
had opened up between mental and moral philosophy on the one hand, and natural or
Newtonian philosophy on the other. Earlier, he had taught both moral philosophy and
 20
Newton’s theories and had perceived no opposition between them.40 But by the turn of
the nineteenth century there was a debate on the nature of the social and human sciences
compared to that of the natural sciences (Hakfoort 1995a:381). The growth of
Newtonianism meant that the natural sciences were increasingly contrasted to, and
valued above, the sciences encompassed by moral philosophy, especially the abstract
Scottish mental philosophy (see chapter 3).

Biographical approaches
Given the paucity of material available for constructing a biography of Stewart,
there is a question as to whether Stewart furnishes material for a useful intellectual
biography.41 The relative absence of earlier biographies means that I cannot hope here
to fill the lacunae, although I do attempt to correct errors and to fill some gaps. Since
Stewart did not begin to publish until he was 40 years of age, there is not the distinction
between his early work and his late work as there is in, say, the work of Plato or
Aristotle. There are no juvenilia,42 and indeed there is a great deal of consistency, to say
nothing of repetition, in his published works. This often obscures the fact that Stewart’s
position did alter between 1792 and 1814, and again by 1827, and I suggest that the
modifications were in direct response to changing intellectual, religious, institutional
and political environments.43 Although the thesis is not a biography, it employs
elements of intellectual biography – as mapped by Stephen Gaukroger in his Descartes:
An intellectual biography (1995) – to throw light on Stewart’s intellectual pursuits,
establishing a rationale for them both in terms of his motivations and the cultural and
intellectual context of his motivations. I do not attempt to reconstruct his intellectual
development; rather, I address three general facets of it: the institutional environment in
which he lived and worked; the intellectual circles in which he moved; and the political

40
From 1778 until he took over the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1785, Stewart gave a course of lectures
on astronomy, in his capacity as Professor of Mathematics. (In 1787-88 he also lectured on natural
philosophy during John Robison's illness [Chitnis 1986:22].) In 1778 he began teaching moral philosophy
in the absence of Adam Ferguson.
41
Despite the problem of the destruction of material, I do use some letters, as well as printed sources.
42
Stewart incorporated his ‘Essay on Dreaming’, written when he was studying under Reid, into Elements
vol.I (II:289-305).
43
Although I do not attempt to trace Stewart’s intellectual development over time, and study only
selected works, I attempt to show that each of these represents a stage in his major campaign. At the same
time, one of his most significant career moves was made in direct response to a personal tragedy, the death
of his adult son, George, in 1809. Stewart’s health, which had never been robust, suffered a severe blow,
his grief exacerbated by the fact that he blamed himself for pushing the youth to excessive study. It was
then that he felt incapable of continuing to lecture, and he retired to Kinneil House, on the shores of the
Firth of Forth, Linlithgowshire (placed at his service by his friend the Duke of Hamilton) to write.
 21
circumstances of Scotland.44 Of course, these areas are not discrete, since educational
changes were linked to religion and politics. I do not seek to deny or downplay the
importance of the Scottish tradition in Stewart’s intellectual development, but I attempt
to show that throughout his literary career, from 1792 to 1828, Stewart continued to
respond to the tremendous social, educational, and political pressures that were
changing the face of British life. Through his direct influence on his illustrious pupils,
he continued to contribute to social and intellectual debate long after his death.
Although this study does not attempt a psychological portrait of its subject and
his private or family life, and does not claim to be an intellectual biography, it does aim
to increase our understanding of Stewart’s personal development, by examining the
kinds of self-images that he created in some of his writings.45 The self-images Stewart
created entailed tensions, and these tensions invite historical study (Gaukroger:9). I will
explore these tensions bearing in mind the unconscious nature of unstated, underlying
beliefs, and self-censorship for religious, social and political reasons. Rather than
psychological understanding, this study aims at a Skinnerean recovery of Stewart’s
conscious motivations.
Another approach to biography, focusing on self-fashioning, is interested in how
an individual uses various cultural forms to construct a public identity or image.
Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), tracing the emergence of
modern individualism from the medieval caste system, shows how, in a shifting
Renaissance world, there was opportunity for people to construct their own identity. He
describes a new consciousness about people being able to make themselves, and the
development of the modern persona. The insights I offer are generated by the
juxtapositions of philosophical texts to non-textual realities rather than to each other. In
showing philosophy at work as self-fashioning in this way, I am drawing on the insights
Greenblatt has generated about the interplay between culture and self-fashioning by
juxtaposing literary texts to the forms which power and domination take in culture.
Studying Renaissance literature from More to Shakespeare, Greenblatt argues that
beginning in the sixteenth century there was an increased self-consciousness about the
generation of identity as a manipulable process. All six writers he considers were
displaced in significant ways from a stable, inherited social world and can be said to

44
Gaukroger’s three biographical questions are 1) the relation between personal development and cultural
environment, 2) the relation between personal development and intellectual development, and 3) the
relation between intellectual pursuits and cultural and intellectual environment (Gaukroger 1995:8).
 22
have manifested fashioning new selves as a response to this experience (Greenblatt
1980:8-9).46 Although I benefit from Greenblatt’s analysis, its application to Stewart’s
case is limited because Stewart’s problem was not that he lacked a secure locus for his
identity – moral philosophy provided a strong institutional and disciplinary base. But
Greenblatt’s focus on the public images that individuals could create for themselves
leads to an approach in which the issue is not the identity of the individual, but the
identity of the discipline, or the identity of the individual in relation to the discipline.
It is interesting that recent work by historians of science touches directly on this
because of the problem of the uncertain identity of the natural philosopher and of the
status of science in the early modern period. Stewart’s concern with the identity of a
discipline renders this work relevant to my project. In the history of science, scholars
such as Steven Shapin (1990, 1991, 1994), Dorinda Outram (1978, 1984), Mario
Biagioli (1993, 1996), Lorraine Daston (1991, 1994, 1995) and Simon Schaffer (1991,
1994) have begun to investigate the role of scholarly civility in terms of discourse and
behaviour within the scientific societies and the republic of letters generally.47 In so
doing, these authors view philosophical discourse not as detached reflection on
behaviour and culture, but rather as part of behaviour and culture, related to various
assertions of the status of natural philosophy. Some of this scholarship shows how men
of science, because they did not have a clear identity to rest on, were compelled to
construct one. When natural philosophy was a culturally weak, ill-defined, marginal
activity, its practitioners fashioned an identity for the man of science out of existing
cultural materials. Historians have shown that Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and George
Cuvier all sought, for various reasons, to promote certain notions of the character of the
natural philosopher.48 Mario Biagioli in Galileo, Courtier (1993) has linked patronage

45
An intellectual biography would explore the full range of his texts, together with the self images that his
personal conduct conveyed, and that his political actions implied.
46
In the history of ideas, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) traces the conflict and deep
uncertainty that characterises the making of the modern self from Plato to the present. Taylor defends the
modern identity, which involves ‘the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality, and being embedded in
nature which are at home in the modern West’, as the result of our quest for the good, and shows how
components of the modern identity have been constructed over time. He reveals also how philosophical
thought, epistemology and the philosophy of language have been shaped by the ideals of personal identity.
47
Dorinda Outram in The Body and the French Revolution (1989) writes on the history of the body in
relation to political power, and in the history of science Lawrence & Shapin (1998) address the issue of
the body and the self-image of the man of science.
48
More on this in chapter 8.
 23
to the process of self-fashioning of clients and patrons, thus exploring the social
dimensions of scientific change in the seventeenth century.
One excursion into the self-fashioning of the man of science has particular
relevance for my project, because it relates to the growing intellectual authority of
experimental science through the construction of the man of science as moral knower.
In A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin (1994) argues that Robert Boyle constructed
a new identity out of existing cultural materials, fashioning a new and valued character
for the experimental philosopher.49 Shapin accordingly construes the identity of the
‘Christian Virtuoso’, whose intellectual authority rested on ‘the understood facts of his
birth and standing, and the understood characters of gentlemen, Christians, and
scholars’. This was an assertion of an identity characterised by humility, disinterest and
trustworthy reporting. These new Christian gentlemen-experimentalists could speak for
‘empirical realities inaccessible to other practitioners’, and their representations might
be accepted as corresponding to things themselves (Shapin:xxviii). Peter Dear (1995)
agrees with Shapin that the early Fellows of the Royal Society were all gentlemen who
solved problems of experimental and observational testimony through adaptation of the
gentlemanly norms of comportment by which they lived anyway. Scientific knowledge
is saturated with trust relationships, and Dear thinks Shapin has written a social history
of trust rather than one of truth. This is because, when there has been controversy,
public pronouncements of trust have usually co-existed with private disbelief. Despite
the public face, individual scientists acted on their private conviction, not on their public
pronouncements of trust. This is not to deny the rise of the ‘Christian Virtuoso’ as
experimentalist in the seventeenth century and the reformulation of the very idea of
philosophy which accompanied this rise. Shapin agues that through key advocates such
as Bacon and Boyle, philosophy became recognizable as a form of gentlemanly
conversation. His study terminates in the seventeenth century, but elsewhere, he
explores the promotion of the idea of the experimental natural philosophical gentleman-
scholar in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (Shapin 1991:300).50 Thus the
new ‘Christian Virtuoso’ gained intellectual authority in the area of natural philosophy

49
Robert K. Merton in the 1930s was first to assert that it was the scientific ethos and not the scientific
method that distinguished science from other disciplines. He identified four norms – universalism,
communism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism – which constituted this ethos. He was a pioneer
of the sociology of science (Merton 1970[1938]; 1973). Steven Shapin’s work takes these sociological
insights on the scientific ethos into the history of science, where they inform his work on the self-image of
the man of science.
50
More on this in chapter 8.
 24
throughout the eighteenth century. The institutional site of this authority was the Royal
Society of London, which gave more attention to the observational and experimental
sciences, rather than the mathematical, as the century progressed
(Gascoigne:179,181,271,283-4). Through the ‘Christian Virtuoso’ and the Royal
Society of London, experimentalism itself gained intellectual authority throughout the
eighteenth century.51
This thesis is an intellectual history drawing on work in history of science. It
draws on a body of work stemming from various theoretical traditions, all offering
approaches that are somewhat different and broader than a treatment of the development
of an individual’s intellectual trajectory. Nevertheless, it is primarily an empirical
historical work and not a contribution to theories of personal or social identity. I am not
imitating these approaches but applying them when relevant, and often the relevance is
one of contrast rather than similarity. Unlike Greenblatt’s subjects, Stewart belonged to
an established discipline within a strong institutional setting. Shapin provides a model
for showing how an individual can embody a problem about a discipline, and this is
instructive, but the model does not fit Stewart, who was not inventing an identity for an
emerging discipline. Nevertheless, although Stewart did not have to define a role for
something new in the way that More, Shakespeare, Galileo or Boyle did, he had to
articulate an existing role when it was under threat. In chapter 8, I discuss Stewart’s
attempt – quite late in his career – to fashion a moral persona for the philosopher in
contrast to other intellectual types, and here the concept of self-fashioning is useful, but
I do not suggest that he had a well worked out plan. Ironically, Stewart defended moral
philosophy against the very tradition that Boyle helped to construct. I study Stewart in
the first three decades of the nineteenth century, when he was defending the role of the
moral philosopher. I believe that this interpretation of a selection of Stewart’s works
offers fresh insights that add to our understanding of his work, and of an historical
moment in the career of Scottish moral philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century.

51
It is arguable that the influence of the Royal Society was assisted by a certain failure of the English
universities in the eighteenth century, when they remained immune from Continental influences. This
stagnation of sorts may have contributed to the circumstances that allowed the self-constructed ‘Christian
Virtuosos’, gentlemen-experimentalists, to be accepted eventually as authoritative moral knowers. In the
eighteenth century Edinburgh was self-consciously the Athens of the North, and it is possible to
characterise Scottish moral philosophy in this period as ignoring the challenge represented by the
emergence in England of the ‘Christian Virtuoso’ experimental generalist as authoritative moral knower,
and of the Royal Society of London as the site of intellectual authority.
 25
Historians of science explore the question of how natural philosophy emerged as a
discipline in early modern England, and Shapin sees this as part of a more general
European phenomenon. However, there has not been the same sort of work on the
social or public role of the philosopher, or philosophy as a life-style. This could have
something to do with the relative historical unimportance of philosophy in England,
compared to Scotland, Germany or France.52 Indeed, in the 1830s William Whewell
warned of the dangers of introducing a philosophical education, of the German kind, in
English universities. In his view an arrangement, like the German one, in which
illustrious philosophers offered systems that attracted followers and rival camps could
only produce unhealthy effects on the minds of young men thus prematurely encouraged
to debate and speculate beyond their capacities. Whewell preferred to retain the English
emphasis on mathematics, classics and theology – subjects in which dogmatic pedagogy
was essential – in undergraduate education (Yeo 1993:213-4). This is perhaps one
reason why there has been little scholarly attention to the role of the philosopher in
England at that time; there was no obvious public role.53
In contrast, in Scottish universities the role of the philosopher was absolutely
entrenched in the curriculum. David Hume is now recognised as a major Scotish
philosopher of the period, but at the time his status was more one of a man of letters and
essayist, as he had no academic role. The eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher
was academic, tutor, lecturer, mentor and moral guide; he was seen to be raising good
statesmen, and moral philosophy was regarded as a crucial preparation for public life
(Davie 1961; Jacyna 1994). When Stewart set out to redefine the public role of the
philosopher it was in response to Jeffrey’s attack on mental philosophy and, by
implication, on the centrality of moral philosophy and the role of the moral philosopher
in Scottish education. Stewart was not inventing the public role of a philosophical
overview; Reid had pronounced on this and it was part of the Scottish intellectual
tradition. But never before had moral philosophy been attacked, so Stewart was
responding to a new threat. Rather than promoting Stewart as an ‘outstanding thinker’, I
suggest that the neglect of Stewart and his works impoverishes our understanding, not
least because a study of Stewart’s predicament provides a way of exploring the changing
cultural role of the philosopher in this period.

52
Pointing out that there is no single abstract definition of the intellectual, Fritz Ringer argues that the
social role of intellectuals has differed greatly over time and from society to society (Ringer 1990:270-
72,281).
 26
Although eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers did have a clear cultural
identity, recognised in the curriculum, this became an issue when there were challenges
to the educational centrality of moral philosophy. The public face of the moral
philosopher was under threat, and Stewart attempted the re-fashioning not just of a
person, but of an academic subject. He did not have to confront the problem faced by
Boyle: how to be at once an aristocratic gentleman, a Christian, and an experimental
natural philosopher. Stewart inherited a public identity ready-made – as professor of
moral philosophy – but found himself needing to defend and clarify it. It is not my task
to show how moral philosophy emerged as a discipline; I am interested in the problem
Stewart perceived – how to sustain moral philosophy in new conditions – and in how he
responded by leaning on a sanctioned body of knowledge, stressing those aspects of that
tradition that allowed him to make epistemological, moral and methodological claims.
My work on Stewart reveals the connections between the leaking of intellectual
authority from moral philosophy to the physical sciences, the changing public role of the
philosopher, and the politicisation of philosophy during the Revolution crisis in
Scotland. By exploring these themes I aim to show how his philosophy, disguised as
detached, abstract reflection was, in part, a response to social, educational and political
factors, involving Stewart’s experience of being moulded by outside forces and his
attempt to fashion exemplary selves. When Reid retired from teaching in 1780, moral
philosophers enjoyed an acknowledged, unchallenged public status expressed through
the central role of moral philosophy in the university. Moreover, Reid escaped the
effects on Scottish university life of the French Revolution and its aftermath. To an
extent, Stewart also enjoyed the public esteem awarded to the moral philosopher, but
from the early 1800s this was under some challenge, so that he had to define the role
more explicitly. Within a debate in Scotland about the value of a philosophical
education, moral philosophy was under attack; there were questions about its utility,
importance, role and relevance in a modern scheme of education. Stewart needed a way
to talk about the role of the philosopher as a moral model, to describe philosophical
comportment and to find a way of being a public figure. When we read Stewart’s works
in this context, we can discern that he presented moral philosophy as an ethic, a mode of
behaviour, and a mode of personal identity.

53
Generally, those who wrote on philosophy had some other vocation: they were, for instance,
theologians (like Berkeley) or physicians (like Locke).
 27
Outline of chapters
In order to understand the complex combination of circumstances that comprised
Stewart’s context, it is essential that we look at his response to an emerging crisis in the
Scottish educational system, and to the sectarian and theological animosities of
Edinburgh. I see these issues as later dramatically manifested in the Stewart-Jeffrey
controversy. Thus Chapter 2 examines Stewart’s relationship to the Scottish
Enlightenment and the special secular character of the University of Edinburgh in
relation to the north-south divide in Great Britain. Viewing developments in political
economy and the Leslie case as signals of the breakdown of the delicate Scottish
intellectual institutional equilibrium, the chapter looks at Stewart’s responses to these
crises. Chapter 3 deals with the gradual decline in the curricular authority of moral
philosophy towards the end of the Scottish Enlightenment. As an instructive point of
comparison, the chapter considers why, in England, there was not a similar tension
between moral philosophy and the natural sciences. At an institutional level, Stewart
was aware of threats to the autonomy of the University of Edinburgh and the special role
of moral philosophy. He responded not by adding to common sense but by changing it
in subtle ways, and reasserting some of its current features and values in new
circumstances. At a personal level, he took risks in adopting a public position, but he
did so by leaning on the established place of moral philosophy. Chapter 4 addresses the
impact of the French Revolution and the Dundas despotism on intellectual life in
Edinburgh, and particularly on its implications for Stewart’s intellectual life and
political opinions. It argues that the politicisation of philosophy forced a certain shape
on Stewart’s common sense philosophy, and it explores the relevance of conjectural
history to Scottish moral philosophy in this context. Chapter 5 covers Jeffrey’s public
attacks on mental philosophy in 1804 and 1810, the learned review culture, the debate
on the nature of the natural sciences, its implications for the changing cultural role of
the philosopher, and the role of scientism in the debate.
Three of Stewart’s works – Philosophical Essays (1810), Elements of the
Philosophy of the Human Mind, Volume 2 (1814) and Volume 3 (1827) – can be located
in the Stewart-Jeffrey debate. Each work attempted to respond in a new way to Jeffrey’s
charges, and to what they reflected – the perceived weakening of the intellectual
authority of moral philosophy by comparison with (physical) science. Chapter 6 deals
mainly with Stewart’s Preface to Philosophical Essays (1810) in which he specifically
acknowledged Jeffrey’s charges and attempted to answer them. Jeffrey had launched his
 28
attack on methodological grounds, distinguishing between experimental and non-
experimental sciences in terms of their utility. Methodology thus became the
battleground, and Stewart tried to break down the distinction, but argued that in any case
the science of mind was experimental. At this stage, Stewart was asserting the
importance of moral philosophy on grounds of its utility. The chapter also addresses
Stewart’s first attempts, in his ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to the Supplement to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1815 & 1821), at reconstructing a role for the philosopher in
the new critical media of the early 1800s. As an encyclopaedist, he fulfilled the public
role of the Kantian man of letters in new ways, extending the moral philosopher’s ambit
even further beyond the lecture theatre than philosophical literature had taken it.
Stewart adopted two main ways of affirming the importance of moral philosophy: a
methodological/philosophical overview, and a treatise on moral character. Chapter 7
discusses the first of these: the second part of Volume 2 of the Elements (1814) is a
work of methodology in which Stewart reformulated common sense. Driven by
Jeffrey’s rejection of his 1810 defence, his goal was to establish a science of mind on
sound scientific grounds. Recognising Stewart’s mission to re-establish the primacy of
moral philosophy is the key to understanding this text. I locate Stewart in terms of the
secularization of Scottish thought and of the very real dangers of being perceived to
endorse materialism and atheism. By this time he had to reassess what he had
previously taken for granted: namely, that he shared with a large section of his
readership a belief in the centrality of moral philosophy. This methodological overview
was the major part of Stewart’s response to Jeffrey; and also a central part of Volume 2
in which he took new specialist disciplines (political economy) and an older one
increasingly appealing to science (medicine) to task on issues of terminology and
methodology. He thought these disciplines were in danger of error because of
terminological inconsistencies; his role as moral philosopher was to hold them all
together. His critique at the methodological legel thus allowed him to exercise the
authority of the moral philosopher. In Chapter 8 I examine a lesser-known work which
appeared in Volume 3 of the Elements (1827) – ‘Of the varieties of intellectual
character’. Although the concerns about moral philosophy are not explicitly stated in
this study of the impact of intellectual activity on character, this chapter amounts to
another defence of the role of the moral philosopher. In this late work, Stewart
fashioned a notion of the philosophical solitary, a demeanour suited to the moral
philosopher. This essay on the mental style of the moral philosopher complements his
 29
methodological treatise, but also asserts that other intellectual specialists did not
possess, or deserve, this high moral role.
 30

Chapter 2

Stewart and the Scottish Enlightenment

 31
Stewart’s location at the ‘chronological limits’ of the Scottish Enlightenment
(Sher 1985:8) is important in understanding his project. The crucial difference between
Stewart and the rest of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (including Reid) is that he
faced different circumstances, most importantly the French Revolution and the Jeffrey
attack (as briefly set out in the Introduction). Of course, the causal relationship between
the Enlightenment and the French Revolution has long been a matter of historical
debate, and the censure of Stewart by two Lords of Session in 1794 was an expression
of the view that Enlightenment ideas had caused the Revolution, and that Stewart was a
carrier of these ideas.1 Rather than attempting a philosophical assessment of Stewart,
this thesis looks at certain of his works from the post-Revolutionary period and
considers them in the light of some debates about the Scottish Enlightenment.
To understand what was happening in Scottish intellectual life at the close of the
eighteenth century I investigate some of the sources and conditions of the Scottish
Enlightenment – domestic and external, intellectual and cultural. A concern with
education and a self-consciousness about a distinctively Scottish education were
constant elements. Examining tensions within common sense philosophy, educational
reform, the construction of personal identity, the discipline of political economy and the
Church of Scotland, provides an insight into Stewart’s complex relationship to the
intellectual culture in which he was educated and in which he worked. The fact that
Phillipson (1976:824) locates Reid and Stewart (as critics of scepticism) in what he calls
the Scottish counter-enlightenment, points to contradictions at the core of
Enlightenment.2
In 1762 when Voltaire acknowledged the sudden ascendancy of Scottish learning
and taste (Tytler 1807:II:84), it was clear that Scotland could no longer be dismissed as
a backward centre of Presbyterian enthusiasm, Highland barbarism and Jacobite
intrigue. These old stereotypes were challenged by the force of an apparent cultural
transformation that has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment.3 Stewart was
prominently engaged in its central debates on education, virtue, progress, reason, free
will, religion, science and government. In fact, the ascendancy of Scottish intellectual
and social life was not so sudden as it seemed to French commentators. Alexander

1
The 1794 incident is discussed in chapter 4. For twentieth-century examples of the historical debate, see
Adorno and Horkheimer 1973[1947]; Habermas 1989[1962]; and Outram 1995.
2
Phillipson (1981:37-40) sees Stewart as ‘the apostle of the expert’. His ‘singularly unsubtle idea of
citizenship’ marked the retreat from the remarkable Scottish inquiry into civic morality.
 32
Broadie counts as a major contributing factor to the Scottish Enlightenment the fact that
in the pre-Enlightenment period,
the country had universities in St Andrews (founded 1411-12), Glasgow (1451),
Aberdeen (1495) and Edinburgh (1583), universities that . . . provided their
students with an education, including a scientific education, at a standard equal
to that found at the great universities on the continent. One aspect of the quality
of the universities during that period, as at previous times, was their enthusiastic
receptivity to new ideas in philosophy, theology, law, medicine, mathematics and
science. (Broadie 1997:10-11)

Thus educational innovation underpinned the Scottish Enlightenment, and educational

reform and development became a hallmark of the University of Edinburgh in the
eighteenth century.
Often seen as the dying light of the Scottish Enlightenment (as I have noted),
Stewart was well aware of continental thought, and in fact wrote the first comprehensive
survey of European philosophy for a British audience (Corsi 1988; Haakonssen 1994).4
But he also enjoyed a rich Scottish intellectual inheritance: as Broadie observes,
‘philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment did not philosophize in a vacuum’. In fact,
without this philosophical tradition – the legacy of Scotland’s Pre-Reformation
philosophers of the early sixteenth century – Broadie doubts whether the philosophy of
the Scottish Enlightenment could have been written (Broadie 1990:2-3). James
Lorimer (1854) and W. Forbes Leith (1915), in describing the high degree and social
value of learning in sixteenth-century Scotland, help us to place Stewart, and the
Enlightenment, in this older tradition. More recently James Moore (1990:38-9) has
suggested that Enlightenment writers were engaged in a dialectical argument with the
seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Scottish mentality, which he calls Reformed
scholasticism.5 In relation to his more immediate intellectual environment, Stewart
occupied a place in the line of philosophers from Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Hume, Reid,
Robertson, Smith, Ferguson, Millar and Stewart to Brown, Hamilton and Ferrier.
Stewart himself was the first historian of the Scottish Enlightenment (Wood
1993:47), and it was he who traced its beginnings to Hutcheson’s election to the
Glasgow chair of moral philosophy (I:428). Whereas this has become the traditional

3
Though this term was coined by W.R. Scott in 1900 (Stewart 1990:3), ‘Enlightenment’ was a term of
self-congratulation in the eighteenth century itself (Broadie 1997:6-7), as were Aufklärung, Illuminismo,
and Lumières.
4
William Enfield’s (1791) The history of philosophy from the earliest times to the beginning of the
present century predated Stewart but was a translation of Johann Jakob Brucker (1766), not an original
British work.
5
David Allan (1993) makes this point with reference to Scottish historical thinking.
 33
view of the Scottish Enlightenment, Paul Wood argues that it overlooks the fact that
new philosophical currents had made considerable headway in the curricula of the
Scottish universities prior to Hutcheson’s appointment. He claims that Hutcheson was a
less novel figure in Scottish academe than historians have previously thought.
Moreover, Hutcheson’s writings were increasingly tangential to the intellectual
preoccupations of those lecturing in the closing decades of the century (Wood:47,145).
Hume himself acknowledged the awakening influence of Hutcheson, and A. L. Donovan
argues that ‘the function of [Hume’s] scepticism and his indebtedness to Hutcheson’s
programme for moral philosophy . . .[are] closely related aspects of his thought’
(Donovan 1975:55-7). Hence Hume and the common sense philosophers who reacted
against his scepticism agreed on the importance of Hutcheson for Scottish philosophy.
Donovan (62) also stresses the importance of Hutcheson’s stimulating didactic role and
traces his influence on the chemist, William Cullen, demonstrating that Hutcheson was
relevant even outside his discipline of moral philosophy. While acknowledging the
importance of Hutcheson, Wood’s perception of continuity adds texture to the picture,
augmenting Broadie’s view that the Scottish Enlightenment owed much to a rich
indigenous intellectual inheritance.
From around the middle of the eighteenth century Lowland Scots were
appreciably more literate than the English nation as a whole, and Scotland was ranked as
one of the most literate countries in the pre-industrial world (Houston 1989:51).6 In the
second half of the eighteenth century the practice of classroom debate and professorial
interrogation, and of giving lectures to tradesmen and youths from the towns, as well as
the establishment of philosophical societies in the university towns, all combined to
produce a ‘philosophically educated public’ with deference to a teaching authority,
especially the professor of moral philosophy (Walker 1994:147).
It is now generally agreed that Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1967 definition of the
Scottish Enlightenment as ‘that efflorescence of intellectual vitality that became obvious
after the defeat of the last Jacobite rebellion in 1745’ is too narrow in terms of what it
was, when it occurred and whom it included.7 Trevor-Roper reduced it to ‘the social
thought of a handful of men’ (Emerson 1988a:333). Similarly, while correctly

6
At the same time Houston (1985) questions the fit between the ideal and the reality of Scottish literacy,
claiming that interpretations have sometimes exaggerated its superiority.
7
Sher argues that Trevor-Roper, equating ‘intellectual vitality’ with genius, separated the ‘camp-
followers’ from the ‘pioneers’, restricting his scope of enquiry to those he defined as pioneers. That he
could exclude Thomas Reid, the high priest of common sense philosophy, proves that one scholar’s
intellectual pioneer may be another’s camp-follower (Sher 1985:4-5,7).
 34
illuminating the primacy of moral philosophy in Scottish intellectual life of the
eighteenth-century, J.G.A. Pocock (1980) excludes intellectual vitality in other fields.
More recently, in talking of ‘the culture of the literati of eighteenth-century Scotland’,
Richard B. Sher expands the definition to include all those men of letters who adhered
to broad ‘enlightened’ values and principles held in common by European and
American philosophes. These were not disaffected, angry intellectuals or hack writers,
not bureaucrats struggling to institute reforms, not Freemasons, pantheists or
republicans dreaming of a new order, not dilettantes. They were middle and upper-
middle class professional men, leading members of the liberal professions in a
‘provincial’ society, with links to aristocratic patronage networks.8 The movement
extended from Francis Hutcheson’s generation born in the 1690s to John Millar’s, born
after 1735, ending with Dugald Stewart. Studying the Enlightenment involves studying
its social, institutional, economic, technological, artistic and ideological dimensions
through studying the activities and writing of these men (Sher: 6-11).
There is a sense in which the Scottish Enlightenment was the creation of
enlightened patrons and politicians who changed the nature of Scottish education and
culture, and they, as much as the intellectuals, were the creators of the Scottish
Enlightenment.9 But whether we see the patrons and politicians as facilitators or
ideologues, it was not they who held intellectual authority. That rested unquestionably
with the philosophers mentioned above: they influenced the Western world through
their pedagogy and writings.10
This intellectual and cultural flowering was given physical expression in
Edinburgh’s remarkable New Town, ‘a set of streets and squares in the Palladian style
which grew up first to the south of the “Old Town” in the 1750s then, more extensively,
to the north between the city and Leith from the 1760s’. This was a monument to
prosperity, improvement and changing ideas, and these ideas flourished ‘more in “North
Britain” than in England’ and were concentrated in Edinburgh’s university and its
‘fashionable salons and houses’ (Houston 1994:8-9). George Elder Davie argues that

8
Insisting on distinguishing between regional differences in the Enlightenment, Sher (11) warns against
following Peter Gay in ‘mistaking the skeptical, anticlerical, reformist Enlightenment of certain French
philosophes and a few men of letters elsewhere for the Enlightenment as a whole’
9
Emerson claims it was the personal interest of politicians in the sciences that saw Scottish universities
filled with distinguished mathematicians, doctors, natural philosophers or improvers (Emerson 1992:104-
105).
10
This is not to deny M.A. Stewart’s point that most educated Scots debated ‘relatively new
philosophical ideas . . . [that] were assimilated into legal, historical, medical, theological, and other
studies’ (Stewart 1990:3).
 35
while the architectural features of the New Town may have been exotics from a Scottish
point of view, this does not mean that the Enlightenment was the preserve of the leisure
class ensconced there. A passion for ideas was intrinsic to the wider Scottish life, and
was perhaps responsible for the Scottish Enlightenment’s intellectual seriousness (Davie
1994). Noting the ‘awesome application of geometrical principles and the self-
conscious grandeur of the New Town’, David Allan (1993:7) warns against seeing this
as proof of a disjuncture between the Enlightenment and a ‘chaotic and unseemly
Scottish past’.11 Nevertheless, the Irish elocutionist Thomas Sheridan christened
Edinburgh ‘The Athens of Great Britain’ (Sher: 3)12 and there is every evidence that the
Scots and their admirers took this epithet seriously.13 Logan Turner notes that ‘pseudo-
classicism was fashion’: scholars were pictorially represented as ‘Greek philosophers or
Roman senators, with towels or swags of drapery round naked shoulders’ (Turner
1933:334). Certainly John Henning’s drawing (1811) of Stewart bears this out, and at
Stewart’s death Edinburgh experienced what was probably the last public display of this
classicism with the erection of his monument on the Calton Hill.14 It is a circular,
colonnaded structure containing a funereal urn, and was the last structure to join the
classical ‘follies’ on the hill overlooking the Old and New Towns.
Clearly the main factor conditioning Scotland’s political life in the early part of
the century was the relationship with England, and several commentators, taking their
lead from Pocock (1975:423-505), see the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of the
politics of 1707.15 Clearly stating that he is interested in only the political angle, Pocock
focuses on the discourse of civic virtue and of republicanism. Jane Rendall (1978:14)
insists that the post-Union ‘drive to emulate England, economically, socially, culturally’
gave impetus to Scotland’s intellectual Enlightenment. Colin Kidd (1993:7,209,211)

11
Allan (9) argues that the Scottish Kirk and the Scottish Enlightenment were kin, and not the ‘distant
and cantankerous relations’ so often portrayed in historical accounts.
12
This predated Allan Ramsay’s (1762) reference to ‘the Athens of Britain’ (Phillipson 1981:19).
13
See for instance Robert Mudie’s The Modern Athens (1825), and John Britten’s Modern Athens (1771-
1857).
14
The Henning drawing is reproduced in Horn (1967:50) and in this thesis. And Stewart’s obituary
portrays him in old age, exhibiting ‘an admirable example of the serene sunset of a well-spent life of
classical elegance and refinement, so beautifully imagined by Cicero: “Quiete, et pure, et eleganter actæ
ætatis, placida ac lenis senectus”’ (Stewart 1829:267).
15
Under the Act of Union of 1707 the parliaments of Scotland and England were united. Scotland lost its
parliament, and the Union’s parliament was in London.
 36
focuses not on emulation, but on the domestic transformation of the Scottish whig
tradition in the eighteenth century, arguing that their historians reinterpreted Scottish
history as being more continuous with English history than with Scottish history pre-
1707. In his view, they ‘hijacked the English whig tradition, and recast it in their own
terms’.16 Phillipson (1981:22) argues that the Act of Union of 1707, in stripping
Scotland of its political institutions, acted as a catalyst to a sophisticated but provincial
intellectual community forced to rethink the principles of virtue, hitherto classically
linked to political participation.
On this account, the resulting inquiry into the science of man was the first
attempt at a sociological study of man, society and history, and was informed by
Enlightenment optimism, the idea that this Science would lead to a better, happier, more
enlightened, virtuous society (Phillipson 1981; Meek 1976).17 But this inquiry was
informed also by the ideas of French philosophes and a continental intellectual tradition
in Scotland.18 Roger Emerson calls on Anand Chitnis (1976) and David Daiches (1986)
to demonstrate that the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment are in seventeenth-century
Scottish thought and culture (Emerson 1988a:333-6).19 Haakonssen (1996a)
demonstrates the extent to which Scottish moral philosophy was informed by
seventeenth-century natural law, in particular German and English interpretations.
Emerson (1990a:32-4) emphasises the ‘very long interplay between moral and natural
philosophy’, arguing that the Scottish Enlightenment had its roots in late seventeenth-
century Scottish scientism. Hence, while there is no doubt about the importance of the
politics of 1707 for Scotland, there are problems in seeing its Enlightenment solely in
terms of these politics.
At the beginning of the century Scots believed they were less well off than their
English neighbours – disadvantaged socially, economically and intellectually. This
perceived disadvantage spurred a demand for educational reform, resulting in the
development of a medical, legal and science-oriented educational pattern (Emerson

16
Oz-Salzberger (54) also sees the Scots as adopting the English whig narrative.
17
This study entails many instances of false universalisation of masculine gender, as in ‘science of man’.
Since the repeated use of ‘sic’ would be distracting, and since there is some debate about whether or not
‘man’ necessarily connoted universality (although it seems to have done so for Stewart – see IV:238), I
refrain from the employment of ‘sic’.
18
At the beginning of the century, among distinguished Scots who opposed the established regime there
was a tendency to study abroad, and to bring their experience back to Scotland (Rendall:7). This was a
continuation of a tradition which began in the early fifteenth century (Broadie 1990:2).
19
In the area of political economy, Rashid (1987a:256) argues that the role of the Irish in stimulating the
Scots has been largely neglected.
 37
1992:8).20 Later in the university classrooms of Germany, France and America, students
read Scottish philosophy, and used medical textbooks set at the University of Edinburgh
(Phillipson 1981:20). Later still, in the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish philosophy was
introduced to Australian universities, and common sense philosophy as amended by
Hamilton was of key significance for Australia’s academic origins.21 The Scottish
thinkers were united by ‘a common commitment to teaching and education, and to the
creation of a social community of scholars’ in a context of critical discussion and debate
(Rendall:1). Writing on philosophy, history, law and the natural sciences before such
words had become limiting labels, they were the purveyors of enlightenment to the
English-speaking world.
There is debate about the relative roles of philosophy, science and literature in
the Scottish Enlightenment, and Emerson finds that limiting it to the sociable literati, as
Sher does, serves to include some, like certain prominent Edinburgh Moderates for
instance, who lacked the interests in philosophy and science that characterised other
equally central groups, and to exclude intellectuals who were of equal or greater
importance.22 He worries that whereas the Scottish Enlightenment moralists generally
classed the scientists among the literati, historians generally identify only the moralists
as the enlightened men of the age (Emerson 1988a:337,350). Emerson does not dispute
the centrality of moral philosophy, but he points out that the Scottish moralists were, ‘to
a man interested in, familiar with, trained to do or were pursuers of some science either
professionally or by avocation’ (Emerson 1988a:350). At times, Stewart himself
lectured on astronomy and natural philosophy. Despite Sher’s broad definition, he too
acknowledges the primacy of moral philosophy in Scottish intellectual life during the
second half of the eighteenth century (Sher:6). During this period intellectual activity
centred around the university towns of Edinburgh, Glasgow and, to a lesser degree,
Aberdeen, and intellectual authority (notably in the form of international recognition)
tended to rest with philosopher-professors such as Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid,
Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and Dugald

20
Medical schools were officially recognised in Edinburgh (1740) and Glasgow (1760), and Edinburgh
established four law chairs by 1722 (Chitnis 1976:135), and an anatomy chair in the same year (Berry
1997:14).
21
Many saw Hamilton as replacing Reid’s simple mindedness with sophistication and universality, but his
doctrine of the relativity of knowledge brought common sense philosophy to something close to the
Humean subjectivism from which it had started out in protest (Grave 1984:6-17).
22
Moderates dominated the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland for most of the second half of
the eighteenth century.
 38
Stewart (Broadie 1997; Emerson 1988a; Gay 1966; Jacyna 1994; Pocock 1985; Rendall
1978; Sher 1985; Trevor-Roper 1977; Waszek 1988).23 David Hume, never a professor,
was the outstanding exception.24 Whereas the French and Italian Enlightenments
occurred outside the universities, the Scottish Enlightenment was a product of, and an
influence on, Scotland’s dynamic educational culture (Houston 1989:50).25

The north-south divide

The inherent intellectual progressiveness in the Scottish tradition saw medicine,
science (including chemistry) and political economy embedded in the curriculum of the
University of Edinburgh, and this arrangement rested on a distinctively secular
institutional system of education in Scotland, quite distinct from that of Oxford and
Cambridge, which were under the direct control of the Anglican Church. In contrast to
the eighteenth-century flowering of the Scottish universities, the English universities
failed to respond in the same way to the challenge of new, ‘continental’ ways of
thinking (Raphael 1996; Rendall 1978; Walker 1994). By the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Scotland had been largely successful in reorganising law and
education along rational lines; Davie (1961:xi,xv) argues that the corresponding attempt
in England had failed lamentably and the universities thereafter stagnated. In fact,
Davie draws attention to a ‘serious secular division between North and South’
throughout the eighteenth century.26 Stewart gave expression to this in his attack on
Oxford University for its backward adherence to Aristotelian logic; and other aspects
were played out in the pages of the learned reviews (III:3). In response to Edward
Copleston’s (1810) reply to Stewart, the Edinburgh Review (1810[16]:168) argued that
natural philosophy had been until very recently ‘wholly neglected at Oxford’; the article
contrasted relatively unreformed universities ‘originating in Catholic times, and
constructed on the principles of a church that claimed infallibility’ to the Scottish

23
This list varies according to the definition of ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ employed. On Aberdeen
universities during the Enlightenment, see Emerson (1992) and Wood (1990;1993).
24
David Hume made an unsuccessful bid for the Edinburgh chair of moral philosophy in 1744-45, and
Sher (1990:103-7) argues that although some council members viewed the election in a purely political
light, Hume was defeated by ‘the Whig-Presbyterian clerical and academic establishment for moral,
religious, and ideological reasons’. Henry Home (Lord Kames) is another exception. Though not a
professor, he was both a patron and a moralist of note.
25
Several contributors to Stewart (1990) note that much of Scottish philosophical development occurred
within the universities.
26
While there are various explanations for the north-south divide, and accounts vary as to its
composition, importance and effects, a body of scholarship exists describing the separate educational
systems of Scotland and England (Davie 1961; Emerson 1992; Gascoigne 1989; Sher 1985; Walker
1994).
 39
universities created in a climate of Reformation, distinguished only by exertion and
open to improvement and progress. J. Davidson’s (1810) attack, which reviews some of
the literature in the debate, is emblematic of this north-south divide. William Lyall’s
(1815) review of Stewart (see Appendix) defends the English universities against
Stewart’s accusations. In 1831 in the British Critic William Whewell defended the
English universities against Sir William Hamilton’s attack in the Edinburgh Review in
the same year (Gascoigne 1989:11-12). Robert Black (1850) engages with the literature.
Protagonists in the inter-varsity wrangle included such notables as John Henry Newman,
John Playfair, William Whewell and William Hamilton (Chitnis 1976:218).27
In his account of Scottish education in the nineteenth century, Davie contends
that eighteenth-century Scotland benefited materially from its submergence in the
political-economic system of England, while it continued to preserve both its European
influence as a ‘spiritual force’ and its well-ordered progressive system of law and
education. This produced a Scotland that was ‘still national, though no longer
nationalist’ (Davie:xv) . That the system of education was intended for poor as well as
rich and connected the Universities with every town and hamlet, helped to preserve
Scotland’s distinctive character (Laurie 1902:3). According to Davie, Scotland’s liberal
educational arrangements ‘bridged the gap between the disparate sections and sects of
Scottish society, allowing the talented to rise without disloyalty to their origins or family
convictions, and creating in the process an intellectual culture of unusual balance’
(Davie:292-3). Sher argues that Scotland remained a nation, though not a nation-state
after 1707. It retained distinguishing institutions and traditions that gave its people a
sense of national identity (Sher: 10).28 As well, the cultural alignment of England and
Scotland was politically and economically good for Scots and probably intrinsic to the
tolerance they came to adopt (Emerson 1992:105).29 At this time, the belief in the virtue

27
An insight into the ramifications in private lives is provided by Bourne & Taylor (1994:612-3) who
describe Francis Horner’s tortured role in the dispute between Oxford and Edinburgh. Lord Grenville, his
patron, who took offence at Stewart’s (1815) attacks on Oxford in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, insisted
on communicating with Stewart through Horner. Thus Horner, ill and unhappy over the matter, was forced
to mediate a very lively dispute between his patron and his mentor.
28
Its cultural traditions included foods, games, manners and spoken languages. It retained its own legal
system, schools and universities with their own pedagogical policies, and national church. It even retained
a surprising amount of political and administrative autonomy (Sher:10).
29
T.C. Smout (1989), also interested in the ways in which Scotland remained a nation, explores the fact
that compared to many of the European history-less nations, where nationalisms were constructed by
intellectuals, Scotland had a real national history. Tom Nairn (1977) argues that Scotland, unlike Wales
and Ireland, suffered from the problem of ‘overdevelopment’ and was already going through the growing
pains of industrialization before its general onset in Europe. Hence the Scottish intelligentsia did not have
to resort to romanticism to invite the masses into history and to mobilise them for industrial development.
 40
of a philosophical education was a fairly general tendency through all the Scottish
Universities (Davie 1961; Sher 1985).
Writing on the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on early Victorian England,
Chitnis argues that it was Scottish, English, aristocratic and dissenting students who
took ‘Scotch knowledge’ to England. Whereas Halévy highlighted the influence of
Stewart on those English aristocrats and Dissenters who came to Scotland to study,
Chitnis takes issue with the view that attributes the coherence and network among
Scottish alumni to the influence of Stewart alone. Such a view detracts from the
influence of other teachers and other universities, and from the influence on ‘medical
practitioners and their significance for provincial life and culture’. Scotch knowledge
resided not only in social philosophy, political economy and ‘the systematic medical
curriculum pursued at Edinburgh and to a lesser extent at Glasgow’, but also in the
general educational experience, methods of teaching in and out of the classroom, extra-
curricular opportunities to develop talent and contacts, general and specific principles
and methods of tackling problems. Through statesmen, reviewers and clerics the Scotch
knowledge was disseminated south of the border, and the lectures of Rev. Sydney Smith
(one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review in 1802) on moral philosophy at the Royal
Institution in London 1804 -1806 communicated it to a general English audience. The
Scots were proud of their distinctive approach, and wished to preserve it (Chitnis
1986:79-81). It is the north-south divide that makes it possible to speak of taking
‘Scotch knowledge’ to England.
Linda Colley offers another perspective on the north-south divide. She argues
that in the second half of the eighteenth century the Wilkite virulence against the
Scots,30 so often interpreted as evidence of the deep divisions between south and north
Britain, was in fact ‘testimony to the fact that the barriers between England the Scotland
were coming down, savage proof that Scots were acquiring power and influence within
Great Britain to a degree previously unknown’ (Colley 1992:121). In other words, John
Wilkes was railing against the inexorable collapse of the divide. While Colley makes
the point that ambitious Scots benefited from having more and better universities as

30
John Wilkes was one of a number of fiercely anti-Scottish journalists.
 41
training grounds (Colley:123), this very fact was testimony to the separate educational
systems of England and Scotland.
Given that Wilkes preyed upon an English suspicion of ‘metaphysical Scotland’,
it is interesting that it might have been Stewart, Scotland’s leading metaphysician at the
turn of the century, who ameliorated this negative English vision. James McCosh – in
1864 a professor in Ireland, later the very same common sense professor at Princeton
who damned Stewart with faint praise – argued that Stewart’s works had guided and
formed the thought of ‘the Three Kingdoms’ and ‘the English-speaking parts of
America’, creating ‘a taste for philosophy where none existed before’ and staving off for
England the horrors of materialism and utilitarianism. It was
altogether for the benefit of English thought that Stewart became known in
South Britain, where his elegant style, his crowning good sense, and the
moderation of his views, recommended him to many who had imbibed as great
an aversion as ever George III had to Scotch metaphysics. (McCosh 1864:d)

Historians have not explored Stewart’s role in breaking down this stereotype and the
resistance to Scottish philosophy, though Corsi’s (1987) exposition of his influence on
the Oxford Noetics is part of this untold story.
Although accepting the existence of a north-south divide, Emerson points out
that the administration of patronage in the Scottish universities also reflected the
increasing political integration occurring in Britain. Still, the Scottish universities
remained distinctive in their educational practices, in their curricula, in their student
recruitment patterns and in the work expectations of their teaching staff. All this
indicates a resistance to incorporation into a homogenous British society, especially one
homogenised to English tastes (Emerson 1992:102-103). On the other hand, Andrew
Walker links the crisis in Scottish education which emerged by 1830 to the anglicisation
of Scottish life, culture and values. As rich Scots began to send their children to English
universities, Edinburgh lost its allure for students, schools, educators and parents
(Walker: 61-3). Even in the late eighteenth century there were the foreshadowings of
this practice: as a young man, Stewart considered taking Anglican vows in order to go to
Oxbridge (see chapter 7). Moreover, a Scottish education was not seen as complete in
itself for English students; rather, it provided the deficits of an English education; it
improved, but did not constitute, an English gentleman’s schooling. In 1838 Henry
(Lord) Brougham, writing about Lord Dudley, declared that ‘the tuition of Dugald
Stewart had well supplied the defects of an Oxford education in all that concerned
 42
metaphysical lore’ (Romilly 1905:9). In 1865 Brougham reiterated earlier views on the
value of Scottish education: the Old High School of Edinburgh and the University
continued, he thought, to employ a system better suited than the English one to cultivate
and cherish ‘higher objects than mere learning’ in a free state (Davie:39-40). The north-
south division continued to be perceived well into the nineteenth century.
John Gascoigne (3) has challenged the traditionally negative view of the
eighteenth-century English universities, arguing that in England the ‘holy alliance’ of
religion and science ushered in an English Enlightenment at Cambridge.31 I am
interested here in the relationship of the universities to the natural sciences. Whereas
eighteenth-century Oxford clung to classical logic and much of the scholastic tradition,
Cambridge cultivated the mathematical sciences and Newtonian philosophy
(Gascoigne:7-8). But the new experimental sciences also grew up outside these
institutions, in London and provincial centres. For example, the dissenting academies
provided a range of secular subjects including the sciences, but so broad was the range
that ‘students often acquired little more than a superficial acquaintance with any single
discipline’ (Gascoigne:8). Notwithstanding Gascoigne’s correction of accounts that
ignore the enlightened Newtonianism of Cambridge, in England the experimental
sciences flourished mainly outside the universities, with the Royal Society of London
providing the only institutional structure until the establishment of specialist scientific
societies in the nineteenth century.32 In contrast, the experimental sciences were taught
and practiced within the Scottish universities.
The common view of Edinburgh as ‘the hub of this intellectual universe’
(Phillipson 1981:19) has now been challenged, with Glasgow and Aberdeen recognised
as centres of Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Edinburgh enjoyed a pre-eminent
contemporary reputation abroad,33 and it was a site of reform and development

31
More specifically, Gascoigne (3) refers to the association between ‘the apologetics of the Church of
England and the popular understanding of Newton’s achievement’. Subsequent scholarship has developed
complex notions of English Enlightenment, some of which are exemplified in Enlightenment and religion:
Rational dissent in eighteenth-century Britain, edited by Haakonssen (1996).
32
The Linnean Society in 1788 and the British Mineralogical Society in 1799 were not followed by the
Geological Society until 1807. The profusion of scientific societies was a Victorian phenomenon (Morrell
& Thackray 1981:1-34), although ‘out of the chaos of the dissolving old order, new, restricted sub-
disciplines were grouping towards the end of the [eighteenth] century’ (Porter 1980:320).
33
Witness ‘the Athens of Britain’. Around 1763 Colonel de la Rochette said ‘Edinbourg est une ville
singulière . . . Les rues sont remplies de monde et la ville a un air vivant’ (Houston 1994:9). In 1772,
J.B.A. Suard wrote ‘Je regarde Edinbourg comme la grande école de la philosophie’ (Sher 1985:3).
Tobias Smollett dubbed the city ‘a hotbed of genius’ (Daiches et al 1996).
 43
throughout the eighteenth century.34 Its transformation from a prosperous Arts College
(with a small Divinity school attached) in the seventeenth century to one of the leading
universities of Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century has been linked to its
abolition of the regenting system in 1708.35 Horn reports that instead of having four
part-time professors of Greek, each also teaching all branches of philosophy, a full-time
professor of Greek was appointed.36 A separate professor was appointed for each of the
newly designated three branches of philosophical study – Logic and metaphysics; Ethics
and natural philosophy; Pneumatics and moral philosophy.37 Students could choose the
classes they wanted to attend and took them in any order they pleased, and natural
philosophy moved away from Aristotle and began to develop into a Newtonian science.
Professors began lecturing in English rather than Latin (Horn 1967:40-47).38
Particularly in medicine and the natural sciences, the abolition of regenting gave
impetus to specialisation (Golinski 1992:15). While the school of Law was based on
Scots Law and thus failed to attract foreign students, the school of medicine (founded
1726) attracted students in large numbers (Horn:41). Its first century saw a ‘golden age’
of Edinburgh medicine under such men as Alexander Munro, William Cullen, James
Gregory and Joseph Black (Jacyna:1; Porter 1997:290-91). Cullen, who occupied the
chairs of chemistry, institutes of medicine, and practice of medicine successively from
1756 to 1790, asserted the disciplinary autonomy of chemistry, and his ‘philosophical’
chemistry addressed the needs not only of medical students but of a general educated
audience. He and his pupil and successor in the chair of chemistry, Joseph Black,
elevated the discipline in Scotland and beyond, and generations of students ‘took away
with them knowledge of the most advanced chemical doctrines’ (Golinski: 13-18) The
University’s range, quality, and choice attracted students from home and abroad,
including English nonconformists excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, and the

34
Houston (1994:9. 379) points out that Hume, Robertson, Ferguson, and Stewart were figures of
European significance who lived and worked in Edinburgh. While their remarkable ideas represented
‘new departures which epitomised the values of an age and shaped the future . . . they were as much an
expression of, and a postscript to, changes in the city as an introduction to novel developments’.
35
Under this system one teacher took the same class in all subjects throughout its term of study. In
contrast, King’s College, Aberdeen did not end regenting until 1799 (Emerson 1992:100). Turner (1933)
gives a brief prehistory of the University beginning with the founding of the College of Edinburgh by a
bequest of Bishop Robert Reid in 1558.
36
And he could no longer veto admission to philosophy classes to students not taught Greek by him.
37
Pneumatics, or Pnewmaticks, was understood as the science of mind, both human and divine (Sher
1990:89).
38
By 1731, half of the first-year philosophy students had not studied Greek or Latin (Horn:41). While
Berry (15) sees Francis Hutcheson as an important pioneer in this organisational change, through his
teaching and writing in English, Hutcheson did not attain the Glasgow chair until 1729, by which time
Edinburgh’s reforms were well under way.
 44
resulting prosperity meant more diversification of courses and faculties. In the second
half of the eighteenth century Edinburgh was renowned for the ability and devotion of
its teachers and the breadth and flexibility of its curriculum (Horn 1967).39 An
indication of the international esteem in which the Edinburgh professors were held can
be seen in Benjamin Franklin’s assertion in 1783 that they were as great a set of men ‘as
have ever appeared in any age or country’ (Campbell & Smellie 1983:7).
Fania Oz-Salzberger points to a highly complex, diffuse, variegated, and many-
voiced enlightenment in Scotland, one less prone to follow leaders and tone-setters than
its French counterpart. Noting that some of the crucial dividing lines ‘ran within, not
between, the “national” Enlightenments’, she describes ‘a highly complex debate on
modernity, virtue, and the nature of political liberty which the Scottish Enlightenment
thinkers were conducting among themselves’ (Oz-Salzberger 1995:19,44). In tracing
some of these dividing lines we form a picture of Stewart’s environment and his
interactions with it, particularly as cracks in the system appeared. Fault lines within the
Scottish Enlightenment widened in the nineteenth century, and Davie records that in the
1850s the filling of academic chairs ‘gave rise to gestures of national cultural disunity
and to remarkable outbursts of sectarian and theological animosities’. In Britain there
was a ‘suspicion of the Scottish metaphysical inheritance’, but at the same time in
Scotland a rising generation became embarrassed by this inheritance. Philosophical
learning seemed old-fashioned compared to the specialist learning on the English model
(Davie:190). Davie is describing conditions in the 1850s, but something similar
occurred at the turn of the century.40 Having held the Chair of Moral Philosophy since
1785 and having published the first volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the
Human Mind in 1792, Stewart was at the turn of the century Scotland’s leading
proponent of common sense philosophy. Yet in the new century some of his erstwhile
pupils saw him as belonging to an earlier period (Fontana 1985:49). Without going so
far as Allan (238), who argues that Stewart and his peers were afflicted by ‘a crippling
loss of national self-confidence’, we can discern a combination of pride and
embarrassment over Scottish difference, mixed with a consciousness of political loss, in
the Enlightenment thinkers. This ambivalence is captured in Hume’s comment:

39
Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, John Robison, and Hugh Blair were internationally recognised. And
so far as the natural sciences were concerned, Thomas Jefferson in 1789 declared that ‘no place in the
world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh’ (Campbell & Smellie:7).
40
There are also dissimilarities. For example, until the 1830s Cambridge, like the Scottish universities,
defended geometry against the incursion of new Continental mathematics.
 45
Is it not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments,
our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are
unhappy, in our Accent & Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the
Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that in these circumstances
we shou’d be the People most distinguish’d for literature in Europe? (Hume
1932[I]:255)

The Stewart-Jeffrey debate provides evidence that Jeffrey’s generation, too, was plagued
by an ambivalence towards Scottishness.41
Stewart is not the only figure in whom these tensions can be discerned. Despite
the great differences between Scottish and English ethical thought in the eighteenth
century, in certain Scottish thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, there are
contradictions and tensions due to the anglicisation of their thought. Walker points to a
variety of English standpoints in the Scottish internal debate of the eighteenth century.
He calls Hume a ‘strangely ambivalent figure’ who loved Scotland and infinitely
preferred Paris (where he felt at home) to London, yet went to elocution classes to
anglicise his speech. Both Alasdair MacIntyre and Broadie, on Walker’s reading, show
that Hume’s philosophical positions were ‘inimical to Scottish traditions of thought and
to Scotland’s nationhood’. Whereas philosophy was at the heart of Scottish ethics and
justice, property was at the heart of England’s, and certainly Hume espoused not
Scottish common sense philosophy42 but a liberal philosophy ‘well suited to nascent
English capitalism’:
Hume depicted a system in which pride in property and hierarchy was the
keystone; in which property determined rank; in which law and justice exist to
protect the propertied and offer no appeal against the social order. Hume
described this as exhibiting the characteristics of universal human nature,
“whereas in fact”, says MacIntyre, “it is the highly specific way of life of the
eighteenth-century English landowning class”. (Walker: 148)

41
Embarrassed by aspects of the Scottish inheritance, Jeffrey acquired in London a contrived accent and
high-pitched delivery which, along with the coxcombry of his peers, was remarked by many commentators
(see for instance Romilly 1905:244).
42
Such a reading of Hume (as the opponent of common sense philosophy) is challenged by David Fate
Norton (1982), who has largely defined the issue in modern debate, arguing that Hume, while a sceptical
epistemologist, was a common sense moral philosopher. Norton argues that Thomas Reid was responsible
for the characterization of Hume as a dangerous sceptic who undermined natural and moral philosophy.
This issue is outside the scope of this study, and at the time Hume was, in many ways, seen as the very
target of what became known as the common sense school (Copleston 1959: 365; Grave 1960: 4).
 46
Like Hume – and unlike Reid and Stewart – Adam Smith retained Francis Hutcheson’s
dualistic epistemology (all ideas derive from sensation or consciousness) while rejecting
his view of moral principles and justice. Thus Hume and Smith became ‘anglicizing
subversives’ in so far as they ‘abandoned Scottish modes of thought on society and
morality for those of England’ (Walker:146-9).43
Hume was not out of step with his times in seeking to anglicise his speech.44
Many Scots were very self conscious of what Beattie termed ‘Scottish barbarisms [and]
accent’. Beattie commented that ‘a person who does not go to live in England till he is
grown up’ cannot fully acquire the English tongue, and he insisted that the best Scottish
authors still handled the English language in a manner inferior to that of the best English
authors (Forbes 1806:16-18). Alongside the current of Scottish Enlightenment
triumphalism ran a current of cultural cringe.
The view of the anglicizing force of Smith’s work is problematised by the extent
to which the Wealth of Nations, as rendered by Stewart in his political economy lectures
and his Life of Smith, departed from the original. Milgate & Stimson (1996:227)
examine some key modifications Stewart made to Smith’s theoretical arguments that
made Smith seem a ‘more thoroughgoing economic liberal’. Insofar as Stewart had an
economic liberal agenda married to a constitutional political conservatism, he too is a
site of internal tensions within the Scottish Enlightenment.
Scottish national identity was complicated by the tensions of English and French
affinities and inter-city rivalries. Colley argues that many Scots, like James Watt,
regarded themselves as both Scottish and British, and that this did not necessarily entail
conflict; the act of winning access to a wider stage of endeavour ‘broadened’ the
patriotism of such Scots (Colley:125).45 Her analysis, while it offers no account of the
philosophical schisms that occurred within the Scottish Enlightenment, is helpful in
understanding something of the complexity of ‘national identity’ for the Scots. The
tensions are discernible in a figure like Colin Maclaurin who taught at Aberdeen

43
Rashid (1987a:257) too sees Hume’s outlook as not Scottish at all, but English: ‘the cosmopolitanism,
the desire for moderate luxury, the intellectual pleasantry, all take us back to Addison and the Spectator’.
44
Janet Adam Smith (1996:107-12) locates Hume’s distaste for his own ‘corrupt Dialect’ in a Scottish
drive to out-English the English in literary pursuits. Berry (1997:16), noting the Scottish self-conscious
preoccupation with writing well, records that many asked Hume to vet their writings for ‘Scotticisms’, and
Alexander Carlyle explained the circumlocutions and redundancies of the Scottish writers in terms of the
foreignness of the English language.
45
T.C. Smout (1989:5-6) too feels that most Scots in the late eighteenth century felt themselves to be
both Scottish and British. He points out that Ferguson, for instance, often spoke slightingly of England,
but warmly of Britain.
 47
reluctantly, and who cultivated patronage south of the Tweed. In London in 1719 ‘he
courted Bishop Hoadly, Dr Samuel Clarke and Sir Isaac Newton, and was duly rewarded
by being elected a fellow of the Royal Society’ (Wood 1993:18). In 1722 he left
Aberdeen without permission and became tutor to the son of Lord Polwarth, Patrick
Hume, with whom he spent over two years in France. Hume’s untimely death
necessitated Maclaurin’s return. Following a chequered career in the Aberdeen he
loathed, Maclaurin was happier in the Athens of the North, where he eventually
occupied the chair of mathematics. In the Scottish vein, he believed that the study of
mathematics was imbued with moral significance (Wood:18-9). It is possible that the
life of Maclaurin offers an opportunity to explore geographical dividing lines within the
Scottish Enlightenment.

Secular character of University of Edinburgh

A striking feature of the University of Edinburgh in the eighteenth century was
its secularism, and in particular the absence of moral paternalism. Unlike Oxford and
Cambridge, it took no responsibility for accommodation, and no one professor (regent)
supervised a student’s studies and general progress through the university. Nor was
there a tutorial system on the Oxbridge model. Moreover, there was no chapel in either
the Old College or the New College begun in 1789, and the governing body practiced
religious toleration for staff and students alike. Under Principal Robertson’s leadership
(principal 1762-90) criteria for appointments were academic and personal, not religious.
That the university attracted ‘significant numbers of nonconformist and Roman Catholic
entrants from England and Ireland’ was due to its religious liberality, as well as its
academic reputation (Williams 1992:88-90).
During the Napoleonic wars the practice of sending young English aristocrats
north intensified, and the University of Edinburgh became the destination of those who
might otherwise have undertaken the European tour as part of their education. Since it
was not a residential university, Stewart himself was host to several young men of rank
and fortune who were later, together with some of his other students, to hold positions
of importance in British government and society, among them two prime ministers
(Metz 1950:31) and those who would later push through Parliament the First Reform
 48
Bill (Flynn 1992:67).46 Whereas the practice of sending sons north seems to confirm
the intellectual authority of Scottish philosophy, and therefore to contradict my claim
that intellectual authority had already begun to shift, in fact the two processes were co-
existent. For the class of young man who was sent to Edinburgh, this northern
experience (in lieu of the continental tour) was regarded as part of the process of
producing a consummate gentleman. It was Scotland’s long-standing intellectual and
cultural links with the continent, the international esteem in which Scottish intellectuals
were held and the international standing of the University of Edinburgh that made
Edinburgh seem the obvious alternative when the continental education became
impossible. Thus the practice was a pragmatic response to the termination of a cultural
practice, or a modification of the practice in order to ensure a continuity of sorts. While
it reflected the intellectual hegemony of Edinburgh, it did not relate to the shifting locus
of intellectual authority from metaphysical philosophy to the physical sciences which
was affecting intellectual life in Edinburgh.
This intellectual hegemony related not only to the separate educational systems
of England and Scotland and the structure of the Scottish curriculum itself, but also to
the fact that the ‘distinctive code regulating the Scottish way of life was based . . . on a
distinctive blend of the secular and of the sacred’. Davie identifies the ‘intellectual-
secular element’ as that most responsible for the ‘foreignness of the Scottish ethos’
(Davie:xi-xii). This distinctive blend of the secular and the sacred informed not only
Hume’s scepticism but also the peculiarly Scottish common sense philosophical reaction
to it. Oz-Salzberger (25-27) argues that in Scotland ‘the process of “secularisation” was
a conscious shift of emphasis by a generation of worldly thinkers’ who were interested

46
Stewart was following a precedent set by others such as Smith, and began himself to take English
noblemen as resident pupils in 1780, but he became associated with a far greater number of English
aristocrats than any of his predecessors. Among those who attended his lectures were Lord Henry
Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Lord Henry Cockburn (solicitor general for Scotland), Francis Horner, Henry
Petty (Lord Lansdowne), Lord Palmerston (foreign minister and prime minister of Great Britain), Douglas
Kinnaird, Lord Webb Seymour, Rev. Sydney Smith, Henry Erskine (lord advocate of Scotland), Lord
John Russell (prime minister), Lord Ashburton, historian Sir Archibald Allison (son of Stewart’s close
friend), William Ward (Lord Dudley) (Romilly:4); Sir Walter Scott, Professor Thomas Brown, Lord
Cochrane (rear admiral of the United Kingdom), Sir Robert Inglis, Macvey Napier (Laurie:221); Lord
Minto (Governor-General of India), Gilbert Minto (Lord Privy Seal), James Mill, Henry Temple (Chitnis
1986:88,127); Lord Belhaven, Lord Lothian, Basil (Lord) Daer, Lord Powerscourt, Muir Mackenzie of
Delvin, Henry Glassford (Lord Warwick), Mr. Sullivan (under-secretary at war) (Stewart 1829:260,265);
Dr Thomas Chalmers (leader of the ‘Disruption’) (Horn:51); John Ramsay McCulloch, Lord Lauderdale
(Hollander:35); and Professor John Leslie (DNB). While Flynn (1992:67) and Hilton (1988:38) suggest
that James Mackintosh was among Stewart’s students, this is unsupported elsewhere.
 49
precisely in ‘the “material”, political, and economic aspects of human nature and
history’.47
By mid century common sense philosophy was under strong attack in Scotland,
and the Rev. John Cairns (1851) was critical of just this intellectual-secular element:
The ethical chairs in our Universities obtained a kind of licence to propagate and
diffuse a refined paganism . . . From the high post of honour in Edinburgh,
Ferguson, Stewart and Brown continued for half a century to dilate in their
different styles on the beauties of virtue and the authority of conscience, without
a single recognition of the Divine influence, which can alone charm virtue into
existence and restore into the hands of conscience its fallen sceptre. (quoted in
Davie:304)

Although this is an extreme statement of the problem for moral philosophy of cause and
will, there was a tension between intellectual secularism and Christian faith, and Stewart
did not escape this. Though its presence was never articulated by Stewart, it has been
remarked by Grave (1960:134-5) and later commentators, who refer to his
‘agnosticism’.48 The issue requires vigilance; we need to be careful that we do not
ignore Stewart’s religious writings and practice, and that we grasp Davie’s point that the
Scottish code was based on a blend of the secular and the sacred. Stewart anchored his
optimism in a variant of providentialism, but insisted that the philosopher, using
philosophical systems as instruments, was the one to know and realise divine design
(Poovey 1998:274). He repeatedly argued that science and religion occupied separate
spheres. He took pains to distance himself from revelation theology, and wanted to
establish a science of mind on sound methodological grounds, completely separate from
religion. The mood in Scotland was in utter contrast to that of Cambridge, which was
experiencing a revival of evangelicalism as the basis of theology (Gascoigne 1989). Of
this extreme form of ‘rational dissent’, Haakonssen (1996:11) comments: ‘Just as the
religious mind was tempted into Enlightenment, so the enlightenment mind exceeded
itself and the excess was religious’. Stewart was wary of such religious excess.
In late eighteenth-century Scotland, universities were seen as ‘centres where the
opinions of those who would in future wield political power could be shaped according

47
This is not to deny Rashid’s argument that Stewart departed fundamentally from the approach of earlier
political economists. Stewart’s approach, like Hume’s and Smith’s, was secular. His difference lay in his
insisting on a moral philosophical framework for political economy. It should be noted that Oz-
Salzberger says the process of secularisation was most notable among the Edinburgh Moderates.
48
Gay (1969:167-8) uses Stewart to make his point that the Enlightenment made psychology into ‘the
strategic science’ in several ways. It offered ‘scientific’ grounds for the attack on religion, underpinning
all other social sciences, and grounding the theory of man. Gay does not brand Stewart an atheist, but
uses his science of mind to locate him in an irreligious Enlightenment.
 50
to sound Whig principles’; and L. Stephen Jacyna (1994:84) points out that ‘Millar and
Dugald Stewart were outstanding examples of professors who set out quite deliberately,
and with some success, to play this role of moral and political tutor’. On the other hand,
Donald Winch (1983:44-45) and Jacyna (23) argue that while the younger Whigs
attached the greatest importance to Stewart’s role as a publicist for political economy,
they were often sceptical of his metaphysics. Winch and Jacyna have in mind the young
Edinburgh reviewers, whose attitude seems in sheer contrast to Lord Cockburn’s
(1874:22) testimony that Stewart’s lectures ‘were like the opening of the heavens. I felt
that I had a soul’. Cockburn attended both the moral philosophy and the political
economy courses and appreciated Stewart’s metaphysical package. The important point
is that for Stewart there was no dividing line between the two – political economy was
part of moral philosophy, and should be contained within a moral philosophical
framework. The apparent anomalies in accounts of Stewart’s reception illustrate the
emergence of cultural discomfort and disunity, and of a debate about philosophical
learning in the face of the modern explosion of knowledge. In his discussion of the end
of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, Emerson (1988:63) shows that even in the
1780s, ‘the old Scottish pattern of education in the classics, mathematics and philosophy
was beginning to be stressed, if not already skewed’ and, although the old
Enlightenment ideals and values were, for a while, passed on in the colleges, a younger
generation in the new century pressed for reforms. It seems, then, that some of the
tensions that produced the demise of the educational heritage described by Davie were
present even when Stewart was writing – already, the very nature of Scottish education
was being questioned. Fragmentation, demise and shifts in intellectual culture were
precisely Stewart’s problems.

Political Economy
The recent revival of scholarly interest in Stewart largely focuses on his political
economy, rather than Reidian common sense or perception theory. My interest is not in
political economy, but in this episode as an example of Stewart’s re-fashioning of the
moral philosopher. He succeeded in moving in his robes as a moral philosopher into the
public lecture theatre where he could talk about political economy in an overarching
way, and yet manage to remain apolitical.49 A crucial feature of post-Union Scotland

49
The lectures were offered at the University, but they were not part of the moral philosophy course, and
were open to all university students and even to members of the public.
 51
was that its thinkers and writers used and transformed several traditions of social and
political discourse, thus creating the new discourse of political economy. Whereas
Adam Ferguson, in the civic humanist tradition, nursed the Stoic ideal of manly ‘civic
virtue’, Oz-Salzberger describes David Hume and Adam Smith as combining several
discourses of sociability, commerce and natural jurisprudence to stipulate a social
sphere in which individuals could benefit one another by pursuing private ends and
partaking in a well-mannered social intercourse. In such a sphere, mutual transactions
are civil but not civic. Adam Smith developed a natural jurisprudential theory of
political economy, the key figure of which is the polite, commercial individual, not the
military-minded and politically active citizen. In abandoning the notions of political
community and a citizen’s militia, Smith broke with the civic humanist tradition (Oz-
Salzberger:41-3,107,118-9). Hume’s argument that the way forward might well be
through the Continental style monarchies (Oz-Salzberger:118) is evident in Stewart’s
political economy lectures (VIII) and elsewhere. He argued that the type of government
was almost irrelevant – what mattered was the type of economic policy. Stewart clearly
endorsed Smith’s faith in the British parliamentary system; he positively shrank from
active political faction and militarism of any sort.
Pocock sees Hume brilliantly employing the vocabulary of civic humanism,
a style of thought . . . in which it is contended that the development of the
individual towards self-fulfilment is possible only when the individual acts as a
citizen, that is as a conscious and autonomous participant in any autonomous
decision-making political community, the polis or republic. (Pocock 1972:85)
In the last years of his life when Hume became agitated by the disjunction between this
all-pervasive discourse and social realities, he ‘became convinced that England was
threatened with imminent corruption by the inescapable growth of the National Debt
and the political influence of stock-holders’. Whether or not Pocock is correct in
attributing to civic humanism the power to ‘drive the mind of Hume into prophetic
despair’ (Pocock:94-7), I suggest that Hume’s distress over the gap between political
paradigm and economic reality gestures towards another dividing line within the
Scottish Enlightenment.
Stewart participated in this debate on political economy; but he also took the
new discourse and developed it pedagogically, offering a separate course in political
 52
economy in 1800, the first at a British university. For the first time, political economy
lectures were open to all: attendance was not dependent on enrolment in the moral
philosophy course. One recent commentator hazards that he was probably ‘the only
academic lecturer on political economy in the world’ (Thomson 1987:251).50
Acknowledging the importance of Stewart’s pedagogic role and his amazingly eloquent
‘commentatorial activity’, Jacob Hollander (1966:28,34-6) argues that Stewart
influenced ‘the men who contributed most – as text-writers, as editors, as publicists, as
reviewers, and as journalists – to the revival of economic study in England’ in the first
decade of the nineteenth century.51 Boyd Hilton (1988:38) identifies Stewart as ‘the
chief intellectual source of political economy’, inspiring ‘an army’ of influential
disciplines including Horner, Jeffrey Brougham, Macvey Napier, Mackintosh,
Lauderdale, Erskine, and Lansdowne. Michael Ignatieff (1983:342) explains Stewart’s
popularity with the ‘sophisticated and disenchanted young gentlemen of the Edinburgh
Review’ in terms of his ‘airy optimism about the march of the mind . . . [and] his
agnosticism on the franchise question’. Although his course in political economy
(1800-1809) was extremely popular, there were complaints, and in general these related
to his refusal to give pat solutions, his insistence on developing the parameters of the
debate rather than addressing particulars, and his political timidity (Fontana 1985;
Bourne & Taylor 1994:43).52 Not all moral philosophers of the time were drawn to the
new science of political economy. Beattie (1793), for instance, treated Economics and
Politics as two distinct realms. His Economics was tied to the older, pseudo-
Aristotelian notion of Oeconomics, which dealt with the arrangements of the home and
family.53 Since Ferguson could not embrace the modern theory of liberty underpinning
the new science of political economy (Oz-Salzberger:110), political economy became a

50
That is, the only one to teach a course in political economy in its own right, outside the moral
philosophical curriculum. This is not to deny that in the 1790s political economy on Smithian principles
was being taught in Germany – as part of philosophy, as it was in Scottish universities (Ross 1995:356-7).
51
Chitnis (1986:106-7) too demonstrates the Stewartian underpinning of the reviewers’ ideas on political
economy.
52
Whereas Fry (1992:362) is under the impression that ‘Stewart only rarely’ lectured on political
economy, in fact he continued to lecture on the subject until 1809. In November 1804 when it was
rumoured that the lectures were to be discontinued because of insufficient numbers, Horner offered a
heartfelt justification for the course as essential intellectual succour for the élite few who ‘take to the
subject in earnest: . . . The effect which these lectures are already producing, by sending out every year a
certain number who have imbibed a small portion of his [Dugald Stewart’s] spirit, is so great that I cannot
consent to any suspension of it’ (Bourne &Taylor:358).
53
It covered ‘Relations of Husband and Wife, Parent and Child, Master and Servant’, as well as ‘Slavery,
particularly that of the Negroes’ (Beattie 1793).
 53
gulf separating Stewart from his erstwhile mentor.54 In this sense, political economy
itself represented one of the dividing lines of the Scottish Enlightenment.55
Political economy was a secular subject which, under Stewart, acquired its own,
independent place in the curriculum. This starkly contrasts with the situation at
Cambridge which, as an Anglican institution, did not have the philosophical framework
to house such a dangerous subject. When Stewart began to offer it as a separate course,
people attended hoping to catch him out in a political indiscretion, and even his
admirers thought the sound of words like corn and drawbacks ‘seemed a profanation of
Stewart’s voice’ (Cockburn 1874[1856]:153-4). This was because the mere discussion
of such materialistic subjects ‘threatened to open up Jacobinical inquiries into the utility
of thrones and altars’. In London at the time there was nobody lecturing on political
economy. In England, it was not until the bullion crisis of 1810-11, the corn law
debates of 1814-15, and Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (1817) that public
opinion came alive to political economy. Even then, clerical economists had to
overcome a widespread prejudice against it as ‘not only dry and repulsive but wicked
and dangerous’ (Hilton: 40,45,48-49).56
When Stewart offered his separate course, neither Oxford nor Cambridge had a
professor of moral philosophy, so there was nobody already lecturing on political
economy; it did not belong in an institutional philosophical framework. At Oxford the
professor of modern history (at the request of the prime minister) lectured on political
economy once a term from 1801-1813 (Hilton:41-42), and although by 1810 Edward
Copleston (Provost of Oriel 1814-1828) supported the introduction of political economy
to the syllabus there, he thought it too dangerous for undergraduates (Copleston 1810:
173-4). Henry Drummond endowed the first Oxford chair of political economy in 1825,
but almost immediately came to see political economy as incompatible with Christian
principles. At Cambridge during the 1820s and 1830s a nucleus of dons crusaded for a
Christian political economy in the face of strong moral prejudices against the subject,

54
Thomson (249-50) notes that Ferguson’s main interest was in historical social change rather than
political economy, and he could not endorse the doctrine of economic liberalism. Hamowy (1987)
confirms Ferguson’s interest in what we would now call sociology rather than economics.
55
Pedagogically these dividing lines extended beyond Stewart’s lifetime. There was so much contention
over who should teach political economy at Edinburgh that the endowment of the first British chair in the
subject eventually went to an English university (Fry:362-3). In 1825 Helen D’Arcy Stewart had
indicated that Dugald preferred John Ramsay McCulloch, first editor of The Scotsman and commentator
on political economy, to the humourless professor of moral philosophy John Wilson. McCulloch was
appointed to the first London chair in 1828 (Chitnis 1986:126-7).
56
Academic political economists at Oxbridge had to be clergy.
 54
and George Pryme became the first professor of the subject in 1828. This early absence
of interest in, and a philosophical framework for, political economy at Oxbridge is in
unmistakable contrast to the situation in Edinburgh.57
Stewart’s political economy course is an example of how, in the post-
Revolutionary climate, a secular university such as Edinburgh could treat such a subject
(one not even considered by Cambridge at the time): it did so under the aegis of moral
philosophy. It is significant that his political lectures (theory of government), delivered
as part of his ordinary course of moral philosophy, were distinct from his political
economy course, and he insisted on inverting the usual order in which these were taught:
political economy, in his opinion, must come first. Not only was it ‘most immediately
connected with human happiness and improvement’, but a knowledge of political
economy was a prerequisite to understanding forms of government (VIII:xvi,21-24).
For Stewart, political economy had primacy over theory of government, because it was
crucial to human welfare, whereas the actual form of government was secondary.
Hence, there were no prerequisite studies for those attending his course of political
economy lectures, but his moral philosophy students studied political economy before
theory of government. I suggest that Stewart’s inversion of the relationship between
politics and economics, and the absence of politics from his political economy course, is
a key to understanding how he managed to remain apolitical. It was because Stewart
was professor of moral philosophy that he could teach political economy. His separate
political economy course is integral to the story of Scotland’s progressive intellectual
tradition. While firmly in this tradition, Stewart was doing something quite new,
something Reid did not do.
Francis Horner, a Scot and a member of the Commons in the British Parliament,
was appointed in 1810 to chair a Select Committee on Bullion that produced a
controversial report. Many denied the validity of political economy and saw its
proponents as dangerous utopians pursuing scientific control over economic phenomena
at the expense of national security. With the conversion of the anti-bullionists58 in
1819, Lord Dudley wrote to the Bishop of Llandaff that

57
Meanwhile it was part of the practical education offered at the East India College at Haylebury, where
Thomas Malthus became professor of political economy in 1805.
58
Bullionists were Whigs who opposed the high price of bullion occasioned by the suspension of cash
payments by the Bank of England, and who wanted the return to specie (cash) payment regardless of
political circumstances.
 55

it appears laughable, and . . . provoking, to see persons who after being a long
time in office, come down to Parliament gravely to declare, that they have just
condescended to learn about as much political economy as was usually known to
the junior students in the University of Edinburgh twenty years ago. (cited in
Chitnis 1986:126)

Lord Dudley (William Ward) had resided in Stewart’s house and attended his lectures as
a young man. In retirement, Stewart did not abandon interest in the subject, and to Lord
Lauderdale and Horner, former students, he expressed serious reservations about the
Bullion Committee’s Report (Chitnis:121-7; Bourne & Taylor:582,654; Fontana:125-6).
Even within Stewartian political economy there were fractures, and political economy
remained a highly volatile religious issue throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century (Hilton 1988).
Not only did Stewart develop political economy pedagogically, but also,
according to A.M.C. Waterman, in his lectures he
very shrewdly identified . . . precisely those features of [Malthus’s] Essay which
had to be strengthened or modified before it could become fully acceptable to the
leaders of informed opinion at that time. (Waterman 1991:114)59

In setting out the tasks that had to be completed to reform Malthusian theory, Stewart
was in effect setting out the ideological program for what Waterman calls Christian
Political Economy.60 Waterman claims that William Paley’s ‘real intention’ in chapter
xxvi of Natural Theology where he incorporated the principle of population was to
address Stewart’s four-part ‘agenda’.61 Later Sumner, Copleston, Whately and
Chalmers amplified and supplemented the work on Stewart’s program.62 It helps to
appreciate the contemporary impact of Stewart’s work in political economy when we
note that students were drawn to Edinburgh from Cambridge and Oxford purely to hear
his political economy. George Pryme, first professor of political economy at Cambridge

59
Malthus himself expressed high respect for Stewart and his work, long before Stewart’s ‘Lectures on
Political Economy’ were published in 1856 (Napier 1879:32).
60
Waterman (200-2) distinguishes between Christian Political Economy and Radical Political Economy
in the ‘classical political economy’ tradition in Britain. Christian Political Economy blended four strands
of ideological tradition: orthodoxy, liberal theology, political economy, and Whiggism. In the second
decade of the nineteenth century radicals and Whigs moved apart, and Philosophic Radicalism, largely
through James Mill, annexed political economy, producing Radical Political Economy.
61
These four parts were 1) purge the Malthusian doctrine of its ineffectual theology and replace it with
something better, 2) retain the crucial anti-utopian argument and carefully guard it against an ultra-tory,
Anti-Jacobin mode of interpretation so that Whigs could meliorate ‘the real imperfection of our existing
institutions’, 3) resist the ‘gloomy inferences’ of the population theory, and 4) assert and explain the self-
correcting function of ‘nature’ in political economy and social ethics (Waterman:134-5).
62
There is a possibility that Sumner was a student of Stewart’s political economy course in 1800-2
(Waterman:160).
 56
from 1828, recorded in 1823 that Dugald Stewart’s political economy lectures in 1800-2
‘attracted so much attention, that several members of our own university went from the
south of England to pass the Winter in Edinburgh’ (Waterman:114,160).63 It is
interesting that it is an historian of political economy who credits Stewart with
originality, whereas most historians of Scottish philosophy do not.
Stewart maintained that
it is in the political union, and in the gradual improvement of which it is
susceptible, that nature has made a provision for a gradual development of our
intellectual and moral powers, and for a proportional enlargement in our
capacities for enjoyment; and it is by the particular forms of their political
institutions that those opinions and habits which constitute the Manners of
nations are chiefly determined. (VII:16-20)

Winch offers a keen analysis of Stewart’s political thought, arguing that Stewart’s
gradualism and perfectibilism (which ‘embodies an optimistic teleology’) gave a slant to
political economy unique at the time. His gradualism informed the primacy he accorded
political economy over forms of government, and at the same time his
thoroughgoing adherence to a form of intellectual and moral ‘perfectibilism’ . . .
[led him to treat] speculation about the ideal perfection of the social order as a
deduction from the progressive principle of human nature, and therefore as
something that should not be confused with ‘Utopian plans of government’.
(Winch:27,38-40,54)64

Again it is an intellectual historian, rather than a historian of Scottish philosophy, who

sees novelty in Stewart.
Political economy emerged from within the pedagogic framework of moral
philosophy, and this development points to the way in which the Scots perceived the
relationship between philosophy and political life. To them the bearing of philosophy
on political life seemed self-evident (Oz-Salzberger:108; Winch:26). This involved
more than a vigilance regarding the political implications of philosophical disquisitions
– a notion not unusual among British philosophers who read philosophy into worldly
action. Stewart demonstrated such vigilance, but more than that he taught a system of
moral philosophy that studied man as a member of a political body. Haakonssen
(1994;1996a) has shown that the Reidian common sense heritage that Stewart brought to
political economy constituted a significant departure from Smithian political economy.

63
Pryme himself was among them (Hilton 1988:48).
64
Haakonssen (1994:xii) comments that the tendency of Stewart’s moral thought, therefore, is to
marginalise politics, and to some extent law.
 57
In effect, Stewart dissolved Smith’s science of legislation65 and reconstituted political
economy as moral philosophy.
Alongside the Scots’ awareness of the bearing of philosophy on political life,
Ronald Hamowy has identified in their writings the notion of ‘spontaneously generated
social orders’. This theory
holds that the social arrangements under which we live are of such a high order
of complexity that they invariably take their form not from deliberate calculation,
but as the unintended consequence of countless individual actions, many of
which may be the result of instinct or habit. (Hamowy 1987:3)

Although ‘the theory of spontaneous order’ in the economic domain was associated with
liberalism, ultimately it became a defence of conservatism.66 Hamowy finds convincing
evidence of the doctrine throughout Stewart’s writings, and judges him largely
responsible, through the influence on and of his students, for the virulence of the
dangerously conservative theory in nineteenth-century economic and social theory.
Hamowy points out that the antirationalist aspects of the theory are
quite consistent with the view that we are ultimately impotent to improve the
social arrangements in which we find ourselves . . . [and it] can also provide a
theoretical justification for the most restrictive political and legal arrangements.
(Hamowy:34)

Stewart and the others seemed unaware of the full import of this implication
(Hamowy:32-36). Stewart held that ‘political order is much less the effect of human
contrivance than is commonly imagined’, and that governments and the structures of
law arise not from political wisdom and philosophical speculation but as ‘the gradual
result of time and experience, of circumstances and emergencies’ (Stewart in
Hamowy:33). To see political order not as the result of deliberate plans but as an
accretion of largely unintended consequences implies that there is no point in human
intervention to change a corrupt political order. It is difficult to reconcile this
implication of the theory of spontaneous order with moral perfectibilism – the idea that
the natural human progress is towards the good society, and that the diffusion of
enlightened opinion, and in particular the moral philosophical subject of political
economy, will be the primary tool for achieving the enlightened society. Either there is
a role for socio-political engineering, or there is not. In a sense the tension between

65
Haakonssen’s term for the Smithian empirical science of the moral system with its emphasis on
jurisprudence in a philosophical sense. Smith in Wealth of Nations defined political economy as ‘a branch
of the science of a statesman or legislator’.
66
Hayek labelled the theory (Hamowy:3).
 58
Stewart’s belief in spontaneous order on the one hand, and his moral perfectibilism and
insistence on moral philosophy as the principal agent of this perfection on the other,
suggests another previously undetected fracture in Stewart’s political economy.
Stewart urged students to begin with Wealth of Nations and then proceed to
James Steuart. This may suggest that Stewart intended his students to appreciate
Steuart’s very different perspective and European orientation: Steuart toured the
Continent from 1735-1740 and was exiled there from 1745-1763 as a result of his
association with the Jacobites. While Smith and others gathered information about
remote peoples, Steuart exploited the unique, if unwanted, opportunity to study
contemporary Europe (A.Skinner 1988:117,137). Rashid (1987:145,151) has traced the
several ways in which Stewart was offering something new in the area of political
economy. He argues that Hume, Steuart and Smith departed from established Scottish
academic tradition and followed the English in treating political economy as largely a
philosophically independent subject. Ironically, though it was Stewart who offered the
first separate course on political economy, it was also Stewart who sought to reassert its
philosophical subservience to moral philosophy.
Rashid’s insight is missed by other commentators. James Henderson (1996:chap
3, passim) argues that Whewell approached political economy in the Scottish tradition
of Smith, that is, as part of a moral philosophical tradition. But Henderson misses a
subtle difference: the emphasis in Scotland had been changing, and Smith himself was
part of this change. Like Hume and Steuart, he treated political economy as an
independent subject. Hume, Steuart, Smith and Stewart all assisted inadvertently in the
institutional demise of moral philosophy. Though Stewart developed political economy
pedagogically as a separate course, he in fact attempted philosophically to bring it back
into the moral philosophical fold. Whewell was in fact more in the Scottish tradition as
modified by Stewart than in the tradition of Smith.
Milgate and Stimson (1996) also find substantial innovation, novelty and
originality in Stewart’s political economy and his reworking of Smith. They are right to
conclude that Stewart was self-consciously engaged in the project of constituting the
discipline of political economy, and that it was to this end that he reworked Smith in his
own image. But Rashid (1987), who takes the point further and clarifies the matter in a
larger context, offers a departure point for this thesis: the fact that Stewart instigated this
radical, progressive project as a way of maintaining the delicate equilibrium of
Edinburgh’s intellectual, institutional arrangements was a complicating factor in the
 59
Jeffrey attack. Stewart was never simply outdated. His project to form the content and
boundaries of the discipline of political economy was integral to his larger project of
reinstating the primacy of moral philosophy.

Leslie Case and Stewart’s defence

From 1800 to 1805, Stewart’s political economy course was a buffer within the
University of Edinburgh against sectoral disintegration on religious lines. He managed
to quanantine the subject from the hysterical reactions to the French Revolution, and he
was able to teach it because he was a moral philosopher. But throughout the period the
University was affected by religious and political animosities, and in 1805 what is
known as the Leslie case represented the peaking of religious and political tensions as
they related to intellectual life in Edinburgh. John Leslie, an eminent man of science,
was a candidate for the Chair of Mathematics.67 His main opponent, far less qualified,
was a city clergyman who had the backing of the Moderate party of the Edinburgh
clergy. The case was a public trial of strength between the Evangelicals and Moderates,
and according to many historical commentators, the Moderates fabricated a charge of
atheism against Leslie (Sher:321; Clark 1996[1970]:201). In defending Leslie, Stewart
defended the principle of academic excellence and integrity against religious
interference.
To understand this dispute, it is necessary to know something of the background
of the religious animosity involved. For three decades (1762-1790) the University of
Edinburgh enjoyed the enlightened leadership of Principal Robertson who, as leader of
the Moderate party of the Church of Scotland until 1780, promoted religious freedom,
academic excellence, ‘reasonableness’ (Clark: 213) and harmony.68 There is a general
perception that the General Assembly was dominated by the Moderate Party from its
inception in 1752 until the 1790s when it was challenged by the rising Evangelical or
Popular party, its own lack of intellectual and political leadership (Williams 1992:92)
and its Erastianism (adherence to the theory of the supremacy of the State in

67
Leslie was taught by Joseph Black, John Robison and Dugald Stewart. From the Chair of Mathematics,
to which he was appointed in 1805, he moved in 1819 to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh
University. In 1810 he showed that it was possible to attain freezing temperatures by evaporating water in
the presence of a drying agent in an evacuated receiver, thus providing the principle later exploited in ice
machines (Display, Museum of Scotland and DNB).
68
Stewart recorded that Robertson’s control of the university senate was so complete that no vote was
ever taken on any issue during his thirty years as principal (X:196). Sher (1985:137) argues that
Robertson was a hugely powerful figure in the university, and that in his era the principal and professors
enjoyed increased autonomy.
 60
ecclesiastical affairs). But Ian D.L. Clark stresses that the Moderates were always a
‘minority regime’ vying with the Evangelicals for numbers (Clark: 209,222).
Moreover, the traditional picture of the Moderates as servants of the Dundas Tory party
in the 1790s and a reactionary force in intellectual and political matters – becoming
under George Hill merely ‘the Dundas interest at prayer’(William Ferguson in Sher:
321) – is qualified by occasions when the Moderates publicly opposed Dundas, by
Dundas’s ambiguous attitude to the Moderates, and by the equal quiescence of the
Popular party with Dundas. Nevertheless there was a change within the Moderates over
the half century from a mood of protest to a conservative ‘defensive attitude’: it became
a political and intellectual reactionary force seeking expediency and dedicated to
maintaining the status quo (Clark:211-3,221).
Then, in 1805, the Leslie Case punctuated Edinburgh life. The Presbytery
(Moderates) relied on a claim that Leslie, in his Inquiry, had ‘unexclusively adopted
Hume’s doctrine of Causation, and therefore became responsible’ for the theologically
dangerous results of Humean scepticism, the destruction of the argument from design
(Veitch:lxxxv-lxxvii). To a large degree it was a showdown over pluralities – the
practice of a professor occupying a university chair and a church living simultaneously.
The Moderates insisted that pluralities were necessary in order to ensure the entry of the
poor to divinity studies, and to supplement professorial incomes. The Evangelicals
maintained that professors must be free to devote all their time to teaching and research
without any parochial distractions, and that pluralities meant that neither job could be
done properly. In the event, in appointing Leslie to the chair of mathematics according
to intellectual criteria, the Evangelicals were, ironically, affirming the standards of
Robertson and the old-style Moderates (Williams:92-3). Despite Stewart’s early
connection with the Moderates in the Young Poker club (Sher:301) and the fact that he
was Robertson’s (1721-1793) hagiographer, Stewart and John Playfair (professor of
mathematics 1785-1805, professor of natural philosophy 1805-1819, F.R.S. 1807)
abhorred the Moderates’ scheme of making the University ‘a mere appendage to the
parochial and ministerial duties of a single Presbytery of the Church’ (Veitch:lxxxv-
lxxvii).69

69
For an illuminating discussion of the Leslie case, see Morrell (1971:53-6;62-3). Hilton (1988:24-26) is
interested in it as the turning-point in evangelical attitudes to science.
 61
As a professor and not as an Evangelical, Stewart published a pamphlet and a
postscript on the subject in 1805 in support of Leslie.70 Besides defending a friend who,
in his opinion, had been wronged, Stewart was upholding both a philosophical principle
(the doctrine of causation) and a point of public interest (the independence of the
university from the church). In the pamphlet Stewart defended the doctrine of causation
‘as applied to physical sequences’ and sought to show ‘by a historical array of opinions,
that the doctrine in this restriction was by no means new to Hume, and that it is not only
theologically innocuous, but the only safe opinion’ (Veitch:lxxvii).71 Instead of
acquiescing in the usual denunciation of Humean scepticism, Stewart was suggesting
Humean causality as a way forward in theology.
The case was decided in Leslie’s favour at a meeting of the General Assembly,
or Supreme Court of the Church, and Cockburn reported that Stewart
closed the discussion by a speech which he meant to have been longer, but
inexperience of such rough scenes made him too plain in his indignation, and he
was called to order, and sat down; not, however, till he had delivered a few long-
remembered sentences in a very fine spirit of scorn and eloquence. (Cockburn
1874 [1856]:175)

In a letter to Francis Horner written shortly after these events, Stewart maintained it had
been
absolutely necessary for the friends of liberality and of learning, to submit to a
contest with the enemy, and I am not without hope, that after the victory we have
gained, we shall be less priest-ridden in our Scotch Universities. (X:cxxxviii)

Morrell suggests the Leslie case could be regarded as ‘one of the first successes of
nineteenth-century Scottish Whiggery, an achievement engineered by Playfair and
Stewart’ (Morrell 1971:56). Davie says that by the 1860s the ‘question of the defence of
the philosophical tradition had, in practice, become utterly entangled with the originally
distinct question of the fate of the Presbyterian heritage’ (Davie:190).72 In seeking to
separate church and university, in insisting on Humean causality in the face of charges

70
Veitch (lxxvii) reported that the Postscript appeared in December 1805, and this is confirmed in the
DNB, but the British Museum General Catalogue, Catalogue of The London Library, and Poole’s index
to periodical literature give the date as 1806. Constable (1873[2]:31)confirms the 1806 date. The
Postscript, bound with many pamphlets and letters on the subject into a tome entitled ‘Tracts’ in Stewart’s
library, is undated. Hilton (1988:25) argues that early nineteenth-century Scottish evangelicalism was not
anti-intellectual or irrational, because there was a group of learned Presbyterian evangelicals who
followed the common sense school of Reid and Stewart.
71
For Stewart’s doctrine of causality, see II:97.
72
Though the Scots were agreed on the need to preserve their philosophical educational tradition, their
passionate differences about sects and denominations effectively prevented them from co-operating to
defend their academic legacy (Davie:190).
 62
of atheism, Stewart was defending the philosophical tradition and insisting on its
autonomy because this had already, by 1805, become entangled with questions of
authority concerning the Church of Scotland.73
Andrew Calvin’s (1805-6) satirical poem, The Ignoble Interruption of the
Liberal and Tranquil Pursuits of Honest Dug, published anonymously as a pamphlet,
set out to discredit Stewart through out-and-out ridicule of his role in the Leslie affair,
making him out to be corrupt, hypocritical, intemperate, uncouth, paranoid, pompous,
raving and self-serving – beneath a sweet-tempered facade.74 This is emblematic of the
excesses involved. In a pamphlet attacking Stewart’s, Rev. John Inglis (1806) referred
to a conspiracy between the Continental illuminati and revolutionaries to seize the
universities and exclude the clergy from them, warning that this was the plan of Stewart
and Playfair. Stewart’s polymathy enabled him to produce an old church law about
witchcraft and show that it was almost word for word what the Moderates were saying
about Leslie (Tracts 1805). Leslie himself talked of ‘absurd scenes’, furious at the
religious zeal of the Moderates whom he referred to, privately, as ‘the Jesuits’ (John
Leslie, Letter to James Brown, 12 April, 1805, Dc.2.57/1-175:EUL).75 The Leslie case
was the site of fracture lines in theology, education and church politics, and it provides
another example of Stewart’s defence of the Scottish intellectual institutional
inheritance. To support free speculation and scientific progress was to defend the
principle of academic excellence and integrity. The furore illustrates the potential that
existed for disintegration of the Scottish academic system on religious lines, and the
balancing act that Stewart sustained. Political economy and the Leslie affair signalled
the breakdown of equilibrium in the system.

Having established a basis for appreciating Stewart’s relationship to certain

aspects of the Enlightenment, and the role of educational institutions in that movement,
in the next chapter I address the central role of moral philosophy in Scottish education,
its decline, the shift from natural philosophy to science, and the relationship between
science and moral philosophy.

73
The Leslie affair also represents an earlier manifestation of the outbursts of sectarian and theological
animosities over the filling of academic chairs in the 1850s, as described by Davies (190).
74
Calvin satirised Robert Burns’s poetic praise of Scotland’s philosophers, especially Dugald and his
father.
75
Dr Finlayson was known as the ‘Jesuit’ of the party because of his superior tactics and discreet
politicking at voting time (Clark:214).
 63

Chapter 3

Authority of moral philosophy

 64
I have argued that Scottish moral philosophy faced significant threats in
Stewart’s time. This followed the period when, under Reid, it sustained a remarkable
achievement: common sense philosophy was successful in meeting what its proponents
saw as serious philosophical, political, religious and moral threats. To begin with, I
would like to locate moral philosophy in a broader historical context, and to clarify what
is indicated by Scottish moral philosophy. A full account would require a vast and
complex map of knowledge; I do not attempt such a taxonomic exercise, merely a
sketch. While the terms moral philosophy, metaphysics and science of mind (or mental
philosophy) were (and are) sometimes used interchangeably, in Stewart’s time mental
philosophy was a metaphysical study which, in turn, belonged to moral philosophy.1 In
Stewart’s classification, Scottish moral philosophy had four strands: the science of mind
(pneumatics, mental philosophy, the study of man’s intellectual powers or
understanding); ethics (man’s active or moral powers, the will); political economy and
forms of government (man considered as a member of a political body, considering what
constituted happiness in a community and how it could best be promoted); and abstract
speculations on mathematics and physics (metaphilosophy). Scottish metaphysics (as
opposed to scholastic metaphysics, involving speculations on the nature and essence of
the soul and other such topics) – as part of moral philosophy – was concerned with two
strands of moral philosophy: the science of mind and abstract speculations on
mathematics and physics (I:475; II:11-12; IV:191-2; VIII:16-24). Thomas de Quincey’s
observation about moral philosophy – that it offered ‘so immeasurable an expanse, that
two people might easily wander there for a whole life and never happen to meet’ (Sher
1990:87) – should alert modern scholars to its scope.
It is helpful to understand how various fields of knowledge were perceived. For
example, Roger Emerson suggests that early modern European thinkers made basic
divisions between subjects according to the manner in which beliefs were justified.
Thus religious beliefs almost always depended upon authorities and rested ultimately
upon revelation: ‘Christianity possessed mysteries not to be rationally comprehended’.
On the other hand, natural, or secular profane (versus sacred) knowledge was derived
from sense and reason, and ‘could show or make probable the design in nature which
allowed people to infer the existence of a Creator’. Thus knowledge was divisible into

1
It is evident in the regulations – which Reid helped to draft – of King’s College, Aberdeen that moral
philosophy there was grounded on mental philosophy, which had high curricular status: ‘the Sciences
depending on the Philosophy of the Mind, are understood to be Logic, Rhetoric, the Laws of Nature and
 65
revealed and natural. To proceed further, since classical times, natural knowledge itself
had been divided into three great disciplines: logic and metaphysics; moral philosophy;
and natural philosophy. Logic and metaphysics involved the abstract consideration of
space, time and substances, and forms of valid arguments about them. Moral
philosophy was concerned with spirits and minds (pneumatics), and hence involved the
study of God, the angels, men, and their active (moral) powers. Natural philosophy was
the study of material bodies and the reasons or causes for their modifications and
changes (Emerson 1990b:960-2).
With the rise of the universities in the thirteenth century and the availability of
Aristotle’s Ethics, Oeconomics and Politics, ‘the triad of ethics, oeconomics and politics
became the normal structure for the moral philosophy curriculum’ and continued well
into the seventeenth century, although there was no consensus about the relative
importance of the three disciplines (Kraye 1988:303-5). The three divisions of natural
knowledge were seen as systematically related, and this unity was preserved until about
the end of the eighteenth century: one ‘could not generally alter one’s metaphysics
without perceiving a need to change one’s physics or moral philosophy’ (Emerson:962).
By the early eighteenth century, in Scotland, the divisions of moral philosophy had
become pneumatics, ethics, natural law, jurisprudence and economics (Emerson:963),2
all distinct from Newtonian natural philosophy, although sometimes influenced by it.3
In Britain, the rise of Baconian empiricism entailed an ‘epistemological
revolution’ – the concepts of the metaphysician had to be shown to be derivable from
experiences and reflection on these. For philosophers such as Locke, Hume and
Condillac, space, time and substance were ideas produced by human minds rather than
objective things in a universe directly known a priori. And the human mind was the
province of moral philosophy (Emerson:962-3). Thus a revolution in metaphysics
entailed fundamental adjustments in moral philosophy. During the same period, the
empiricist programme announced by Francis Bacon promoted natural history and,
increasingly, the methods of the natural philosophers and natural historians shaped the
work of improvers, giving rise to new social sciences. One consequence was that the

Nations, Politicks, Oeconomicks, the fine Arts and natural Religion’ (Abstract of some statutes and orders
of King’s College in Old Aberdeen [1754] quoted in Wood 1990:139).
2
A different typology of knowledges applied on the Continent, but I am interested here in Scottish moral
philosophy.
3
Usually we use the term ‘natural philosophy’ to refer to what ‘science’ (or what we now call science)
was until the early nineteenth century. But through the eighteenth century there was a division between
natural history, an observational science, and natural philosophy, which included the physico-
mathematical and experimental sciences. See Yeo (2001b).
 66
unity of philosophical systems was slowly replaced by a methodological unity; thus
Emerson sees the Enlightenment as largely the story of the extension of empiricism and
experimental methods to every field of inquiry during the eighteenth century. Whereas
in its scholastic forms natural philosophy had remained aloof from the arts which it
could ‘explain’, during the eighteenth century it came to involve artisans, and to bridge
the gap between the theorists and the doers, a process assisted by popular scientific
expositions, lectures, toys, instruments, and technical literature from broadsides to
encyclopaedias (Emerson:964-5).4 Thus the empiricist revolution changed all three
divisions of natural knowledge, and their relationships to one another.
Visualizing a bridge between the theorists and the doers does not really help us
to understand Stewart’s position. By 1800 the basic contrast between skill and
‘reflective and rational philosophic knowledgeability’ remained (Shapin 1989:561), but
throughout the eighteenth century natural sciences were increasingly promoted for their
utility (Emerson:969). One of the main charges hurled against mental philosophy in the
early 1800s was that it was useless, and the Stewart-Jeffrey debate is evidence that the
criterion of utility had migrated from natural philosophy to philosophy generally. A
subtle shift in emphasis had occurred – from skill versus theory to utility versus inutility.
Stewart was acknowledging the new emphasis and responding to it. In refurbishing and
championing common sense philosophy and the science of mind, he saw himself as
promoting an intellectualism that was useful.
In the area of moral philosophy, Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), the Glasgow
University professor of moral philosophy after 1729, dedicated himself to showing that
moral philosophy, too, could be restructured on an empirical base (Hankins 1985). As
well as dealing with ethics (man’s active or moral powers, the will), he made a more
detailed and critical attempt to understand the human mind – involving a study of man’s
intellectual powers (understanding). Since moral philosophy also dealt with ‘ethics,
natural law, jurisprudence and economics, Hutcheson’s work put these, too, on
empirical foundations which were broadened by his successors in Scotland’ – David
Hume, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, Reid and Stewart. As such thinkers pursued these
branches of natural knowledge ‘they helped to found the modern sciences of
anthropology, psychology, political economy and sociology’ (Emerson: 963). However,

4
At the same time, the philosophical distinction between theory and practice remained.
 67
while the purview of these Scottish philosophers was broad, their central concern was
moral influence.5

The curriculum and authority

A striking feature of the curriculum of the University of Edinburgh is the crucial
role that the chair of moral philosophy came to play. The reforms of 1708 ‘constituted a
Professor of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, to be apparently the apex of the whole
teaching establishment’ (Grant 1884:262), and Edinburgh was seen as the centre for
pneumatics or ‘speciall metaphysicks’ – as opposed to logic and ‘generall metaphysicks’
(Morgan 1933:71).6 For most of the eighteenth century, ‘moral philosophy provided
the medium through which the findings of all sciences, natural and moral, were
mediated and assessed’ (Winch:26). During the same period, the cultivation of
metaphysics was regarded as necessary to social advancement in Scotland (Davie
1961:xii); metaphysics and moral philosophy became synonymous in Scotland, except
when ‘metaphysics’ was wielded as a derogatory term to link moral philosophers to
scholasticism. Moral philosophy ‘achieved an authority in Scottish culture rarely seen
at other times and places’ (Walker:147). This is despite the fact that the abolition of
regenting at Edinburgh removed the pressure to graduate, so that ‘teaching and learning
soon grew to be thought of more importance than graduation’ (Grant 1884:264).7 With

5
Laurie (1902:7) points out that while Scottish moral philosophers studied both psychology and
epistemology, their prime and deepest concern was philosophy and not psychology.
6
From 1695 onwards the Scottish Parliament issued a series of regulations which were sent to the
universities, some of which were caried out, others ignored. One such communication (sometime between
1695 and 1707) directed that dictation and note-taking in classes cease, and instead there be printed ‘a
course or systeme of philosophie composed, to be taught in all the colledges’. The compilation and
printing of the courses was divided between the Scottish universities or colleges as follows: ‘logicks and
generall metaphysicks be composed by the two colledges of St Andrews, and the general and speciall
aethicks by the colledge of Glasgow; the generall and speciall physicks by the two colledges of Aberdeen;
and the pnewmaticks or speciall metaphysicks by the colledge of Edinburgh’ (Morgan:70-71).
Pneumatics (or pneumatology) at this time involved consideration of God, the angels, and the souls of
men (Grant:274), and was usually defined as the science of mind, both human and divine (Sher 1990:89).
(In chemistry, it had a separate meaning, referring to the study of the ‘airs’.) Mind and soul were used
interchangeably. By the 1740s moral philosophy involved a six months’ course of moral and political
philosophy, deduced from Cicero, Marcus Antoninus, Pufendorf and Lord Bacon, and illustrated with an
account of the rise and fall of the ancient governments of Greece and Rome. There was no mention of
Aristotle (Grant 1884:262-3, 274). Whereas the reforms of 1708 meant that the responsibility for teaching
ethics was divided between the professor of ethics and natural philosophy and the professor of moral
philosophy, during the first half of the century ethics lost its place in the natural philosophy class and the
professor of moral philosophy assumed full responsibility for moral instruction (Sher:91). For Ferguson
(1766) pneumatics covered human nature and God. Under human nature he taught history of the species
and history of the individual, which involved the understanding and will. By Stewart’s time pneumatics
covered only the study of the intellectual powers or understanding (IV).
7
Stewart and Professor Andrew Dalzel, who were friends and colleagues, petitioned the university in
1778 to raise money to repair the common hall for the newly reinstated graduation ceremonies (Dalzel
 68
the ceremonial public laureating abandoned, there were no rigid curricular requirements,
although divinity students had certain mandatory courses (Grant:264-5, 277, 281).8 In
the revised curriculum of Stewart’s day, metaphysics covered mental philosophy and
abstract speculations on mathematics and physics.9 It was the province of moral
philosophers, who might also hold expertise in other sciences (IV:194-5).10 Even
outside the university, as Jacyna’s work on extramural medical teaching shows, moral
philosophy could provide a framework for medical education.11 Nevertheless, Sher has
pointed out that the development of Edinburgh’s moral philosophy chair in the
eighteenth century is not one of unchecked progress. For instance, none of Ferguson’s
predecessors attracted much attention or many students, despite the fact that the period
was one of rapid expansion. But during the same period a succession of internationally
known thinkers – Gershom Carmichael, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith (Hutcheson’s
pupil), and Thomas Reid – occupied the rival chair at Glasgow. Ferguson and Stewart
brought the Edinburgh chair into international prominence, raising it to ‘new heights of
popularity and prestige’ (1990: 88,125).
Early in the century the pre-eminence of divinity at Edinburgh seemed to be
manifest in several ways: for example, the professor of moral philosophy was instructed,
in 1734, to prelect weekly ‘upon the truth of the Christian religion’, and to act as a
censor of printed materials ‘to prevent the youths’ being corrupted with error or
immorality’ (Horn:47; Sher: 99-100). The salient point is that it was the moral
philosopher, rather than the professor of divinity, who was seen as uniquely qualified to

1862[I]:28), then in 1789 Dalzel took it on himself to get a University seal made up and managed to
secure a patent free of charge (Morgan 1937:257).
8
Morgan (1933), in his study of Scottish university curricula, commissions, examinations and degrees,
notes that there is precious little primary material on the latter part of the eighteenth century for
Edinburgh. From 1804, students who wished to enter Divinity Hall had first to attend Greek and logic,
Moral philosophy, and Natural philosophy, each during a separate session (Morgan 1937:258-9). In
1778, the Senatus conferred honorary M.A. degrees on three professors who had not previously
graduated: Dugald Stewart professor of mathematics, Dalzel professor of Greek, and Bruce professor of
logic (Grant:281).
9
Long after Stewart’s departure, William Rankine, the Glasgow professor of engineering (1855-72),
derived the framework he needed for engineering science from the moral philosophy of Reid and Stewart
(Channell 1989:448-9).
10
In contrast, moral philosophy for his predecessor in the chair, Adam Ferguson, involved natural
religion and reason. The idea of human progress informed his account of reason, and under moral law he
discussed politics but not political economy. He covered abstract speculations on mathematics and
physics under natural philosophy, which he treated separately from pneumatics and moral philosophy
(Ferguson 1766,1792).
11
John Thompson insisted that metaphysics formed a necessary part of the education of an enlightened
medical practitioner, and the metaphysical portion of his medical lectures owed a great debt to Stewart’s
Elements (Jacyna 1994:135-7).
 69
translate and comment upon the findings of the other sciences, to expose their religious
implications and thus to locate them in terms of the Christian cosmology. Another
indication of divinity’s hierarchical standing seems to lie in the fact that the professors
of divinity and ecclesiastical history, with the Principal, headed academic processions;
but Williams (1992:88) argues that the pre-eminence of divinity was symbolic rather
than real. Sher points out that in the Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy
professors taught ‘elements of what would now be called psychology, religion,
epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, jurisprudence, sociology, history, economics,
political science, philosophy of history, rhetoric, literary criticism, and more’. They
were expected to ‘teach natural religion and instill conventional moral and religious
principles’, as well as respect for the crown and the constitution (Sher: 87-88). So
despite the symbolic institutional importance of divinity, significant intellectual
authority rested with moral philosophy. In 1803 Sir Archibald Davidson warned all the
Scottish universities that ‘any attempt to reduce their philosophy requirement [for the
divinity faculty] from three years to two would be “materially hurtful to the education of
the clergy of the church of Scotland”’ (Williams:91). This suggests that there was a
perceived challenge to the curricular status of philosophy in 1803, and since the warning
appeared in the University’s ‘Senatus Minutes’, Stewart must have been aware of these
concerns. When he then read Jeffrey’s attack on philosophy in the Review in the
following year, he saw that there was also a threat to the status of philosophy in the
public mind.
When Stewart assumed the chair of moral philosophy in 1785, the mediating
role of the moral philosopher and his position at ‘the apex of the whole teaching
establishment’ were intact, but in the 1790s the intense politicisation of philosophy had
a detrimental effect on Edinburgh intellectual life. In the first decade of the new century
moral philosophy came under open attack. Sher warns that Scottish intellectual life did
not deteriorate as dramatically as is usually thought, and it did not so much decline as
become reoriented. As the particular values and genres associated with the Scottish
Enlightenment died out, they were replaced by
new values – such as romanticism, sentimental Jacobitism, evangelicalism,
patriotic bibliomania, and nineteenth-century Whig and Tory ideologies – and
 70
new genres – such as the historical novel, extended critical essay or review, and
specialized scientific journal. (Sher 1985:308)
Stewart wrote at this turning point in Scottish intellectual life, and sought to resist the
decline of moral philosophy. Whereas Hume and Reid did not live to see the birth of
the new critical journals, Stewart was at the centre of a struggle that found expression
largely within their pages. Given the nineteenth-century contributions of Henry
Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Sir James Mackintosh, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg,
Thomas Carlyle, John Galt, Thomas Brown and Sir William Hamilton, Sher is right to
note a reorientation rather than the decline of Scottish intellectual life. But this
intellectual reorientation involved the decline of one important component: moral
philosophy.
Winch describes the formal connections between parts of the moral philosophy
curriculum in Stewart’s time as follows:
a study of man’s intellectual powers (understanding) was completed by an
account of his active or moral powers (will); and these two enquiries into
metaphysics and ethics dealt with those questions which related directly to the
capacities and duties of the individual. The edifice was completed by a
consideration of man as ‘a member of a Political Body’, of what constituted
happiness in a community and the means by which it could best be promoted.
(Winch:26)12
Thus politics was intimately connected with metaphysics and ethics. However, Winch
argues that Stewart introduced a ‘novel emphasis within the Scottish tradition’ through
his emphasis on ‘the gradual development in our intellectual and moral powers’. The
manner in which Stewart upheld his position, ‘even when purporting merely to describe
that of his predecessors, sets him apart from them’ (Winch:27,39).
Despite the reorientation of Scottish intellectual life, in the closing decades of
the eighteenth century, Scottish moral philosophy maintained a good deal of its
intellectual authority (Davie 1961; Winch 1983). This was achieved through the
emergence of common sense philosophy, which began with Reid in Aberdeen and
Glasgow and was brought to Edinburgh by Stewart.13 Paul Wood traces the ascendancy
of common sense at Aberdeen in the 1790s through Stewart’s pedagogy at Edinburgh
(Wood 1993:138-43).

12
For Stewart’s more detailed articulation of the connections, see II:11-12.
13
In fact Reid’s system was institutionalised at four of the colleges by the late 1780s (Emerson 1990:35).
This is not to ignore Norton’s (1982) reading of Hume as a common sense moral philosopher.
 71
Common sense philosophy
In the late eighteenth century, the highly analytical study of psychology,
epistemology and metaphysics – associated with Reid and Stewart – came to be called
the ‘Scottish Philosophy’ or common sense philosophy (Sher 1985:314). Thus the
common sense school came into being around the time of Reid’s death, and centred on
Stewart (Somerville 1995:37,333). In order to understand the emergence of such a
school, we need to appreciate the level of consternation caused by reflection on the
implications of Locke’s sensationalism, Berkeley’s idealism, Hume’s scepticism and
Condillac’s materialism. Although the common sense tradition has been treated in
detail by scholars and a considerable body of literature exists, I want to present
Stewart’s perceptions of the common sense school.14 Stewart offered an account of the
philosophical background to the emergence of common sense, and quoted Reid’s
acknowledgment that his thought owed its impetus to Hume (III:246-8).
Stewart drew a line from Locke’s sensationalism to Berkeley and Hume, and
Condillacisme. He argued that Berkeleian idealism was ‘a logical consequence of the
opinions universally admitted by the learned at the time when Berkeley wrote’; it
involved a scepticism regarding the existence of the material world. In turn, Hume’s
scepticism was a direct consequence of ‘turning Berkeley’s weapons against himself’.
Hume perceived ‘that the ideal theory went to the annihilation of mind as well as of
matter’ (III:51-2, 55). Stewart described Hume’s scepticism as ‘melancholy . . . ready to
reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or
likely than another’ (X:270-1). He claimed that the scepticism of Hume had had a ‘great
and extensive . . . effect in unsettling the opinions of mankind’ so that human reason
was entangled in a ‘labyrinth’ (V:48). For Stewart, materialism was founded on ‘a
misapprehension of the proper object of science’, since ‘matter as well as mind is
known to us by its qualities and attributes alone, and . . . we are totally ignorant of the
essence of either’, and since it was based on the premise that all events are necessarily
linked together as causes and effects (II:48, 97-107). In brief, Berkeleian material
idealism involved a scepticism regarding the existence of the material world. Humean
idealism went even further, rejecting religious belief and inviting relativity and
uncertainty. Extreme materialism rejected all previous knowledge and claimed the
essence of the material world was knowable. Such, in Stewart’s account, was the

14
The concept of a Scottish ‘school’ of philosophy was invented by Stewart (Wood 1990:127).
Concerning Reid’s philosophy, see Haakonssen (1990a;1996a;1999); Lehrer 1989.
 72
dangerous state of philosophical affairs when Reid launched his antidote.15 James
Manns (1994:1) believes that it is ‘precisely against the backdrop of such excesses that
Reid’s philosophy is best appreciated’. Its basic claims – ‘that we really do directly
perceive the objects about us, for example, and that they really are largely as they
appear to us’ – were so unpretentious that their ‘genuine boldness’ could not be
appreciated by any who had not fully assimilated the Western philosophical tradition at
that point. In the face of Humean scepticism, Reid posited an instinct, a common sense,
and, in Stewart’s assessment, thereby provided the foundations for a philosophical
system.
Scottish mental philosophy, the kernel of common sense philosophy, was a
speculative, philosophical psychology that has since become known as faculty
psychology, as opposed to the associationist psychology stemming from Locke and
elaborated by James Mill and others, including Hartley, Hume, Hobbes and Condillac.
Associationist psychology held that some ideas seem ineluctably tied to others, so that
one comes to mind immediately after the other. This was explained by the postulation
that principles related sensations, ideas of sensations, and ideas to one another: such
principles were even advertised as ‘laws’ of association. Since physical sensations were
seen as a source of ideas this was often regarded as a materialist philosophy and
perceived as dangerous by many who feared its atheistic implications. Reid and the
common sense philosophers, worried about the trend of associationist psychology which
robbed the mental faculties of their prominence, defended the power of the mind and the
validity of the mind’s perceptions. According to E.G. Boring (1950:53,205-8), it was
Stewart who popularised Reid’s identification of mental faculties as ‘faculty
psychology’. Faculty psychology held that we do, by reflection, have direct access to
the operations of our own minds, and that mental phenomena are the result of a
comparatively small number of simple and uncompounded faculties. Stewart himself
saw associationist psychology as an absurd jumbling together of scholastic metaphysics
and hypothetical physiology. Nevertheless he devoted one of his five essays in
Philosophical Essays (1810) and two chapters in his encyclopaedic ‘Dissertation’
(1821) to refuting it. Corsi (1988:56) argues, I think correctly, that in troubling to refute

15
Reid was obsessed with the refutation of Hume’s scepticism (Haakonssen 1999:730), and, while
Norton (1982) argues that Hume was a common sense moral philosopher, my concern is with Stewart’s
 73
physiological and psychological materialism, Stewart acknowledged the vitality of the
materialist tradition. At the same time, I suggest that Reid and Stewart viewed their
common sense defence as intimitely linked with their professional and moral positions.
Our knowledge of this chapter of intellectual history is enriched by an
appreciation of the historical context of common sense philosophy. For instance,
Phillipson (1975) sees the emergence of the common sense school in terms of the
passing of Scottish leadership and influence from the landed élite to the lawyers,
ministers and professors – the distinctively Scottish professions. Such people preferred
an activist language of virtue to the passive determinism of Hume and Smith, and were
thus drawn to anti-Humean common sense. Whereas Phillipson has drawn the fire of
those who emphasise cultural continuity, Christopher J. Berry (1997:190-1) thinks that
the Scots’ own awareness of themselves as ‘distinctive in their “enlightenment” is . . . a
significant pointer to their divergence from their forbears’.16 This cultural reading does
not disrupt, and can comfortably co-exist with, Stewart’s own ‘intellectual’ reading
described above.
James Beattie and James Oswald attempted to disseminate Reid’s common sense
philosophy well before Stewart fortified and popularised it through what Phillipson
(1983:85) calls his pedagogical genius. In the opinion of some commentators, their lack
of success was due to lack of philosophical sophistication (Clark 1996:212-3; Grave
1960:5; Sher 1985:311), but the difference between Stewart’s understanding of common
sense and that of these two exponents indicates divisions within Scottish common sense.
In Chapter 7, on Stewart’s methodology, I examine the gulf that separated Stewart and
Reid on hypothesis, analogy, the design argument, the very term ‘common sense’, and
‘fundamental principles’. Stewart’s censure of the approach of Brown, his successor in
the chair of moral philosophy (IV:231-2; X:292-3,8,llxxxi) and Wilson, Brown’s
successor (Chitnis 1986:126-7), was followed by the remodeling of common sense
undertaken by Hamilton and Ferrier.
Tracing a ‘remarkable intellectual continuity’ in the influence of Scottish
philosophy on the French from about 1730 to about 1890 (mainly through the work of
Thomas Reid, Stewart, Sir William Hamilton and Robert Flint), Davie identifies

perception of common sense philosophy.

16
Berry (185-99) discusses Phillipson in these terms in his discussion of the readings of the Scottish
Enlightenment, which he divides into explanatory and significatory. Explanatory readings are subdivided
into ideological, cultural and intellectual; significatory (addressing the significance of the Scots to
subsequent developments) into sociological and liberal. These readings are not necessarily mutually
exclusive.
 74
moments of arrest within this continuity. These occurred during the transition from
Stewart’s to Hamilton’s influence and from Hamilton’s to Flint’s. Although James
Ferrier is commonly treated as the ‘great foe of the Common Sense school’, Davie sees
Hamilton and Ferrier, from about 1830 to 1860, as renovating the common sense
tradition in an attempt to adapt its sagacity and moderation to the conditions of the
modern world.17 This was a period of crisis in Scotland, when a ‘sudden
provincialisation of the country’ (following the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Disruption
of 1843) swept away the ‘delicate balance required for the efficient operation of the
peculiar institutional inheritance of Scottish democracy’ (Scots law, secular education
system, and the balanced tensions of Church and State) (Davie 1961:272-90). Tracts on
the Scottish Universities (1848-50), into which are bound pamphlets by leading
academics and a graduate, evidence the heated public debate concerning Scottish
education at the time.18
Even before Hamilton and Ferrier were engaged in their philosophical
renovation project, Stewart at the turn of the century had sniffed the winds of change.
The peculiar institutional inheritance of Scottish democracy – especially in the field of
education – was already a topic of debate, and also surfaced in the Stewart-Jeffrey
dispute.19 Not only did Stewart reshape Reid’s common sense, but he also perceived a
need to defend the very role of the philosopher. Reid carried on something of a
mentoring role with Stewart who, accepting the challenge of building on Reid’s sturdy
foundations, nevertheless found himself having to fight a battle on a different front.
Stewart felt that the challenge was no longer confined to questions about the nature and
certainty of knowledge but rather went to the very purpose of moral philosophy. I
suggest that Stewart’s efforts to stem the seepage of intellectual authority from moral
philosophy can be seen, in part, as an early expression of the Scots’ ‘struggle to adapt

17
Davie argues that the common reading leaves unstated the vast area of common intellectual
presupposition between Hamilton and Ferrier. Ferrier elected a middle way between the extremes of
monism and pluralism, and his programme involved neither the Coleridgean inflation of Common Sense
nor a Benthamitic mutilation of it (Davie:280-1).
18
There was a war going on in the press it seems. Considerable space is given to answering charges
which are branded as grossly misleading, sometimes downright perfidious. By this time the practical
education that would suit students for the East India company was valued, and Scotland was charged with
being non-utilitarian amongst other things, such as not teaching the classics properly or deeply enough.
Some graduates replying attested to the quality of Edinburgh professors and defended the Humanities
there. One complained that though Scottish professorships and masterships were open to English
graduates, the reverse was not the case. Five publications (Anon. [1849], Black [1850], Blackie [1848],
Dunbar [1848], Pillans [1848]) bound together as ‘Tracts on the Scottish Universities’, Special
Collections, EUL.
 75
their system to modern conditions’, a struggle they eventually abandoned in the middle
of the nineteenth century (Davie:287). Despite the intellectual continuity we can trace
from Hutcheson to Ferrier, there was disruption to the social meaning of philosophical
learning. The disruption occurred at the point occupied by Stewart on the line of
Scottish philosophers – the philosopher’s role was in question.
Another matter of contention was the relevance of philosophical learning. In
early nineteenth-century Britain there was a set of debates conducted in books, journals,
newspapers and pamphlets over education, morality and scientific knowledge, and
religion. The perceived explosion of natural knowledge, evidenced by the emergence of
philosophical societies in many industrial towns (Morrell & Thackray 1981:12), gave
rise to public discussion on the relevance of Scottish philosophical learning. The
contests over education reflected, among other things, the growing intellectual authority
of the experimental sciences. The significance for religion of scientific findings was
debated, reflecting the attempt by many religious writers to retrieve for religion the
intellectual authority that the experimental sciences were claiming. Theology had once
been Queen of the sciences. The debates over curriculum content, the morality of the
natural philosopher, and the theological implications of philosophical positions were all
concerned to a degree with the issue of intellectual authority. In Scotland, despite the
level of secularisation of intellectual life, debates about moral philosophical learning
were nevertheless not divorced from debates about theology.
Whereas Reid objected to the grounding of the truths of religion upon analogy,
Stewart used notions of design to justify analogical reasoning within the framework of
natural theology. Reid insisted that final causes had religious, and not scientific,
significance; Stewart argued that final causes and design had guided the development of
sciences such as physiology (III:291-4,341-2). Not only did Stewart find God’s design
displayed in nature, but he also contended that the study of natural philosophy elevated
the mind to contemplation of the Creator. He was keen to promote the use of reason,
claiming that to lose the God of design was to lose also the God of revelation (II:40-41).
In his Life of Smith he referred to Revelation as an ‘indolent philosophy, which refers to
a miracle, whatever appearances, both in the natural and moral worlds, it is unable to
explain’ (X:34).
Notwithstanding their differences, both Reid and Stewart were too speculative in
the eyes of another common sense philosopher – James Beattie – who thought that Reid

19
The debate was, in part, over the relevance of a philosophical education.
 76
paid far too much attention to ‘theorists’ like Locke, Hume and Berkeley.20 Wood has
argued that for Beattie, Reid was not enough of a moralist and too much of a detached
metaphysician (Wood 1990:47). From time to time Reid and Stewart were accused of
unwittingly undermining the principles of morality and religion through their insistence
on an ‘instinctive inductive principle’, their analytical approach to the mind and their
abstract style of philosophising (Inglis 1806; Forbes 1806; Lyall 1815; Davie 1961:304).
Stewart’s attempts to separate philosophy and religion, especially when combined with
his distaste for dependence on revelation theology, and his resistance to being used for
theological purposes, were viewed with suspicion and alarm by those who perceived
new philosophical ideas as a danger to religion.21 The relationship between religion and
institutionalised intellectual life in Scotland was distinctive, and this produced a Royal
Society quite unlike the Royal Society of London.

Royal Society of Edinburgh and authority

Throughout the century the Royal Society of London was gaining intellectual
authority in England through a process of accretion. In his study of ‘philosophical
civility’ in the seventeenth century, Biagioli offers an insight into intellectual authority,
and into the very constitution of the Royal Society (est. 1662), considering its members
as civil philosopher-subjects. Biagioli suggests that the development of academy-based
forms of scientific politeness may be related to the symbiotic development of polite
manners, court society, and political absolutism.22 Focusing on etiquette as a social
technology, Biagioli analyses the transfer of philosophical manners from their location
in court society to the emerging scientific community, and argues that the Royal Society
‘constituted its authority in the republic of letters’ like a king within his court. Whereas
the continental academies derived their legitimation from the prince, the Royal Society
constituted itself as a prince. Since it promptly and successfully ‘asked the king for
permission to correspond with foreign savants and to publish with its own imprimatur’,
the virtuosi were able to legitimise their work ‘through their own interdependence rather
than through their dependence on the prince’. Thus their subjection was not to their
prince but to their corporation. Since the Society did not receive power from its prince,
it ‘needed to colonise the republic of letters (or rather help constitute that republic as

20
Beattie to Forbes, 5 March 1788 in Forbes (1806:222-7).
21
See Corsi (1987) on Stewart’s resistance to being used for Christian apologetics.
22
See also Norbert Elias (1983) and Biagioli (1993:11-101). Daston (1994:53-54) identifies a cross-
national trend toward philosophical politeness and links it with Elias’s ‘civilizing process’.
 77
that which could sustain colonisation)’. In other words, its tactics ‘required a republic
of letters in the same way as the development of capitalistic economies relied on a
colonial system or, at least, on an international market’ (Biagioli 1996:195,107-211,266-
7). Through this colonisation process, intellectual authority gradually accrued in the
counting-house, the Royal Society of London. Moreover, the exclusion of Dissenters
from English universities meant that their scientific work was located outside those
institutions. The Royal Society of London, which was the locus of scientific
communication, thus had many members who had no connection to the universities.
The significant point here is that, whereas in England the Royal Society, which
represented the experimental sciences and ‘new knowledge’, was generally seen as the
site of intellectual advance, in Scotland the site of intellectual activity and authority was
the universities. This is despite the existence, after 1783, of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, which, though prestigious, did not challenge the universities as the seat of
intellectual power. Because the relationship between religion and the universities was
different in Scotland from that pertaining in England, those involved with the Royal
Society of Edinburgh tended to be involved also with the universities.23
The Royal Society of London was established in 1662, but with the foundation
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783, Edinburgh became ‘the only city in Britain
which possessed both an active scientific society and a university . . . [adding] to
Edinburgh’s unique cultural reputation’. The Society emerged in an atmosphere of
professional and institutional jealousy, signalled in 1782, when the University and the
Faculty of Advocates feared encroachments by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in
lecturing and the establishment of a natural history museum. As a result, the University
united with the Faculty of Advocates and the Philosophical and Antiquarian Societies to
form the Royal Society of Edinburgh under a Charter from the Crown. Stewart was a
member of the Senatus of the university, the body mainly responsible for the Society’s
formation; and, as Professor of Mathematics, he was a founding member of the Physical
Class, as opposed to the Literary Class, of the Society which, until 1807, met in the
University Library (Campbell & Smellie: 3-4,7,10). Sher (1985:302-3) points out that
the presence of the physical class and literary class was indebted not to the Royal
 78
Society of London but to the ‘foreign academies’ dedicated to the culture of all forms of
polite learning. It was only in the 1790s that the literary class ceased to function and the
Society was transformed into a predominantly scientific organisation.
Stewart’s central importance to the strength of the early Royal Society has been
recognised (Campbell & Smellie: 10,24,33,123,132); but his position within that
Society was ambiguous. Wood (1985:307) argues that the Society was dominated by
Dundas and his retinue, rendering Stewart politically estranged from the majority of his
fellow members, and in the following chapter I argue that the three biographies read by
Stewart before the Society reflect some of the tensions he experienced. Shapin (1974)
demonstrates the relevance of party political tensions and the social composition of the
Society to its concerns. Emerson (1988b) confirms Shapin’s reading, which emphasises
a confluence of Edinburgh politics, personal animosities and disputes over intellectual
control, but argues also that national politics, pre-existing stresses within the
Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, disputes about the functions of natural knowledge,
and the view that many Scottish Enlightenment ideas were outmoded, were important
factors.24 It is clear that, within the Society, Stewart found himself ensconced with
many who did not share his investment in the central role of moral philosophy.
Although the link with the university was there from the start, the Royal Society
of Edinburgh was not simply an expression of Scottish concern with scholarship and
research: it was born when the University’s local monopoly on the physical sciences was
threatened. Thus, as early as 1782, university professors felt themselves threatened by
the establishment of an extra mural body that would host lectures in natural history and
open a natural history museum. The menace was from the physical sciences; the issue
was who would control them. Stewart, unlike Reid, experienced a state of siege. Later,
in 1804, when Jeffrey publicised this conflict between philosophy and the experimental
sciences, it was not entirely new, insofar as Stewart had already experienced and met a
threat at a professional level from natural history.
I have argued that Stewart’s political economy lectures and the Leslie affair
signalled a disturbance of the equilibrium of Edinburgh intellectual life. The
establishment of the Royal Society of Edinburgh provides an example of an earlier
danger to this delicate balance. From the early eighteenth century, philosophy and the

23
Although there was from time to time a problem with what Stewart called ‘kirk politics’ in Edinburgh,
the university fought for and retained its independence from clericalism. In Scotland scholars were not
required to take religious orders.
24
None dispute the dominance of Dundas’s political interest in the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
 79
physical sciences had no problem co-existing in Scotland. Under Cullen and Black in
the chair of chemistry at Edinburgh, as discussed in chapter 2, chemical lectures formed
part of the repertoire of the educated gentleman, as part of a moral philosophical general
education. A high level of consensus characterised Edinburgh intellectual society at this
time (Jacyna: 14). Natural philosophy and moral philosophy were conducted under the
aegis of university professors. In the period in which Reid worked the equilibrium was
undisturbed, but from 1782 there were threats.25 In England, the Royal Society of
London was quite distinctly a major source of scientific credibility, and Edinburgh’s
university professors were aware that the same could happen in Scotland if an
extramural body gained power: they saw the proposal for a natural history museum
offering extramural lectures as a challenge to the university’s monopoly over
knowledge. The episode indicated turbulence at an institutional level in Edinburgh in
the relationship between moral philosophy and natural philosophy.

From natural philosophy to science

Jeffrey’s attack of 1804 also signalled a profound change in intellectual culture.
Historians have identified a fundamental change in the way ‘science’ was conceived and
practiced in Europe in the period 1780 to 1840 (Brush 1988; Cunningham & Williams
1993; Corsi 1988; Kuhn 1977; Yeo 1993). Some have interpreted this as a second
scientific revolution involving professionalisation and institutionalisation. Others
emphasise the shift from natural philosophy to science in this revolution. As Richard
Yeo puts it:
the formation of a new intellectual geography encompassing Lavoisier’s
chemistry, Cuvier’s and Lamarck’s biology and physiology, Laplacian physical
astronomy, Fresnel’s and Young’s wave theory of light, the geology of Hutton
and Lyell, and Faraday’s electromagnetism
can be seen as concomitant with ‘the collapse of natural philosophy’ (Yeo 1993:35).
Traditional natural philosophy, linked in certain ways with religion and moral
philosophy, was replaced by a set of specialist ‘scientific’ disciplines. At the same time,
whereas the ‘whole point of natural philosophy was to look at nature and the world as
created by God’ (Cunningham & Williams: 421-2), science was a nascent secular
activity, not reliant on religious values. Jeffrey’s attack on moral philosophy assumed
an added importance in this context.

25
Reid retired from the Glasgow chair of moral philosophy in 1780.
 80
Stewart was entirely conservative and traditional in insisting that the study of
natural philosophy, following Bacon’s formulation, was a bulwark against atheism
(III:338).26 But although men’s rights and duties derived ultimately from God,
Hutcheson insisted that he began his investigations, not with God, but ‘with what is
“more immediately known”’ (Forbes 1982:192). That is, Hutcheson did not see moral
philosophy as an area of theological enquiry, though its investigators studied human
nature as created by God. Like Scottish moral philosophy, natural philosophy was not a
sacred study, but it too was godly, and Stewart experienced the demise of these godly
studies that could be conducted by men in or out of holy orders. This demise of godly,
but non-sacred, studies represented a profound cultural shift, and entailed a reordering
of the moral economy, the web of shared psychological and normative values (Daston
1995:4-5).27
By the early 1800s the ‘Christian Virtuoso’, or experimental generalist, gave way
to the specialised ‘scientist’. Between 1781 and 1840 ‘the monopoly of the Royal
Society was overthrown by the foundation of some two dozen specialist scientific
societies’. As Yeo indicates, William Whewell publicised his neologism, ‘scientist’, in
1834 (coined in the previous year) as ‘part of a strategy to prevent the disintegration of .
. . “the empire or commonwealth of science”’, precisely because ‘the definition of
“science” – as distinct from particular disciplines – was a serious problem’ (Yeo
1993:33-4,111). Stewart was writing at this moment of transition from natural
philosophy to science and, while he did not live to hear the word ‘scientist’, people in
his day began, for the first time, ‘to speak of “science” or “the sciences” referring only
to the sciences of nature’ (Cunningham & Williams:422; Morrell & Thackray: 267-
75).28 He was a philologist, and it is probable that his sensitivity to the implications of
such linguistic nuances informed a certain understanding that Jeffrey’s attacks of 1804
and 1810 marked a sea change in intellectual culture.

26
Bacon set out a plan emphasising empirical research rather than the traditional reliance on scholastic
texts.
27
I use ‘moral economy’ in Lorraine Daston’s sense of ‘a web of affect-saturated values that stand and
function in well-defined relationship to one another. In this usage, “moral” carries its full complement of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century resonances: it refers at once to the psychological and to the normative’
(Daston: 4-5).
28
At the same time the word had not entirely lost its earlier meaning of systematic knowledge, or scientia
(Yeo:33), such that, logic and theology continued to be referred to a ‘sciences’, for example.
 81
Science and moral philosophy in England
The differences between English and Scottish universities has been a theme in
the foregoing discussion, and I have contrasted the ways in which the respective Royal
Societies were handled. Because shifts in Scottish intellectual culture did not
necessarily parallel those in England, the question arises as to why in England there was
not a similar tension between moral philosophy and the natural sciences. One factor
seems to be the different institutional settings of moral philosophy and the natural
sciences in the two countries. In order to appreciate the situation of moral philosophy in
Scotland I make a deliberate comparison with the case of Cambridge. I am not
attempting to study the Cambridge situation, but to use it to highlight some interesting
differences that go to the question of the central position of moral philosophy in
Scotland, and the way in which Stewart perceived this. The fact that the chair of moral
philosophy at Cambridge was inactive suggests that nobody there had similar concerns.
In fact, there is stark contrast between the centrality of moral philosophy and the
importance of its professors in Scotland, on the one hand, and the absence of a moral
philosophy professor in Cambridge, on the other.29 By looking at the somewhat later
English debate about moral philosophy and the sciences, when Whewell and Adam
Sedgewick entered it in the 1830s and 1840s, I attempt to profile and explain what was
crucial in Scotland.30
In discussing the reorientation of Scottish intellectual life, I have noted the
special place moral philosophy held in the Scottish curriculum for most of the
eighteenth century. But perhaps as early as the 1790s, and certainly from 1804 onwards
(the date of Jeffrey’s first attack), Stewart perceived Scottish moral philosophy to be at
risk due to the rising intellectual authority of the experimental sciences. It does not
seem that a similar situation prevailed in England. For example, at Cambridge,
Whewell was unaware of any such challenge: indeed, he published the Philosophy of the
inductive sciences, 2 vols (1840) while occupying (what had been the effectively
moribund) Knightsbridge chair of moral philosophy (1838-1855).31 In his A discourse

29
Students at Cambridge did study Paley’s Principles of moral and political philosophy (1785) as part of
their general theological studies; indeed, this is why Sedgwick targeted this text.
30
This provides the first instance of English debate on moral philosophy and science; in Stewart’s time,
there was no suggestion, in England, that moral philosophy was in trouble. The English discussions,
though later, cast light on the Scottish situation.
 82
on the studies of the university of Cambridge of 1833, Adam Sedgwick had complained
of the influence of Locke, via the utilitarian ethics of William Paley, on the Cambridge
moral philosophy curriculum.32 However, Yeo suggests that it was not until 1840 that
Whewell contended that Locke’s theory of knowledge had negative implications for
physical science, as opposed to ethical theory. Some High Church theologians feared
the growth of ‘a secular morality founded on science’, and in the context of the debate
on whether or not rational science was opposed to religion, Whewell sought to dispel
fears of atheism.33 In his Astronomy and General Physics (1833), one of the
Bridgewater Treatises on natural theology, he had argued that inductive and deductive
methods were associated with distinctive mental habits that produced different religious
outcomes: the great scientific discoverers reasoned inductively and this strengthened
their piety. However, by 1840 Whewell responded on epistemological grounds: not
only was a sensationalist (Lockean) theory of physical science erroneous, but it needed
to be replaced by one that recognised the role of the intuitive mental categories which he
called Fundamental Ideas (Yeo:118-21,180-82,187).34 Thus in England, the Lockean
influence acquired unsavoury connotations for moral philosophy in the 1830s when
there was a curricular debate over ethics, and for science in the 1840s when Whewell
saw empiricist philosophy of science, combined with utilitarian ethics, as a threat to the
harmony of science and religion endorsed by Anglicanism, and assumed by the
Cambridge curriculum.35
In Scotland, the alarm about Lockean sensationalism appeared earlier, and in
more manifold ways. In his Inquiry (1725), Hutcheson rejected Lockean relativism and
sensationalism (Moore 1990:49-50), and Reid raised the alarm about what was taken
from Locke. This Scottish reception of Locke informed Stewart’s Philosophical Essays
(1810) in which – well before Sedgwick and Whewell – he outlined the many historical
consequences of Locke’s sensationalism, such as Berkeley’s ‘material idealism’ and the
universal scepticism of Hume (V:131). Locke’s sensationalism, as interpreted by
Diderot, also led, in Stewart’s account, to the extravagance of that extreme materialism
which involved ‘the total rejection, from the book of human knowledge, of every word

31
Formerly the chair of Moral Theology or Casuistical Divinity, Whewell changed it to Moral
Philosophy on his occupation of the chair (Whewell 1852:xxvii-xxviii).
32
Aarsleff studies the strong Lockean move and the reaction against it. By 1830 there was evidence that
Locke had become quite influential in England through Paley in ethics (Aarsleff 1982:120-45).
33
At Oxford, Baden Powell was undertaking a similar task (Corsi 1988).
34
For Whewell’s debt to Kant, see Yeo (1993: chapters 1, 6, passim).
35
For Whewell, moral philosophy was not the problem – utilitarian moral philosophy was: he was
concerned to break the nexus he saw between utilitarian ethics and scientific empiricism.
 83
which does not present a notion copied, like a picture or image, from some archetype
among the objects of external perception’ (V:131). At the same time, in so far as Locke
offered a means of transcending the limitations of the introspective method in the
science of mind, his approach was adopted by Reid, who assumed the role of the natural
historian of the mind in his Aberdeen lectures (Wood 1989:97). Leaving aside this
Lockean influence, Stewart traced the ‘mistakes’ of the French philosophers (Helvetius,
Diderot, Condorcet) in terms of their materialist psychology or science of mind (which
they called ideology) to the misplaced confidence they had in Condillac as the faithful
expounder of Locke’s doctrines (V:121-7).36 It should be noted that Stewart did not
blame Locke, but rather his (mis)interpreters. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1821)
Stewart insisted that Locke had been misrepresented on innate ideas and on the power of
moral Judgement, and set out to ‘vindicate the fame of Locke, not only against the
censure of his opponents, but against the mistaken comments and eulogies of his
admirers’ (I:204-251).
Given that Whewell and his contemporaries read Stewart (Corsi 1988; Yeo
1993), it might be possible to trace a line of influence from Stewart to Whewell on the
matter of the Lockean danger.37 In any case, the difference in the reception of Locke in
England and Scotland helps to account for the difference in philosophical concerns and
debates in the early nineteenth century. In England, moral philosophy was discussed in
relation to Lockean ethical relativism, and science in relation to religion. In Scotland,
the debate concerned moral philosophy in relation to science. Thus in the early 1800s in
England there was a backlash against ethical relativism, seen as a Lockean legacy still
influential in the utilitarianism of Paley’s Principles of moral and political philosophy
(1785). Whewell presented his Philosophy of the inductive sciences (1840) as a
continuation of the fight against the ‘fallacies of the ultra-Lockian school’. When John
Stuart Mill talked of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, he was
referring to the widespread disenchantment with utilitarianism and Lockean philosophy
(Yeo:176-81). Yet this debate did not occur on the same grounds in Scotland, where
Lockean sensationalism and its recent expression in utilitarian ethics had not held sway,
following the early rejection by Hutcheson. One exception may appear to be Robert

36
Aarsleff (1982:129) argues that Stewart was correct in his interpretation of Locke, but ignored at the
time.
37
The line of influence would be complicated by the English (and Whewell’s) frustration with
metaphysics. Hugh James Rose told Whewell in 1822 that it was ‘absurd of defenders of the “Scotch
school” to talk of its “connexion with Religious Matters as if both it and the Locke System did not alike
 84
Eden Scott’s political economy lectures at Aberdeen and his rejection in the 1790s of
Locke’s theory of the social contract. Wood (1993:143) argues that in the wake of the
French Revolution, conservatives turned to Paley’s utilitarian account of the origins of
civil society to counter radical readings of Locke. Hence Wood sees Scott’s anti-
Lockean stance in a political – rather than an ethical, curricular or religious – context.
In all contexts it was interpretations of Locke which were perceived as dangerous. And
in any case, Scott demonstrates the traditional opposition to Lockean ideas by Scottish
moral philosophers.
That Whewell saw no issue at stake between moral philosophy and science raises
the question of whether his conception of moral philosophy differed significantly from
Stewart’s. In a letter to Whewell in 1843, Sydney Smith stated what he took to be
Whewell’s definition of this subject:
By ‘moral philosophy’ you mean, as they mean at Edinburgh, mental philosophy;
i.e. the faculties of the mind, and the effects which our reasoning powers and our
passions produce upon the actions of our lives. (Smith 1953:II:782)

Smith is acknowledging that Whewell was adopting an unusual position for an

Englishman: that is, in seeing that moral philosophy involved mental philosophy and not
simply ethics. (This was Smith’s position too; he lectured in London on Scottish
science of mind). Whereas moral philosophy in England had traditionally been defined
as ethics, and involved the study of man’s active and moral powers (human will), the
Scottish moral philosophers, following Hutcheson, attempted also to understand the
human mind, and this involved a study of man’s intellectual powers, or understanding
(Hankins 1985:158-90).38 Whewell did not employ the Scottish agenda involving
mental philosophy and history when in the Knightsbridge chair, but rather confined
himself to ethics and the duties of the citizen of the state; yet he appreciated that moral
philosophy in Scotland referred to this broad base.39 It appears there was no great
disagreement in what Whewell and Stewart took to be moral philosophical questions.
The relevant differences concerned the curricular status of moral philosophy and their

lead to the most hopeless Scepticism as to the existence of a first Cause”. Both produced a view of human
mind as if it were “the same sort of thing as Babbage’s Calculating Machine”’ (Yeo:192).
38
This is not to deny that Gershom Carmichael (1672-1729), Hutcheson’s predecessor at Glasgow, was a
pioneer of change in Scottish ethics (Emerson 1990:18-20; Haakonssen 1996a:66-71).
39
Although Whewell was ambivalent about whether history and political economy should be part of the
core curriculum at Cambridge, he actively campaigned for the Moral Sciences Tripos, introduced in 1848,
which ‘recognized the value of subjects such as history, ethics, and political economy in addition to
mathematics and the classical languages’ (Yeo:245)
 85
moral philosophical projects. In England, moral philosophy was not institutionalised in
the same way as it was in Scotland. Thus, whereas Stewart responded to the loss of the
curricular centrality of moral philosophy in Scotland, Whewell was campaigning in the
1840s to increase the curricular importance of moral philosophy in Cambridge
education, leading to the establishment of a Moral Sciences tripos in 1848 that included
history, ethics and political economy (Yeo:245).
The religious significance of moral philosophy also differed in England and
Scotland. Whereas Stewart combined an ‘intellectual-secular element’ with
Presbyterian Whiggism, Whewell worked within established Anglicanism. Where
Oxford and Cambridge were morally circumscribed by Anglicanism, in the eighteenth
century the Scottish universities were morally circumscribed by moral philosophy;
hence the epithet, ‘metaphysical Scotland’. Stewart was well aware that metaphysics
was not valued in England (X:lxv), but when it was publicly attacked in Scotland, and
by one of his own pupils, he was forced to face the fact that its authority and supremacy
could no longer be taken for granted.
Experimental sciences and natural history were located within the Scottish
universities; in England they were not part of the undergraduate curriculum, although
there were professorial chairs in some subjects.40 Whewell’s main aim was to establish
science on an appropriate epistemological basis; this project had a religious imperative
and he was concerned to defend science, so constituted, as a legitimate part of the
culture of educated gentlemen (Yeo 1993, chap.8). By Stewart’s time in Scotland, it
was not science that required defence, but moral philosophy. Reflecting the increasing
importance of the experimental sciences and the explosion of knowledge, the science of
mind (the core of Scottish moral philosophy) was attacked by Jeffrey and others as
unscientific and redundant. Ironically, it was precisely the great generation of Scottish
moralists who had ‘made science and its methods part of the intellectual culture of their
time’ (Emerson 1990a:25); but for this older generation of Scots the natural sciences
posed no threat. In contrast, Stewart had to respond to Jeffrey, who used scientism
against moral philosophy, in a way that acknowledged the power of science and its
methods. He deployed the ideology of scientism as a rhetorical weapon in his battle to
re-establish the central importance of moral philosophy.

40
Of course, geometry and some mixed mathematics were central to the Tripos exams developed in the
eighteenth century. See Gascoigne (1989).
 86
To understand the relationship between moral philosophy and science in
Scotland, as opposed to England, it is instructive to look at the reception of Newton, as
well as that of Locke. Like Clerk Maxwell before him, Davie distinguishes sharply
between ‘the tradition of Newton in England and the tradition in Scotland’, and stresses
the close relationship of the Scottish Newtonians with the commonsense philosophers
(Davie: 148).41 Davie is describing the link between mathematics and philosophy in
Scotland. Scotland’s illustrious mathematician, Colin Maclaurin, who held
mathematical chairs at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, was a strong advocate of
Newtonianism, even diffusing it beyond élite circles in An account of Sir Isaac
Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748). The line of influence from Newton
through Maclaurin and the Stewarts to the Scottish school was preserved unbroken in
the Scottish universities, and Davie records that the ‘alliance between philosophy and
mathematics . . . was quite a distinctive feature of the intellectual life of the Scottish
Universities during the whole of the eighteenth century’ (Davie:147).42 But Scottish
Newtonianism was by no means confined to mathematics. The 1708 Edinburgh
University reforms saw Robert Stewart installed as professor of natural philosophy,
teaching mechanics, physics, hydrostatics, pneumatics (doctrine of the air), optics,
astronomy, and offering exhibitions and experiments in mechanics. He soon dropped
Aristotelianism and ‘became a Natural Philosopher of the school of Newton’. The
adoption of the Newtonian method was a ‘mighty change’, soon followed by the other
Scottish universities (Grant 1884:263,273). This link between the Newtonian method
and philosophy is noted by Wood (1989:97) who sees Reid’s projected anatomy of the
mind, as sketched in the Inquiry (1764), as ‘a fusion of the description and classification
of the “furniture of human understanding” with Newton’s method of analysis’. The
Scots also went furthest in repudiating the critics of Newton, such as Bishop Berkeley.
In England, although Boyle, Locke and Samuel Clarke reflected the Newtonian ideas,
Berkeley resisted them, and there was not a similar alliance between philosophy and

41
Davie (1981:7) defines the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of Newtonianism and Locke, as ‘the
Scottish success in assimilating and developing the brilliant ideas which had first come to light among the
English (in a fit of absence of mind) during the days of Locke and Newton only to be neglected in the era
of Walpole, when the metaphysical complications of its intellectual discoveries began to show
themselves’.
42
Wood (1985:310) argues that Reid’s mathematical interests were deeper and longer-standing than
Stewart’s account suggests.
 87
mathematics (Davie:147-49).43 Thus the Scots adopted Newton while rejecting the
Lockean dangers.
Newtonianism was an argumentative resource for Stewart in his defence of the
status of philosophy. While asserting that Newton had been interpreted too literally, he
invoked both Newton and physiology to argue for divine design (III:291-93). To note
Stewart’s rhetorical use of Newtonianism is not to question the notion of the unbroken
line of Newton’s influence in Scotland. In Scottish universities, Newtonianism
produced a strong alliance between moral philosophy and the natural sciences, an
alliance exemplified in Stewart’s works. In other words, the Newtonian ethos was
married to moral philosophy. In contrast, in its English manifestation Newtonianism
was not linked to moral philosophy as it was in Scotland – as part of a debate over the
curriculum – because moral philosophy was not entrenched in the Cambridge
curriculum and did not have the same meaning there. This was the situation in
Stewart’s time.

Moral philosophy was the centre piece of the Edinburgh curriculum and central
also to the values of Scottish culture. Reidian common sense philosophy was an
outstanding accomplishment, providing a bulwark against the philosophical and
religious dangers of idealism, scepticism and materialism, but Stewart faced new
threats. The conflict surrounding the establishment of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
Stewart’s political economy course and the Leslie affair suggest that the delicate balance
of Scottish institutional intellectual life (which preserved moral philosophy in its
eminence) had been disturbed. In the following chapter I look at some effects of the
French Revolution on Edinburgh life as the context in which Stewart defended moral
philosophy. By selecting these episodes I aim to show what the Stewart-Jeffrey dispute
meant for Stewart’s work.

43
Laudan (1970:104-6) points out that Locke was surprisingly un-Newtonian when it came to questions
of scientific method, although Newton’s physics, theory of space and time, and theology were profoundly
important to him.
 88

Chapter 4

Politicisation of philosophy
 89
Like most thinkers of his time, Stewart was sensitive to the political implications
of philosophical disquisitions: time and again he drew out specific political,
philosophical and theological consequences of particular theories of knowledge. In
‘Dissertation on the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy’ (1815),
he attempted to articulate the connections. It was to this that Michelet turned in 1824
‘while seeking to relate philosophy to history’ (Neff 1961 [1947]:132). Stewart was
anxious to point out the historical, philosophical and logical consequences of Locke’s
sensationalism, Hume’s scepticism, Berkeley’s idealism, and Condillac’s materialism.
Philosophical scepticism had produced French materialism and had led, inevitably, to
mental and theological scepticism. The result was ‘the tendency of their sceptical
doctrines to corrupt the morals, and to poison the happiness of mankind’ (X:lxxiii).
This chapter looks at the impact of the French Revolution on Edinburgh intellectual life
and Stewart in particular, examining his biographical discourses on Adam Smith (1794),
William Robertson (1796), and Thomas Reid (1803), his use of conjectural history and
its relevance to Scottish moral philosophy. It attempts to show how the politicisation of
philosophy has explanatory power when combined with an understanding of the
challenge to the authority of moral philosophy.
Throughout his career as a man of letters, Stewart was affected by the extreme
politicisation of philosophy occasioned in Britain by the French Revolution and its
aftermath. In the early and mid 1790s William Pitt, as Prime Minister, presided over a
repressive regime which arrested, tried and sentenced dissidents. But in Scotland
political repression was superimposed on the politicisation of Scottish intellectual life
which had been present throughout the century, reaching its climax in the era of the
French Revolution (Sher 1985:305), as seen in the examples discussed in chapter 2.
The Scottish reaction to the French Revolution in 1789, at the very outset at
least, was that the French were merely catching up with what Scotland had achieved a
century before (Fry 1992:162; Vincent 1994:192). Stewart certainly was of this opinion
(X:lxxiii). A concrete reminder that the history of Edinburgh was entwined with the
course of events in France ‘was supplied by the presence of the Comte d’Artois who,
after his brother’s execution, took up quarters in Holyrood Palace along with a train of
French nobles’ (Jacyna:3). Nevertheless with the disintegration of order in France,
attitudes in Scotland changed. From then until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, political
feeling throughout Britain was high. Even before France declared war on England in
1793, the ideas of the French philosophes were thought by many in Britain to have
 90
contributed directly to the Revolution and instability, and many people feared a similar
phenomenon in England (Morrell 1971; Mudford 1968, Corsi 1987). Thus any
endorsement of such ideas in Britain was treated with alarm and suspicion. The
following picture of Edinburgh life was painted by the eye-witness reporter, Henry
Cockburn:
Everything rung, and was connected with the Revolution in France; which for
above 20 years, was, or was made, the all in all. Everything, not this or that
thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event. (Cockburn 1874
[1856]:70)
The well known Vindiciae Gallicae. Defence of the French Revolution and its English
Admirers, against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1791) was penned
by a Scotsman, James Mackintosh, who by 1796 had converted to Burke’s views (Butler
1984:90).1 While Mackintosh later in life regretted the extremity of his recantation, he
did not resile from it (Fontana:25), and this process of conversion and regret is
emblematic of the shifting political, moral and ideological sands beneath the Revolution
controversy.2
Recently the term ‘theophobia gallica’ has come to be used as a shorthand for
the extreme fear of French atheism and revolutionary politics which gripped a nervous
British establishment (Knox 1996:181). Originally, it was a term used by a Scottish
Tory to describe the French atheism inherent in French revolutionary politics (Morrell
1971:49). I use it in its shorthand sense. Historians have explored the especially
oppressive levels reached by the Establishment reaction in Scotland, where a degree of
national discontent had lingered throughout the century under study (Butler 1984;
Emerson 1992; Fontana 1985; Fry 1992; Hollander 1966; Lenman 1981; Mizuta 1975;
Pocock 1985; Rothschild 1992; Sher 1985; Vincent 1994; Wood 1985).3 Jack Morrell
describes the way in which the all-powerful and reactionary Scottish Tories tarred
Whigs with the hated label of Jacobins, denouncing them as ‘potential traitors, as

1
Burke saw the French Revolution as a revolt against Enlightenment, and a relapse into the barbarism of
religious enthusiasm (Haakonssen 1996:3).
2
Stewart himself had in his library literature representing both sides of the debate. See for instance Anon
1805; Hunter 1806; A Country Gentleman 1807; The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 1798,
Wollstonecraft 1790. Some of these books and pamphlets bear handwritten greetings to Stewart from the
author.
3
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Jacobites, followers of the exiled branch of the Stuart Kings,
sought to restore James II and his descendants to the English and Scottish thrones. Despite the dashing of
Stuart hopes with the disastrous battle of Culloden Moor (1746), traces of Jacobite sympathies remained
in Scotland. As a term of derision, the word ‘Jacobite’ was synonymous with traitor.
 91
friends of France, and as enemies of their own country’.4 Within Edinburgh University
the fiercest expression of Tory reactionism came from John Robison (professor of
natural philosophy 1774-1805) with his publication in 1797 of Proofs of a conspiracy,
which rapidly achieved wide circulation in Britain and the United States. This was an
expression of the extreme fear of the atheism of French material determinism and of the
consequences of freeing people from the restraints of religion (Morrell: 45-9).5 A
nervous establishment feared that ‘French science, tantamount to French politics, would
cross the Channel’ (Knox:181).6 In such a climate, words, ideas and actions could be
construed as high treason.
The theophobia gallica flourished under what Cockburn (1856) dubbed ‘the
Dundas Despotism’, referring to the political management of Scotland during the 1790s
by the Tory Henry Dundas, assisted by his nephew Robert Dundas. In 1792 Henry
Dundas was burned in effigy in many villages in the North of Scotland, and in Dundee,
Aberdeen, Perth, Edinburgh and Peebles (Emerson 1992:96). There were political riots
in Lanark, Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee, Peebles, and Edinburgh, and the first Society of the
Friends of the People in Scotland was formed in Edinburgh, a radical society accessible
to the labouring classes (Vincent 1994:191). Arguing that ‘the Dundas despotism’ was
a misnomer, Michael Fry notes Cockburn’s remark that Dundas was ‘well calculated by
talents and manner to make despotism popular’ (Fry: 384), while Shapin (1974:16) calls
him ‘a charming and ingratiating character, personally liked by the bitterest of his
political enemies’. Sher (1985:140) acknowledges ‘Dundas’s liberal policy on Roman
Catholic relief’; but even Fry acknowledges Dundasian persecution. Wood (1988:58)
talks of the effect on Scottish intellectual life of ‘Henry Dundas and his Tory
henchmen’, and Morrell (1971:45) refers to Dundas as, at the very least, a ‘benevolent

4
Jacobin was the name of a political club of the French Revolution formed in 1789. After the fall of the
Girondists in 1793 the Jacobins instituted the Reign of Terror. Though their organisation fell with the fall
of Robespierre in 1794, the term lived on and in Scotland was a generic term for traitorous revolutionary
(Fry:185). In fact Cockburn insisted that there were in Edinburgh ‘wonderfully few proper Jacobins’,
though ‘there were plenty of people who were called Jacobins’ (Cockburn 1874[1856]:70). Devine
(1990:58) argues that it was the outbreak of hostilities that made it possible for the state to brand all
radicals as traitors and legitimise the use of coercion against them.
5
For an account of the responses of Scottish Churchmen to the French Revolution, see Emma Vincent
(1994).
6
In his memoir of Robison in 1815, Playfair (a Whig and Robison’s successor in the chair of natural
philosophy) ‘generously explained Robison’s credulity by showing how it was fostered by the
indiscriminating suspicion and alarm so pervasive in the 1790s’. He defended the French science Robison
had abhorred, and denied that a conspiracy theory could explain the French Revolution (Morrell:59).
 92
dictator’. I am interested in Wood’s point about the effect of politics on intellectual life.
Although Fry acknowledges that Dundasian persecution occurred, the thrust of
his argument is that this was a small price to pay for good Scottish government which
redressed the Union’s imbalance and ‘gave the nation its one era of genuine historical
importance and claim to imperishable fame’. The Dundases helped to establish new
identities for Scotland and for Britain, identities which endured until the loss of Empire
(Fry:ix,384). One effect of Fry’s work is a tendency to normalise the Dundas despotism
by contextualising it. The problem with this is that such a study omits a particular type
of context: that is, the sort of effect the despotism had on the way people worked, in
particular on the writings of a man like Dugald Stewart. In questioning the notion of a
strict ‘despotism’, or the usefulness of such a descriptor, we run the risk of forfeiting the
insights we derive from its use.
In England the Revolution made Whig-Tory distinctions less relevant, as the
July 1794 alliance of the Portland Whigs with the Tory government side demonstrated
(Beedell & Harvey 1995:1). John Reeves, founder of the 1792-3 monarchist and
reactionary Association movement in London, referred to himself as ‘a settlement Whig,
or if you will a settlement Tory’ as opposed to a ‘Revolution Whig’ (Beedell 1993:814).
Burke was a conservative Whig, and Pitt’s own lord chancellor, Loughborough, was an
ex-Whig.7 But Morrell argues that the operations of the Scottish Tories, who possessed
wealth, rank and political power, ‘revealed only too clearly their self-interest which was
scarcely disguised as an ideological stance’ (Morrell:44). Thus in Scotland, in
Robison’s Proofs and in Edinburgh’s sedition and treason trials, the Whig-Tory lines
seem fairly clearly drawn.8
The Revolution generated a fear that parliamentary reformers would unite with
what Burke called the ‘swinish multitude’ to overthrow the State, and the riots in
Scotland made this seem a very real possibility. Sedition trials began in Edinburgh in
1793 with the trial of the Whig Thomas Muir, their ‘great object’, as stated by Robert

7
Pocock points out that it is difficult enough from this historical distance to identify the social
membership of individuals, let alone of ideas and political ideologies. He suggests that whereas some
events can be understood in terms of Tory-Whig dynamics, others might be understood better in terms of
a Whig-official/Whig-intellectual, or a Court-Country context (Pocock 1972). For the young Scottish
Whigs who were the product of Stewart’s classroom, a crucial question was: ‘what could the old
categories of Court and Country, Tory and Whig possibly mean after the French Revolution?’ (Fontana
1985:27). See Pocock (1985:215-310) on varieties of whiggism.
8
Jacyna sees the lines clearly drawn in Scotland.
 93
Dundas, being ‘to satisfy the country that within the British dominions none of these
fellows are safe, and that every exertion will be made by government to bring them to
justice’ (Beedell & Harvey:10). Muir was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years
to Botany Bay for arranging a political meeting, and in 1793-4 Joseph Gerrald, Maurice
Margarot and William Skirving also received fourteen years, Thomas Palmer seven.
Robert Watt was hanged for treason and James Downie convicted of treason (though
later conditionally pardoned).9 Morrell notes that in 1796 the Whig Henry Erskine was
deposed from the Deanship of the Faculty of Advocates, and that as a result of this
oppressive climate, by the late 1790s only a few Whigs were left in Scotland (Morrell:
44-45). Most had, according to Cockburn (1874[1856]:73), been ‘converted’ to
Toryism by self-interest or ‘terror’.10
In Burke’s rhetoric and in the theophobia gallica, atheism and revolutionary
sedition went hand in hand, and Michael Hunter (1990), who has studied the meaning of
the term ‘atheism’ in the seventeenth century, finds that its deployment indicated alarm
at extremes of naturalistic and secularist explanation and a fear of the decline of religion
– it belonged to a general rhetoric of social anxiety, an accusation levelled at and by
fellows of the Royal Society. We can see in the reaction to the French Revolution the
use of the label ‘atheism’ again reflecting this sort of social anxiety. Investigating the
theophobia gallica invites an appreciation of the effects of politics on intellectual life
generally, and particularly on Stewart’s intellectual activities and public persona.
Roger Emerson has traced the impact of politics on Scottish universities from
the Revolution Settlement of 1688-1690 and the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 to the French
Revolution, when again a fear of subversion prevailed and professors were ‘eager to
proclaim their loyalty and orthodoxy’. He exposes the political cast of professorial
appointments throughout the 1790s when ‘the Dundas connection’ exerted a direct
influence on and control over universities throughout Scotland (Emerson
1992:8,92,96,100). Sher (1985:305-6) finds that the politicisation of Scottish
intellectual life reached its climax during this era, when the few Scottish men of letters
suspected of republicanism were watched carefully and sometimes subjected to abuse by
the literary and professional establishment.

9
For references to the trials, see Rothschild 1992; Beedell & Harvey 1995.
10
There were at the same time sedition and treason trials in England under Pitt in 1793/4, perhaps given
impetus by ‘Jacobin-style meetings in Edinburgh’ and Dundas’s quick reaction there. Fyshe Palmer was
sentenced to seven years for sedition, but Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy, along with eleven others, were
charged with high treason. Only three trials actually took place, resulting in acquittal (Beedell & Harvey).
 94
Despite the political control over appointments, Emerson claims that the teachers
were not robbed ‘of their freedom to teach what seemed to them true and useful’
(Emerson 1992:103). While this may be so, it fails to appreciate the fact that there were
controls far more subtle and in some areas as powerful as direct control over
appointments: namely, the climate of fear in which self-censorship did the work of
silencing or modulating subversive voices.11 In Stewart’s case for instance, we know
that in his lectures he voluntarily ceased to mention the slave trade and income tax
(topics in political economy), and, although celebrated for his oratory, began to read his
lectures to minimise the political risks he ran (Chitnis 1986:25). He withheld critical
comment from his ‘Life of Smith’ (1794) due to the political climate and tailored his
political economy to offset fears about its political implications. His Life of Reid (1803)
was a response to his own political predicament in the wake of the French Revolution
(Wood 1985). Davie (1961:25) suggests that Stewart abandoned the practice of setting
essays because ‘he was politically suspect, and any close direct contact with students
might be embarrassing’. Self-censorship achieved the Dundasian ends in an atmosphere
of painful silences and constraint well into the new century.

French connection
From the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until the failed invasion of
1745 and beyond, the French court sheltered the exiled branch of the house of Stuart and
materially supported their claims to the English and Scottish thrones. Alongside this
well known political liaison between Scotland and France, but less well known, was an
intellectual connection. Scotland’s earliest university, St. Andrews, was established in
1411-12 by Scottish academics who had been educated at the University of Paris and
had remained there in teaching and administrative posts (Broadie 1990:2-3). A
continental intellectual tradition continued into eighteenth-century Scotland, involving
philosophical exchange and cross-fertilization (Rendall 1978; Oz-Salzberger 1995;
Lorimer 1854).

11
For instance, the fact that written communication was subject to scrutiny encouraged self-censorship.
And it was only on a holiday voyage far from the metropolis in 1799/1800 that Brougham and his
companions felt free to sing the Marseillaise and exult in their ‘freedom of speech’ (Jacyna:26,35-6).
Self-censorship was also necessary to academic promotion. Francis Horner asked Jeffrey to advise
Lockhart Muirhead to ‘conceal his liberality, till he gets his professorship’ at Glasgow. In the event, both
Muirhead and Richard Millar were prevented from converting their lectureships to chairs because they
were Whigs. Millar finally attained his chair in 1831 when the Whigs came to power (Jacyna:83-84).
 95
Dugald Stewart observed the French situation directly during four extended trips,
and although no record remains of his impressions regarding the Fall of the Bastille, it is
clear that he took ‘a deep and hopeful interest in the movements of the liberal party in
France’ both before and after the Revolution. In 1788 when the States General were
summoned, he wrote from Paris to Archibald Alison of ‘the wonderful revolution which
has taken place here within these two days’, and, while it must be pointed out that he
used ‘revolution’ here in the archaic sense, in January 1793 he was still praising Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man (X:cxxii,cxxxv). Again in 1806, when the Whigs were briefly in
power, he spent most of the summer in Paris, this time as part of his friend Lord
Lauderdale’s diplomatic mission.12 In his ‘French journals’, now lost, as well as in
those letters from the time which remain, he recorded his observations of the political
situation (X:lvii,cxvii-cxlvii). As a moral philosopher he studied and taught continental
philosophy and political economy, and in 1810 he brought to the British public his
Philosophical Essays, the first general survey of European philosophy – including
French philosophy.13 Stewart spoke and read French, drew on the work of French
philosophers, and had friends among the French literati with whom he maintained a
lifelong correspondence.14 In turn, the French translated and published his books,
incorporating his pedagogical works into the French curriculum.15 As the foremost
proponent of faculty psychology or mental philosophy of a non-materialist kind in
Britain, Stewart enjoyed considerable influence in France where he was taken up by
Victor Cousin and introduced into the French curriculum to combat Condillacisme
(Madden 1984).16 Any attempt to understand his works must view them in the context
of this French connection, the Napoleonic Wars and the Dundas despotism.

12
In 1783 he visited Paris for the first time with his friend Lord Ancram, afterwards sixth Marquis of
Lothian. Fraser’s Magazine (1838) claims he was there in the capacity of tutor (but this source is
unreliable on many other details regarding Stewart). On his return to Scotland he married his childhood
sweetheart, Helen Bannatyne, who died in 1787. He spent the summers of 1788 and 1789 on the
Continent. The latter he spent chiefly in Paris, arriving in May and remaining at least until late September
(X). Stewart’s role in Lauderdale’s peace mission was probably that of secretary (Thomson 1987:251).
When Lauderdale arrived, Bonaparte is said to have exclaimed: ‘comment! on m’envoye un ancien
Jacobin’ (Jacyna:32). The point is that Stewart was vitally interested in the French situation and in the
politics of his own country.
13
When Corsi (1987:103) claims that the Elements provided the only systematic survey of continental
philosophy available in Britain before 1830, he seems to be neglecting the Philosophical Essays (1810)
and the Encyclopaedia Britannica ‘Dissertation’ (1815;1821).
14
An indication of his correspondence with French friends can be gleaned from his letters to Baron
DeGerando 1792-1816, NLS, MS.5319, ff.34-62.
15
Metz (30) records that ‘the Scotch philosophy’ inspired also Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Garnier,
Damiron, de Rémusat, and others in the French capital.
16
This was in the nineteenth century. For details on the French curriculum in the eighteenth century, see
Brockliss (1987).
 96
When Stewart published the first volume of his Elements (1792) he was certainly
aware of the troublesome climate in which he wrote. For his predecessor, Adam
Ferguson, the Revolution provided ‘a heady blend of national invigoration and social
upheaval’, according to Oz-Salzberger (104), who is describing the form of Ferguson’s
civic humanism, with its moral arithmetic of unrest and stability, obedience and
resistance. Whereas Stewart clearly deplored social upheaval (see his letters from
France [X]) and agitation of the masses (see his reply to Lord Craig [X:lxxii-lxxv]), he
did blame the Revolution on the intransigence of the rulers, specifically ‘their bigoted
attachment to antiquated forms, and to principles borrowed from less enlightened ages’.
Criticizing any ‘indiscriminate zeal against reformers’, he predicted that in the long term
‘this spirit of reformation, cannot fail to be favourable to human happiness’ (II:228-30).
Hence Stewart initially endorsed the Revolution despite his aversion to social upheaval,
appeals to the masses and controversy. Ferguson, on the other hand, embraced this
upheaval.
Contrasting Stewart and Ferguson in this way is useful if we are to appreciate the
nuances of Stewart’s reaction. In Ferguson’s schema conflict was not evil, nor just
dialectically productive, but a positive good in itself. External threat or war was
essential to civil society in forming national cohesion, and conflict could bring out the
best in men (Berry:43). He drew on Stoic tradition to construct a very masculinist
morality celebrating the warrior and gamesmanship (Oz-Salzberger:114). It is precisely
in the lack of this stoic morality that Stewart departed from his predecessor.17 It is not
simply that Stewart had a more optimistic view of humanity in contrast to Ferguson’s
vision of ‘perpetual discord’ (though he did): he had a different morality. For Stewart,
conflict was undesirable and avoidable; but when it occurred, it could prove at best to be
part of a dialectic process leading to a higher, harmonious society. Stewart’s Condorcet-
like moral perfectibilism was central to his thinking in all areas.18 Thus his position on
the French Revolution, which he linked to the ‘infallible progress of human reason’

17
Writing on the influence of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers in Germany, Oz-Salzberger (107) claims
that Ferguson gave to Stewart (and his other Scottish disciples) a ‘unique moral-intellectual education
which may be seen as a Scottish Bildung of sorts’; they received an ‘education in conflict’. While this
may be so, conflict was something Stewart took pains to avoid, and it does not feature in his philosophy.
18
In Progrès de l’esprit humain (1794) Condorcet proclaimed the indefinite perfectibility of the human
race.
 97
(II:229) was an expression of his moral philosophy, which married perfectibilism and
common sense philosophy.19
In invoking the names of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet,
Condillac and Turgot to support his arguments on education and politics, and in
endorsing the French ‘spirit of reformation’, Stewart was aware of the criticism and
suspicion he thus (albeit reluctantly) courted (II:63-83,229-30,236-7).20 Even in his
political economy lectures, according to Hilton (38), he attempted ‘gently and
respectfully’ to deflect opinion away from Smith in favour of Turgot and the French
physiocrats. I have already noted Stewart’s attitude to controversy; all reports confirm
that of Cockburn, who wrote that he ‘shrank, with a horror which was sometimes rather
ludicrous, from all polemical matter’ (Cockburn 1874[1856]:20). Despite his clear
abhorrence of conflict, and his political awareness, Stewart nevertheless expressed in
1792 what could be regarded as pro-French sentiments. This is precisely the reason why
Winch (32), following Veitch, writes of Stewart’s ‘moral courage’ in the face of the
French Revolution.

Despite Stewart’s evident sensitivity to the ‘public mind’ (X:87), he failed to

avoid an attack in 1794 by two Lords of Session accusing him of expressing dangerous
sentiments in his Elements (1792).21 Following the ‘massacres in France’, Lords Craig
and Abercrombie censured Stewart’s endorsement of the French philosophes. Charging
him with attempting to ‘point a practical application of them to the Political Institutions
and Government of this country’, and warning of the combined dangers of ‘the triumphs
of philosophy and reason, daily exhibited in France’, they asked for an ‘open and
manly’ retraction. Stewart refused, saying that ‘with respect to my writings, they are
now before the world, and I must abide by the consequences’. This was a bold refusal,

19
Winch (26-27,42-43) finds Stewart, in his notion of progress, his gradualism and perfectibilism, to be
building on a firm European foundation, while introducing a novel emphasis within the Scottish tradition.
20
He called for ‘a manly confidence in the clear conclusions of human reason’, endorsing ‘what the
French writers call force of character’ (II:71).
21
Wood (1985:308) assumes that the Lords of Session were referring to Stewart’s ‘Life of Smith’. Winch
(32), on the other hand, thinks it was the Elements. Since Craig’s letter specified ‘a certain chapter in a
certain book’, and since Stewart refers to his passage on Condorcet, I think it most likely that the letter
referred to the first volume of the Elements. Such points indicate that much remains to be discovered if
we are to understand Stewart’s place in British intellectual history. In a note to the second edition in
1802, Stewart said that despite the events which had occurred since the publication of the first edition, he
had decided to send the offending passage to the press in its original form. Though he wanted to guard
against ‘uncandid misinterpretation’, he defended ‘the doctrine it inculcates [as] favourable to the good
order and tranquillity of society’, and declared himself unwilling ‘to vitiate the record which [the passage]
exhibits of my opinions’. He also footnoted the Condorcet quote, disclaiming responsibility for the
inconsistency of the author’s personal conduct with his philosophical principles (II:219,237).
 98
given that Condorcet was then widely held responsible for the September massacres.
Though Stewart expressed ‘regret that I dishonoured some of my pages by mentioning
with respect the name of Condorcet’, he nevertheless defended the particular passage he
quoted from Condorcet as breathing ‘a spirit of moderation’ (X:lxx-lxxv).22
Michael Fry (185) plays down the significance of the censure by the Lords of
Session and, indeed, Stewart was not tried for sedition. But it is telling that only three
Edinburgh professors stood firm as Whigs: John Playfair, Andrew Dalzel (professor of
Greek 1772-1806), and Stewart (Morrell: 45). Cockburn tells us that of these ‘stronger-
minded men’ who remained Whigs despite the ‘personal risk’ involved in espousing
liberal opinion, Stewart, in particular, was watched ‘anxiously’. Though ‘too spotless
and too retired to be openly denounced, [he] was the object of great secret alarm’
(Cockburn 1974[1856]:73-4). While he was too apolitical and circumspect to be tried
for sedition, he suffered an unofficial and nebulous marginalisation from about 1790 to
1804. At the age of 21 in 1775, Stewart gained the chair of mathematics and was made
a burgess and guild brother of the city (Dalzel 1862[II]:447), but less than twenty years
later he was shunned ‘in the city he adorned’ (Cockburn:90). Merely in remaining a
Whig, he was courageously walking the fine line between conscience and sedition,
exposed to the dangers of political prejudice and religious animosities. The censure is
important for what it tells us of the pressures under which Stewart wrote, and for the
light it sheds on his subsequent publications.
John Veitch, a nineteenth-century Scottish commentator and also Hamilton’s
biographer, paints a picture of Helen and Dugald Stewart as contributing a sort of social
glue joining the disparate sections and sects of Edinburgh society. Stewart’s ‘personal
character and philosophical reputation, rendered his house the resort of the best society
in Edinburgh’. Through the ‘brilliant circle’ who gathered at their ‘weekly reunions’,
they ‘happily blended the aristocracies of rank and letters’. Veitch esteems their
substantial role in soothing ‘the bitterness of party feeling in Edinburgh’ (X:lix-lxi).
The beginning of this aspect of Stewart’s cultural role coincided with his marriage to
Helen D’Arcy Cranstoun in 1790, and this fortunate marriage was central to the way in

22
Stewart in his reply confirmed the merits of the French Economists, claiming their ‘speculations
certainly had no more connexion with forms of government, than those in Mr. Smith’s Wealth of Nations’.
Most secondary sources construe Stewart’s reply as an apology or retraction, failing to note that he
explicitly refused to retract any of his ‘writings’. It has even been characterised as a ‘cringing apology’
(Lenman:110) and an ‘extraordinary recantation’ (Rothschild:78-80). Hollander (30) is one of the few
commentators to note Stewart’s ‘dignified and convincing refusal to make the recantation demanded’.
Michael Fry says that Stewart, ‘undaunted, . . . defended [his statements] with vigour’ (Fry:185). Chitnis
(1986:23) too notes that Stewart ‘stoutly defended’ his writings.
 99
which he managed his political location as a quietly firm Whig during the height of the
Scottish reaction to French events, when Whigs were suspect as potential traitors.
Theirs was a love-match, and Stewart was a gracious and erudite host, with Helen being
the most popular hostess in the city. By linking his cultural roles as Whig, pedagogue,
philosopher, mentor and host in a troubled and divided city to his simultaneous respect
for, and transcendence of, the divisions of class through support of universal education,
we can develop an appreciation of how remarkable it was that Stewart, for a time, was
probably the city’s most prominent agent of cultural cohesion despite his politically
‘untouchable’ status.23
Stewart felt the effects of the politicisation of philosophy so long as political
tension remained. Jacob Hollander (31) suggests that the sensitive state of public
opinion probably delayed Stewart’s offering of the separate course in political economy
until 1800-1, by which time the theophobia gallica was not so virulent, and ‘Stewart’s
position in the intellectual and social world had become sufficiently secure, to justify an
independent survey’. If this is so, it is only in so far as Stewart felt safe enough to offer
the course, for, as I have noted in chapter 2, many attended hoping to catch him out in a
political indiscretion. We know that he ceased setting essays because of Tory objections
to the personal contact with students that this involved, and there is no evidence that he
ever felt at liberty to resume this practice. Sydney Smith thought it was only in the
encyclopaedic ‘Dissertation’ (1815) that Stewart relinquished his ‘insane dread of
misrepresentation’ (Smith 1953:272). It seems also that Stewart’s public demeanour
continued to reflect the politicisation of philosophy well after the turn of the century, for
in about 1807, Helen D’Arcy told an old friend that he would find the philosopher’s
manner ‘more serious and reserved in company than it was when you knew him, but it is
only in company’ (Chitnis 1986:25). The Tories were in power for almost forty years,
during which time Whig members of Edinburgh’s professional élite lived, as one
scholar puts it, ‘under a regime that systematically excluded them from patronage and
office, and which subjected them to various forms of harassment’ (Jacyna:23).
Although Stewart held the chair of moral philosophy and was, after Reid’s death in
1796, considered to be ‘the only distinguished philosophical teacher in Great Britain’

23
Hemingway (29) suggests that Stewart’s advocacy of a meritocracy was ‘a position neatly consonant
with his own status in the professoriat’.
 100
(Hollander:33 and DNB), and the greatest literary man in Scotland (Phillips:288), his
intellectual comportment was marked by the political climate.
The ambiguity of Stewart’s social position blurs any picture of him as persona
non grata. While there were those who would not allow their sons to attend his lectures
(Cockburn 1874[1852]:49), he and Helen continued to entertain frequently until his
retirement, and to provide a venue for communication that helped to defuse political
antagonisms in Edinburgh. Such tensions are illustrated by the words on the back of
one of the Abercrombie/Craig letters, in Mrs Stewart’s hand: ‘Scotland in the 1794.
From two persons who were at least three evenings in the week in our house’
(Veitch:lxx). Stewart was regarded with suspicion because he refused to recant his
Whiggism, and while the theophobia gallica lost much of its hold on the public mind in
Edinburgh after 1800, political tensions remained throughout the period of the
Napoleonic Wars, that is, until 1815. In a letter to Mrs Stewart in 1810, the First Earl of
Dudley, a former pupil and boarder of Professor Stewart, wrote from London of a civil
disturbance when Burdett, a Jacobin leader, was carried to the Tower: the military had
responded to angry mob resistance by killing a few of the mob (Romilly:100). Hence,
when Stewart delivered his separate course of lectures on political economy beginning
in 1800 – that is, during the period of the theophobia gallica and British-French
hostilities (from about 1790 to 1815) – caution and prudence were still crucial to his
repertoire.24
By the time Stewart gained his public platform as a common sense philosopher,
the Revolution was not far off. In 1778 when he was professor of mathematics he began
to lecture for Adam Ferguson on moral philosophy, until he succeeded him in the chair
of moral philosophy in 1785. Hence, while he presented common sense philosophy to
Edinburgh from 1778, it was not until 1785 that he achieved a satisfactory pedagogical
platform, and in 1792 he began its popularization with the publication of the first
volume of the Elements. I suggest that, just as the politicisation of philosophy had a
particular impact on Stewart’s political economy course, his lectures on the slave trade,
and his biography of Smith, it also forced a particular shape on his common sense
philosophy. For one thing, it might explain the prolixity of his writing, since by all
accounts he displayed no verbosity in his private life. His publications display a

24
France declared war on Britain in 1793, and hostilities continued until 1815. A brief peace followed
the signing of the treaty of Amiens in 1802, but Britain declared war on France in 1803.
 101
considerable anxiety not to be misunderstood and a fear of exposing himself to attack,
colourfully remarked upon by McCosh (1875). Given that his public manner became
more reserved after the Revolution (Chitnis 1986:25), it seems that the politicisation of
philosophy was linked to his prolixity as well, which necessarily informed his
exposition of common sense philosophy.
This is not to deny that Stewart saw himself as continuing Reid’s work. Though
he thought the appellation ‘common sense’ unfortunate and preferred ‘Fundamental
Laws of Human Belief’, Stewart was convinced that Reid’s ‘instinctive inductive
principle’ provided the foundation for the rejection of both materialism and scepticism.
He saw Reid’s philosophy of common sense based on the instinctive inductive principle
as an answer to what has since become known as ‘Hume’s problem of induction’.25
Stewart claimed Reid had been the first to link, ‘justly and clearly’, physical science and
the science of mind, ‘defining with precision the distinct provinces of Observation and
of Reflection, in furnishing the data of all our reasonings concerning Matter and Mind’.
Reid had grounded the new ‘mental science’, and Stewart predicted the vast advantage
to be gained from applying to the science of mind the inductive philosophy of Francis
Bacon (X:266-309). Paul Wood stresses the fact that
Reid did not see his achievement in Stewart’s exclusively methodological terms
. . . he placed more emphasis on his substantive theoretical contribution to the
science of mind than on the methodological reform of that science which Stewart
highlighted. (Wood 1985:317)
I return to this emphasis on methodology in chapter 7, but the point to be drawn here is
that Stewart’s project differed from Reid’s, and he was doing much more than making
Reid pedagogically palatable. He had to negotiate a course through controversy during a
time of political turmoil following the French Revolution, at the same time defending
mental philosophy against attacks in the climate of the new explosion of knowledge
(signalled by Jeffrey’s attack).

Writing the history of lives

Before the emergence of methodology as a battleground in the contest over
intellectual authority, Stewart used history as an argumentative tool. As well as writing
history of philosophy and engaging in the Scottish debate on the nature of history,

25
In Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) Hume argued that induction assumes that the
future will resemble the past. Induction cannot prove this resemblance since it is founded on the
supposition of the resemblance. Induction is thus not rational.
 102
Stewart published biographical memoirs, then typically conceived as history of lives.26
His biographies of Adam Smith, William Robertson and Thomas Reid were read before
the Royal Society of Edinburgh as official tributes to deceased Fellows in 1793, 1796
and 1802 respectively, prior to publication. Wood (1985:305) suggests that these
tributes were modelled on the éloge tradition of eighteenth-century France, and
certainly, Stewart’s colleague and friend, Andrew Dalzel (1862[I]:112), calls Stewart’s
‘eloge’ of Smith ‘one of the finest I have seen yet in English’.27 The éloge was a
panegyric funeral oration, and Wood draws on the scrutiny of the tradition by
intellectual and social historians, Daniel Roche, Dorinda Outram, and Charles Paul, who
reveal the use of the éloge to further didactic, ideological, moral and cultural ends. I
examine Stewart’s biographies against the backdrop of the Revolution to suggest what
those ends might be.

Stewart’s ‘Life of Smith’ (1794) can be appreciated as both a self-defensive

strategy against the theophobia gallica, and a vehicle for his exposition of conjectural
history, which silently reinforced his argument for the primacy of moral philosophy. I
have alluded to the fact that in later years he explained that his cautious omission of
‘comments and criticisms’ from the ‘Life’ was necessitated by the current state of the
‘public mind’ (Hollander: 29; Mizuta 1975; Wood 1985:308). Looking back in 1810,
he acknowledged that
it was not unusual, even among men of some talents and information to
confound, studiously, the speculative doctrines of Political Economy, with those
discussions concerning the first principles of Government which happened
unfortunately at that time to agitate the public mind. (X:87)
When ‘the doctrine of a Free Trade was itself represented as of a revolutionary
tendency’ and Adam Smith’s former followers in turn deserted his liberal system, it had
not been politic to promote the topic in the public domain (X:87). In this rare lapse,
Stewart himself confirmed that the politicisation of philosophy occasioned by the
Revolution had pressed him to self-censorship.
Emma Rothschild, who traces Smith’s posthumous career from
subversive to conservative philosopher, notes that when Scotland itself was considered

26
See Yeo (1996:142) for a discussion on ‘biography as the history of a life’.
27
Stewart said the memoirs were written ‘in compliance with a practice, which, after the example of some
foreign Academies, the founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh were anxious to introduce at the time
of its first establishment’ (X:1).
 103
to be on the verge of revolution, Smith’s ideas were thought to have inspired popular
discussion, opposition to war, and discontent with English government. She views
Stewart’s ‘Life of Smith’ as a stage in the rediscovery of Smith as establishment
theorist. She sees the biography, read in the same year as the sedition trials (which were
concerned with words ‘ominously close to Smith’s’), as a defence of Smith, and of
himself, against the terror of the times. In order to paint Smith as a conservative,
Stewart constructed him as a sort of defendant, with Stewart as his counsel: Rothschild
argues that Stewart even used the language of the sedition trial and standard legal texts
of the time. She further claims that in 1810 Stewart looked back and recanted from his
former admiration of Smith (Rothschild 1992:78-83). In fact, Stewart was still
defending Smith, saying only that some formerly zealous supporters of free trade began
to wonder about the expediency of calling such matters into public debate (X:87).
There is no evidence of ‘deep suspicion’ of Smith, only a cautious representation of the
impact of the French Revolution on British philosophical literature.
It was in the ‘Life of Smith’ that Stewart coined the term ‘conjectural history’.
This much vaunted, ‘scientific’ Scottish history-writing, which promoted itself as being
in the vanguard of a new kind of Scottish learning, was one of the effects of the
scientistic impetus that informed the broader Scottish Enlightenment (Berry:63). Much
has been written about this Scottish phenomenon, but Allan (151-6) insists that there is
a misunderstanding of the role conjecture actually played. He sees it as a myth
constructed by early Enlightenment thinkers, ‘embellished and perpetuated by
subsequent scholars from Dugald Stewart to the modern historians’ who have been
misled by eighteenth-century triumphalism.28 Whereas Emerson confirms Stewart’s
historical account of philosophical development and urges us to take seriously ‘the
Scots’ own accounts of the origins of their ideas’ (Emerson 1990a:32-34), Allan argues
that Stewart’s historicization of Scottish thought cannot be taken at face value, and must
be investigated in the light of his motive, which was to address a crisis in national
identity (Allan:156,238).29 It is possible Stewart had a more subtle motive, that is, to

28
In a letter to an Edinburgh convention in 1792, the United Irishmen declared that Scotland, ‘having
shown the world how to write history . . . must show the world how to make history’ (Davie 1981:25).
Clearly the idea of a particularly Scottish form of history-writing was recognised beyond Scotland, though
it must be admitted that some of the United Irishmen were Scottish-educated.
29
Mary Poovey argues that by praising the conjectural history of Smith, Hume and Kames, Stewart
wanted to rescue both the method and the term from the disrepute they had fallen into. Conjecture came
to seem like a method that had to be reviled or defended only after the problem of induction posed by
Hume came to seem like a problem (Poovey 1998:219-222).
 104
provide an alternative to the French ‘materialist’ histoire raisonée, and thus an answer
to Burke.
The French philosophes wanted to turn history into a science, and Turgot
insisted it be added to the ‘physical sciences’. Peter Gay argues that the philosophes
offered a ‘secular alternative to the logical determinism of Christian historians’, but in
fact evaded analysis, because they lacked a coherent social theory. Nevertheless, they
revolutionised the writing of history (Gay 1969:369,378,389). There may be a
connection between this histoire raisonée of the philosophes and the conjectural history
of the Scots beyond the likeness acknowledged by Stewart (X:34). That connection may
be Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in which he
attacked the Jacobins and their British supporters for denying history in the prospect of
some mad, supposedly rational plan for rearranging organic society, comprised of
institutions like the Church and the aristocracy. Burke depicted the rational blueprints
of the reformers as opposed to history. Stewart, who coined and defined the term
‘conjectural history’, disdained the vulgar Whiggism of Burke’s appeal to history in
moral matters (Haakonssen 1996a:258). Is it possible that Edinburgh Whiggism,
through Stewart, provided an answer to Burke that avoided charges of sedition and
atheism, and avoided the opposition of history and rationalism? The responses to Burke
of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Paine and Mackintosh are well-documented, and I suggest it
could be useful to investigate Stewart in this context.
Most of the secondary literature on conjectural history fails to deal with what
Stewart actually said, assuming that he advocated the use of conjecture only where the
facts could not be known. Stewart applied the term ‘Theoretical’ or ‘Conjectural
History’ to that study which shows, ‘from the known principles of human nature’, and in
the absence of the known facts, how all the various parts of a particular language might
gradually have arisen (X:34). In this sense, ‘conjectural history as a way of conducting
social science was integral to the Baconian temper of the Scottish enlightenment’
(Berry:68). There is some current debate about which part of Smith’s theory Stewart
considered to be conjectural history.30 But leaving that aside, in explaining his notion of

30
Whereas it is quite common for Stewart’s term ‘conjectural history’ to be applied to Smith’s four stages
theory, Ronald Meek argues that in fact the term more properly applies to Smith’s theory of ‘the natural
progress of opulence’, since this was ‘the particular type of eighteenth-century stadial scheme which
Stewart had mainly in mind’ . . . [and] not the four stages theory at all’. The term may also be applied
legitimately to Smith’s account of the origin of languages (Meek:237-39). In his ‘Dissertation’ (1815)
 105
the usefulness of such an approach, Stewart went much further than the histoire
raisonée of the French writers, or Hume’s ‘Natural History’, although he claimed that
both pretty much coincided with his concept (X:34).31
Hume thought that history’s
chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human
nature by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations and
furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and
become acquainted with the regular springs of human actions and behaviour.
(Hume 1975[1748]:83)
According to Christopher Berry (167), Stewart used the term ‘natural history’ as a
synonym for ‘conjectural history’ and cited Hume as its exponent. In fact Stewart used
the idea of Natural History and in particular Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757)
to legitimate his new conjectural history (X:34). In what was to become a pattern, he
took pains to disguise the radical nature of his own work, claiming to offer nothing new.
In an overlooked expression of his concern for the status of moral philosophy,
Stewart argued that
[i]n most cases, it is of more importance to ascertain the progress that is most
simple, than the progress that is most agreeable to fact; for, paradoxical as the
proposition may appear, it is certainly true, that the real progress is not always
the most natural. It may have been determined by particular accidents, which are
not likely again to occur, and which cannot be considered as forming any part of
that general provision which nature has made for the improvement of the race.
(X:37) 32
This extraordinary statement, that Stewart favoured a conjectural history which departed
from the ‘facts’, should be seen in the context of his project. As a moral philosopher, he
was concerned with the ethical question of how we ought to live rather than the
historical question of how we have lived. He was not really interested in mapping the
historical ‘progress’ as it actually occurred, since many turns and improvements may
have been accidental. He believed in the gradual perfectibility of the human race and of

Stewart cited Smith’s History of Astronomy and Ancient Systems of Physics and Metaphysics as
‘unexceptionable specimens’ of conjectural history (I:4).
31
Phillipson (1976:824) in an early piece has a very different reading of conjectural history. He sees
Stewart as using the concept to damn Adam Smith with faint praise, and sees this as the triumph of the
counter-enlightenment.
32
Stewart’s reference to theoretical simplicity is quite distinct from Smith’s notion expressed in his
‘History of Astronomy’ (the manuscript of which Stewart discovered amongst Smith’s papers when
editing his works), where he argued that theories which cater to the mind’s need for coherence and
simplicity were often accepted as a result. Stewart was not making the same claim about simplicity; his
was not an observation about the influence of psychology on the reception of theories. Stewart was
arguing that a particular theory of history was preferable because it was most useful for understanding
society in order to ameliorate it.
 106
society, and by ‘nature’ he meant here something like the inexorable force of human
improvement. Hence his interest was in mapping the stages of improvement that nature
would logically have built into the process of human development. It was only these
‘natural’ stages that could be useful for projecting future improvements and helping to
guide future direction in political and economic planning. He thought that ‘accidental’
historical improvements were of no assistance in illuminating the way forward.
The challenge to the moral sciences from the physical sciences highlighted a
pervasive ambiguity in the concept of moral law, which embraced both necessity and
choice. ‘It was superfluous’, Lorraine Daston points out, ‘for physicists to urge
compliance with the law of gravitation; it would have been absurd to suggest that there
existed any choice in the matter’. When moral philosophers complained of violations of
moral laws, ‘they assumed that the natural order was best, but not necessary’ (Daston
1989b:299).33 This concept of moral law informed Stewart’s notion of conjectural
history - it was about the best, and not the necessary, historical development; that is, it
was normative rather than descriptive. Where human action was involved, laws could
be discerned, but they were not always followed. Because they had not always been
followed, history had not always taken the course it should have, namely, one of
uninterrupted progressive development toward the good.
Adam Ferguson’s theory of civic virtue meant that his historical narrative was
based on a decidedly ‘weak’ cyclical model in which conscious human intervention was
a possibility, decline was not predetermined, and progress was not guaranteed (Oz-
Salzberger:116-7). In contrast, Stewart’s model of history was developmental, founded
firmly in the idea of progress and incorporating psychological perfectibilism and
scientism. His history of philosophy showed the gradual, though not unimpeded,
development of philosophy, and he predicted an improvement in the science of mind
through the application of scientific method. Given the inherent perfectibilism of
human beings, the application of scientifically discovered laws of political economy
would, when combined with the growing body of knowledge in the area and the

33
Herbert F. Thomson, writing without the benefit of Daston’s insight, finds it strange that Smith, a moral
philosopher, ‘preferred to describe what tends to happen, rather than what ought to happen’, and that
Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is ‘more like a law of physics than a law of behaviour’ (Thomson 1987:238).
Daston’s work on the alliance between mathematical probability and the Enlightenment moral sciences,
beginning with intersections between classical probability theory and legal thought, offers a tool for the
analysis of what Haakonssen (1996a:226) calls Smith’s ‘science of legislation’, and a way of exploring
Stewart’s political-economy in relation to his remaking of the Smithian science.
 107
eventual emergence of an educated public, produce an increasingly more harmonious
and just society.
From this memoir of Smith we can see that, as early as 1793, only one year after
the publication of the first volume of his Elements, Stewart was not so prone to making
overt claims about the supremacy of moral philosophy. Instead, this theme informed his
work at a less conspicuous level: he set about demonstrating the centrality of moral
philosophical questions to all areas of knowledge. And he did it in whatever forum was
available. Here, in a work of biography, a medium in which he professed himself
uncomfortable (X:lxxv), he constructed a platform to launch a concept – ‘Conjectural
History’ – which made sense as he defined it, only if one appreciated the centrality of
moral philosophy to all intellectual endeavours. Presumably, he did not foresee that his
term would be appropriated and used freely without the implications he thought he had
implanted in it.
In the same work he defended Smith, and himself, against the terror of the times
(during the sedition trials), while defending the scientific history of the French
philosophes. When Burke railed against French rationalism and the attack on history, it
is possible that Stewart was offering an alternative to histoire raisonée – associated with
materialism and atheism – by linking conjectural history to a non-materialist, though
rationalist, psychology. Conjectural history may have been designed to undermine
Burke’s pitting of reason against history.

In 1796 Stewart used his biography of Scotland’s Historiographer-Royal, Dr

William Robertson, famed Leader of the Moderates and Principal of the University of
Edinburgh, as a vehicle for his perfectibilism and his historiographical views, and to
reorient the genre of biography. One aspect of the éloge tradition of particular relevance
to Stewart was Condorcet’s use of the medium of biography. David Williams argues
that Condorcet used Vie de Voltaire, and the biographies of Turgot and others, as a
‘powerful instrument of enlightenment propaganda’, elaborating and dramatizing the
historical, moral and political themes of perfectibilism woven into his Esquisse d’un
tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain. In his capacity as official panegyrist
for the Académie Royale des Sciences, Condorcet composed ‘miniature biographical
portraits . . . nearly all [of which] provide evidence of a covert intention to reorient the
genre of biography in ways that would serve the interests of the party of reason’
 108
(Williams 1985:495). I suggest that Stewart shared not only Condorcet’s perfectibilism,
but also his appreciation of the genre of biography as an argumentative arena.
Stewart used the memoir of Robertson to criticise romantic history and to couch
historical narrative in terms of a society ‘which is now progressing gradually towards
perfection’ (X:147). In many respects the piece amounted to a panegyric, but in it
Stewart expressed discomfort with the notion of history writing as art or poetry; he
thought literary romanticism had sometimes marred the work of Scotland’s leading
historian (IV:34-7, 101-244). Useful history was less poetic, less evocative, with less
appeal to the emotions: it demonstrated gradual progress towards enlightened society.34
The Robertson memoir was attacked, deservedly, as hagiography in the
Edinburgh Review, and a partial explanation probably lies in the fact that Dr. Robertson,
while he lay dying, ‘sent for Dugald Stewart and requested him to write the history of
his life’ (emphasis mine) (Dalzel 1862[I]:100). Whereas the reviewer claimed the Life
was not a true history, because it was devoid of criticism, anecdotes and insights into the
subject’s life, he observed that Stewart had created ‘a new and most interesting
department of literature’. The reviewer did not speculate on the illocutionary force of
Stewart’s text, and did not draw attention to Stewart’s criticism of Romanticism, but
identified a new literary genre combining ‘general criticism and literary history’.
Stewart excelled in this new genre, but remained a failed biographer (that is, a failed
historian) (ER 1803:238-9). He had departed from the ‘modern’, eighteenth-century
notion of biography as invented by James Boswell: the detailed history of a life, replete
with personal anecdotes drawn from friends and critics, and drawing on letters and
autobiographical writings, to explore the character of a great individual (Yeo 1996:157-
162). The 1803 reviewer’s message was clear: Stewart had perverted the genre of the
history of lives.
Stewart confided to his close friend Archibald Alison prior to publication that
writing Robertson’s biography had been one of his most difficult and unwanted tasks
(X:lxxv). Wood (309) suggests that this might reflect Stewart’s invidious position as
Whig biographer of a well-known Whig during the Tory despotism. Not only was
Robertson a Whig, but a Whig who shared Stewart’s distaste for the ‘ravings’ of the

34
Stewart was conventional in viewing history as a literary style. Bacon had differentiated between
poetry as a literary style and poetry as “fictitious history” (IV:222). Beattie (1793:527-9) had written
conventionally of History, classifying it as a prose style under the heading of ‘Rhetorick’; his critiques
focused mainly on style.
 109
conservative Whig, Burke.35 Is it possible that Stewart seized this opportunity (to write
the official biography of Robertson) because he could use it to ameliorate his own
situation? He enjoyed a certain reflected glory as Robertson’s chosen biographer, and
this had immediate political and social relevance given that Robertson, though a Whig,
was of a party (the Moderates) that worked in close concert with Dundas.
Kidd argues that it was Robertson who reinterpreted eighteenth-century Scottish
history as a discrete break from its feudal past. Robertson explained the Scottish
present not in terms of its history pre-1707, but in terms of ‘the long sweep of English
history’, leading the Scottish historians to appropriate the English whig tradition,
abandoning the Scottish past as meaningful history and thereby rendering their native
country in a sense ‘a “historyless” nation’ (Kidd 1993:3,197,209,211). T.C. Smout
draws attention to the fate of Scottish history: Robertson caused the Scots to believe that
their history was rubbish, which set them at a disadvantage. The country then made
itself into a ‘history-less nation’. The new Romantic images didn’t really disturb
Robertson’s essential story, which ‘denigrated everything before 1688 as feudal
darkness and anarchy’. The Highlanders were not seen as quintessentially Scottish, but
as quintessentially barbarous, disloyal and to be forgotten (Smout 1989:13-14).
It is difficult to reconcile the Scottish intellectuals’ preoccupation with justice
and virtue, their vision of the just society, with the reality of the ensuing Highland
clearances of the nineteenth century, when thousands of families were displaced and
impoverished through eviction to make way for commercial undertakings.36 To see a
connection we need to understand Smout’s points about the displacement of the
Highlanders in the new history and the hegemonic discourse on ‘national enrichment’.
This entailed the twin ideas that national enrichment was synonymous with patriotism,
and that national enrichment was best attained by allowing the upper classes a free hand
in the pursuit of wealth (Smout:19). It seemed evident, following Robertson, that ‘the
Highlands needed to be “civilized” . . . and an important agent of civilization was the
introduction of commerce’ (Berry:125). Through Robertson, the writing of history had

35
Alexander Carlyle (1973:281) reported that Robertson ‘Could not Listen to the Ravings of Burke’.
36
The Highland/Lowland divide complicated the traditional North/South divide, and was never addressed
by Stewart. Presumably he classed the subject in the same category as the Slave Trade once it became the
topic of public debate – rabble-rousingly dangerous. Emerson (1992:9) notes that the existence of
Highlanders, so culturally different from most Lowland intellectuals, complicated the Scots’
Enlightenment debates.
 110
direct impact on social policy and the subsequent course of history.37 Appropriately, it
was Stewart, a non-historian who rejected history per se, who became the historian of
the life (though perverting that genre) of the very historian who rendered Scotland
historyless.

The Life of Reid (1803) was a site for Stewart’s work on philosophical
comportment in the aftermath of the Revolution, and for the applicaton of the methods
of conjectural history for the purpose of self-location. Apart from slender biographical
details of Reid and his family, the memoir consists mainly of an outline of Reidian
common sense philosophy: it endorses Reid’s desire to establish the philosophy of mind
as a science, explains its importance in relation to extant philosophy, and offers a
defence of it against its detractors, paying particular attention to the four most important
objections. From this, it is clear that Stewart in 1802 perceived Reidian philosophy to
be under attack, and that this particular foray into public discourse was to defend and
promote common sense philosophy.
But, seeking the illocutionary force of Stewart’s biographical labour, Wood has
gone further, showing that in this work, Stewart was attempting to outline the
philosopher’s role and to present himself as apolitical in the politically hostile
environment of Edinburgh and its Royal Society (see chapter 3).38 By appealing to the
ethos of solitude, Stewart represented the ideal philosopher as ‘an isolated figure,
pursuing his studies as a form of retreat from the realm of social and political
relationships’. Reid was ‘remote from the pursuits of ambition’, aloof from and
untainted by commerce, patronage, and polite society, and thereby morally superior. In
‘exploring the tensions between solitary study and social involvement’, as Cuvier had
done before him, Stewart used the medium of public discourse to define the
philosopher’s role. Given his own tenuous position in Edinburgh society during the
Dundas despotism, by depicting the philosopher as politically and socially disinterested,
he was declaring his own aloofness from political turmoil and creating a particular
social niche for himself (Wood:306-8).39 Wood’s insight suggests new readings of

37
Though Robertson died before the Highland clearances got under way, his view of history influenced
Scottish thought and policy after his death.
38
Dundas and his Tory colleague were vice-president and president of the RSE for its first thirty years,
and their presence ‘conspicuously aligned the institution with the Tory centre of Scottish political power’
(Shapin 1974:37).
 111
Stewart’s forays into biography. Here, in a brief work, Stewart went outside the usual
core of moral philosophy to outline a particular role for the philosopher in response to
the politicisation of philosophy.
The role of conjectural history in Stewart’s own work is not usually appreciated.
Wood (310-12) alerts us to the fact that the use of the concept of progress in Stewart’s
biographical reconstruction of Reid is akin to conjectural history. Stewart conceived of
the progress of Reid’s thought in linear developmental terms, culminating in his mental
philosophy, and the resultant biography is a work of conjectural history that serves to
legitimate Stewart’s own location in the development of Scottish philosophy. In so far
as the Robertson memoir carried Stewart’s perfectibilist message and assumed human
progress, it too was a work of conjectural history in which historical narrative
reconstructed the ‘natural’ progress, rather than a biography as understood by, say,
James Boswell.

In all three memoirs of the professors, Stewart refrained from finding any flaws
in the moral character of the subject. But he also contributed to James Currie’s Life of
Burns (1800) (see full text in X:cxl-cxlvii), and it is interesting that he demonstrated no
such delicacy when writing of the poet. While he generously attested to the powers of
Burns’s mind and manners, he nevertheless identified character flaws, criticising Burns
for his sarcasm, his nasty wit, and his inflexibility (X:cxli-cxliii). It seems then that it
was not simply that Stewart shrank from criticizing the dead for fear of offending the
living (as the reviewer of his Robertson suggested), or that he could not find fault in a
friend. His piece on the poet, precisely because Burns was not part of the intellectual
institutional establishment, was irrelevant to Stewart’s project of reasserting the primacy
of moral philosophy.
For an insight into the public portrayal of figures of intellectual authority, it is
useful to look at the construction of Newtonianism in the eighteenth century, when
Newton’s admirers sought to link his intellectual and moral qualities (Yeo 1988:274-5).
Given this link, there was a danger in finding character flaws as biographers delved

39
Haakonssen (1990a:24-9) finds significant distortions in Stewart’s account of Reid, and this discrepancy
invites speculation on the illocutionary force of the work.
 112
more deeply into the lives of heroic figures.40 There is evidence that Stewart recorded
gossip when in company with Smith, Dalzel, Burke and Lauderdale (Ross 1995:256-7),
but he seems never to have used such information.41 Rothschild (81) asserts that
Stewart was at pains to deny or explain away those of Smith’s character flaws that were
common knowledge. Horner recorded that Stewart ‘told us some very interesting
particulars of Adam Smith’s character and habits, to which he has alluded but slightly in
his biographical account’ (Bourne & Taylor:156). Thus, though it was known that
Smith was ‘so worried about someone getting to press with his ideas before he did that
he . . . [was] unwilling when in company ever to talk about what he understood’
(Turnbull 1995:165), Stewart failed to flesh out his biography with such interesting
information about the person. A similar failure was noted by the 1803 reviewer of the
memoir of Robertson, and by Alexander Carlyle (1973:144-45), who revealed that
Robertson was so loquacious as to bore even his best friends, was often the brunt of
their jokes, tended to promise what he could not deliver, and did not get on well with
women. Stewart withheld such morsels, and the fact that Robertson’s wife ‘was not his
First Choice’.42 Stewart’s failure appears again in the Life of Reid (1803). In each
instance he was using the genre of biography for his own ends. In the cases of Smith
and Reid, both moral philosophers, the exposure of character flaws might have been
counter-productive to his long term project.
It is worth noting that Stewart’s ‘Lives’ did not follow the format available in
Britain, as exemplified in the Biographica Britannica (1747-66 and 1778-93), of giving
a methodical collection of biographies of men of letters (Yeo 1996:147). He did not
attempt a comprehensive history of his subjects’ lives. Instead he discussed their
contribution and relevance to the history of philosophy, sketching a brief character
portrait and adding personal anecdotal details only to illuminate the ‘progress’ of his
subject’s mind (X:2). In thus mapping the lives of individuals against the history of
philosophy, both Stewart and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, who encouraged this
practice (X:1), reflected one view on the appropriate form of biography. This was the

40
After Biot ascribed Newton’s theological writings to his derangement, Brewster (in 1831) was anxious
to denounce this assertion, because it affected contemporary assumptions about the relations between
genius and virtue.
41
He moved in circles where high level gossip circulated. For instance, Dalzel recorded that when Burke
visited Scotland, Smith, Stewart and Dalzel ‘had more of his company than anybody in this country, and
we got a vast deal of political anecdote from him, and fine pictures of political characters both dead and
living’ (Dalzel 1862:I:43).
42
Carlyle (125) also refuted Stewart’s heroic account of Robertson’s role in the General Assembly.
 113
view that Macvey Napier brought to the Supplement to the fourth, fifth and sixth
editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica beginning in 1815. In particular, the ‘lives’ of
men of science in encyclopaedias became ‘small sections of the history of science in
which the contributions of an individual were mapped against a larger story’
(Yeo:155;163). Since it was Stewart’s view of biography that came to predominate, and
given Napier’s esteem for Stewart (Napier 1811:1), it is possible that Stewart’s ‘Lives’,
collected in his Biographical Memoirs (1811), became the model for scientific
biography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.43
In these memoirs, Stewart was not attempting to write history per se. Like
several of his eclectic peers, he was interested in history only as a tool, as ‘a repository
of exemplars, for good or for evil’ (Haakonssen 1996a:7). Each work of biography
should be appreciated in the light of Stewart’s own interests. Each can speak to us
about an historical moment, about Stewart’s shaping of his own identity, his experience
of being moulded by outside forces, and his attempt to fashion other lives as exemplars
of the philosopher. Moreover, in the ‘Life of Smith’ (1794), the Life of Robertson
(1801), and the Life of Reid (1803), Stewart painted portraits whose covert intention
was, like Condorcet’s, to reorient the genre of biography to ‘serve the interests of the
party of reason’ (Williams:495).

Scientific history
Kidd (211) identifies an ‘intellectual imperative’ that linked the abandonment of
the Scottish past to the Scottish critique of English historiography. This intellectual
imperative was ‘scientific or sceptical Whiggism’. Scientific Whiggism gave birth to
scientific history, and Stewart’s conjectural history was an expression of Scottish
Newtonianism in so far as it entailed a confidence in historical laws that governed the
main developments in human history. At the same time it is yet another indication of
his place in the tradition of Scottish moral philosophy, and Oz-Salzberger rightly draws
a line from Ferguson’s ‘commitment to the primacy of moral philosophy in the writing
of history’ to Stewart’s ‘conjectural history’. The crucial question for Ferguson was
‘not what happened to mankind, but what is human happiness (or perfection) and how
can it be achieved and secured’ (Oz-Salzberger:177-8). But Ferguson railed against
‘conjecture’ in history-writing. Sensitive to the dangers of what we now call ‘the Whig

43
While this question has little bearing on the politicisation of philosophy, it might suggest other work to
be done on Stewart.
 114
view of history’, of seeing ourselves as ‘the supposed standards of politeness and
civilization’, he warned that histories tell us ‘only of the conceptions and sentiments of
the age in which they were composed’ (Ferguson 1768:123-26). It is interesting that
Stewart, not heeding his predecessor’s warnings because they were irrelevant to his
project, even seized on the maligned term ‘conjecture’ and made it his own. At a time
when ‘conjecture’ and ‘hypothesis’ were receiving a bad press from staunch Baconians
(Yeo 1985), Stewart did not search for less odious terms but appropriated these terms to
argue that conjecture and hypothesis were integral to scientific and social progress.
Without losing sight of Stewart’s novelty we can see his approach as emerging from the
Scottish moral philosophical tradition, which was inherently and self-consciously
‘scientific’.
Historical conjecture in the weak sense, as opposed to Stewart’s radical sense,
involved supplying conjecture only where the facts could not be known. In so far as this
was often defended by justifying a calculation of probabilities in the absence of extant
evidence, it, too, was scientific. Hume himself promoted a technique of
‘PROBABILITY or reasoning from conjecture’, and to the conjectural historians
‘“Experiment” seemed indeed to reaffirm the empirical value of “experience”, and so by
extension of “conjecture”’ (Allan:153-154). Conjectural history, then, was indeed a
fruit of the Newtonian tradition in the Scottish universities, and an expression of the
Scottish scientific spirit.
Where Allen sees the motivation for Stewart’s conjectural history in terms of a
loss of national self-confidence, Pocock sees the Scots’ attitude to the question of
historical change as illustrative of a ‘crisis in the relations between the age’s political
norms and paradigms and its awareness of social realities’. The new economic realities
of the rentier, the officer and the bureaucrat, for instance, challenged the classical
political paradigms in which they had been below the level of the political animal
(Pocock 1972:94). Berry (61-7), on the other hand, locates conjectural history not in
crisis but in continuity, seeing it as an expression of the Scottish scientific spirit
comprising Newtonianism and Baconianism. Whether we see conjectural history in
terms of continuity or crisis, or somewhere between the two, I suggest that we can best
view Stewart’s manipulation of Scottish history writing and of the genre of biography in
the light of the Revolution controversy.
Wood, too, sees Stewart in the context of continuity, and discusses the impact of
his notion of conjectural history on later Scottish thought, specifically at Aberdeen
 115
University, where Robert Eden Scott in the early nineteenth century presented a
sophisticated case for the legitimacy of conjectural history to illuminate ‘the history of
the human mind’ (Wood 1993:141). And in Cambridge William Whewell, who was
antagonistic to Stewart’s view of the nature of the mathematical sciences, nevertheless
adopted conjectural historiography, along the lines of Smith’s ‘History of Astronomy’ as
the model for his First Principles of Mechanics in 1832 (Cantor 1991:68-9). Not only
did conjectural or scientific history emerge from seventeenth-century forces, but its
influence was not confined to Scotland or the eighteenth-century.
The recognition of the scientistic impetus of conjectural history, political
economy and Scottish moral philosophy complicates any notion of the Stewart-Jeffrey
debate as simply old guard versus new guard, science versus philosophy, or a challenge
to established institutions. Certainly these were elements in the debate, but Stewart’s
position was ambiguous and precarious. Moral philosophy belonged to the old guard,
but Stewart renovated Reid’s common sense philosophy. While doing philosophy, he
sought to do it using the methods of the physical sciences. While he was a lifelong
practicing Christian, he defended Humean causality despite its association with atheism.
While he was of the establishment, he challenged that establishment in the Leslie case.
Stewart’s promotion of strong conjectural history involved a rejection of history,
and Haakonssen has shown the relevance of this for Stewart’s political economy. He
points out that it was Stewart who denied a theoretical role for history in his political
economy, in which he remade the Smithian ‘science of a legislator’. In Stewart’s
cognitivist theory of morality, the moral standpoint was not Smithian impartiality, but
natural moral qualities. It was not history, but the moral powers of the subject, that
explained moral judgement and behaviour (Haakonssen 1996a:226-7).44 Stewart’s
explicit rejection of history was based on his belief that the invention of the printing
press had changed the whole course of human affairs, promoting the growth and spread
of knowledge and rendering the condition of the human race radically different from
what it ever was before. In such circumstances statesmen could no longer find their
guiding principles in the past ‘but [had] to “search for the rules of their conduct chiefly
in . . . their own times, and in an enlightened anticipation of the future history of
mankind”’ (Haakonssen:233).45 This is precisely why, in promoting conjectural history,

44
For a full discussion of Stewart’s rejection of history see Haakonssen 1996a, Chapter 7 ‘Dugald
Stewart and the science of a legislator’.
45
The quote is from Volume 1 of the Elements (II:223), but these views are found elsewhere in Stewart’s
works, including his political economy lectures, and the other volumes of the Elements.
 116
Stewart rejected the notion of using history understood as the progress most agreeable to
fact: instead, the purpose of conjectural history was to guide statesmen and legislators in
making policy for the benefit of an increasingly educated and enlightened populace.46
Such was the discontinuity between the present and the past that, according to Stewart,
mere history had no theoretical role to play.

During the eighteenth century moral philosophy became the core of Scottish
university curricula, and by the 1780s Reid’s common sense philosophy was known
abroad simply as ‘the Scottish philosophy’ (Grave 1960:1). Despite the rising
importance of the experimental sciences in Britain generally, Scottish moral philosophy
was able to withstand encroachments on its intellectual authority until the turn of the
century. In 1783, when Stewart was professor of mathematics and member of the
Senatus, there was a threat to the university’s pedagogic and custodial authority in the
area of natural history. Stewart was instrumental in meeting the danger by
institutionally embracing it through forming the Royal Society of Edinburgh. A decade
later in 1793 he fashioned conjectural history – scientific history rooted in Scottish
moral philosophy, scientific history designed to replace mere history. His three forays
into public biographical discourse reflected his tenuous social position in Edinburgh
during the Revolution controversy. I have offered the suggestion that conjectural history
was Stewart’s response to the challenge, announced by Burke in 1790, to histoire
raisonée and rationalism. Stewart’s rational conjectural history was not French, not
revolutionary, and it was tied to a non-materialist moral philosophy. Perhaps this aspect
of his conjectural history has been difficult to detect because it was couched in the
history of lives genre rather than political literature and pamphleteering, thus
circumventing the turbulent and contentious arena that Mackintosh entered. Stewart’s
pedagogical and literary work was circumscribed by a hostile political climate that
forced a particular shape on his common sense philosophy, his biographical endeavours,
and perhaps also on his account of Scottish history writing.

46
Haakonssen (1994:xii) distinguishes sharply between Stewart’s political economy on the one hand and
jurisprudence and the theory of government on the other. First, as society approached future harmony,
there would be less need for legislation. Second, attention to the forms of government could lead people
to believe that the source of power in itself determined the quality of its exercise – a notion Stewart found
dangerous.
 117

Chapter 5

The Stewart-Jeffrey debate

 118
In an anonymous review of Stewart’s Life of Reid in the Edinburgh Review of
January 1804, Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) pronounced the science of mind, ‘from
Hume . . . down to . . . Condorcet and Mr. Stewart’, to be overestimated, futile,
unscientific, and with no possibility of future improvement (Jeffrey 1804:273). This
constituted an attack on the central part of Scottish common sense philosophy, and on
Stewart as the carrier of mental philosophy. Thus began what Robertson refers to as
‘the fierce debate which was to snap across the journals during the first two decades of
the nineteenth century’ (Robertson 1976:43).1 He is referring to what became known as
the Stewart-Jeffrey controversy, the debate about the importance, utility and
methodology of mental philosophy. Davie (1961:176-7) locates this dispute in a critical
period in Scottish education, when a technological and utilitarian conception of science
was forming. Jeffrey’s attack
galvanised the Scottish intellectual establishment as nothing had done since the
challenge of David Hume. A chain-reaction of arguments at once was sparked
off, which, lasting for some thirty years, brought in Dugald Stewart, Thomas
Brown, Sir William Hamilton and J.F. Ferrier . . . [and later] Macaulay . . . the
physicist J.B. Forbes and the prophet Thomas Carlyle. (Davie 1973:16)2
In line with this, Chitnis (1976:214) argues that the main issue for Jeffrey was the
rethinking of the relevance of a philosophical education and the necessary ‘demotion of
the philosophy of mind in any “modern” educational scheme of things’.3 The Stewart-
Jeffrey dispute over the utility, scientific legitimacy and relevance of the science of
mind was emblematic of the early-nineteenth century debate on the nature of the social
and human sciences in relation to the natural sciences. In offering a separate course in
political economy at Edinburgh University, Stewart made it possible for students to
study this subject outside its usual moral philosophical framework. Francis Jeffrey was
one such pupil.4 Thus the public voice of opposition to the Scottish school of common

1
It is reasonable to date the debate from 1802, when the ‘Account of Reid’ was read before the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, because it is clear from this that Stewart perceived Scottish common sense
philosophy to be under attack. But I have dated it from Jeffrey’s offensive because Stewart’s own assault
in the Life was chiefly on the materialism of Hume, Helvétius, Hartley, Erasmus Darwin and Priestley.
2
Corsi (1987) finds that the Quarterly Review and the Oxford Noetics, while hotly opposed to Stewart
over Aristotelianism, sided with him against Jeffrey.
3
Student marginalia in EUL copy (Dugald Stewart Collection) of Maurice Cross’s Selections from the
Edinburgh Review (1833:28) indicates that this debate was alive into the 1830s. Four of the ten articles
are reviews of Stewart’s works, and the scribbler ‘heartily’ recommends pieces critical of Stewart and
confirms ‘the uselessness of mental philosophy’, recommending ‘to exclude it from the regular course of
academical instruction in Scottish Universities (and make it unnecessary for passing examinations for
degrees etc)’. Such comments support the view that this debate belongs in the Scottish educational reform
debate.
4
That is, he was a law student who attended Stewart’s political economy lectures, but was not a moral
philosophy student.
 119
sense philosophy, the central part of which was mental philosophy, emerged from
among Stewart’s own pupils. It is ironic that Stewart was instrumental in providing just
the type of education that would produce his most damaging critic.
Jeffrey contended that ‘metaphysical writers’ generally had magnified the
importance of mental philosophy and expected some striking improvement in its
method, whereas in fact these enquiries were of no utility and offered no ‘possibility of
their ultimate improvement’. The main thrust of his argument was that mental
philosophy could not benefit humanity because it was a non-experimental science,
restricted to observation. There are, he said, entities ‘actually in our power’ and on
these we can experiment, and there are entities ‘placed altogether beyond our reach’ -
such as ‘the phenomena of the human mind’- and these we can only observe.
Knowledge gained by observation ‘does not directly increase [our] power’ over matter.
Jeffrey made the Baconian point that only sciences involving ‘the strict experimental
philosophy’ advance us materially. Newton was ‘no exception’, since, according to
Jeffrey, ‘the law of gravitation . . . was first calculated and ascertained by experiments
performed upon substances which were entirely at his disposal’ (Jeffrey 1804:273-5).
Jeffrey’s claim that astronomy, as celestial mechanics, was an experimental science was
strategic. He sought to defuse Stewart’s anticipated riposte: that positional astronomy,
an observational science, had given us the useful tool of navigation.5
According to Jeffrey, Bacon’s focus was on experimental science. It was
knowledge gained through experiment that would enlarge ‘man’s dominion over the
material universe which he inhabits’, and clearly ‘no direct utility can result from the
most accurate observations of occurrences which we cannot control’. Still, observation
‘may often’ greatly extend knowledge. But this was not the case in mental philosophy,
since ‘every one’ already knew the laws of thought, and ‘it is impossible that any one
should ever discover . . . any laws of which men would admit the existence, unless they
were previously convinced of their operation themselves’. So in metaphysics,
‘knowledge is not power’, and Jeffrey therefore likened the metaphysician to a
grammarian or a cartographer rather than a ‘chemist or experimental philosopher’
(Jeffrey:274-6).6

5
Davie (1961:176) misinterprets Jeffrey’s position on astronomy. He has Jeffrey arguing that ‘an
observational science, like astronomy, because of not being able to manipulate its objects, did not give
power over matter’
6
Since ‘metaphysics’ could be a term of derision, it suited Jeffrey’s rhetorical purpose to equate it to
mental philosophy. Stewart, on the other hand, since he wanted to establish the philosophy of mind as a
Baconian science, insisted on distinguishing his science of mind from the vulgar understanding of
 120
Jeffrey acknowledged that ‘Reid’s great achievement was undoubtedly the
subversion of the Ideal system’ (the Berkeleian thesis that only sensations or ideas can
properly be said to be or to be real). But he insisted that ‘the destruction of the Ideal
theory’ could not be regarded, as Reid and Stewart thought, as a ‘demonstration of the
real existence of matter, or a confutation of all those reasonings which have brought into
question the popular faith upon this subject’. This was because the adherents of the
ideal system did not necessarily doubt the existence of the material world, but queried
merely the origin of their sensations. Thus Reid’s attack on the Berkeleians was ‘vulgar
raillery’ (Jeffrey:281-4).
In his 1810 review of Stewart’s Philosophical Essays (1810), though conscious
of the honour Stewart had done him in quoting his 1804 review at length, Jeffrey
nonetheless reiterated and developed his former complaints. His explanation of the
unpopularity of the philosophy of mind implied that whereas the world had moved on,
Stewart had not; he was out of date. Scholars and philosophers no longer had time for
‘abstract studies’:
In older times, a man had . . . to take seriously to theology and the school logic.
When things grew a little better, the classics and mathematics filled up the
measure of general education and private study; and, in the most splendid
periods of English philosophy, . . . the investigation of our intellectual and moral
nature [was added] . . . Now-a-days, however, a man can scarcely pass current in
the informed circles of society, without knowing something of political
economy, chemistry, mineralogy, geology and etymology, - having a small
notion of painting, sculpture, and architecture, with some sort of taste for the
picturesque, - and a smattering of German and Spanish literature, and even some
idea of Indian, Sanscrit and Chinese learning and history, - over and above some
little knowledge of trade and agriculture; with a reasonable acquaintance with
what is called the philosophy of politics, and a far more extensive knowledge of
existing parties, factions, and eminent individuals, both literary and political, at
home and abroad, than ever were required in any earlier period of society.
(Jeffrey 1810:168-169)
This explosion of knowledge and ‘universal hurry’ had had most impact on the
philosophy of mind for two reasons. First, it had outlived its usefulness, and its history
was of no practical relevance. Second, it was more destructive than constructive,
offering no philosophical succour (Jeffrey 1810:168-170). The debate expressed ‘the
doubts of educated men outside the universities concerning the value of the philosophy
of mind’ (Flynn 1992:69).

metaphysics, which he associated with scholasticism (V:40-43). Tom Paine sought to delegitimise
monarchy by casting it as ‘metaphysics’, and when Burke portrayed the French revolutionaries as agents
 121

The learned Review culture

It is significant that this debate snapped across the journals (and at the time of
the attack Jeffrey was the editor of the Edinburgh Review). Although Stewart’s
contributions to the debate were not published in journals, reviews of his contributions
were, and the learned journals remained the main site of the conflict following Jeffrey’s
initial attack in the Edinburgh Review. The attached Appendix indicates the extent to
which the journals were involved and the range of protagonists, who came from a
variety of disciplines and backgrounds.7 The identity of the author or authors of several
pertinent articles in the Quarterly Review is difficult to ascertain due to conflicting
attributions.8 Despite the supposed anonymity of the review articles and the large
number of reviewers listed in the Wellesley Index, the authors of the essay-style reviews

of false philosophy, ‘metaphysical’ men of letters, Paine responded that Burke himself was ‘a
metaphysical man’ without good judgement (Hundert 1986:148-9).
7
For the roles of Brown, Hamilton, Ferrier, Macaulay, Forbes and Carlyle, see Davie (1961;1973).
R. E. Scott (1805;1810) was Professor of moral philosophy in the university and King’s College
of Aberdeen.
James Douglas (1839) was an author but not a trained philosopher so it is interesting that he was
insisting on doing mental philosophy in 1839, when it had heard its death knell. This could be read as a
sign that a fresh entrant had entered the arena, prepared to do battle for mental philosophy. That his
background was not moral philosophy, and his interest was more scientific than philosophical, meant that
his defence was scientistic and, according to the ER (1840), philosophically naive. In fact the reviewer, at
this late date, weighed heavily into the Stewart-Jeffrey debate in defence of Stewart.
Thomas Upham (1831:43) was Professor of moral and mental philosophy and instructor of
Hebrew in Bowdoin College Maine, and his Boston publication is evidence that the Stewart-Jeffrey debate
extended not only beyond the grave but also beyond the shore. Upham draws heavily on Stewart
throughout, and specifically refutes Jeffrey’s charges, even using Jeffrey’s examples and quoting Stewart’s
counter-arguments.
An anonymous review in Blackwood’s (1824a[16]:227-29) suggests an international dimension
to the debate. The reviewer was approving of Magalotti, noting that the Italian, who was highly critical of
the common sense school, reserved his worst temper for Dugald Stewart.
Rev. Latham Wainewright (1830) of Emmanuel College Cambridge made the debate relevant to
the North-South divide in defending Stewart and the legitimacy of mental science while maintaining that
the ‘too French’ philosophy of the Scots was unwelcome in England.
8
The 1811 review of Stewart’s Philosophical Essays is attributed by DNB and Corsi (1987;1988) to W.
R. Lyall, but Poole’s Index, Jessop (1938) and Robertson (1976) confirm Macvey Napier as the author.
Shine (1949) lists Macvey Napier on the authority of his son; Archdeacon Lyall on the authority of the
Murray Register; and Bowdler, John the Younger on the authority of Gentleman’s XXI:138. Napier
(1879:5-6) reproduces a letter dated 1811 from Stewart to his father thanking him for his anonymous
review in the Quarterly, so it seems reasonable to attribute this review not to Lyall or Bowdler, but to
Napier. William Rowe Lyall reorganised the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana at the request of Bishop
Howley in 1820, became Archdeacon of Colchester in 1824, Archdeacon of Maidstone in 1841, and Dean
of Canterbury in 1845 (DNB). He was also editor of British Critic (Corsi 1988:4). There is consensus
among Shine, the Murray Register, DNB and Corsi on Lyall as the reviewer of Stewart’s Elements Vol. 2
(1815). Shine further identifies Lyall ‘on the authority of his nephew Canon Pearson’ as the reviewer of
Stewart’s Britannica ‘Dissertation’ (1821), whereas Poole’s Register cites J. Bowdler, and Gentleman’s
XXI:578 mentioned Dr. Sayers and Mr. Bowdler. It cannot have been Sayers or John Bowdler since both
were dead. Though Thomas Bowdler, the Shakespeare critic, lived until 1825 it is most unlikely he was
the author. Since there is some internal evidence that the same author reviewed both Supplements, Lyall
is a strong contender for attribution of the 1822 review.
 122
in this field were relatively few, and the identities of the major ones were usually known
within the intellectual community. Stewart, for instance, would have been well aware
that Jeffrey was his critic at the Edinburgh Review, just as he was aware that Napier was
his reviewer in the Quarterly of 1811 (Napier 1879:5-6). To appreciate the significance
of the debate we should understand something of the culture of the journals.
To maintain social credibility, an educated person required a wide range of
continuously updated knowledge. The intellectual journals provided a means for this
updating. Through them, members of ‘the educated public’ were able to stay abreast of
developments in the natural, political and economic sciences, and in philosophy and
literature. There were reports of voyages and addresses to parliament, of new books and
poetry, and of experiments and discoveries. With the advent of the Edinburgh Review
in 1802 (which itself symbolised the new ‘universal hurry’ and explosion of knowledge
to which both protagonists pointed9) there were also essay-like critiques, bringing about
a revolution in British journalism and promoting an entirely new style of critical writing
(Fontana: 1). These ‘high brow’ quarterlies shaped opinions and even Walter Scott,
founder in 1809 of the rival Quarterly Review, noticed that ‘no genteel family can
pretend to be without [the Edinburgh Review]’ (Flynn: 68). The extent of its readership
is illustrated by the fact that whereas in 1816 the London Times had a daily circulation
of only 8,000, the Edinburgh Review had a subscription list of 12,000 in 1813. Jeffrey
said, and according to Lenman (1981:111) he was probably right, that this represented
50,000 readers.
Although Stewart never wrote for a journal, he is known as the philosophical
father of the Edinburgh reviewers, a small group of literati comprised mostly of his ex-
pupils (Fontana 1985; Fry 1992; Hilton 1988; Winch 1983).10 The founders Sydney
Smith, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey and Francis Horner were all his students in
political economy, as was James Mill, a regular contributor. Hollander (39,51) refers to
the first issue in October 1802 as ‘a larger product of Stewart’s lecture-room’, and
identifies Stewart and the Edinburgh reviewers, Francis Horner, Thomas Robert
Malthus, Jean Baptiste Say and David Ricardo as ‘the notable figures in the early
building of “the classical political economy”’.11 Fry notes Cockburn’s enthusiasm for
the Review’s talent, spirit, writing and independence. The scale and speed of the

9
Stewart in (IV:248).
10
Though he disdained the genre, he was much reviewed in Britain and America: Poole’s Index to
Periodical Literature lists seventeen journals and twenty-nine reviews.
11
Malthus, Say and Ricardo were contributors.
 123
achievements of these (mostly) young whig lawyers raised them to a British prominence
which protected them from the Edinburgh establishment, which ‘accordingly gave the
parvenus no encouragement whatever’ (Fry:362). Stewart’s links to the reviewers and
the personal esteem in which they held him were complicated by the shifting intellectual
authority which informed their intellectual climate. While they admired his political
views and esteemed his character and his pedagogy, they did not share his position on
mind and morals (Fontana 1985; Fry 1992).
The anonymity of the reviewers, combined with the use of the first person,
plural, was an important tool of Victorian review journals. It was an accepted
convention which carried with it implications about the platform of the journal (Yeo
1993:78). Thus Jeffrey’s review, which amounted to a sacrilegious attack on Stewart as
the carrier of Scottish mental philosophy, bore the implied authority of the Edinburgh
Review, which was seen in England, though perhaps not in Edinburgh, as the voice of
Scottish liberal opinion. Hence Stewart had a complex relationship with the Review
that, pedagogically and intellectually, he had engendered.
If the voice of Scottish Whig liberalism was the Edinburgh Review, then the
voice of English Toryism was the Quarterly Review.12 Many controversies across the
spectrum of politics, political-economy, literature, philosophy, education, science and
religion raged in the pages of these two review journals, which were often engaged in
pitched battle with each other. Reviewers were not universally loved, though illustrious
and esteemed people like Walter Scott were connected with the journals. Macvey
Napier in 1818 published a strong critique of (the ultra-Tory and sensationalist)
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine founded in 1817, likening reviewers to mischievous
boys in a gutter throwing dirt.13 A more humorous broadside, aimed at reviewers and
their standards by Edward Copleston (1807) and containing tongue-in-cheek ‘advice’,
was bound by Stewart into a book of pamphlets for his own library. Most revealing of
the influence the Reviews were seen to exercise over public opinion is the comment by
Edmund Burke in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (1798:58), written prior to
the appearance of the Edinburgh Review and also bound by Stewart for his library.
Burke contends that ‘the Monthly, the Critical, and the Analytical Reviews, have been
for years carrying on an attack, more or less concealed, on the principles of all

12
The English Westminster Review, founded by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill in 1824, espoused
liberalism and was seen as a vehicle of Utilitarianism. It did not address the Stewart-Jeffrey debate.
13
Richard Jones advised Whewell in 1831 that his review of Herschel’s Discourse would be more
‘popular’ if he could ‘cast about and abuse somebody’ (Yeo 1996:97).
 124
constitutional authority in church and state . . . [They are] seditious’. Whether or not the
journals were seditious, they were certainly sites of controversy and public debate.

Public opinion
We need perhaps to be more aware of the complexity of this public debate,
surrounded as it was by protocols, and goaded by the emerging importance of ‘public
opinion’. The Gentleman’s Magazine and others like it in the eighteenth century tended
to quote large slabs of the book under review – the tone was something like that of a
salon conversation, and the journal itself did not adopt a critical stance. The Edinburgh
Review was in stark contrast, for the reviewer used the book to make an essay of his
own, so that the journal provided a platform for announcing his own general, political
and aesthetic views. Whereas previously, intellectual debate had been conducted among
intellectuals only, once journals such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly
Review existed for ‘the public’, they created that public anew as witness to intellectual
debate. (Earlier journals also appealed to a public, but not in this way.) With the
emergence of the critical journals, intellectual debate entered a new arena. It was
largely in this arena that the ‘twin popularising influences’ of Stewart and the Edinburgh
Review brought recognition to the Scottish literati as ‘the intellectual praetorian guard of
the English whig tradition’ (Kidd:213). Whereas in Cockburn there is a sense in which
writing philosophy like a Whig was a lifetime commitment and science was secondary,
the attack by Jeffrey on Stewart marks the moment when science ceased to be accepted
as secondary. In the new arena constituted by the new journals, there were dividing
lines within the ‘praetorian guard’.
Prior to the establishment of these journals, Stewart had studiously avoided
public dispute. Though two Lords of Session had censured him in 1794, this encounter
had occurred within the privacy of Edinburgh’s élite intellectual circles, and took the
form of private correspondence and conversation. But when Francis Jeffrey attacked his
former professor through the new medium of the critical journals in 1804, his review
constituted a public attack. Unlike the charge of Lords Abercrombie and Craig, it could
not be answered by a confidential letter; Stewart’s response was necessarily in the
public domain. In 1810, 1814 and 1827, following the Leslie case in 1805, he published
books which formed part of his defence of Scottish moral philosophy, mental science
and the role of the moral philosopher.
 125
Phrenology
When Scotland’s intellectual fault lines widened in the nineteenth century one of
the conspicuous sites was the conflict between phrenologists and their detractors in the
first three decades of the nineteenth century. The war was between phrenologists and
moral philosophers, and Stewart’s mental philosophy, already challenged by Jeffrey,
was threatened by a new, empirical (albeit pseudo) psychology. Steven Shapin argues
that the clash was, in large measure, between university professors and their social ilk,
on the one hand, and those not associated with the university and professions, on the
other. He claims the emergent middle-classes, which included Edinburgh’s mercantile
‘new men’, together with the lower-middle and working classes, supported the
phrenologists. Shapin suggests that whereas Scottish society had been changing, the
moral philosophy tradition of social thought had become ossified in the institution of the
university (Shapin 1975:224-6).
The phrenologists and common sense philosophers offered different versions of
faculty psychology, with one interesting difference, according to Shapin (1979:56),
being the insistence by phrenologists on a far greater number of faculties of the mind.14
Stewart found that mental phenomena were the result of consciousness, perception,
attention, conception, abstraction, association of ideas, memory, imagination, judgement
and reasoning, powers formed by particular habits, language and the principle of
imitation (II:12-38).15 George Combe, the Edinburgh champion of phrenology, insisted
that such an undifferentiated model of the mind could not explain the vast differences in
human occupations and propensities. The followers of Stewart, finding there were
common psychological faculties shared by all, attributed the division of labour in society
largely to environment or social arrangements.16 The phrenologists, on the other hand,
made it out to be a direct result of each person’s constitution. Combe contended that
‘every one differs from another in the size and activity of his organs’. Hence
differentiation and specialization were seen to be a result of individual human innate
endowment (Shapin 1979:57).
David De Giustino insists that the popular allure of phrenology was due, at least
in part, to its familiarity. It was precisely because it was in line with late eighteenth-

14
E.G. Boring (1957[1929]:53,205-8) says that Gall obtained his classification of the mind into thirty-
seven powers and propensities from the lists of Reid and Stewart.
15
Even after Stewart’s death, his relevance to the debate is seen in the title of J. Slade’s (1838)
Colloquies: imaginary conversations between a phrenologist and the shade of Dugald Stewart.
16
The ER (1826:271,318) defended moral philosophers against the ‘dogmatism and arrogance’ of
phrenologists who were deluded by their ‘absurd and extravagant multiplication of the faculties’.
 126
century rationalist ideas about psychology that it held such appeal. There was still wide
enthusiasm for the general laws of nature, and the human mind was no exception to the
whole pattern of creation. In fact some phrenologists saw the ‘new science’ as the
practical fulfilment of Reid’s theory (De Giustino 1975:38).17 (Stewart himself in
Elements Vol.3, while criticising the more ‘exaggerated and absurd’ claims of the
phrenologists, acknowledged that the new art had a foundation in ‘the principles of
Human Nature’, in that it inferred a ‘variety in our mental gifts’ (IV:186).) Thus there
are traces of Enlightenment optimism and rationalism discernible in the nineteenth-
century excitement over phrenology. In so far as the phrenology debate occupied the
popular press, it was an expression of the public enthusiasm for the physical sciences.
But as the stuff of élite determinations of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science, it evidenced a struggle over intellectual authority. The phrenologists saw
their exclusion from the newly formed BAAS in sociological terms. They claimed in
1839 that it was not on the grounds of the validity of their practice, but because of a
power play, that their science was excluded from the BAAS.18 Stewart too saw the
conflict in terms of intellectual authority. He had been alarmed in 1782 when the
Society of Antiquaries threatened to steal the natural history market from the university
(see chapter 3), had experienced academic integrity being subjected to political
influence during the Dundas despotism in the 1790s (see chapter 4), had forcefully
claimed political economy as the intellectual property of the moral philosoper in 1800
(see chapter 2), and had warded off a challenge to academic authority in the Leslie affair
of 1805 (see chapter 2). The Stewart-Jeffrey debate had alerted him to the wider
implications of the shift in intellectual authority. The Stewart-MacKenzie exchange of
1821 over phrenology (Cooter 1984:309), and his later public attack on phrenology in
Elements Vol.3 (1827), belonged to the Stewart-Jeffrey debate as expressions of
Stewart’s mission to reassert the status of moral philosophy in the face of the continuing
leakage of authority from metaphysical philosophy to physical science.
It seems that, indeed, the science of mind and phrenology shared common
ground. The important and unpalatable difference that characterised phrenology, in
Stewart’s view, quite apart from its materialism, was that it existed outside moral
philosophy. His science of mind, Scottish mental philosophy, was part of moral

17
George Nadel (1957:140) sees Australian phrenologists as basing their science on the Scottish realist
philosophy.
 127
philosophy: Stewart’s exposition of it had a moral philosophical core; it asserted the
supremacy of moral philosophy over the other sciences. Phrenology, on the other hand,
emerged from an area outside institutionalised moral philosophy, which it disdained
from this position of exclusion, and the two remained firmly opposed.
Shapin’s sociological reading illuminates the fact that the moral philosophy
tradition was lodged in the University of Edinburgh, which, with the loss of Whig
Professors Stewart in 1809 and Playfair in 1819, was seen by some to lose its soul
(Romilly 1905; Cockburn 1874[1856]; Bourne & Taylor 1994). But perhaps at that
stage, Scottish moral philosophy was not so much ossified, as Shapin puts it, as fighting
its last battles. It won the skirmish against phrenology, but it lost the war against what
this parvenu doctrine represented: the relentless march of scientism and the physical
sciences. I have noted Davie’s examination of the mid nineteenth-century attempt by
Stewart’s heirs – Hamilton and Ferrier – to adapt Scottish moral philosophy to rapidly
changing conditions in the modern world. This thesis addresses an earlier attempt:
Stewart’s struggle on the battleground of methodology. The conflict with the
phrenologists provides a window on the struggle of Scottish education to meet the
challenge of educational reform by adapting itself to emerging external exigencies,
while retaining its democratic philosophical core.

Emergence of strong scientism

Where some historians, such as Sher (1985:311), refer to a Scottish passion for
science, others talk of scientism. While it may seem that the difference between
scientism and science is obvious, Casper Hakfoort (1995a:376-86) insists that the issue
is usually addressed in ahistorical terms. Identifying an ignored historiographical
problem – when, how and why did scientism originate, and how and why did it develop?
– he proceeds to analyse and describe how science became intellectually more distinct as
well as institutionalised, gaining intellectual and social status in Western culture from
the seventeenth century onwards, and how its boundaries were constructed in relation to
pro-scientistic and anti-scientistic public relations. I suggest that the Stewart-Jeffrey
debate provides an opportunity to trace a part of the history of scientism.

18
Phrenology was not just about cranioscopy; it was ‘a reformist movement’ occupying contentious
religious grounds as well, and the BAAS, struggling to establish its own intellectual authority, wanted to
distance itself from such positions (Morrell & Thackray:276-90).
 128
There is a danger of using the term ‘scientism’ anachronistically. Given the fact
that the term ‘science’ came to be more narrowly defined and the physical sciences
gained institutional power only in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘scientism’
in its modern sense is a post mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon.19 Indeed, Mikael
Stenmark’s analysis of scientism distinguishes two broad classifications: academic-
internal scientism and academic-external scientism. In other words, modern scientism
has a direct relationship to the institutional location of scientific disciplines. But if
scientism itself has a history, then we can develop a nuanced understanding of changes
in its meaning over time. Hakfoort outlines the way in which the conceptual structure
of scientism changed in the nineteenth century as science grew into a professionalised
institution. The story of scientism is the story of ‘the ups and downs experienced in
using the authority of science outside its domain (as generally accepted at a certain
period)’. If we accept the idea that ‘the authority of science is a key factor in scientism’
(Hakfoort:386), then the notion of eighteenth-century scientism is not anachronistic. It
addresses a stage in the development of modern scientism. At the end of the eighteenth
century, according to Emerson, ‘science was being used to support the religious views
of such diverse groups as the clerical Moderates, the fideists who backed John Leslie for
an Edinburgh professorship in 1805 and the deism of men such as James Hutton’
(Emerson 1988a:347). Science was an effective argumentative device outside its
domain because of its growing intellectual authority.
Scientism, however we define it, involves the authority of science (Barnes 1985;
Hackfoort 1995; Sorell 1991; Stenmark 1997), and this thesis addresses the shift in
intellectual authority from philosophy to science.20 An understanding of the history of
scientism could help us to focus on this intellectual shift. One form of scientism (I will
call it weak or methodological scientism) involves the belief that only a scientific
methodology is intellectually acceptable for use in any branch of human knowledge.
The other conspicuous form of scientism involves the belief that the sciences are more
important than the arts for an understanding of the world in which we live, or, even, all
we need to understand it (Sorell 1991; Stenmark 1997). I will call this strong or

19
The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park London had a vast public audience, and marked the
beginning of an era which accepted ‘the pursuit of science as a national need, and its relationship to
industrial progress’ (Morus 1996:403).
20
The idea of scientism ‘is that science, at least, sets the boundaries for what we humans can ever achieve
or know about reality’ (Stenmark:15). In Stenmark, the issue of the authority of science is implicit rather
than explicit.
 129
supremacist scientism.21 Both of these forms of scientism can be discerned in the
Stewart-Jeffrey debate.
Emerson, who sees science as a driving force of Enlightenment (1988:338),
traces roots of the Scottish Enlightenment to ‘late seventeenth-century Scottish
scientism’ (Emerson 1990a:32-34). Though he does not label it, Emerson discusses an
early expression of weak or methodological scientism. I have already noted the line of
influence from Newton to the Scottish school (Davie 1961:147-49). George Turnbull,
who became a Regent at Marischal College in 1722, was the first, Emerson notes, who
‘wished to apply the methods of the natural sciences to morals’, followed by Francis
Hutcheson at Glasgow (1730) and Sir John Pringle at Edinburgh (1734). The Scottish
moralists ‘applied the critical and empirical methods of the natural philosophers to
moral philosophy and all its branches and sub-divisions’. Emerson contends that the
agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment was set by early Scottish virtuosi ‘based upon a
[natural] scientific view of things’: the means the Scottish moralists chose was ‘a
scientism rooted increasingly in empirical methods’ (Emerson 1988a:350,356). Stewart
imbibed this methodological scientism.
In his study of ‘Science and the Aberdeen Enlightenment’, Wood argues that
‘scientism provided an overarching cognitive and ideological structure, linking together
the moral and the natural sciences in both the curricula and the clubs’. He too sees in
Turnbull’s thesis ‘the origins of the so-called “Newtonian turn” of British
methodological thought’, and notes that this ‘scientistic approach to moral philosophy’
continued to distinguish the philosophical tradition throughout the eighteenth-century
(Wood 1988:43,58). Reid was a ‘most articulate spokesman . . . for the ideology of
scientism’ (Wood 1990:145). Berry (52) stresses that these social theorists ‘should not
be identified as a breed apart from social scientists’, since the moral philosophers were
engaged in a scientific enterprise as the Scottish Enlightenment understood it. Hence in
his scientistic approach to mental philosophy Dugald Stewart was in an established
Scottish tradition.22
Both strong and weak scientism involve ‘the use of the authority of science
outside its domain’, and this is how Hakfoort (386) defines scientism. Sher explores

21
Stenmark offers a more detailed and nuanced classification of scientism, but his study is confined to
science and scientism in a late twentieth-century context, and his classification has little relevance for the
period under study here. Under two broad classifications, he identifies eight distinct types of scientism.
22
There was in fact no simplistic moral philosophy/physical sciences dichotomy. Besides mathematics,
Stewart lectured in astronomy in 1778, and in 1787-88 he took over the duties of the Natural Philosophy
Chair during John Robison’s illness (Chitnis 1986:22).
 130
aspects of this phenomenon, calling it ‘a sign of the times’ that Adam Ferguson put the
term ‘science’ into the title of his last book on moral philosophy in 1792.23 He argues
that while natural science and medicine had played a vital role in the Scottish
Enlightenment, towards the end of the eighteenth century science took on increasingly
vital significance in the Scottish intellectual outlook. This ‘rush to science’, or
‘epidemic of science fever’, is evident also from a look at the Edinburgh periodical and
encyclopaedic press at the turn of the century (Sher 1985:308-10). Sher does not talk of
scientism, but of the growing authority of science within Scottish intellectual life; the
use of the authority of science outside its domain is implicit in his analysis of this
period.
Hakfoort (381) argues that the debate at the turn of the nineteenth century on the
nature of the social and human sciences compared to that of the natural sciences served
to signal the ‘growing intellectual authority and independence of the natural sciences’.
Science, and therefore scientism, had become more visible and powerful.24 Indeed Yeo
(1993:68) has remarked on Whewell’s confidence expressed in the 1830s that the
natural sciences exemplified ‘certain knowledge’.25 Stewart was forced into this debate
on the nature of the social and human sciences compared to that of the natural sciences
by Jeffrey’s attack on mental philosophy. Jeffrey claimed that the nature of the natural
sciences was that they were experimental rather than observational, and therefore
superior. Jeffrey was wielding the growing intellectual authority of the natural sciences
as a weapon in a battle against what he considered to be the outdated, irrelevant and
useless study of mental philosophy. Any ‘modern’ education would be ‘scientific’.
With the other Edinburgh reviewers, he was heavily influenced by ‘a liberal scientistic
model of society’ (Shapin 1974:40). Jeffrey subscribed to strong or supremacist
scientism which involves the belief that the sciences are more important than the arts for
an understanding of the world in which we live.26

23
Gay (1969:333) too notes the scientific impetus and aspirations of the Scottish school of moral
philosophy.
24
In the English context Samuel Johnson in the late eighteenth century found it necessary to resist
scientism, arguing that natural philosophy was not so important as intercourse with intellectual nature and
moral knowledge (Philip 1975).
25
Whewell’s claim was not that the natural sciences were more important, but that the social and political
sciences were more prone to bias. This distinction about ‘certain knowledge’ is what marks him (and
others) off from the Scottish attempt to ground moral philosophy and social philosophy on Newtonian
methods.
26
Sher (1985:311) argues that Jeffrey’s attitude reflects the intensification of the Scottish ‘respect for
practical, improving science . . . in an era of relatively rapid commercial and industrial growth, English
utilitarianism, Whiggish political economy, and inventive Scottish engineers like Watt, Telford, Rennie,
and McAdam, who were becoming the new heroes of the incipient industrial age’.
 131
In exploring this particular shift in intellectual authority I am, at the same time,
elucidating a small part of the story of scientism. In seeking to establish a science of
mind on methodological foundations (as he did in 1814), Stewart was attempting to use
the authority of (experimental) science outside what was generally accepted as its
domain at the time. Both Jeffrey and Stewart operated in an intellectual arena informed
by scientism; both used the authority of science outside its domain, but they were
informed by different forms of scientism. Whereas Jeffrey’s involved the supremacy of
science over all other knowledge (strong or supremacist scientism), Stewart’s involved
the centrality of scientific methodology in all knowledge projects (weak or
methodological scientism). The emergence of strong scientism was precisely Stewart’s
enemy. It saw scientism redounding on Scottish moral philosophy.
Throughout much of the eighteenth century, physical science was still embedded
in natural philosophy, and the authority of the physical sciences supported the authority
of philosophy as a whole. This is nowhere more evident than in the Scottish case.
Hakfoort (392) notes that both ‘socially and psychologically’, the authority of
philosophy and science changed: in the nineteenth century as science grew into a
professionalised pursuit, the conceptual structure of scientism changed. Due to the
perceived successes of science and technology, the authority and independence of
science increased.27 Science was no longer part of philosophy, so that scientism no
longer was part of nor reinforced philosophy.
By the time Stewart was writing the works under study, physical science was no
longer so ‘embedded’ in philosophy (no longer merely natural philosophy), nor was it
yet a separate discipline or a professionalised institution. Alarmed and alerted by
Jeffrey’s attack on the project of philosophy, Stewart sought to rein in the physical
sciences, to reclaim their methods so that their authority would back up the authority of
philosophy once again. He sought to hold the line at early scientism. Since Jeffrey
asserted that the superiority of the physical sciences lay in their method, Stewart was
prompted to defend philosophy on the newly emerging battleground of experimental
methodology. He used methodological scientism against the onslaught of supremacist
scientism.

27
Exploring the changing relationship between natural theology and the physical sciences, Gascoigne
(308) notes the rising intellectual authority of the physical sciences, and concludes that natural theology
had nurtured the infant sciences, ‘but by the late nineteenth century they were full-grown adults beholden
to no one and determined to go their separate ways’.
 132
I suggest that Stewart experienced this shift in intellectual authority as a serious
attack on the role of the philosopher. He was, through scientific methodology, making a
bid to reclaim this lost intellectual authority for moral philosophy, or at the very least to
stop the leak. As a moral philosopher who also became a methodologist and self-
proclaimed Baconian mental experimentalist (albeit of the introspective kind), he argued
for the supremacy of metaphysical philosophy over physical science.28 Whereas at first
glance it seems ironic that he argued this while using the authority of science outside its
domain, he was actually seeking a return to early scientism.
Whereas Ferguson, Stewart’s predecessor in the chair of moral philosophy at
Edinburgh, had felt it necessary to assert the precedence of knowledge of what is over
knowledge of what ought to be, Stewart was forced to see the implications that such an
assertion held for the authority of moral philosophy.29 The idea that moral philosophy
depended upon natural science took on particular relevance even in the 1790s which,
according to Sher, saw a rising passion for science in Scotland. Stewart had to negotiate
a delicate course taking on board the methodological scientism of earlier Scottish moral
philosophers, while steering clear of the danger of supremacist scientism and managing
the Fergusonian threat from within.
In Stewart’s work there is an absence of any engagement with Ferguson on this
issue of dependence, but in almost everything he wrote there is evidence of attention to
the issue. Stewart argued consistently, and in various ways, that moral philosophy,
because it asked first order questions (the primary and most important questions), must
take precedence over all other knowledge. He always presented his work as
uncontroversial, and it seems that commentators, contemporary and modern, have failed
to notice this major departure from his mentor and predecessor, Adam Ferguson. The
study of mind was the core of the common sense school of Scottish moral philosophy,
but this did not mean that God and ethics took a back seat. On the contrary, natural
religion, the study of our duties, political economy and mental science were

28
Schneider (1957: 165) accuses ‘Scottish common sense’ of using philosophical reason as a moral
sedative, administered in American colleges ‘in excessive doses by the clergy in the hope that it would be
an antidote to the powerful stimulants of the experimental sciences’. While this suggests that the
American clergy recognised an opposition between the Scottish philosophy and the experimental sciences,
in fact in America common sense was more a bastion against the extremes of idealism, atheism and
materialism.
29
Ferguson (1785[1769]:13) wrote: ‘Although Moral Philosophy is not the knowledge of what is, but
rather of what ought to be; yet, before we can ascertain rules of morality fitted to any particular nature, the
facts relating to that nature should be known’. Quite apart from the issue of intellectual authority, this
raises Hume’s problem of the logical jump from an is to an ought, the so-called naturalistic fallacy, a topic
 133
interconnected in an inquiry into how we ought to live and organise our society. Stewart
could not afford to draw attention to Ferguson’s position on the relationship between
moral philosophy and natural science, precisely because it could so readily be construed
as inverting the traditional relationship, and in any case could be used to encourage or
confirm a belief in the superiority of natural science. Stewart’s silent departure from
Ferguson speaks eloquently of the delicacy of his situation, given the rising authority of
the natural sciences and the threat this posed to moral philosophy.
A French expression of scientism can be found in the attempts by the
probabilists to apply mathematics to moral sciences as aids to policy making. Daston
records that ‘Condorcet recommended the abolition of the death penalty on probabilistic
grounds; Laplace advocated gradual social change and condemned the French judicial
system in the name of probability theory’ (Daston 1989b:299).30 Since Stewart was a
competent mathematician who held the Chair of Mathematics at Edinburgh University
from 1775 to 1785 and had a mathematician’s understanding of probability theory, it
might seem odd that there is little reference to this in his moral philosophy.31 But he
was publishing after the French Revolution, and Daston argues that the French
Revolution shattered the two assumptions underpinning the probabilism of philosophes
and mathematicians: ‘first, that associationist psychology guaranteed the direct
proportion between objective experience and subjective belief; and second, that good
sense was monolithic and a constant for the fortunate few who enjoyed it’. The
intellectual chaos of the Revolution prompted Condorcet to abandon probabilism in
favour of the precision of ideas and the rigor of proofs. Laplace later wrote on the
‘Illusions in the estimation of probabilities’. Gone also was the assumption of a
consensus among an élite of reasonable men. The Revolution produced ‘dizzying shifts
in political philosophy’ which shook the probabilistic confidence in ‘the existence of a
single enlightened viewpoint among even the right-thinking’. Good sense ceased to be
a matter of estimating probabilities. Moral philosophers like Victor Cousin, a carrier of
Scottish common sense in France, now suggested that ‘good sense was more intuitive

on which Stewart remained silent, though he elsewhere analysed Hume’s ideas and discussed at length his
contribution to philosophy (I;V;X).
30
Barbara Shapiro (1991) reveals the importance for English law of the probabilist epistemology forged
by seventeenth-century theologians, naturalists, and philosophers.
31
In Elements Vol.2 Stewart draws occasionally on the concept of probability, but there is no recourse to
the Calculus of Probability, and certainly no attempt to use it to determine social policy. In Chapter II he
distinguishes between the logical and popular meanings of Probability, arguing that in astronomy or
physics, to speak of an event as probable ‘does not imply any deficiency in the proof, but only marks the
particular nature of that proof . . . It is opposed, not to what is certain, but to what admits of being
demonstrated after the manner of mathematicians’.
 134
than rational, more synthetic than analytic, more complex than abstract’ (Daston: 300).
This particular expression of scientism (probabilism) evident in associationist
psychology was absent from faculty psychology.
It was through Reid and Stewart that Cousin was deeply influenced by Scottish
common sense philosophy, which he then introduced to the French educational system
(Madden 1986; Phillipson 1983:83-4). In fact, common sense philosophy, based on
Reid’s instinctive inductive principle (our instinctive expectation of the continuity of the
laws of nature), had no need of probability theory. Faculty psychology, which held that
we have direct access to the human mind, involved practitioners in carrying out
‘experiments’ in an ‘intellectual laboratory’ (V:34). It did not involve the calculation of
probabilities. Moreover, the Scots had institutionalised and naturalised toleration. For
these reasons, a single enlightened position was not the issue for the Scottish school.
Leo Strauss argues that ‘modern rationalism’, which he deplores as morally self-
destructive, reflects the historical displacement of concern with contemplation and self-
understanding (philosophy) by concern with power and control over nature (science)
(King 1983:14). What is relevant for my thesis is that Strauss maps a shift in
intellectual concern, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, from philosophy to
science. If he is correct, this would add weight to the hypothesis of a transfer of
intellectual authority from philosophy to science. Strauss provides us with the
opportunity to locate this shift in intellectual authority in terms of a longer-standing
movement in intellectual concern. The Stewart-Jeffrey controversy then is not an
unexpected and unpredictable clash: it emerges from this continuing realignment in
intellectual concern, something noticed by Stewart only when he was moved to staunch
the flow of intellectual authority and forced publicly into his defence of philosophy.
Sher studies another realignment in intellectual authority, a ‘dramatic’ one
involving clerics and lawyers. By the beginning of the nineteenth century lawyers had
attained predominance over clergymen in intellectual matters, reversing the roles that
had pertained during the Scottish Enlightenment. Sher associates this change in
intellectual authority with the ‘rush to science’ that characterised Scottish intellectual
life and with the connection between the legal profession and nineteenth-century
Whiggism (Sher 1985:310-16). I think we can also associate the intellectual
predominance of the Whiggish ‘Jeffrey circle of lawyers’ (Sher:316) with scientism and
the leakage of authority from moral philosophy to science. They were important carriers
 135
of strong or supremacist scientism, and it was not just the clergy whose authority was
subordinated as a result.
Stewart was neither a clergyman nor a lawyer, but he and Reid were responsible
for the ‘common sense revolution of 1785’, when Reid published his Essays on the
Intellectual Powers of Man and republished An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, on the
Principles of Common Sense, and Stewart began ‘popularising the subject in his moral
philosophy lectures at Edinburgh University (1785-1810)’ (Sher:312). When Sher says
that by the time the first volume of Stewart’s Elements appeared in 1792, ‘the Edinburgh
intellectual establishment had been completely won over to the Reid-Stewart camp’
(Sher:313), he is painting a picture of a time when intellectual authority resided with
moral philosophers. Yet by the time of Stewart’s second volume in 1814, the
reorientation of intellectual life was such that power had shifted from moral philosophy,
and he was forced to defend not just common sense philosophy but the role of the
philosopher. Intellectual debate had moved to the public domain following the founding
in 1802 of the Edinburgh Review, the platform from which Jeffrey launched an assault
on mental philosophy. The Reid-Stewart camp were supporters of weak or
methodological scientism, and the story of its overthrow by the Jeffrey circle, who were
carriers of strong scientism, belongs to the history of scientism.
 136

Chapter 6

Experimental Responses
 137
In the early nineteenth century there was a wide-ranging debate on the relative
importance, value and potentialities of the human sciences versus experimentalism. In
challenging the intellectual authority of experimentalism, Stewart also questioned this
dichotomy. Since the horse had bolted, he could no longer simply claim the sovereignty
of his subject – the science of mind. Instead, he set about re-instating the authority of
moral philosophy (the centre-piece of which was the science of mind) through his
writings. This chapter covers his early responses through the Leslie Case in 1805 and
Philosophical Essays (1810), before he completed his plan for the defence and
renovation of common sense philosophy. In his ‘Dissertation’ prefixed to the
Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1815 and 1821, he attempted to create a
role for the moral philosopher as public intellectual in these new circumstances.
Although he did not pioneer the role of public moral philosopher, he took the theme to a
new arena and did so when moral philosophy was under siege.
Once Jeffrey had alerted Stewart to the fact that mental philosophy was under
threat, everything Stewart wrote bore traces of the attack. If we look at the Report of the
proceedings on the Leslie case (Church of Scotland 1805:67-71) in the context of
Jeffrey’s attack of 1804, we see that the Leslie Case indicated the continuing importance
of matters that Jeffrey had pronounced no longer important. Jeffrey thought mental
science was on the scrap heap, and in this very public forum Stewart quoted Reid on the
Active Powers (moral powers), arguably as a way of insisting on Reid’s relevance to
contemporary debates about scientific methodology and causation. Although the old
men of the Town Council or Moderates were still in power and still talking of heresy
and atheism, they were fighting a losing battle against the (weak) scientistic impetus of
moral philosophy.1
Although by all accounts Stewart actively sought to avoid confrontation, the
appended ‘Outline’, my discussions of the Leslie case in chapter 2, the censure by two
Lords of Session, and Burke’s attack on rationalism and scientific history illustrate the
fact that Stewart was not avoiding controversy but negotiating a course through it. He
was doing this quite consciously, always with his eye on the larger goal, his life’s work
– the return of the ascendancy of moral philosophy.
This public debate with Jeffrey led Stewart into new areas and new forms of
legitimation, compared with those required of Reid, and this qualifies the standard view

1
Stewart argued that Hume and Leslie were right about causation, and he insisted that scientific causation
had absolutely nothing to do with faith or final causes.
 138
of Stewart as merely a second generation exponent of common sense philosophy, albeit
the pedagogical genius Reid needed.2 Whereas Reid in 1764, and even in 1785 and
1788, could and did assume the superiority of (metaphysical) philosophy over the
(physical) sciences, by 1803 Stewart’s public declaration of such a supremacy could not
go unchallenged. The ensuing thirty-six year Stewart-Jeffrey debate over the utility of a
science of mind (and of philosophy generally) was an expression of this wider
intellectual shift. Stewart found himself forced to defend the very project of philosophy.
Scientific, experimental knowledge had become exemplary, and the ‘Christian
Virtuosos’ (experimentalists) were ethical knowers who knew more about science than
the traditional moral philosophers. Since they could speak of empirical realities
inaccessible to mere moral philosophers, their claims had a greater truth value. No
longer, in Scotland, was all knowledge mediated through moral philosophy, and Stewart
himself, through introducing political economy as a separate course, had inadvertently
played a role in its dislocation.
In the ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to his Philosophical Essays (1810), Stewart
responded to Jeffrey’s 1804 attack on Scottish mental philosophy, treating the critique
very seriously.3 He interpreted Jeffrey’s objections as applying ‘with equal force, not
only to such writers as Locke, Condillac, and Reid, but in a far greater degree to the
Father of Experimental Philosophy’. He set out to correct this ‘mistaken representation
of Francis Bacon’s doctrines’ (V:24-5). Jeffrey had appealed to Baconianism in his
review, and through interpreting the attack as an attack on the great Lord Chancellor,
Stewart appealed to Baconianism in his own defence.
In answer to Jeffrey’s charge of non-utility, the allegation that in non-
experimental enquiries knowledge is not power, Stewart began by questioning the
distinction between experiment and observation. He argued that just as astronomy is an
observational science, philosophy is experimental. The difference between observation
and experiment ‘consists merely in the comparative rapidity with which they accomplish
their discoveries’. The discoveries of both ‘are so precisely of the same kind, that . . .

2
In seeking to explain why Reid’s philosophy should have been so influential in education when he did
not write for the classroom and had no interest in pedagogical problems, Phillipson refers to Stewart as a
‘pedagogue of genius’. He credits Stewart with having turned common sense philosophy into a
‘pedagogically viable system’ (Phillipson 1983a:84-5).
3
It should not be assumed that Jeffrey and Stewart were intellectual enemies. In political economy
Jeffrey remained Stewart’s admirer (Fontana 1985). Clive argues that a controversy in the House of
Commons had some influence on Jeffrey’s exposition of constitutional theory. Cobbett had attacked
Stewart in the House, and Clive suggests that Jeffrey, student and admirer of Stewart, came to Stewart’s
defence via his work on political economy (Clive 1957:108-9).
 139
there is not a single proposition true of the one, which will not be found to hold equally
with respect to the other’. Though the discoveries of astronomical laws had not
contributed to our power over the stars, they had contributed to the ‘progress of
chronology and of geography’ and to navigation, which had ‘completed the empire of
man over the globe’ (V:29). In particular, according to Stewart, the utility of Newton’s
law of gravitation, ‘notwithstanding the experiments which supplied him with some
data essential to his results’, was identical to the utility of ‘the observations of Tycho
Brahe and of Kepler’. This is because it is by deduction or, to use Stewart’s words,
‘synthetical reasonings from the theory of gravitation’, that we have produced
knowledge which has ‘practical utility’.4 Whereas he agreed with Jeffrey that ‘we are
indebted, not so much to the observer, as to the person who discovered the application’,
he insisted the case was ‘exactly the same with the knowledge we derive directly from
experiment’. In both cases it was the application which gave us power through
knowledge (V:29-30).
Stewart conceded that mental science raised some further issues. In particular,
‘as to the minds of others, it is undoubtedly but seldom that we have the means of
subjecting them to formal and premeditated experiments’. Even here, education
provided an excellent example of an exception:

What is the whole business of Education, when systematically and judiciously

conducted, but a practical application of rules deduced from our own
experiments, or from those of others, on the most effectual modes of developing
and of cultivating the intellectual faculties and the moral principles?

. . . The difference between Observation and Experiment, in this instance,

considered as sources of knowledge, is merely nominal . . . Hardly, indeed, can
any experiment be imagined which has not already been tried by the hand of
Nature; displaying, in the infinite varieties of human genius and pursuits, the
astonishingly diversified effects, resulting from the possible combinations of
those elementary faculties and principles, of which every man is conscious in
himself. (V:34-35)
An ‘experiment’ tried by Nature seems to refer to variety within a type, which is hardly
equivalent to ‘experimental’ manipulation of Nature, but Stewart did not labour this
point. He moved on quickly to claim that it was not in the spirit of Bacon’s philosophy
to restrict his maxim, ‘that Knowledge is Power’, to its ‘obvious and partial application
to the new resources which experiments have occasionally lent to the mechanician’. For

4
Stewart did not use the word deduction here because, as is clear in the second volume of his Elements,
he wished to distance himself from Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning.
 140
Stewart, the ‘refined and enlarged sense of his aphorism’ rested in the unexpected (and
not at first obvious) benefits of astronomy; and this was ‘a more undeniable proof of the
universality of Bacon’s maxim’ than new experimental advantages (V:31).5 It seems
that Stewart was rewriting Bacon here, implying that Bacon did not specifically endorse
experiment; it was astronomy which permitted this interpretation. By 1810 Stewart had
recognised astronomy as a crucial methodological resource.6 That this position was
rhetorical is suggested by earlier student lecture notes that report Stewart as arguing that
the ancients ‘gained their knowledge from the mere observation of simple facts, by
which it is impossible that they could have arisen to any degree of eminence in science’.
Describing the power of experimental science, he said that the ancients ‘interrogated,
while we force nature’ (James Bridges, ‘Notes from Mr. Stewart’s Lectures on Moral
Philosophy, read in the University of Edinburgh, Winter 1801-2’, Special Collections,
EUL). The sharp contradiction between this and his 1810 position prompts us to look
for what might have motivated such a transformation.
Stewart wished to resist Jeffrey’s argument that the Philosophy of Mind was not
scientific because it was not experimental. To do so, he argued that in fact the
Philosophy of Mind could be experimental, pointing out, for example, the experimental
processes involved in Berkeley’s Theory of Vision:
Even in the case of our perceptions . . . we cannot, indeed, decompose them in a
crucible, in the literal sense of these words; but is there no possibility of
decomposing them by such experimental processes as are suited to the nature of
the subject? Of this no better proof can be given than Berkeley’s Theory of
Vision, more particularly his analysis of the means by which experience enables
us to judge of the distances and magnitudes of objects. It is, at least, an attempt
towards an experimental decomposition of our perceptions; and, in my opinion,
(although I have always thought that much is still wanting to render the theory
completely satisfactory,) a most successful, as well as original attempt, so far as
it goes . . . To draw the line between the original and acquired perceptions
which we receive by some of our other senses, more especially by those of
Hearing and of Feeling, is a problem equally difficult and interesting; and of
which no pretended solution would, in the present times, attract one moment’s
notice, which rested on any other basis than that of Experiment. (V:32-3)
Having established the link between experiment and a theory of perception (the area on
which Jeffrey had chosen to fix), Stewart went on to argue that the link was even

5
Stewart’s insistence here on the utility and non-experimental nature of astronomy is significant in terms
of his later project to establish methodologically a science of mind.
6
It is likely that Stewart was influenced by Adam Smith to draw on astronomy as a methodological
resource. The full title of Smith’s relevant essay was ‘The Principles Which Lead and Direct
Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’ (Smith 1971[1795]:1-130). It was
partly methodology, and partly a rationale of the human propensity to indulge in philosophical enquiry.
 141
stronger in other branches of the science of mind, such as analysis of the phenomena ‘of
Attention, of Association, of Habit in general, of Memory, of Imagination; and, above
all, those which are connected with the use of Language, considered as an instrument of
thought and of reasoning’ (V:33).
Moreover, he insisted that philosophy itself was inherently experimental:
The whole of a philosopher’s life, indeed, if he spends it to any purpose, is one
continued series of experiments on his own faculties and powers; and the
superiority he possesses over others, arises chiefly from the general rules (never,
perhaps, expressed verbally even to himself) which he has deduced from these
experiments; - experiments, it must be granted, not carried on by such
instruments as prisms or crucibles, but by an apparatus better suited to the
intellectual laboratory which furnishes their materials. (V:33-4)
Here, in response to an attack on the very project of philosophy, Stewart responded with
an assertion of the ‘superiority’ of the philosopher. Thus Stewart was engaged in the
construction of the philosopher as supreme experimental scientist. This expanded his
previous insistence in 1792 on the ascendancy of philosophy over natural science. Corsi
notes Stewart’s attempt throughout the Elements to ‘vindicate the superiority of the
philosophy of the human mind, and of philosophers, over the physical sciences and the
scientists’ (Corsi 1988:43; Schaffer 1991:213; Winch:123). It would be interesting to
explore Stewart’s focus on the primacy of philosophy over the natural sciences in the
light of Reid’s declamation against philosophy: ‘I despise philosophy, and renounce its
guidance; let my soul dwell with common sense’ (Reid 1970[1764]:12). This occurred
in the context of a mock dialogue. In defending common sense, Reid believed he was
defending philosophy, because attacks on common sense destroyed philosophy itself.
His target was the vulgar, scholastic metaphysics that Stewart also disdained. But Grave
(1960:31) claims that the declamation nevertheless ‘hung in the air over all Reid had
written, to damage his reputation and embarrass Stewart’. If this is so, it could have
been, partly, in order to divert attention from the apparent opposition of philosophy and
common sense that Stewart focused on the contrast between (metaphysical) philosophy
and natural science. In any case, Jeffrey highlighted this opposition (of philosophy and
science) and inverted Stewart’s dualistic hierarchy, forcing him to a defence of
philosophy on new, methodological grounds (see chapter 7).
Whereas Jeffrey remarked that ‘no metaphysician expects, by analysis, to
discover a new power, or to excite a new sensation in the mind, as the chemist discovers
a new earth or a new metal’, Stewart pointed out that this was true also of the
physiologist, who did not hope to discover a new organ, nor even ‘the means of adding a
 142
cubit to the human stature; but it does not therefore follow that these researches are
useless’. When he insisted that physiologists ‘increase the power of man in that way in
which alone they profess to increase it’ (V:35), he was claiming the same for
philosophers of mind. By likening the science of mind to the science of body, Stewart
was undermining Jeffrey’s narrow notion of utility. More significantly, for my
argument, he was defending the philosophy of mind by likening it to another science, in
this case physiology.
In an attempt to historicise the prevalent scepticism towards the Philosophy of
Mind, he pronounced it ‘curious that the objection which we are now considering to the
Philosophy of the Mind, is the very same in substance with that which Socrates urged
against the speculations of natural philosophers in his age’.7 According to Stewart, the
scepticism of antiquity towards ‘what is now called Physics’ was perfectly reasonable
considering ‘the unprofitable questions about which . . . the inquiries of Natural
Philosophers were then employed’. The change in the estimation of Physics wrought by
‘the physical discoveries, indeed, which have distinguished the two last centuries’
offered ‘some ground of hope that the day may yet come, when a juster estimate will be
formed of the value’ of the labours of Philosophers of Mind. By casting this particular
historical light on the subject, Stewart sought to undermine the ‘scepticism of modern
Europe’ towards the science of mind (V:36-7).8 Implicit in this was the assumption that
the rejection of mental philosophy extended beyond Jeffrey. Clearly others also saw
such a trend,9 and while in the 1830s it became more common for English writers to say
that metaphysics was only cultivated on the Continent, in the 1820s there were laments
about the general demise of mental and moral philosophy - notably Thomas Carlyle’s
(1829) essay, ‘The Signs of the Times’ in the Edinburgh Review.10 Whereas Reid had
been able to assume the supremacy of mental philosophy, in the nineteenth century the
comparative merits of physical science and metaphysical philosophy became a matter

7
Although Aristotle wrote on Physics, Stewart claims that the ancients were sceptical about ‘theories
which pretended to explain the phenomena of the Material Universe’. Drawing attention to the first
chapter of Socrates’ Memorabilia, he argues that ‘Socrates, with all his zeal for the advancement of Moral
Science, was a complete sceptic in what is now called Physics’ (V:37).
8
At the time the scepticism and materialism of Condillac’s association psychology prevailed in France. It
was not until the 1830s that common sense philosophy was institutionalised there by Cousin (Phillipson
1983a:83-4).
9
In 1802 James Mackintosh wrote to Stewart from London, complaining of the lack of philosophical
thinking in England (X:lxv). Lyall (1811:1), an Englishman, in defending the ‘paramount utility’ of
Stewart’s project, lamented the wane of public interest in the subject generally.
10
The ER (1827), examining a work on German literature, noted the relevance of Kant in Germany in
contrast to the contemporary dearth of metaphysical philosophy in Britain. In an aside on the eminence of
 143
for public debate in the leading journals (Yeo 1993:183-4). In locating the debate
historically, Stewart sought to diminish the cachet of the new.
Although Stewart likened the science of mind to the science of body on the
grounds of practical utility, he had to insist on the importance of the science of mind
over that of body. He did this by arguing that no medical advance could compare to the
benefits of ‘Education, in invigorating [man’s] intellectual capacities, in forming his
moral habits, in developing his sensitive principles, and in unlocking all the hidden
sources of internal enjoyment’. And defects in education were defects that the
‘Philosophy of the Mind can alone correct’ (V:36). Jeffrey had specifically attacked the
capacity of mental philosophy to be of any use in the future (Jeffrey 1804:273). Stewart
replied that in education, one of the primary human endeavours, the key source of future
improvement would be through the science of mind, and he claimed this as a clear
demonstration of its prospective utility.
Nor did Stewart rest his case on ‘future contingencies’. He claimed that the
science of mind had already yielded valuable accretions to human power and happiness.
By way of example he described the way in which the philosophy of Bacon influenced
important scientific discoveries by individuals who had never heard of the Novum
Organum, and claimed that it was
in this manner that the paramount influence of the Philosophy of Mind, on the
subordinate sciences and arts, escapes the notice of those who are unable to look
beyond palpable and proximate causes. (V:38-9)
Here Stewart conflated methodology and science of mind to argue, again, that
philosophy enjoyed primacy over natural science.11 In fact, he claimed that the
improvement of the philosophy of mind, which Bacon ‘gives the name of Philosophia
Prima’, was ‘manifestly the great object of Bacon, from the beginning to the end of his
work’. Stewart insisted that Bacon himself guarded his readers against inferring,
from the multiplicity of physical illustration with which it abounds, that his
object is to instruct them with respect to the phenomenon of Matter, when his
real aim is to deduce, from the laws of the Human Mind, such logical rules as
may guide them in the search of truth. (V:40)
Stewart stressed that ‘it is not merely as an organon for the advancement of Physics,
that the science of the Mind is valuable’. Seeking to portray the science of mind as a

Stewart, it recommended the assiduous study of his works as the best preparation for studying those of
Kant.
11
Stewart claimed that Bacon’s value was as a methodologist, but also claimed the paramount influence
on the sciences to be the philosophy of mind.
 144
Baconian science, Stewart argued that here, too, the effects of Bacon’s writings ‘have
been great and most important’ (V:41-3).
One of Jeffrey’s most serious allegations had been that the science of mind could
yield no information other than what all men already knew. As part of a larger critique
of Jeffrey’s assertion that the science of mind leads us back to ‘the ignorance of the
vulgar’ ( Jeffrey 1804:277), Stewart argued that Jeffrey’s evidence ‘concludes still more
forcibly . . . against Physics, strictly so called, than against the science of Mind’. He
addressed Jeffrey’s example of the groom who,

‘in feeding his young war-horse to the sound of the drum’, has nothing to learn
from Locke or from Hume concerning the laws of association, [and who] might
boast, with far greater reason, that without having looked into Borelli, he can
train that animal to his various paces; and that, when he exercises him with the
longe, he exhibits an experimental illustration of the centrifugal force, and of the
centre of gravity, which was known in the riding-school long before their
theories were unfolded in the Principia of Newton . . . but it is not on that
account the less useful to evolve the general theorems which are thus embodied
with their particular applications, and to combine them in a systematical and
scientific form, for our own instruction and that of others. (V:44-5)

Having addressed the particulars of Jeffrey’s critique, Stewart returned to the influence
of Bacon to make his point about the value of philosophy:
I am doubtful if Bacon himself did so much by the logical rules he gave for
guiding the inquiries of his followers, as by the resolution with which he inspired
them to abandon the beaten path of their predecessors, and to make excursions
into regions untrodden before; or if any of his suggestions, concerning the plan
of experimenting, can be compared in value to his classification and illustration
of the various prejudices or idols which mislead us from the pure worship of
Truth. (V:52)
So for Stewart, Bacon’s key significance was the revolution in thought he brought about
through inspiring people to abandon the idols of the mind. Here already, in 1810,
Stewart was giving Bacon’s ‘plan of experimenting’ less weight than the spirit of his
philosophy. This is significant for my discussion, in chapter 7, of Elements Vol. 2,
where Stewart endorsed this spirit and proceeded to give his own twist to Bacon’s
methodology.
Whereas Bacon had denied the value of the hypothetical method, in Elements
Vol. 2 Stewart endorsed it. In Philosophical Essays Stewart himself gave hypothesis a
bad press, but it was the ‘hypotheses consecrated by time’, and especially ‘the theory of
Perception which prevailed universally before the time of Reid’ rather than the
hypothetical method to which he referred:
 145
After the darkness in which every theory relating to the study of mind has been
so long involved, by means of hypotheses consecrated by time, and interwoven
with the inmost texture of language, some preliminary labour, in like manner,
may be expected to be necessarily employed in clearing away the metaphysical
rubbish of the ancients, and of the middle ages. (V:47-8)
It was due to the ‘sagacity and zeal, both of Locke and of Reid, that they have devoted to
this ungrateful, but indispensable task, so large a portion of their writings’. Stewart
reminded his readers that it was on the

hypothesis concerning Perception, which has been successfully exploded by

Reid, that the scepticism of Hume, concerning the existence both of Matter and
of Mind, rests fundamentally. Has this scepticism had no effect in unsettling the
opinions of mankind? or, granting (as I believe will not be disputed) that the
effect has been great and extensive, shall we deny the practical utility of
disentangling human reason from such a labyrinth? (V:48)

In insisting that benefits in thought - freedom from past prejudices - were practical
benefits, Stewart was again insisting on the primacy of philosophy. He asserted that
the correction of one single prejudice has often been attended with consequences
more important and extensive than could be produced by any positive accession
to the stock of our scientific information. Such is the condition of man, that a
great part of a philosopher’s life must necessarily be spent, not in enlarging the
circle of his knowledge, but in unlearning the errors of the crowd, and the
pretended wisdom of the schools; and that the most substancial benefit he can
bestow on his fellow creatures, as well as the noblest species of Power to which
he can aspire, is to impart to others the lights he has struck out by his
meditations, and to encourage human reason, by his example, to assert its liberty.
(V:51-2)
Hence the philosopher was cast in a special role: that of judging what was most useful to
human development, and guiding humanity in the progress of human reason and
liberty.12
In the case of philosophy, Stewart admitted that it was difficult to ‘trace to
particular individuals what has resulted from their exertions, with the same precision . . .
(as) in physics or mechanics’. He concluded his obviation of Jeffrey’s objections by
reasserting the central importance of philosophy, pointing out ‘how deeply the morals
and the happiness of private life, as well as the order of political society, are involved in
the final issue of the contest between true and false philosophy’ (V:53). This seems to
be a defence of philosophy as a ‘science’, that is, as systematic knowledge. Here he was

12
Iwan Morus (1991:604-5) argues that Stewart suggested that only the properly trained philosopher was
fitted to establishing methodological and ethical guidelines for the investigation of nature, human nature,
and human society.
 146
defending (true) philosophy itself on the grounds of its social utility.13 In 1810 ‘the
order of political society’ still resounded with echoes of the Terror, and he was implying
that since socio-political chaos is the fruit of ‘false philosophy’, the systematic pursuit
of philosophical ‘truth’ was crucial to the individual and to society.14

Philosopher’s role
Throughout most of the eighteenth century, Scottish moral philosophy embraced
all knowledge and had a meta-level function (Winch:26). During this time, moral
philosophers, Reid among them, had been claiming the public role of the moral
philosopher, but I am interested in Stewart’s articulation of this role in the nineteenth
century, and why he was worried. By the second decade of the new century it was clear
that the epistemological significance of moral philosophy had changed due to the
fragmentation and explosion of knowledge. Reid did not face this circumstance, so the
strategic aspect of Stewart’s deployment of the theme of the public role of the
philosopher is relevant in understanding why he took it into new arenas, and why it was
not so much a trumpeting as a defence.
The demotion of moral philosophy challenged the central role of the moral
philosopher as intellectual and social arbiter. Along with the change in the
epistemological significance of moral philosophy went the shift in intellectual authority
from moral philosophy to natural science, and from the moral philosopher to the
scientist or natural philosopher.15 To a degree Jeffrey’s attitude reflected a traditional
respect for improving science, but Sher (1985:311) points out that it was ‘intensified in
an era of rapid commercial and industrial growth, English utilitarianism, Whiggish
political economy and inventive Scottish engineers’. In the context of such change, the
cultural role of the philosopher was being questioned and re-evaluated. It is significant
that Stewart’s own students, while esteeming his character, his political economy and
his pedagogy, felt him to be quaintly out of touch (Fontana 1985; Bourne & Taylor
1994). To a large extent, that he was a moral philosopher in the new century marked
him as outdated.

13
Whewell distinguished between good and bad metaphysics, and argued that good physical discoverers
had good metaphysics in their head rather than no metaphysics, and bound their metaphysics to their
physics, instead of keeping the two asunder (Lindberg 1990:11). It is possible Whewell was influenced in
this by Stewart.
14
It could also have been in the wake of Reid’s malediction against philosophy (as it was misunderstood
to be) that Stewart was anxious to distinguish between true and false philosophy.
15
Even the earlier category of ‘natural philosophy’ had differentiated into a variety of subjects and
disciplines.
 147
Stewart’s venture into encyclopaedic territory is significant when viewed against
this backdrop. From 1775 Stewart began to gain a reputation as an impressive lecturer
and when, in 1785, he was able to offer his own course in moral philosophy his standing
was sealed. With the publication of his Elements in 1792, his influence was no longer
limited to the élite of Edinburgh society and the privileged English and Irish youths who
travelled north for their education – although it was limited to the educated readers of
philosophical literature. However, in 1815 and 1821, in writing the main preliminary
‘Dissertation’ to the encyclopaedic Supplement, he consciously reached out to this
audience in a different way. Though he contributed no entries, this was a self-conscious
step into new intellectual and economic territory. Noting with surprise Stewart’s entry
into the ranks of encyclopaedists, John Leslie suggested that it may have been ‘as a
douceur’ to the purchase of the second volume of his Elements (Chitnis 1976:211).
Even if this was a consideration, the step into this public intellectual space was one
Stewart took boldly, demanding and receiving a record fee of £1,000 for the first part
while retaining copyright (Constable & Co Journal 1812-1822:50; Constable
1873:II:322).16 And it was a much larger step than Leslie suggested: Stewart did not
merely enter the ranks of encyclopaedists. When Archibald Constable acquired the
Encyclopaedia Britannica he consulted Stewart, the leading philosopher of the day,
about publishing a Supplement of international standing (Constable 1873:II:319-21).17
Stewart re-imagined the nature and role of encyclopaedic preliminary discourses on the
sciences, replacing the classificatory approach with an historical framework, and wrote
the ‘Dissertation Exhibiting A General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical,
and Political Philosophy, since the Revival of Letters in Europe’ prefixed to the bold
new Supplement, edited by Macvey Napier (Yeo 1991a:30).18
The Britannica represented the orchestration of many of the greatest talents from
all intellectual fields. But whereas the idea of a systematic classification of the sciences
had been proposed and attempted in L’Encyclopédie, Stewart doubted the value of this.

16
Constable had a reputation for generosity to his authors, but declared he had paid Stewart £1,000 for
the first part ‘because he would not take less’ (Constable 1873:II:322). Stewart’s ‘Dissertation’ comprised
166 quarto pages, which at Constable’s average £15 per sheet (see Agreement with Napier 21 Dec 1813 in
Constable & Co Journal:64-70) would have commanded only £311/5/0 (i.e. 166 ÷ 8 x £15). The £1,000
Stewart received represented £48/3/10 per sheet, that is, more than three times the average payment per
sheet. Constable contracted Playfair to produce a dissertation for £250, but then voluntarily raised it to
£500 because he had paid Stewart so much by comparison. He thought Stewart’s fee had been £1,700 for
the two parts, or perhaps £1,600 (Constable:II:321). Jessop (179) puts it at £1,700.
17
Constable wanted not only Stewart, but also the outstanding literary men who would follow once
Stewart gave the undertaking his imprimatur (Constable:II:320).
 148
He was convinced also that it was no longer possible for a single person to attain
omniscience because knowledge had become specialised. Finding Bacon’s
classification of knowledge and d’Alembert’s use of it deficient, and thinking a
schematic representation – even if it could be produced with complete success – suited
only to a branch of Logic, he abandoned the map of knowledge project (I:1-22). Stewart
regarded the moral philosopher, one who addressed the primary ought questions, as
supremely qualified to introduce this disparate collection of knowledge.19 Other
contributors could speak to their own areas of specialised knowledge, but Stewart
refrained from mapping these. Thus he did not attempt to interpret the physical sciences
and translate the state of knowledge for general readers: instead he provided an
historical and critical account of European thought from the ‘Revival of Letters’ to the
end of the eighteenth century.20
Encyclopaedias required supplements to stay current, and Gunnar Broberg
(1990:50) argues that the ‘constant adding made an encyclopedia something like a
journal’. Chitnis (1976:211) also notes the ‘periodical form’ of the Britannica. But
while publishers, editors and contributors to the supplements were conscious of dealing
with the very latest knowledge, this immediacy alone did not make an encyclopedia like
a journal. Indeed, the participants clearly regarded the Britannica and the journals as
different genres (Yeo 2001).21 In writing for the Supplement to the Britannica, Stewart
was nonetheless entering current debate in a more immediate way than he did through
his slowly-incubating text-books.
The chance to write the opening ‘Dissertation’ for the Britannica allowed
Stewart to create a new role for the moral philosopher in response to the loss of
intellectual authority experienced by the moral philosopher as academic personage. In
Philosophical Essays (1810) and Elements Vol.2 (1814) Stewart had reacted to Jeffrey’s
attacks on common sense philosophy. He had been forced into a defence of mental
philosophy and the role of the moral philosopher. We can see his decision to address
the readers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the context of the Stewart-Jeffrey debate.

18
He prescribed, in addition, five preliminary discourses on various departments of the natural sciences
by leading men of science, whom he nominated for the task (Constable:II:320-21).
19
Schiller in The Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) addressed the question of what to do about the
specialization of knowledge, and Stewart’s response as an encyclopaedist was to place all knowledge in a
metaphilosophical framework. That the moral philosopher should introduce the disparate specialists
implies a hierarchy.
20
For a discussion of Stewart’s ‘Dissertation’ see Yeo (1991a:30-3; 2001a).
21
The contributors to the supplement to the Britannica numbered many who would never condescend to
writing for a journal. And whereas they proudly proclaimed their contributions to encyclopaedias, journal
articles were published anonymously.
 149
In 1815 he was creating a role for the moral philosopher as public philosopher, best
suited to provide a history of philosophy for general readers. In lending his name and
effort to the exercise he was endorsing the general aims of the encyclopaedic enterprise,
and in demanding a high remuneration he was flagging his supreme suitability to the
meta-philosophical task. He was also seizing the opportunity to write for a publication
that carried weight among men of science. The supplement offered the possibility of
retrieving some of the lost intellectual authority of moral philosophy, for the leading
men of the science of the day would be contributors, and at their head would be the
leading moral philosopher.22
Other factors may well have come into play at the same time. Apart from his
need to support his family following his retirement in 1810 in the absence of
professorial pensions,23 perhaps his experience of being insulted in the British
Parliament over his £300 Writership of the Edinburgh Gazette in 1806 affected his
perception.24 Cobbett in the House of Commons commented that Stewart’s
former income could have kept body and soul together; and, if not, would it not
have been better to have let them separate a few years sooner, than become, at
last, the subject of a wrangle in the honourable house? (Clive 1957:108-9)
Perhaps Stewart felt that if he was to be damned for taking a financial reward he had
earned but not sought, he would seek fit reward for his literary labours when the
opportunity arose. He has been labelled by Lenman (94-8) as an ‘academic
entrepreneur’ for taking economic advantage of the trend to send English youths north
for an Edinburgh education: Stewart received £400 per boarder per session.25 Although
he earned more than most professors until 1809 and received the Gazette income for the
rest of his life, he lived in retirement in a house he did not own and was not well off.
Jeffrey had exposed the declining status of the moral philosopher and Stewart was
forced to face the financial implications of this. Whereas he was too proud to accept
financial assistance, Helen asked for and received assistance from the Earl of Dudley
(Romilly:22-3). This situation informs our understanding of Stewart’s drive to promote

22
Indeed, ‘Stewart’s “Dissertation” gave the first definite justification [in encyclopaedias] for the
authority of experts’ (Yeo 2001a). He redefined a role for the moral philosopher in the context of
defining the distinct and various roles of men of science. Phillipson (1981:38-40) sees Stewart as the
‘apostle of the expert’, the exponent of a new theory of citizenship which substituted the expert for the
virtuous citizen.
23
Edinburgh had no system of professorial pensions until 1858 (Grant 1884:275).
24
An annual sum bestowed on him when Whigs attained power briefly in Edinburgh in 1806.
25
From 1780 Stewart at times opened his house to young noblemen as resident pupils (Stewart
1829:260).
 150
a role for the philosopher. Through his negotiations in 1813 with Constable, he
positioned the public intellectual as economic agent.
In so doing Stewart was emphasizing the role of the philosopher as a Kantian
man of letters in the public sphere, rather than in the private domain of the lecture
theatre and the university.26 Stewart detected and responded to this changing role of the
philosopher. He remained a pedagogue, but chose the encyclopaedic genre as an added
medium and, following Jeffrey’s attack, became involved in public debate. In the
opening pages of his ‘Dissertation’, as well as taking d’Alembert to task over maps of
knowledge, Stewart rejected the Baconian linking of specific faculties of the mind to
branches of knowledge. He thereby placed a philosophical debate in a highly visible
public arena. I suggest that he was defending the public role of the moral philosopher
because that role was threatened by the fragmentation of knowledge, and such an
attempt demanded maximum public exposure.

Largely because of the contrasting educational circumstances in Scotland and

England during the eighteenth century, Scottish moral philosophy remained immune for
some time to the growing intellectual hegemony of the experimental sciences. But by
the turn of the nineteenth century moral philosophers were no longer automatically
taken to be the supreme ethical knowers, and Stewart was forced to recognise that
Scottish moral philosophy was clearly losing some of its ‘truth value’ to experimental
science. In 1810 Stewart portrayed the philosopher as supreme experimental scientist
with a metascientific role, and in 1815 and 1821 he confirmed the moral philosopher as
public intellectual – all in response to the Stewart-Jeffrey debate.
Whereas Jeffrey’s position may have had many weaknesses, J. Charles
Robertson argues that it was in his insistence that there was nothing in the conclusions
of mental philosophy which was not first familiar to every man that the ‘real bite of his
attack on Stewart’ resided (Robertson 1976:46). As well as the methodological issue,
this was a real worry for Stewart. The charge that mental philosophy dealt only in
common knowledge demanded an answer. In the ‘Preliminary Observations’ of the
second volume of his Elements (1814) Stewart retorted that

26
Kant’s ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784) was published in English in 1798-9 and is reprinted in Kant
(1979:249-55). Kant attached great importance to the role of the man of letters, claiming that it was the
responsibility of all educated people, not just professional writers, to write for the world at large on
matters of conscience. Enlightenment would be achieved through this public use of reason because it
allowed members of the clergy, professors, soldiers and others more freedom to speak – beyond the limits
imposed by their professional duties within their institutions.
 151
whoever, in treating of the Human Mind, aims to be understood, must lay his
account with forfeiting . . . all pretensions to depth, to subtlety, or to invention
. . . it is chiefly in those discussions which possess the best claims to originality,
where [the Mental Philosopher] may expect to be told by the multitude, that they
have learned from him nothing but what they knew before. (III:21)

Stewart was arguing not that the science of mind was inherently obscure, but that the
relocation of intellectual debate in the public arena entailed the impoverishment of that
debate.
Jeffrey’s 1810 Review is evidence that in Philosophical Essays Stewart had
failed to answer the original criticism.27 It signalled to Stewart that he would have to do
much more in order to establish that his proposed science of mind, the core part of
common sense philosophy, was ‘scientific’. Elements Vol.2 contained his major
defence, and renovation, of common sense philosophy – his treatise on methodology.

27
Hamilton, Stewart’s editor, claimed in 1854 that Jeffrey in 1810 ‘candidly acknowledged his objections
to have been obviated’ (V:24). Leslie Stephen in the DNB accepts that Stewart replied to Jeffrey’s
satisfaction. In fact Jeffrey could not have been clearer in his rejection of Stewart’s project.
 152

Chapter 7

The methodologist
 153
In previous chapters I have studied Stewart’s political economy course, the
Leslie case, the biographical works, the ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to Philosophical
Essays (1810), and the encyclopaedic ‘Dissertations’ (1815, 1821) as ways in which he
asserted the status of moral philosophy. In the second volume of the Elements of the
Philosophy of the Human Mind (1814) this affirmation of the central subject of the
Scottish tradition was consolidated as Stewart emphasised the overarching role of the
moral philosopher as central intellectual authority, monitoring all the subjects, with
particular regard to terminology and methodology. This volume appeared some twenty-
two years after the first, and I suggest that only through reading it in relation to the
Stewart-Jeffrey controversy can we explain its long incubation.1 Such a reading reveals
that Stewart’s underlying mission was to reassert the importance of moral philosophy.
As seen in chapter 6, he laid out a plan to establish the science of mind on an
experimental basis, in order to locate the human sciences within the experimental
tradition. At the same time, he sought to subsume the experimental sciences under the
prior category of metaphysical philosophy.
In Volume 2 of the Elements, Stewart’s response to Jeffrey’s 1810 attack
displayed a radical change of direction. The work was given shape by questions
deriving from the aim of legitimating the science of mind, a project driven by the
challenge, articulated by Jeffrey, to the general intellectual authority of moral
philosophy posed by the experimental sciences; the challenges to religious belief
associated with scepticism and materialism; the idea, both Baconian and Cartesian, that
a proper methodology was necessary for science to go forward; the diminution, implied
by Jeffrey, of the cultural role of the philosopher; the question, implied by Jeffrey, of the
role of philosophy in any reformed system of Scottish education; and the realization that
any study of man, in order to be accepted and validated in the emerging new intellectual
order, would have to be part of that new order. That is, it would have to be seen to be an
experimental science, or at least to have elements in common with the experimental or
inductive sciences (as Stewart called them).
By 1814 Stewart assessed his 1792 assumption, that philosophy was taken by his
intellectual peers in Great Britain to be superior to experimentation, as a dangerous
anachronism. He realised that even in addressing the intellectual élite, he was not
necessarily addressing like-minded people. Accordingly, it became necessary for him to

1
Since Reid died in 1796, it could not have been Stewart’s unwillingness to offend a respected mentor
which made him hold back from publishing until 1814.
 154
make a case for the primacy of (metaphysical) philosophy over (physical) science.
Since the attack on philosophy involved methodological issues, it was on this ground,
now a battleground in full public view, that Stewart decided to mount his defence. In
this volume Stewart made significant adjustments to common sense philosophy: he did
not, as he claimed, simply extend Reid’s foundational work on the science of mind, the
central part of common sense philosophy.
Although Stewart appealed repeatedly to Baconianism, invoking the Father of
Experimental Philosophy to make his points, he did not reflect the strict Baconian
inductivism that prevailed in Britain. In fact, of the volume’s four chapters, the last two
constitute an analytical and normative methodological treatise in which he advocated
what I will call a ‘hypothetico-inductive method’. Richard Olson has shown not only
that it was Stewart who set the stage for the value of hypothesis to science, but that his
work on methodology provided physical scientists with a technical language they could
utilise in formulating their own methodologies (Olson 1975:109).2 By looking at
Stewart’s methodological discourse, I investigate the part he played in the
epistemological revolution that empiricism entailed, following Bacon. The fact that he
engaged with Jeffrey in the arena of methodology means that this debate tells part of the
story of the slow replacement of the unity of philosophical systems by a methodological
unity, a story which Emerson (1990b:964) sees as one of the main Enlightenment tales
(see chapter 3).
Whereas Davie (1961:147-49) draws a line from Newton through mathematics
to common sense philosophy, Laudan goes further and sees Reid, a non-mathematician,
as the one who introduced Newton into the mainstream of British philosophical thought
on epistemology and the philosophy of science.3 (He finds the classical British
empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, surprisingly un-Newtonian when it comes to
questions of scientific method [Laudan 1970:105-6].) Although Reid became Newton’s
spokesperson on methodology, I argue that it was Stewart who popularised Reid’s work.
Thus, in a sense, Stewart co-facilitated the introduction of Newton into the mainstream
of British epistemology and philosophy of science. Moreover, as a mathematician who
lectured on astronomy and Newton’s Principia, Stewart was well qualified to expound

2
Sher (1985:314) records that Crosbie Smith (1976), G. N. Cantor (1971), and L. L. Laudan (1970), as
well as Olson, have noted this effect of the influence of the common sense school.
3
Wood (1985:310-11) challenges the idea, suggested by Stewart and perpetuated by historians, that Reid
was a non-mathematician.
 155
on methodology. But he differed significantly from Reid: Stewart’s Newtonianism
broke the hypotheses non fingo spell.4 Although, by Stewart’s time, others had also
argued for the hypothetical method (and Stewart drew on their work), his sustained
methodological dissertation provided a philosophical framework for Whewell and
Herschel, and was thus influential in the nineteenth-century about-turn on hypothesis
(Laudan 1981:14). In pointing out the inconsistency in Newton’s position – in that he
did in fact work from hypotheses – Stewart demonstrated the layered meanings of the
word hypothesis. In the process he gave his own slant to Newtonianism.
Stewart’s methodological treatise is contained in chapters 3 and 4 of the volume
under study. In the first two chapters (on the Fundamental Laws of Human Belief,
Reasoning, and Deductive Evidence) he critiqued the disciplines of political economy
and medicine, both of which now claimed a scientific approach, on issues of
terminology.5 Chapter 3, ‘Of the Aristotelian Logic’, is devoted to an assault on
Aristotelianism preparatory to the exposition of Baconian induction in chapter 4.
Stewart’s main attack on Aristotelianism was directed at the pointlessness of the
‘syllogistic art, . . . a puerile employment of the mind’ which was of ‘no use in
extending our knowledge of nature’. Syllogisms involved deduction from premises to a
necessary conclusion. They linked propositions that could be expressed in a categorical
subject-predicate form. The simplest, atomic syllogism consisted of three propositions
of which the first two, the premises, were supposed to entail the third, the conclusion.
Since syllogistic thought was tautological Stewart argued that it did not advance
knowledge. While Aristotle drew a distinction between syllogism and induction,
Stewart showed that his induction was at times mere syllogism. At best, it involved
‘empirical inferences from mere experience’. The ‘lunacy’ and ‘dogmatism’ of logical
disputation counteracted the natural intellectual checks which encouraged considered
judgement (III:187,189,191, 197-9,202,211,257,261).
Pietro Corsi locates Elements Vol.2 in a debate between Oxford University and
the Scots over the cultivation of Aristotelian and scholastic logic, which Stewart saw as
relics of the past, superseded by the inductive logic of Bacon. Responding to an 1809
pamphlet written by Edward Copleston, Stewart denounced the educational practices

4
Newton’s declamation against hypotheses became a catch-phrase for intellectual reformers in Britain
(Laudan 1987:86), and for those who sought to claim Newton as one who used Baconian methods. For an
account of the semantical slidings and glidings in Newton’s notion of the hypothetical, both within and
between editions of his Principia, see Hanson (1970:14-33).
5
He thought the disciplines were in danger of error because of the inconsistencies he exposed; the clear
implication was that it was the role of the moral philosopher to hold them all together.
 156
followed at Oxford. Though Copleston declined to reply, Corsi contends that he gave
advice to William Rowe Lyall (Corsi 1987:100-2). Writing in the influential Quarterly
Review, Lyall defended the study of logic and the English universities against Stewart’s
denunciation; he faulted Stewart’s reasoning, his critique of Aristotle, and his
injudicious praise of Bacon. At the same time he rejected the foundation of an inductive
logic on instinctive principles. Claiming that Stewart was an unwitting danger to
religion, he explained that if belief in the existence of a material world is founded on
instinct, it leads to the renunciation of Reason, and it is Reason which grounds religion.
He warned of the grave theological consequences of reducing humanity to the level of
animals ruled by instincts (Lyall 1815:293-5,302-7). Notwithstanding this dispute,
Corsi (1987) claims that Oxford academics, including Copleston, Whately and Senior,
were considerably influenced by Stewart.6
Stewart was concerned that whereas the acquisition of scientific knowledge
proceeded from particulars to universals, Aristotle presumed that the truth of particulars
was a logical consequence of, and depended on, the truth of the universal. He
complained that the movement of Aristotle’s deduction from ‘universals to particulars’
was in the direction opposite to that in which we acquired knowledge. In fact,
reasoning, or the ‘habit of synthetic deduction’, was but a small element of reason; it did
not ‘open and liberalize’ the mind. For Stewart, the extraordinary progress of
‘enlightened’ reason during the previous 200 years had been due not to the improved art
of reasoning, but to the diffusion of knowledge, particularly through print. Bacon
thought that the diffusion of the correct methodology would bring about scientific
progress ‘to ameliorate the condition of man’; this ideal of utilitarian progress informed
Stewart’s position on induction, and was a key justification for his science of mind
(III:192,202,206-8,213-4,232). In stressing the progress of enlightened reason and the
goal of human happiness within an exposition of the science of mind, Stewart was
responding to Jeffrey’s charge of non-utility.
Stewart valued progress and the ‘spirit of free enquiry which it was the boast of
philosophy to cultivate’ (III:207). Because he saw Aristotelianism or scholasticism as
detrimental to these ends, he was keen to distinguish between the meanings Aristotle
and Bacon gave to the word ‘induction’, or as he put it, between ‘the process of

6
Copleston’s close attention to Stewart’s works emerges also from letters to him from the Earl of Dudley
published by Copleston (1841:15-22).
 157
experience’ and the analytical-synthetical method of ‘experimental induction’ (III:195,
262, 282). Whereas Aristotelian induction involved only ‘empirical inferences from
mere experience’, Bacon’s induction began with observation but proceeded by analysis
to ‘decompose nature’ in order to arrive at ‘general laws’, from which one could
synthesize ‘other particulars formerly unknown to us, and perhaps placed beyond the
reach of our direct examination’ (III:261-2, 251).7 According to Laudan (1981:60), it
was hypotheses about unobservable events and entities that were the most contentious in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In talking of the particulars placed beyond the
reach of our direct examination, Stewart thus linked Bacon’s induction to hypothesis.
Stewart devoted chapter 4, ‘Of the Method of Inquiry pointed out in the
Experimental or Inductive Logic’, the final and largest chapter, to an explanation of
induction, and to a modern reader it must seem curious that, under the rubric of
‘Inductive Logic’, he discussed syllogistic theory, analysis and synthesis, hypothetical
theories and analogy, the unity of design and final causes. Gaukroger (1995:6)
articulates what he claims to be Descartes’ reasons for writing in a certain manner,
pointing to the way in which Descartes would hide a controversial doctrine in
uncontroversial language. I suggest that this is precisely what Stewart found it
necessary to do with what I have termed his hypothetico-inductive method: he concealed
it in the language of Baconianism, in an exposition of the prevailing ‘Inductive Logic’.
At a time when British writers heralded Baconian induction as the scientific
method (Yeo 1985:259), it was precisely because he wished to legitimate the use of
hypothesis that Stewart justified hypothesis and analogy within a discussion of
induction. Through developing an account of induction which included final causes,
Stewart sought to establish that it was methodologically respectable to speak of them.
He was seeking both theological and scientific legitimacy for a methodology that would
ground his proposed philosophy of mind. Yeo (1986:289) has written of the subject of
methodology as an ‘argumentative resource’; my chapter locates Stewart’s treatment of

7
Stewart implied that Aristotelian induction was a passive collection of data and not an active means of
acquiring new knowledge (III:261-2).
 158
the inductive methodology within his argument for the establishment of a science of
mind.8
Recent work in the history of the philosophy of science has considered the
changing attitude to ‘hypothesis’ over time in Britain. In particular, Barbara Shapiro
traces the rethinking of hypothesis and other related concepts to the breakdown in the
seventeenth century of the centuries-old tradition that divided science, knowledge,
certainty and philosophy on the one hand, from opinion, probability, appearance and
rhetoric on the other. Hypotheses could be proofs or mere conjectures. They could
ascend from ‘bare’, through highly probable to ‘morally certain’, and then to ‘reasoned’
hypotheses. Even among those who endorsed the use of hypothesis, there was no
consensus. Whereas some regarded hypothesis as merely a scientific tool, for others, to
whom no conclusions were absolutely certain, it was a characteristic of knowledge
itself. Hypotheses were at times equated with sound theories, which involved the
application of reason to accurate observations, and could be confirmed by experiments.
At other times they were offered as speculations that could not be verified or refuted by
empirical data. They could be possible, plausible, probable, very probable, true, good,
easy, intelligible, simple, excellent, temporary, explanatory and predictive (Shapiro
1983:15-73).9 Michael Barfoot identifies in the late eighteenth century a ‘Janus-faced
attitude . . . [which] simultaneously endorsed their elimination from philosophy
generally, while reserving a use for them in favoured instances’ (Barfoot 1990:161). It
is useful to bear in mind that even into the early nineteenth century, as is clear from
Stewart’s writing, ‘hypothesis’ carried several meanings and connotations.
In the wake of Newton’s claims to certainty and rejection of hypothesis —
epitomised in his famous ‘hypotheses non fingo’ utterance — eighteenth-century
methodologists such as Hume and Reid condemned the hypothetical method (Laudan
1981:17,86-9).10 Challenging the common perception that Reid was totally opposed to

8
I am not suggesting that methodology was just a rhetorical resource to Stewart, but that this was one of
its functions.
9
Hanson (18-19) notes the change in form of hypotheses over time. In medieval science, even up to the
sixteenth century, they were subjunctive conditional arguments, stated assertorically (“If the earth were to
move, no stars could appear to us as fixed”), whereas now the claims they embody-by-supposing are
synthetic in form (ie they can only be known to be true on the evidence of experience).
10
Barfoot claims that Hume displayed the prevalent ambivalence to hypotheses, because despite his
condemnation of the passion for hypotheses, he thought the ether an acceptable one. Nevertheless Hume
did rail against the hypothetical method, the use of hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy
(Barfoot:161). It was in the wake of Newton’s rejection of hypothetical reasoning that Descartes’
advocacy of a hypothetical method was increasingly criticised, especially by English natural philosophers
(Gaukroger:3). Through most of the century, the standard epistemological declaration in British scientific
works involved a ubiquitous denial of feigned hypotheses (Schofield 1970:3).
 159
hypotheses, Wood discusses the hypotheses actually entertained by Reid and suggests
that his objections were mainly metaphysical rather than epistemological (Wood
1989:439-42). Nevertheless Wood does not dispute that Reid delivered a strong
Baconian critique of hypotheses in general. Like Hume, Reid rejected arguments from
analogy, regarding them as a major obstacle to a correct understanding of the human
mind, and therefore of what constitutes rationality and true knowledge (Sutherland
1982:146). He also rejected hypotheses as insufficient in themselves. For Reid,
hypotheses were unproductive, misleading, prejudicial to the impartiality of the
scientist, falsely simplistic, impertinent regarding the possibility of understanding the
works of God, unprovable, and violent toward Newton’s first principle ‘that no more
causes are to be admitted than those which are both true and sufficient to explain the
appearances’ (Laudan:90-92). Thus Reid’s common sense philosophy, developed as a
defence against scepticism, excluded hypothesis and analogy.
There is some doubt as to whether Reid offered a system at all. Stewart
observed that Reid had not ‘laid much stress on systematical arrangement’ (X:264), and
Timothy Duggan (1970:xii) argues that for Reid, common sense was not so much a
philosophy as it was a method that permeated all his philosophy. But Reid is generally
seen as providing a structure for the defence of common sense against the impact of
philosophical paradox and scepticism, and Haakonssen detects a coherent philosophical
outlook throughout his works.11 I do not attempt to settle this question, but whether or
not Reid’s common sense philosophy was a system, he certainly disdained having a
system attributed to him by Stewart. Daniel Robinson quotes Reid’s admonition of
Stewart: ‘I have an aversion to the having a System imputed to me especially by my
Friend’. Reid insisted he was offering not a system but a ‘provisional inquiry based
upon unprejudiced introspection’ (Robinson 1989:414). At the time, a system was
regarded as
a wide range of phenomena, all causally related by some simple concept or
common principle that could provide unity and harmony amidst an apparent
chaos of diversity. (Thomson 1987:221)

11
‘All science was united by the empirical method within a framework of natural theology; it had an
overall social goal in the promotion of politeness and public virtue, and was subject to a coherent
pedagogy determined by the natural progress of the human mind. From the concrete world that was the
subject of natural philosophy, the understanding would naturally proceed to the more elusive world of the
mind and then to the abstract sciences that were dependent upon the philosophy of mind, namely the moral
sciences and – the most abstract of all – logic’ (Haakonssen 1999:741).
 160
It seems that Reid was wary of a proliferation of systems, and a clue to this attitude
might be found in Ephraim Chambers’ complaint in his Cyclopaedia (1728
‘Experimental Philosophy’) about the state of philosophical inquiry prior to the age of
experimental philosophy when ‘systems were heaped upon systems, having neither
consistency with one another nor with themselves’. Another clue lies in Hume’s
aversion to systems in natural philosophy (Barfoot:161), especially given Hume’s
influence on Reid. Stewart’s remark about ‘those system-builders who, without any
knowledge of facts, have presumed to form conclusions a priori concerning the
universe’ (III:309) indicates that system-building connoted fanciful conjectures.
At the same time, Stewart saw in Baconian experimental philosophy the
opportunity to systematise all knowledge projects. Hollander (1966), writing on Adam
Smith as the founder of political economy, stresses the crucial importance of Stewart in
building the system of political economy. Oz-Salzberger has noted that Ferguson,
Stewart’s first moral philosophical mentor, was no systematic philosopher, and it is
possible that the young Stewart, seeking structure, was attracted to Reid’s philosophy, at
least in part, because of its systematic possibilities.12 In the science of mind, Reid
offered an answer to the philosophical turmoil and dangerous uncertainty engendered by
Hume’s scepticism. He was the first to provide a philosophical justification of the
realist position (that there is mind-independent material existence) (Walker:152).
Stewart thought that Reid had done the preparatory work, clearing away the
metaphysical debris and offering the beginning of a new system, and he made it his
business to continue the work, building on Reid’s substructure. Reid offered
philosophical security, a sound foundation for the system-builder.
Whereas Stewart began in 1792 and 1803 by endorsing Reid’s mental
philosophy, or philosophy of mind, by 1814 he was doing something original and quite
different: he was aiming to develop a model. He was building the system of science of
mind. In previous chapters I have charted Stewart’s course from mental philosophy,
through controversy, to this point, where he models a science of mind.

12
Ferguson’s various philosophical enquiries were discrete: his theory of man in society was formulated
as a response to Rousseau, and his account of the origins of civil society was created with Hobbes in mind
(Oz-Salzberger:110).
 161
Stewart’s hypothetico-inductive method
The hypothetico-deductive method is usually contrasted to Baconian
inductivism, since throughout the eighteenth century British inductivists argued against
the use of hypothesis (Laudan 1981).13 To indicate that Stewart called his method
induction, yet insisted on hypothesis as a stage in induction, and on a Baconian heritage
for the hypothetical method, I have designated his method the ‘hypothetico-inductive’
method. The term also signals that he was a forerunner of the philosophical about-turn
on hypothesis.
On the familiar hypothetico-deductive model, we start with hypothetical
assumptions, deduce, in conjunction with certain initial conditions, certain
consequences and then test those consequences in experiments which, in turn, confirm
or disconfirm the hypothesis. Hence ‘hypothetico-deductive’ reflects the order in which
these procedures operate in the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Since in
contemporary understandings of methodology, induction is the process of arriving at an
hypothesis (Oldroyd 1986; Chalmers 1976), clearly I am not claiming the same
mirroring of the procedural order for the term ‘hypothetico-inductive’. For Stewart,
Baconian induction, the synthetic method, and experimental logic were often
synonymous. In insisting on ‘hypothesis supported by analogy’, he seems to be
describing the process of induction (which he called ‘analysis’) to reduce particulars (via
analogy) to a generalization (general law or hypothesis), and the process of deduction
(which he called ‘synthetical reasoning’) from the hypothesis to previously unknown
and perhaps unobservable particulars, producing ‘useful knowledge’ (via confirmation)
or disconfirmation (III:244,262, 275-6).14 Both analysis and synthesis presupposed
observation and experiment (III:244), and hypothesis was a necessary part of the
inductive method. He did not elaborate on the methodology of test, but Ernan
McMullin (1990:825) has observed that by 1690, Locke did not need to do this, so it is
no strange omission.

13
Gladys Bryson (1945:17) links the aversion to hypothesis with the word’s corruption by association
with the ‘fantastic vortices’ of Descartes.
14
Stewart rarely used the word ‘deduction’ in this context since he was anxious to distance himself from
Aristotelian deduction, which he saw as merely syllogistic (III:191). The old forms of deductive argument
had been supplemented by a logic of discovery, found in induction and experimental methods (Emerson
1990b:963). Although this had informed the new social sciences in Scotland and France, Aristotelian logic
still held sway at Oxford.
 162
According to Stewart, Bacon’s induction proceeded by analysis to decompose
nature to arrive at general laws, from which one could synthesise new knowledge,
perhaps inferring particulars ‘placed beyond the reach of our direct examination’
(III:262). In his treatment of the subtle fluids debate, Laudan examines the tension
between the received epistemology (classical empiricism) and ethereal explanations of
heat, light, magnetism, electricity, and virtually every other physical process. Reid,
recognizing the strain, took the view that ‘epistemological doctrines took priority over
physical theories and thus should be allowed to legislate fluid theories out of the
scientific arena’ (Laudan 1981:112-3). It is in the light of Reid’s naive inductive
empiricism that we can appreciate the significance of Stewart’s methodological move in
creating a place for unobservable entities. The term hypothetico-induction distinguishes
Stewart’s method from the strict Baconian inductivism of his peers.
Though a major thrust of his book was to extend Reid’s work on the science of
mind, and indeed Stewart saw this as his mission, he had to negotiate three problems,
the first of which was the public perception that mental philosophy was outmoded,
unscientific and useless. Jeffrey and Stewart had engaged in the arena of methodology,
and Stewart continued to argue on methodological grounds, this time developing a
methodological model of scientific inquiry that could ground a science of mind. The
second problem was Stewart’s realization that Reid was wrong on a crucial point: he
rejected hypothesis as a stage in induction. Laudan discusses Reid’s ‘several objections
to the hypothetical method, some logical, others historical or psychological’.15 In
constructing his methodological model, Stewart thus had to reject significant elements
of Reid’s common sense philosophy.
The third problem was that a fairly orthodox Baconianism (entailing extreme
empiricism) prevailed in Britain, and Baconian induction – at least, in principle –
eschewed hypotheses (Yeo 1993:98). Stewart’s task was thus to ‘re-orient the
epistemological convictions of an age which took the view that, where hypotheses were
concerned, indirect evidence was no evidence at all’. Laudan argues that this was the

15
They were: 1) Historically, hypotheses and conjectures have been non-productive and misleading. 2)
They prejudice the impartiality of the scientist, as the history of medicine bears out. 3) The hypothetical
method presupposes a greater simplicity in nature than we find there. Even Newton was sometimes
misled on this, by analogy and the love of simplicity. 4) The use of hypotheses assumes that man’s reason
is capable of understanding the works of God. 5) Hypotheses can never be proved by ‘reductio’ methods,
or series of crucial experiments. 6) The use of hypotheses usually violates Newton’s first rule - that no
causes are to be admitted than those which are both true and sufficient to explain the appearances
(Laudan:108-12).
 163
task Hartley set himself (Laudan 1981:115). Hartley failed, but I am suggesting that it is
possible that Stewart was instrumental in the subsequent ‘rejection [in Britain] of
Baconian methodology based on positive appraisals of the use of hypotheses in
scientific thinking’ (Yeo 1985:267). There is particular irony in this when we consider
that Stewart, for his Baconianism, was in 1838-9 credited with turning ‘that which had
been a blind veneration into a rational worship’ (Hallam in Yeo:259-60). He revised
Baconian induction through an appeal to Baconianism. Thus the Stewart-Jeffrey dispute
gave a particular form to what Stewart saw as his mission.

Methodology and authority

While half the volume reads like a work of methodology, it is also a work of
moral philosophy. The three volumed Elements were designed as text books for
undergraduate students of moral philosophy. In this discipline, according to Reid, the
sciences dependent on the philosophy of mind were logic, rhetoric, the laws of nature
and nations, politics, economics, the fine arts and natural religion (see chapter 3). While
the volumes of the Elements were text books, Stewart could also assume a significant
audience for philosophical literature, and in relation to this reading public he held
another agenda.16 Through a work of methodology he sought to legitimate a science of
mind and reassert, in the minds of his readers, the status of moral philosophy. That a
large part of one volume was devoted to scientific methodology in an attempt to ground
a science of mind is indicative not only of the philosophical threat which the new
sciences posed for moral philosophy, but also of a prevalent scientism.
Although methodology was a traditional pursuit of philosophers, Laudan
(1981:11-15) has pointed out that those philosophers who wrote methodological tracts
were usually practicing scientists motivated by a need to defend their own natural
philosophical hypotheses in the face of criticism.17 It is significant that Stewart did not
fall into this category. Instead he was motivated to defend the very project of
philosophy itself and the role of the philosopher. He had to show that it was the moral
philosopher who was best equipped to write methodology. Through methodology,
Stewart was trying to take back the centre, to retrieve intellectual authority.
Methodology had become central to the question of intellectual authority, and hence to

16
From the time that Addison, founder of The Spectator (1711) and great publicist for Locke, undertook
to bring philosophy out of the closet and into the clubs, assemblies, tea-tables and coffee houses,
philosophical reading had been fashionable (Price 1982:165).
17
Although Reid and Hume were methodologists, neither wrote a major work on methodology.
 164
the question of the authority of moral philosophy. Whereas in the past it had been but
one area open to investigation by moral philosophers, in the early nineteenth century,
with the conceptual change in scientism taking place, it became the key to the defence
of their role. Stewart’s work, in applying scientific methodology to mental philosophy,
was an expression of methodological or weak scientism. But in contrast with his
Scottish predecessors, Stewart did it in a new situation, when science was contrasted
with moral philosophy.18
While adopting elements of a biographical approach to establish a rationale for
Stewart’s intellectual pursuits, I have focused on the post-1790 period, paying little
attention to Stewart’s early development. But even this limited attention to the genesis
of Stewart’s doctrine reveals that the hypothetico-inductive methodology is a scientific
legitimation of a long-held commitment to common sense principles, and in particular to
continuing Reid’s work on the science of mind. It also reveals the contentious nature of
metaphysical explanation at the time when Baconianism held great sway in Britain.
Despite his insistent claims to be offering a descriptive methodology, an analysis
of the means by which the natural sciences arrive at conclusions about the material
world, Stewart nevertheless resorted to appeals to theology. As well, much as he railed
against metaphor and analogy elsewhere (IV:226-9), he used them to construct his
methodology: for instance, in the science of mind, the philosopher carried out
experiments in an ‘intellectual laboratory’ (V:34). In so far as this is in the context of
his developing a method — hypothetico-induction — peculiarly suited to grounding a
science of mind, it is clearly a work of normative methodology. His motivation is thus
similar to that of Laudan’s scientists-turned-methodologists: legitimation of their own
projects and theories.

18
In the ‘Advertisement’ to his Philosophical Essays (1810), Stewart blamed the state of his health for
having interrupted, ‘for many months past’, his work on the Human Mind, and explained that he had been
‘induced to attempt, in the meantime, the easier task of preparing for the press a volume of Essays’. He
vowed not to delay any longer his work on the Elements, which he hoped would, ‘if carried into complete
effect, be of some utility to the public’ (V:3). This was the first hint that Stewart planned to offer
something which would need to be carried into effect, or implemented. Realizing the importance of
scientific method and its relevance to his hopes of having the science of mind accepted, he planned to
develop a model which would be methodologically grounded. If his model should be accepted, it would
be of utility to the public.
 165
Stewart’s Baconianism
A detailed examination of Stewart’s study of inductive logic reveals that he
liberally interpreted Bacon’s induction as allowing a place for hypothesis. At the same
time he claimed Reid’s notion of the instinctive ‘inductive principle’ was implicit in
Bacon (III:247). Stewart drew examples from mathematics, physics, anatomy,
astronomy, and medicine to argue that science progressed through a cautious and
judicious use of observation, experimental induction involving analytic and synthetic
reasoning, hypothesis, analogical reasoning, and even through a search for final causes.
The fact that he argued all this under the subject heading of ‘Induction’ was due, at least
in part, to the fact that he sought thereby to slip his entire program under the protective
cloak of scientific respectability which Baconian induction was enjoying at the time.
Although ‘induction’ was the obvious methodological framework, the value of
hypothesis was not so obvious; Stewart reformulated ‘induction’ to include
hypothesis.19 This is another instance of the moral philosopher, standing above
everyone else, commenting on all knowledge; that is, another instance of Stewart’s
fashioning of the moral philosophical self.
For the purpose of this analysis I have found it useful to conceive of Stewart’s
strategy as having six parts which were sometimes employed concurrently. First, as I
have shown, he critiqued Aristotelian induction on the grounds of its ‘form’ and ‘end’:
since the syllogistic form did not advance knowledge, it had no good purpose (III:209).
Second, in a protracted examination of scientific methodology, he compared Bacon
favourably with Aristotle. A modified nominalist doctrine informed the entire work; I
will call it his third strategy.20 Fourth, and crucially, he claimed a Baconian pedigree for
the use of hypothesis as a necessary part of the inductive process. It was his unstated

19
Whewell thought there was appalling confusion about the meaning of the term ‘induction’, and Yeo
argues that by ‘stressing the active role of the mind in induction, Whewell gave this concept a meaning at
odds with prevailing interpretations’ (Yeo 1993:12,93). Stewart, too, challenged prevailing notions of
induction.
20
In making this claim I am not neglecting Stewart’s importance in arguing that language was not the
precise image of thought, and that the meaning of words could only be understood in their context
(Aarsleff 1967:104; Richards:110)). But, as William Krebs argues, Stewart committed himself to a
nominalist doctrine on the grounds of his doubts as to the possibility of conceiving a distinct general idea
without the assistance of signs (Krebs:205). Grave more emphatically refers to Stewart’s ‘heavily
linguistic view’ (Grave 1960:42). Throughout this text Stewart insisted that the misuse of language had
led to wrong conclusions. On this basis he reinterpreted key texts for his readers according to his own
sometimes idiosyncratic lights. Schneider warns that his ‘titles or labels for things can be deceptive’
 166
aim to lead his reader to liken the science of mind to the non-experimental science of
positional astronomy, and on this basis to accept his hypothetico-inductive model for a
science of mind. This interpretation suggests that Stewart’s insistence on the utility of
astronomy was strategic: if astronomy was to be the model for his science of mind, he
had to present it as beneficial to humanity. It was also crucial that he play down the
importance of experiment — and to insist that instead of contriving experiments we
would observe the experiments of nature, socialization and education. Fifth, he claimed
the judicious use of analogical reasoning was historically valid, and that this sanctioned
the use of hypothesis and supported the argument from design.21 Sixth, he argued that
the science of medicine, a science demonstrably Baconian in its utilitarian telos, had
been aided by the idea of final causes.22 These six strategies often overlap throughout
his works and can be detected in Stewart’s deployment of Baconianism in this
methodological tract, as explored hereunder.

Mathematics and experimental science

Corsi (1987:104-5) has noted Stewart’s feeling that the recent successes in the
experimental sciences had given rise to the mistaken conviction that mathematical
methods conferred mathematical certainty upon the results of all physical and moral
investigations. In distinguishing between analysis and synthesis in mathematics and the
meaning of these terms in experimental science, Stewart the nominalist demonstrated
the import of the ‘misapplication’ of the terms. Even Newton, and Maclaurin after him,
had conflated the two uses of analysis, and erred in claiming that in both mathematics
and natural philosophy, analysis ought to precede synthesis. But it was Condillac who
had contributed, ‘more than any other individual, to the prevalence of the logical errors
now under consideration’ (III:29-32,263,272-83,278).23 Rider argues that eighteenth-
century language reformers were guided by mathematicians, paying specific attention to
Condillac’s exhortation to analyse, because ‘analysis is the only method by which
accurate knowledge is to be acquired’. Mathematics was ‘eminently rational to

(Schneider 1967:288). While it is clear that Stewart gave great weight to the role of language, more work
needs to be done to clarify the nature and intellectual location of his nominalism.
21
Whereas this is now more usually called the argument to design, I have retained the earlier term. In
fact Stewart spoke of the Unity of Design rather than the argument from design.
22
Within comparative anatomy, he argued that teleological thinking, or the idea of final causes, had led to
specific instances of progress in medicine. For instance, anatomists, guided by the idea that God had
created organs for particular purposes, had gained insights into the functions of organs (III:341).
23
Stewart was convinced that the fashion for geometrical precision was responsible for wild metaphysical
speculations based on materialistic ideas. It also reinforced the erroneous belief that the inductive science
of the human mind was a mere combinatory art (Corsi 1987:105).
 167
eighteenth-century eyes’, offering itself as a methodological model (Rider 1990:113-6),
and it is against this background that the novelty of Stewart’s position can be
appreciated.
Stewart argued that in the ‘abstract and hypothetical investigations’ of
geometricians, synthesis was really analysis converted. In other words, once analysis
had produced a conclusion known to be true, the geometer had only ‘to return upon his
own steps . . . to convert his analysis into a direct synthetical proof’. But geometrical
and physical analysis were ‘essentially’ and ‘radically’ different, and ‘in natural
philosophy, a synthesis which merely reversed the analysis would be absurd’. In the
physical sciences, including Philosophy of the Human Mind, analysis suggested the idea
of reducing the phenomena to constituent elements, finding the ‘true initial causes’ or
the ‘simple laws’. In the Greek geometry, on the other hand, analysis involved setting
out from a hypothetical assumption to arrive at a known truth, so it involved the
‘retrograde direction’ of the method of physical analysis. Stewart drew on Boscovich,
Hartley and Le Sage to argue that in experimental sciences, synthesis proceeded from
general laws or hypothetical theories and followed analysis, thus exemplifying his own
interpretation of Baconian induction (III:262,267,273-5,277,282), or what I have termed
‘hypothetico-induction’.
Stewart’s position on mathematics, like his work on the science of mind, should
be seen in the context of the increasing importance of the experimental sciences.
Thomas Kuhn has explored the changing nature of empirical practice and ‘experimental
science’ in the Scientific Revolution and the shift from ‘thought experiments’ to real
experiments. Whereas traditionally mathematics had been queen of the ‘empirical’
sciences, by the middle of the eighteenth century Baconian experimental sciences had
become more systematic, and in the last third of the century replaced mathematics in
terms of status (Kuhn 1977:35-47). Gascoigne too notes that
by the late eighteenth-century the reign of mathematics was over in so far as
natural history, or the experimental and observational sciences, was more
popular with the larger scientific community, with the offspring of the landed
classes, and with the general public. (Gascoigne: 283-4)
But mathematics was far from defeated: it was the physico-mathematical sciences that
dominated the scientific hierarchy successfully promoted by Whewell in the ‘Cambridge
invasion’ of the BAAS (Morrell & Thackray:267-275; Yeo 1993). Nevertheless, in
terms of popular culture, mathematics was dependent on the new physical scientific
 168
culture. Gascoigne and Kuhn explore a particular aspect of the shift in authority
involving experimental science, this time from mathematicians to natural scientists.
Stewart, himself a mathematician, sought to explain the essential difference between
mathematics and the other sciences.
Stewart held that it was because the grounds of induction in mathematics
differed from those in other sciences that Newton was able to say that the theory of
gravity was inconclusive. (He pointed out that Newton would never have said the same
of his binomial theorem.) In fact Condillac and Leibniz had overlooked ‘the essential
distinction between mathematics and the other sciences, in point of phraseology’: that
the definition of mathematical objects coincided with their existence. Due to this
consistency, there was certainty in mathematics, but this certainty was not about truth,
but about consistency. Physical induction, on the other hand, resolved into our
‘instinctive expectation of the laws of nature’ and could never be demonstrably certain
(III:104,106,319,320).
Stewart’s understanding of mathematical axioms, and his insistence that they
differed radically from axioms or general laws in the natural sciences, informed his
theory of induction. Yeo finds that Whewell’s new theory of induction differed
importantly from Stewart’s, particularly in their positions on mathematics. Whewell
detected and rejected the assumption behind Stewart’s position, namely that ‘geometry
depends upon arbitrary definitions and nothing else’. Whewell argued that ‘we must in
geometry form our conceptions before we can define them; and that in the process of
forming them we establish in our minds axioms which are the first principles of our
reasoning’ (Yeo 1991:187). In 1825 an article in Blackwood’s Magazine (1825:207-
220) argued that whereas Stewart said the terms identity and equality were not
synonymous and convertible, in mathematical reasoning, they were the same. But
Hamilton thought that Whewell had erred in understanding what Stewart said about
mathematics, its nature and difference from other sciences, and about the terms
hypothetical and arbitrary, axioms and definitions; he called on Stewart as a
mathematical authority (Hamilton 1838:84-98;1836:437). John Herschel, too, rejected
Whewell’s philosophy of mathematics (Ashworth 1996:645), and even ‘borrowed’ from
Stewart.24 It is salient that in the Preface to The Mechanical Euclid (1837) Whewell
 169
saw the necessity for a disclaimer about criticizing Stewart ‘without ceremony’. Clearly
Stewart was regarded not only as a leading authority on mathematical reasoning, but
was usually afforded ceremony, and commanded considerable respect.25 In Richard
Whateley’s Remains of the late Edward Copleston (1854), Stewart is the mathematical
authority quoted, challenged, and taken to task throughout. Stewart’s position on the
nature of mathematics remained contentious after his death and informed the
metascientific debate which prevailed during the formative years of the BAAS, when
science struggled to become professionalised and the various disciplines fought for
positions on the ladder of intellectual credibility.
When Stewart denied there was a possibility of transferring the certainty of
mathematics to the other sciences (III:317), his distinction between mathematics and the
experimental sciences was a direct rejection of Condorcet’s position that the essential
model for scientific reasoning, and therefore for a science of mind, was the
combinatorial analysis of mathematics (Baker 1975:117). I have shown that Stewart
blamed Condillac as the worst offender in the confusion over analysis. Indeed he took
pains to expose Condillac’s reasoning on the point as vague, confused and ‘palpably
absurd’ (III:278-83). Significantly, Stewart was systematically creating a science of
mind distinct and distant from the French materialist mental philosophy.
Ian Hacking (1975) and Shapiro (1983) argue that in the seventeenth century a
more modest conception of inductive argument and scientific method, directed toward
acquiring probability rather than certainty, began to emerge. While I have argued that
there was little recourse to the calculus of probability in Stewart’s moral philosophy, he
did draw on the concept of probability, and certainly there were indications that he saw a
problem with the expectation of intellectual certitude. He related probability to
simplicity, arguing that ‘the probability of a hypothesis increases in proportion to the
number of phenomena for which it accounts, and to the simplicity of the theory by
which it explains them’ (III:311). Although he hoped his science of mind would one day
be ‘not inferior in certainty to the science of body’ (II:8), that is not to say he thought
experimental science could produce certain knowledge. I suggest that the phrase
indicated his desire to ground and legitimate a science which would prove as useful as
medicine or astronomy. He acknowledged that even in astronomy, ‘no hypothesis . . .

24
Marvin Bolt, Assistant Curator of Adler Planetarium in Chicago, attests that Stewart gave a signed
copy of his Elements to William Herschel, that John Herschel read it (marginalia are in his hand), that he
adopted some important ideas, and even ‘borrowed’ from it (private communication).
 170
can completely exclude the possibility of exceptions or limitations hitherto
undiscovered’ (III:311). Nevertheless he did not explicitly address the problem of
certain knowledge.
Stewart’s circumspection suggests that the problem of certainty, loaded as it was
with theological implications, had to be explored rather than confronted head-on.
Although extreme Calvinists believed reason had been damaged by the Fall, the idea of
the human mind as made in the image of the Divine mind entailed the efficacy of human
reason. To some, to challenge the notion that there was an absolute truth was to
challenge the existence of God. When we reflect that Stewart’s Elements was
appreciated not as a polemic but as a ‘systematic epistemological survey of
contemporary scientific debates’ (Corsi 1987:103), the subtlety of his approach is
apparent. Into works ostensibly orthodox, he slipped mildly phrased questions about the
basic assumptions of British philosophy, assumptions that would need to be re-thought
if his hypothetico-inductive model for a science of mind were to be accepted.

The problem of induction

Acknowledging that Bacon was inconsistent in defining induction, Stewart
defined it as the method by which ‘a philosopher connects, as a general law of nature,
the event with its physical cause’. He argued that
in drawing a general physical conclusion from particular facts, we are guided
merely by our instinctive expectation of the continuance of the laws of nature
. . . To this belief in the permanent uniformity of physical laws, Dr. Reid long
ago gave the name of the inductive principle. (III:246-7)
Stewart then proclaimed a Baconian sanction of Reid’s inductive principle. ‘In all
Bacon’s logical rules’, he wrote, ‘the authority of this law of belief is virtually
recognised, although it is nowhere formally stated in his writings’ (III:247). Thus
Reid’s instinctive inductive principle was under Stewart’s Baconian umbrella. It might
also be argued that he was in a sense claiming Bacon, who thought common sense
notions had to be overcome, as a common sense philosopher!
Berry (78) discusses the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers’ commitment to causal
explanation, both moral and physical, and its relationship to progress and knowledge.
We have already seen Stewart defending Humean causation in the Leslie case, and in
1814 he returned to the subject, referring his readers to the first volume of his Elements

25
It should be noted that Charles Babbage ‘became fascinated by the genius of Dugald Stewart . . . as a
mathematician’ (Buxton 1988:350). Davie (1961:147) describes him as ‘a mathematician of note’.
 171
for an explication of the distinction between physical and efficient causes (III:230).
Generally, said Stewart, when it is said that
every change in nature indicates the operation of a cause, the word cause
expresses something which is supposed to be necessarily connected with the
change, and without which it could not have happened. This may be called the
metaphysical meaning of the word; and such causes may be called metaphysical
or efficient causes. (II:97)
But natural philosophers investigated only physical causes, and here
when we speak of one thing being the cause of another, all that we mean is that
the two are constantly conjoined; so that when we see the one we may expect the
other. These conjunctions we learn from experience alone. (II:97)
Stewart endorsed Hume’s position that the science of physics gives us no information
concerning the efficient causes, and proceeded to argue that Bacon too, in his implicit
refutation of the ancients’ science of necessary causes, had this Humean notion of
causality (III:231-2).
David Hume, who held that our idea of necessary connection was nothing more
than an internal response to the habit of expecting the uniformity of effects, embraced
the spirit of scepticism. He decided that all induction was nothing but a species of
sensation and he rejected the argument from design (Dialogues concerning natural
religion 1779). Stewart explained that Reid, faced with Hume’s denial of any grounds
for our belief in the permanent uniformity of physical laws, and perceiving common
sense to be the only alternative to scepticism, responded with his inductive principle
(III:246-8).26
When addressing the connection between a physical event and its cause in his
lectures Stewart maintained that ‘philosophy in its infant state is in use in savage
nations’. The practices of savages in relation to cures and remedies were not due to
superstition, but rather to ‘ignorance of the essential causes of the cure’. The natural
philosopher who investigates the laws of nature ‘proceeds in the same way’ (James
Bridges, ‘Notes from Mr. Stewart’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, read in the
University of Edinburgh, Winter 1801-2’, Special Collections, EUL).27 He claimed that
Bacon, ‘in calling man the interpreter of Nature’, understood that ‘what are commonly

26
Stewart described how Hume, in furnishing ‘all the premises from which [Reid’s] conclusions were
drawn’, forced Reid to his splendid defence against scepticism (III:248). Stewart followed this theme in
his Life of Reid (X:271,307) and ‘Dissertation’ (I:439,450,457-8,462). For a critique of Stewart’s reading
of Reid in this respect, see Somerville (1995:286,334).
27
While this smacks of Feyerabend, Stewart did say that the difference between the two was the
discovery of natural laws.
 172
called the causes of phenomena, are only their established antecedents or signs’, and
that natural laws are ‘a grammar for the understanding of nature’ (III:238-9). Stewart’s
assertion is tenuous, since Bacon speaks of essential qualities that seem to be causal
powers. Nevertheless, Stewart makes the claim, and I would argue that it is intelligible
in the light of my reading of this volume. Realizing the pervasiveness of Baconianism,
Stewart sought to make his system a Baconian system. He had therefore to interpret
Bacon for his readers. Since, with due Newtonian scientific modesty, he wanted to
restrict the science of mind to the discovery of laws, he was anxious to eschew Baconian
essentialism. Humean causality and nominalism now shared the Baconian umbrella
with Reid’s inductive principle.
While Stewart noted that before the Novum Organum its method had been
followed only accidentally and haphazardly, he nevertheless ‘concluded that science
would eventually have progressed without [Bacon’s] work’ (Yeo 1985:261). It is
precisely the complexity of Stewart’s position on Bacon that needs consideration. In
order that his model should enjoy the imprimatur of Baconian induction, Stewart
endorsed the aim of applying scientific knowledge ‘to the enlargement of human power
and the augmentation of human happiness’ as Baconian. In panegyric tones he declared,
‘how far does he rise above the level of his age!’. But concomitant with the notion that
a correct scientific methodology was the central criterion for the progress of knowledge,
Stewart elevated the method over the man. Hence his comment that Bacon ‘only
accelerated a revolution which was already prepared by many concurrent causes’
(III:224,236,361).
Since hypothesis was integral to his proposed philosophy of mind, and although
Bacon had denied the value of hypothesis, Stewart claimed a Baconian pedigree,
asserting that ‘in thus apologizing for hypothesis’ he was only repeating ‘in a different
form the precepts of Bacon’ (III:302). In fact, according to Shapiro, ‘Bacon was
extremely hostile to hypothesis, associating even the Copernican hypothesis with
fiction’ (Shapiro:45).28 It is interesting that elsewhere Stewart criticised Bacon. In his
Britannica ‘Dissertation’, where he rejected Bacon’s categories of the faculties in
relation to human knowledge, he attributed the popularity of this part of Bacon’s
philosophy to its ‘specious simplicity’, and not to the soundness of its logical structure

28
See Shapiro (44-61) for a discussion of the complex development of the history of the hypothetical
method in seventeenth-century England.
 173
(I:1-22).29 This adds weight to the argument that in this methodological treatise Stewart
was using, rather than following, Bacon.30 In any case, hypothesis, once it was
designated a precept of Bacon, was keeping company with Reid’s inductive principle,
Humean causality and nominalism under the Baconian umbrella Stewart had erected.

Hypothesis, astronomy and utility

Laudan argues that developments in science always precede debates on
methodology. Whereas eighteenth-century ‘philosophers of science and
epistemologists’ such as Hume, Reid, Condillac, Diderot and even Kant (in the first
Critique) condemned the hypothetical method, and most argued in favour of strict
induction, in the early nineteenth century Stewart was one of the methodologists who
conceded that the ‘method of hypothesis’ had a vital role to play in scientific inference –
more central than enumerative or eliminative induction. Laudan sees this early
nineteenth century about-turn on hypothesis as constituting the emergence of philosophy
of science as we know it today (Laudan 1981:10-15). The focus has moved from a
philosophy of discovery to a philosophy of validation. While Stewart wanted to
emphasise that the old forms of deductive argument had been supplemented by an
inductive logic of discovery, he was gesturing also toward a philosophy of explanation
and verification. In the history of methodology, Stewart is located between Reid and
Whewell. He was searching for the via media that, according to Laudan (129), Herschel
and Whewell later defined between Reid and the other opponents of hypothesis, on the
one hand, and the extreme votaries of hypothesis like Hartley and Le Sage, on the
other.31

29
In the ‘Dissertation’, it must be remembered, Stewart was not arguing for a model. In relation to
Elements Vol.1, Robinson (1989) asserts that Stewart’s original manuscript was more critical of Bacon
than the published version, and that it was diluted in response to Reid’s privately delivered critique (in an
unpublished manuscript). Charles Stewart-Robertson (1987:296) claims only that the critique may have
referred to an early draft of the first volume of the Elements.
30
I am certainly not the first to notice Stewart’s manipulation of Bacon. Lyall (1817:46) accused both
Stewart and Reid of ‘merely availing themselves of Bacon’s venerable name’. And, more recently, Yeo
has discussed Stewart in his exploration of Baconianism in science in nineteenth-century Britain (Yeo
1985:263-4). In the field of political economy, Salim Rashid (1985:245) finds Stewart to be noteworthy
for having ‘revised’ methodology ‘while waving the banner of Baconianism’. Mary Poovey (277) argues
that Stewart’s induction was intended to ‘invoke but surpass Baconian method and Baconian facts’.
31
In the methodological work of Herschel and Whewell, Laudan (129-36) identifies what he calls ‘the
requirement of independent or collateral support [which demanded] . . . that before an hypothesis was
credible, it must explain (or predict) states of affairs significantly different from those which it was
initially invented to explain’. He argues that they were concerned ‘to find some way of reducing the
arbitrariness and adhocness of hypotheses’.
 174
Laudan (1981) uses Hartley, Le Sage and Stewart to argue that scientific
practice, in using hypotheses, broke with strict Baconian method, and that methodology
adjusted ex post facto. It is instructive to note that Stewart was insisting that the
hypothetical method was Baconian: there was no admitted break with Baconian method.
Stewart’s focus was not the post hoc rationalisation of a method for its own sake so
much as the role of this method in his own project. Stewart explored the methodology
of Hartley, Le Sage and Boscovich and, according to Laudan (15), endorsed hypothesis
because the sciences of the time required it. While this is true, it does not go far
enough: Stewart endorsed hypothesis because the sciences of the time required it, and
because he wanted to legitimate a science of mind in order to reassert the role of the
moral philosopher and the status of moral philosophy.
The controlled hypotheses Stewart wished to endorse were those sanctioned by
analogy. In this he had to oppose the position of Reid. In Laudan’s interpretation,
Stewart ‘had to concede’ that Reid ‘nowhere spelled out the rules of his form of
induction’ (Laudan:125). In fact Stewart did not so much concede Reid’s failing as
claim it as his point of departure. He held that Reid was wrong on a crucial point: he
rejected hypothesis as a stage in induction. When Reid challenged the ‘votaries of
hypotheses’ to name one useful discovery made in that way, Stewart responded (though
not in Reid’s lifetime) by citing the theory of gravitation and the Copernican system.
Newton’s theory of gravity had arisen from a ‘hypothesis suggested by analogy’,
and since the Ptolemaic system was ‘not demonstrably inconsistent with any phenomena
known in the sixteenth century’, the Copernican system was preferred for its ‘simplicity
and beauty’. Adam Smith (1971[1795]:74-6) had stressed the beauty and simplicity of
the Copernican system in his ‘History of Astronomy’. It is quite possible that Stewart’s
position on simplicity in astronomy was informed by what K. C. Cleaver terms Smith’s
‘Principle of Ontological Economy’, whereby initial systems of thought are always the
most complex (Cleaver 1989:213). Afterwards, says Smith, ‘it often happens, that one
great connecting principle is . . . found to be sufficient to bind together all the discordant
phaenomena that occur in the whole species of things’ (Smith:60-61).
Stewart was explicit that astronomy provided an argument not for hypothesis in
general, but for ‘hypothesis sanctioned by analogy’. He articulated the problem of
choosing between hypotheses unsupported by experience or analogy, and he cautioned
against transposing analogical-hypothetical reasoning directly to the human mind
(III:299-300,313-14, 316). But through astronomy he nevertheless demonstrated that
 175
there were some circumstances in which a hypothesis unsupported by direct evidence
could warrant acceptance. Because his science of mind had to be non-experimental, he
played down the importance of experiment through choosing astronomy as an exemplar
of the hypothetico-inductive model. In the Philosophical Essays (1810), he had taken
pains to minimise the distinction between observation and experiment, and to emphasise
the indirect utility of astronomy. In 1814 the arguments over observation and
experiment were absent: the thing to notice about astronomy was that it had progressed
through judicious use of the hypothetical method. Stewart implicitly likened the science
of mind to the science of astronomy, as a strategy in promoting his hypothetico-
inductive model for a science of mind.
Olson (1975:119) observes that whereas Reid warned against the principle of
simplicity, Stewart allowed it a greater role. It is helpful to contextualise Stewart’s
position. He critiqued the ‘passion for excessive simplification’ of the Greeks,
applauded Reid’s reaction to the over-simplification of the times, and eschewed
reductionism (III:300). Arthur Lovejoy (1964:7) characterises the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as ‘largely an age of esprits simplistes’, and Stewart argued that
prior to Reid the science of mind was plagued by ‘an undue love of simplicity’. Hume
was guilty of it, and Hartley wrongly pursued a mathematical reductionism. Adam
Smith, according to Stewart, pursued clarity but rightly eschewed simplicity and the
danger of reductionism in his political reasonings. And Brown’s false simplification
interfered with impartiality and observation of phenomena (X:292-3,8,llxxxi). Despite
all this, in the light of his project Stewart was forced to acknowledge that there was
indeed a role for simplicity. In astronomy, as I have noted, the chief advantage of the
Copernican heliocentric hypothesis over the Ptolemaic hypothesis seemed to be its
simplicity (III:313). Thus it was important not to reject entirely the idea of simplicity if
astronomy were to provide a methodological support for the new science of mind.
In another example from astronomy, Stewart reported that the hypothesis of a
Ring encircling the body of Saturn had enabled Huygens to explain all the known
phenomena and to ‘predict those which were afterwards to be observed’. But Stewart
was careful not to overstate the predictive power of hypothesis, positing that it was
perhaps precisely because this example was non-representative that it was so often cited
(III:313). If astronomy were to be a model for his science of mind, it was well that he
should remain cautious about the predictive power of hypotheses. So while astronomy
was a predictive science par excellence, Stewart’s need to use it as his model forced him
 176
to play down this feature. He was shy of making wild assertions about what his science
of mind would do. The ability to predict human action was not his goal; rather, he
soberly sought to reveal the laws of human behaviour, not to explain, predict or
experiment with it.32
In fact, Stewart was well aware that the predictive power of astronomy posed a
real problem for his distinction between mathematics and the natural sciences. He
anticipated being asked how it could happen that mathematical reasoning, applied to a
hypothetical science, could produce results infallibly predicting the behaviour of
celestial and terrestrial bodies in motion, if mathematics relied on arbitrary axioms. His
answer was that astronomy provided a ‘singular coincidence of propositions purely
hypothetical, with facts which fall under the examination of our sense’. And in any
case, practitioners of theoretical mechanics always studied abstractions, being forced to
leave out certain physical features and making allowances later in practice (III:153-5).
This response seems strangely inconsistent with the main argument of the Elements (that
a mathematical model was completely unsuited to scientific methodology), until we
seek its illocutionary force. Although astronomy posed such a difficulty in terms of
Stewart’s methodology, proving in fact to be the singular exception to it, still as a non-
experimental and hypothetical science it remained essential to his model for a science of
mind.
While Stewart criticised ‘the indiscriminate zeal against hypotheses’ among the
‘professed followers of Bacon’, he suggested they had simply interpreted both Bacon
and Newton ‘too literally’. Newton’s strictures on hypotheses had to be ‘qualified and
limited’ due to the ‘many exceptions to them [which] occur in his own writings’
(III:299,314). I have argued that this represents a significant departure from Reid, who,
according to Laudan, sought to structure the philosophy of mind ‘so as to conform to
Newton’s methodological insights’ (italics mine) (Laudan:89). As to Bacon, Stewart
thought that there were those who ‘have been more disposed to follow the letter of some
detached sentences, than to imbibe the general spirit of Bacon’s logic’. In any case the
‘rapid progress of knowledge’ of the last hundred years had rendered obsolete many of
the objections to hypothesis (III:303,310). Instead of confronting Bacon, Stewart

32
His notion of explanation differed from the modern notion exemplified in Hempel and Oppenheim’s
account (Hempel 1965). In denying that science could give us an explanation, he was denying that it
could reveal necessary connections or what he called efficient causes (II:9). Moral laws, unlike physical
laws, were not always followed, and were not predictive.
 177
appropriated him, freely interpreting Bacon’s inductive methodology, and his ‘spirit’, to
suit his own proposed science of mind.
In the light of historical work on the rethinking of hypothesis, it comes as no
surprise that in the late eighteenth century ‘hypothesis’ carried with it the connotation
of ‘wild or fanciful conjecture’ (Rashid 1985:252). Stewart took pains to distance
himself from precisely this connotation. It helps to explain his dismissal of the
‘hypothetical theories’ of Bacon’s predecessors, in contrast to which Bacon’s induction
involved only ‘useful’ and ‘necessary’ hypotheses. In rejecting the cypher analogy of
Hartley, Le Sage and Gravesande, Stewart warned against confirming a hypothesis as
true on the grounds that it had great explanatory power. Hartley claimed that ‘every
theory which can explain all the phenomena, has the same evidence in its favour, that it
is possible the key of a cypher can have from its explaining that cypher’. Thus, Hartley
suggested, a hypothesis was true if it explained the phenomena completely. Stewart
correctly pointed out that whereas in a cypher we had all the facts before us, in nature
we did not.33 Still, he drew on Hartley to defend the utility of hypothesis as an aid to
bringing new facts to light, and to making experiments for the sake of future inquirers.
Though he insisted on the validity of hypothetical thinking within each science, he
sanctioned Reid’s warning ‘against the danger of transferring hypothesis based on the
material world to the sphere of moral phenomena’. While for the sake of his project he
was strongly promoting analogical-hypothetical theories, he had to caution against their
injudicious and rash use (III:249-51,301,307-8,314, 316). John Venn (1973[1889]:401-
2) saw such warnings as useless, and commented that Stewart ought rather to have
cautioned people not to publish too early. But if we locate Stewart’s wariness within his
project for a science of mind, we can see that a cautious posture was a strategy well
suited to counteracting the prevalent hostility to hypothesis.
In articulating the problem of using observation to falsify a hypothesis, Stewart
explained how an ‘apparent exception’ could ‘turn out to be an additional illustration of
the very truth it was brought to invalidate’. Still, he emphasised that one of the great
values of hypotheses rested in their ability to generate experiments that led to their own
correction: for example, the Ptolemaic hypothesis was ‘a necessary step in the progress
of astronomical science’. Stewart implied that since Bacon ‘inferred the necessity of
avoiding every beaten track’ he would have sanctioned this process of hypothesis and

33
Peter Medawar (1967:146) notes that Stewart alone got to the bottom of this ‘strange blindness’ of the
time regarding the cypher analogy.
 178
falsification. In fact, Bacon had said that induction proceeded ‘by means of rejections
and exclusions’. The process was not only useful but necessary to the progress of
science (III:262,306-7,332). Falsification (though Stewart did not use the word) was
thus accommodated under his Baconian umbrella.34
Robertson (1976:41-2) casts Stewart and the Scottish school as self-conscious
pioneers, appreciative of Bacon’s pioneering spirit. In this light it is interesting to note
the examples Stewart cited to validate hypothetical thinking. As well as Galileo and
Newton, there was Dr Gregory who argued that hypotheses were ‘necessary for
establishing a just theory’. Also, Dr Hooke ‘by means of hypotheses’ anticipated
Newton’s theory of planetary motions. It is significant that Stewart celebrated Hooke
not for this but for his active championing of hypotheses as necessary despite the
conventional prohibition (III:302-4).35 It is no coincidence that this was of course what
Stewart himself was doing, and there is a sense in which Stewart casts Gregory, Hooke
and himself as Baconian pioneers of hypothesis.36

Analogy and appeals to theology

Stewart’s nominalist doctrine could be cast as a Baconian notion of the way in
which ‘words react on the understanding’ (Yeo 1985:287). Whereas Stewart generally
exposed the idols of the market place, he exploited the term ‘Baconian’ in order to
establish what I have called Baconian hypothetico-inductivism. Still, as we have seen,
he exposed the misuse of terms such as cause, hypothesis, analysis, synthesis and
induction. For instance, philosophers had been mistaken in calling Aristotle’s method
induction. He took the same approach to analogy, and argued that the evidence of
experience and analogy differed in degree, not kind (III:235,284). To reject analogy out
of hand was thus mistaken. This is a significant step given Reid’s outright objection to
analogy.
While Stewart sternly rejected the ‘fanciful analogies’ which language
occasionally suggested, he championed analogy as a heuristic device (III:296).

34
This is not to suggest that Bacon would have rejected falsification - he did say that much can be learned
from errors, through the process of exclusion (Bacon 1970:322-27). My point is that Stewart used this to
argue for the hypothetical method.
35
See Shapiro (1983:50-52) for a discussion of Hooke’s complex and ambiguous position on hypothesis.
It appears that Hooke was not as consistent as Stewart would have his reader believe, and this suggests
that Hooke, like Bacon, was being used as an argumentative resource by Stewart.
 179
Analogical arguments were at once more fruitful and more dangerous. Some
commentators (Laudan 1981; Medawar 1967; Olson 1975), observing Stewart’s
insistence on the heuristic value of hypothesis and analogy, have noted the significance
of Stewart’s rebellion against the ‘methodological strait-jacket’ (Nickles 1990:156) of
Reidian Newtonianism.
As with the inductive principle, Stewart claimed that the mind was ‘naturally
disposed’ to ‘indulge in analogical conjectures from the known to the unknown’
(III:289).37 Thus, whereas Reid had rejected analogical reasoning, Stewart’s
nominalism enabled him to postulate a kind of analogical principle akin to Reid’s own
inductive principle. In so far as this was an epistemological rather than a
methodological issue, Stewart’s nominalist approach, employed in constructing a model
for a science of mind, abetted in a different way his reconceptualisation of common
sense philosophy.
This view of analogy was supported by an appeal to theology. Just as
Copernicus perceived the harmony of the world as confirming the ‘great Author of the
world’, Stewart noted the ‘innumerable proofs . . . of that systematical unity and
harmony of design which are everywhere conspicuous in the universe’, and concluded
that ‘Analogy and Unity of Design may be regarded as very nearly synonymous
expressions’ (III:311-2,289). It is significant that whereas design was never thought un-
Baconian, in Reid’s scheme analogy was certainly methodologically suspect.
Furthermore, whereas Reid denied that we could use analogy to ground legitimately the
truths of religion, Stewart used design notions to justify analogical reasoning. He
claimed that Cuvier demonstrated that ‘the improvement of physiology’ had been, and
was to be expected, ‘chiefly from lights furnished by analogy’. For Stewart, the
resulting ‘comprehensive Laws of the Animal Economy’ revealed the ‘consistency and
harmony of one grand design’ (III:291-3).
Stewart’s point was that the argument from design, which he called Unity of
Design, was analogical in its very structure. From this he was able to argue that
analogy, in revealing Divine design in nature, assisted theological argument. This was
part of his vindication of analogical argument, which he needed for his science of mind.
He cited Newton’s analogical argument that the proof of action at a distance in Nature

36
Gregory himself aimed to bring about ‘a Baconian reform of medicine’ (Wood 1989:91).
37
There may be a connection between Stewart’s position on analogy and Adam Smith’s argument, again
in his ‘History of Astronomy’, that analogy had become ‘the great hinge upon which every thing turned’
(Smith 1971[1795]:30).
 180
meant that there could well be a supreme mover acting at a distance (III:294). Analogy
promoted scientific progress and helped to reveal the divine design; it was instrumental
in the theological argument from design. In the late eighteenth century ‘Newtonian-
based natural theology was increasingly overshadowed by natural theology based on the
biological sciences’ (Gascoigne:301). It is significant therefore that Stewart invoked
both Newton and physiology theologically to make his methodological point.
In a now familiar vein, Stewart suggested that ‘the general spirit and tendency’
of Bacon’s writings showed that he was ‘laying the foundations of a bulwark against
atheism’; Bacon too had found a ‘divine marshal’ of ‘order and beauty’(III:338-9). Thus
the argument from design, which included analogy, joined hypothesis, Reid’s inductive
principle, Humean causality, nominalism and falsification under the Baconian umbrella.
The story was different in the pragmatic science of medicine, and to indicate the
danger of analogical medical reasoning, Stewart cited the German monk of popular
tradition who poisoned by analogy.38 But he argued that in medicine, facts or
experience were necessarily theory laden. Thus medical evidence (whether experiential
or analogical) was ‘conjectural and dubious’ in comparison with that of chemistry or
mechanics (III:325,328-9). It was nonetheless evidence. So despite the inherent danger
of analogy, medicine required and validated the use of conjecture, or hypothesis.
In his Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers (1828) which was drawn from
his moral philosophy lectures, Stewart presented a priori and a posteriori proofs for ‘the
existence of the Deity’, which he did not feel to be an ‘intuitive truth’ (VII:11). This is
something Reid did not do – he insisted that there was no need to use reason to argue for
the existence of God; natural theology dealt with the unique feature of the divine mind
which was not subject to empirical investigation (Haakonssen 1999:742). Stewart was
particularly keen to promote the use of Reason in natural philosophy to argue from
design, and to combat revelation theology and the notion that belief in God was beyond
reason. He integrated natural philosophical ideas with a rational theology to develop an
argument for the existence of God that relied in part on Humean causation. Denouncing
the ‘pernicious and impious tenets of those theologians who maintained, that moral
distinctions are created entirely by the arbitrary and revealed will of God’ (II:38), he
treated the problem as historical, insisting that ‘a return to common sense, and to the

38
The monk ‘observed the salutary effects of antimony upon some of the lower animals’ and, reasoning
analogically, poisoned all the monks of his convent (III:325).
 181
genuine spirit of Christianity’ had been achieved.39 He complained, endorsing Locke, of
‘that worst of all heresies of the Romish church, which, by opposing revelation to
reason, endeavoured to extinguish the light of both’ (II:40-41). By locating the issue in
the past and directing his criticism at Catholicism, he avoided the fact of his serious
departure from Reid’s position.
A clue to Reid’s and Stewart’s theological differences might lie in Stewart’s
perfectibilism. His moral philosophy was infused with the notion of perfectibilism —
individual, social and political. Human beings and society were perfectible, moving
continually toward human and social improvement through a science of mind and
political economy, but the precise nature of that future perfection remained a possibility
and did not constitute certain knowledge.40 The absence of certainty sits comfortably
with the belief in perfectibilism, and invites the application of reason. The design
argument was responding to the question, How can we know about the existence of
God? Because the question indicates the absence of certainty, it invites the application
of reason. Reid, who was comfortable with theological certainty, could not ask that
question. Is it possible that Stewart’s belief in the perfectibility of human beings and
society rendered him open to the question of the very existence of the deity and to the
employment of reason in proof?

Stewart found that medicine validated the use of the idea of final causes as a
heuristic device. Noting the ‘regard paid by anatomists to Final Causes, in the study of
physiology’, he argued that it was because Harvey had an idea of ends that he
discovered the circulation of the blood; it was a matter of ‘probable’ design. In so far as
physiology was directed towards ‘ascertaining the functions of the various organs in the
human frame’, Stewart insisted it tacitly assumed that these functions were ‘ends in the
contemplation of the artist’. Whereas Descartes was prejudiced against final causes
because he thought it a presumption to seek to ‘penetrate into the counsels of Divine
Wisdom’, Stewart endorsed Boyle, Maclaurin and Newton, who argued that it was

39
In Stewart’s copy of Copleston (1821) there is a handwritten document that appears to be Stewart’s
draft or copy of a response in which he takes Copleston to task on natural and revealed religion. Clearly
the issue could not be relegated to the realm of history as he suggested in Elements (1814).
40
The science of the future was political economy, a moral science which, by describing ‘the future
human condition that is given to us as a possibility’, would thereby help to shape the present (Haakonssen
1994:x-xi).
 182
hardly ‘arrogant to attend to the design and contrivance that is so evidently displayed in
nature’. Newton, in particular, thought that the consideration of final causes was
‘essential to true philosophy’ (III:341-346). There is a sense in which Stewart, through
linking the illustrious astronomer to final causes, linked astronomy, the model for his
science of mind, to final causes, and hence to theology.
In this discussion about seemly and unseemly curiosity, and indeed in all of
Stewart’s discussion of experimentalism and methodology, there is implicit the notion
that curiosity drives investigation. Hypothesising, system building, experimentation,
seeking certainty, and seeking final causes – all crucial constituents of Stewart’s
Baconianism – involve the impetus of curiosity. As well, curiosity clearly gave impetus
to the Enlightenment commitment to causal explanation discussed by Berry (78).
Lorraine Daston has argued that curiosity was ‘an indispensable part of the militant
empiricism of seventeenth-century natural philosophy’ (Daston 1995:18), and I suggest
that it continued to inform the eighteenth-century Baconianism on which Stewart drew
to construct his methodology for a science of mind in 1814.
Stewart believed that in the science of mind people were ‘apt to confound’ final
and efficient causes since they confounded human and divine wisdom or intent. He
endorsed Adam Smith’s point that people never imagined ‘that the blood circulates, or
the food digests, of its own accord, and with a view or intention to the purposes of
circulation or digestion’; and he argued that people ascribed intention not to the watch’s
motion, but to the watchmaker. He inferred from this that we should not resolve ‘all the
different virtues into a sense of their utility’ (III:351-2). While his meaning is not
spelled out, it becomes clearer when read in conjunction with his Philosophy of the
Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828), which contains his Lectures given in 1792-3
and for twenty years afterwards (VI:111). Stewart contends that if there is divine
design in human actions, we cannot be conscious of it, and therefore should be wary of
using final causes to investigate human actions.41 Though the consideration of final
causes has ‘uses or advantages’ in ethical inquiries (and he does not specify these
here),42 and in physics is chiefly responsible for rendering ‘the investigation of general

41
Indeed, writing on ‘man’s free agency’, he offered a lengthy argument for free will versus
Necessitarianism. He emphatically resisted inferences from ‘what is altogether placed beyond the reach
of our faculties’, rejecting arguments about human action drawn from ‘the prescience of the deity’
(VI:343-96).
42
They are specified in VII:35-120, where he refutes Hume’s attack on the argument from design.
 183
laws interesting to the mind’, in the science of mind we must be vigilant against looking
for the ultimate and necessary cause of human behaviour (III:357).
This is in line with Stewart’s consistent disdain for what he termed ‘vulgar
metaphysics’, which involved inquiry into what could not be known. Stewart’s
insistence on the distinction between final and efficient causes, and his lack of clarity on
final causes with specific regard to the science of mind, were perhaps tied to a concern
to distance himself from revealed theology. According to William Paley’s Evidences of
Christianity (1794), some at least of the evidences were believed to be miraculous, and
hence supernatural rather than natural.43 What is clear is that Stewart promoted the
investigation of final causes, or teleological thinking, for its scientific rather than its
theological value.44
Stewart managed to give even final causes a Baconian sanction. Having
explained Bacon’s ‘contempt’ for final causes in terms of his reformist zeal in assaulting
Aristotelian prejudices, Stewart concluded that ‘if Bacon had lived’ to witness ‘the
discoveries to which [the investigation of Final Causes] has led’, he would have
changed his mind. So final causes, though described by Bacon as ‘a powerful obstacle
to the progress of inductive science’, joined the throng under Stewart’s Baconian
umbrella (III:335,337,339,344).
In scientifically legitimating final causes, Stewart was simultaneously seeking
the protective mantle of theological legitimacy for his science in a nation ‘obsessed by
the belief that the social and intellectual components of the French Revolution were still
active and ready to produce their explosive mixture again’ (Corsi 1988:57). The
dangers of being seen to recommend a materialist theory of mind became apparent in
England shortly after publication of the Elements with the interruption of William
Lawrence’s career. Lawrence was forced to resign his chair at the Royal College of
Surgeons when his materialist theory of mind was condemned as atheistic and was
linked to the horrors of the French Revolution and its aftermath (Mudford 1968:433-6;
Corsi 1988:55-8).
Writing on Reid’s engagement with Joseph Priestley’s materialism in the 1770s
and 1780s, Wood (1995:31) argues that Stewart’s analysis of this ‘tell[s] us more about
[his] own philosophical priorities than . . . about the actual course of events’. Thus

43
For a discussion of the revival of revealed theology in England in the troubled decades of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Gascoigne (237-269).
44
He gave a theological vindication of analogical argument, but this was within the framework of his
scientific defence of mental philosophy.
 184
Wood sees Stewart’s work in this instance in the context of his intellectual agenda. We
should view Stewart’s desire for theological affirmation in the light of his need to
distance himself from materialism, particularly if, as Grave (1960:134-5) has argued, he
verged on agnosticism. Grave notes that Stewart was at times ‘agnostic as to the nature
of what lies behind the phenomena’. This, combined with his aversion to revelation
theology, and his refusal to contribute to the Christian apologetic of the Oxford Noetics
(Corsi 1987), meant that he was walking a theological tightrope in dangerous times. If
we are to read his endorsement of Hume’s type of historical construction as also an
endorsement of Hume’s Natural History of Religion (and Stewart did not bother here to
distance himself from the content), then, given Hume’s suggestion that religion might be
a temporary historical phenomenon,45 we must wonder whether there are faint
suggestions of agnosticism in Stewart’s notion of conjectural history. (He certainly saw
it as a check on ‘that indolent philosophy, which refers to a miracle, whatever
appearances, both in the natural and moral worlds, it is unable to explain’ [X:34].)
There is also his endorsement of Humean causality and of John Leslie to consider. We
now know that Leslie was ‘almost certainly an atheist’ and even to Stewart’s
knowledge, he was at least sailing close to the wind of atheism (Morrell: 56).46 Stewart
walked a fine line, bearing in mind his intended audience. He was like other Scottish
thinkers who, according to Oz-Salzberger (40), wrote primarily for the next generation
of gentlemen participants in the British intellectual and political debates, and for an
educated laity as well as clergy and holders of office. He expected that people of
influence, and people destined for influence, would read his books. This is why there is
only a faintly discernible agnosticism (although Grave sees it), and why Stewart is
anxious to legitimate his science of mind on theological as well as scientific grounds.
I am not suggesting that Stewart was insincere in his use of design and final
causes, or that the man who had held the chair of moral philosophy was irreligious, but I

45
Since ancient times, polytheism had ben replaced by monotheism, which might conceivably be replaced
by an abstract Deism as humans developed more understanding and control of nature. Hume’s account
was limited to European societies.
46
Leslie (1804) said privately that he was ‘always ready in the externals of devotion to comply with
custom’. By the mid-1820s it was common knowledge in Edinburgh that Leslie was an atheist. Stewart
first defended Leslie in 1795, then in 1804, when he applied, twice unsuccessfully, for the chair of natural
philosophy at the University of St Andrews. Principal George Hill, leader of the Moderates, complained
of Stewart to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. Leslie was accused of being ‘a professed atheist, and a
democratical leader in the times of trouble’. Morrell thinks the first charge correct, but that Leslie was a
Whig rather than a republican (Morrell:53-56;62).
 185
have shown that the intellectual secularism of his work produced accusations of
paganism. Overall, his work reflects what Pitre (1982:98) terms ‘the Enlightenment
concern with the reconcilability of the rational and the spiritual’. Reid and Stewart
occupied close, but different positions, on the spectrum from Kierkegaardian irrational
faith to atheism. Besides the fact of Stewart’s upbringing – his father was an ordained
Presbyterian minister – Dugald himself considered taking Anglican orders when young,
and later became a lay elder in the General Assembly (X:xviii; Sher 1990:123).47 He
was an appreciative Presbyterian and Episcopalian church-goer, but resisted what he
saw as the corruption of educational institutions by clerics.48 Reid, too, was the son of a
cleric and looked benignly on episcopalianism, but he was never accused of paganism.
My point about Stewart’s rhetoric of final causes has nothing to do with irreligiosity;
rather, it suggests that he could, like Reid, have left science out of the picture entirely
when dealing with final causes.
For Reid, it was through common sense applied to experience that humans
inferred God’s existence from final causes. Final causes had religious, and not
scientific, significance (Grave 1960:147). Thus Reid (possibly in agreement with Bacon)
implied that science and religion were discrete areas, although science was pursued
within a religious framework, such as the teleological one provided by natural theology.
In discussing the Unity of Design, Stewart explicitly countered Reid’s objection to the
foundation of the truths of religion upon analogy (III:297). The fact that Stewart did not
leave science out of the picture is due chiefly to the fact that, unlike Reid, Stewart was
attempting to develop a model. Furthermore, Stewart argued that in the use of final
causes, religion and physics were closely allied (III:335). This is another illustration of
the fact that the pressures on Stewart were different from those on Reid. By 1814 there
was a level of public discussion on science and religion, as well as a changed political
and institutional climate.

Adjusting common sense

The problem of induction (a phrase Hume never used) is yet to be resolved. In
modern studies of induction, the point can still be made that ‘even halfway plausible

47
In 1771 when Stewart went to study at Glasgow, it was partly to study under Thomas Reid, and partly
with an eye to a scholarship to Oxford, which would have entailed a career in the Church of England. His
early recall to Edinburgh to take over the Mathematical Classes terminated this ambition.
48
Stewart attended the sermons of Rev Sydney Smith, and almost certainly also those of his close friend
Rev Archibald Alison, the chief representative of the Church of England in Edinburgh, in Charlotte
Chapel (Reid 1884:46).
 186
justification of induction is preferable to the scepticism engendered by having none at
all’ (Rescher 1980:186). Reid went to great lengths to make clear the relation between
his own philosophical position and Hume’s, but Broadie argues that ‘it is not as easy as
one might suppose to say precisely what that relation is’ (Broadie 1990:105).
Particularly because of the haziness surrounding the borders of common sense, Stewart
was able to promote a system as Reid’s common sense philosophy when in fact he
departed from his mentor on several crucial points.49
As part of his own response to Hume’s problem, Stewart was forced to redraw
the boundaries of Reid’s common sense philosophy. Reid thought the sceptical
violation of common sense was due to philosophical error: hypothesis had replaced
severe induction, there were analogies where the facts should have been left to their
uniqueness, and there was a vacuum in the place of first principles. It was important to
Reid that his polemical use of the uniqueness of the mind disallowed ‘the analogies out
of which the great sceptical hypothesis grows’ (Grave 1960:131, 143). He proclaimed it
to be a great merit of the inductive method that it teaches us to ‘treat with contempt
hypothesis in every branch of philosophy, and to despair of ever advancing real
knowledge in that way’ (Laudan:89).50
The ‘first principles of contingent truths’, which included the inductive
principle, and the ‘first principles of necessary truths’ became the principles of Reid’s
common sense. The principles of contingent truths affirmed that there was an external
world, and that there were other minds besides one’s own. The principles of necessary
truths affirmed the truthfulness of our faculties; that God existed was a necessary truth
(Grave:117). According to Torgny Segerstedt (1935:153), Reid declared necessary
truths were necessary because they were not derived from experience, but implanted by
God in the human constitution. In the Inquiry, Reid noted an ‘opposition betwixt
philosophy and common sense’ (Reid 1970[1764]:77), and in his Lectures on the fine
arts (1774), he constructed a history of philosophy that presented modern philosophy as
‘a barren trunk’ from which all the branches had been lopped. In fact Reid thought that

49
James Mackintosh (1836:323) asserted that ‘Stewart employed more skill in contriving, and more care
in concealing, his very important reforms of Reid’s doctrines, than others exert to maintain their claims to
originality’.
 187
the principles of common sense should ground philosophy, and that common sense and
philosophy could be reconciled once the theory of ideas was rejected. But some chose
to read his championing of common sense as a malediction against philosophy, rather
than simply against metaphysical paradox and scepticism. Hence Reid pitted his first
principles of common sense (and the inductive method) against scepticism, hypothesis
and analogy, but antagonists claimed it was against philosophy itself.
Stewart regretted not only Reid’s perceived assault on philosophy (Grave
1960:31), but also the very label ‘common sense’, because of its historical opposition to
science and to the ‘speculative convictions of the understanding’. Here Stewart’s
nominalism was reflected in his recognition that, since we think largely in words, the
term ‘common sense’, with its connotations of ‘mother-wit’, was itself problematic.
While he wished Reid had not employed a phrase ‘so well calculated by its ambiguity to
furnish a convenient handle to misrepresentation’, he called on philosophers ‘to lend
their aid in supplying what is defective in his views’, rather than dismissing outright a
doctrine so intimately connected with human happiness (X:306-7). Stewart refashioned
Reid’s first principles, the nucleus of which he took to be the inductive principle, into
‘Fundamental Laws of Human Belief’ or ‘elements of reason’ (III:40-49).51 As a
methodologist he retrieved hypothesis and analogy, as well as final causes, for his
account of induction (III:286-7,297). Perhaps because Stewart himself underplayed the
differences between his system and Reid’s common sense philosophy, commentators
have not stressed these differences.52 But in fact, common sense in Stewart’s hands
changed its shape. In reconceptualising the relationship between common sense,
induction, hypothesis, analogy, final causes and scepticism, Stewart was thereby
renovating common sense itself, so that, importantly, it incorporated his hypothetico-
inductive methodology.

50
Wood raises the possibility that Reid was led to his anti-hypothetical methodology as a result of his
engagement with Buffon’s writings (Wood 1987:175).
51
Grave confirms the inductive principle to be ‘in a class by itself’ (Grave:117). Whewell took issue
with Stewart’s ‘fundamental laws of belief’ on the grounds that ‘laws require and enjoy a conjunction of
things which can be contemplated separately, and which would be disjoined if the law did not exist’
(Whewell 1837:161).
52
It is significant that Veitch (X:lxxxix), Stewart’s biographer (who might have been expected to note
Stewart’s individuality), referred to ‘the Philosophy of Reid and Stewart’ as if there was little or no
difference between them. Veitch took over the project from Hamilton just prior to Hamilton’s death, and
as Hamilton’s biographer was aware of Hamilton’s project to ensure the continuity of common sense
philosophy (Veitch 1882). Hamilton, who himself took common sense even farther from its Reidian
roots, had no wish to draw attention to dividing lines within common sense philosophy.
 188
The Elements Vol.2 is an argument for the primacy of philosophy over physical
science. What is significant is that it was necessary for Stewart to make this argument at
all. He was the first moral philosopher in the Scottish context to find himself in this
position.53 Forced into a rear-guard defence of the intellectual authority of moral
philosophy, Stewart had to engage in battle on the newly emerging battleground of
scientific experimental methodology. Whereas debate of a general kind on method can
be traced back to Bacon and Descartes, for most of the eighteenth century a fairly
orthodox and vague Baconianism prevailed in Britain. It was in the late eighteenth
century that Scottish philosophers began to debate the merits of Bacon as a
methodologist (Yeo 1985:259), and Jeffrey’s assault in 1804 on non-experimental
philosophy underlines the advent of methodology as an arena of combat.
From this analysis a picture emerges of Stewart as a cautious pioneer, a
hypothetical Newtonian, a summarising innovator, a defiant disciple, and an ambivalent
admirer of French Enlightenment thought. Earlier I noted the evidence of his prudent
courage. Such slightly oxymoronic notions suggest the complexity of Stewart’s
position. He was attempting the construction of a model of scientific inquiry that could
be applied to a study of mind. Since he was seeking both theological and scientific
legitimacy for his hypothetico-inductive model, he claimed a Baconian pedigree for
hypothesis supported by analogy, and offered scientific support for the argument from
design and the investigation of final causes. It was his unstated aim to lead his reader to
liken the science of mind to the non-experimental science of astronomy, and on this
basis to accept his hypothetico-inductive model for a science of mind.

Some commentators have assumed a homogeneity in Stewart’s work, taking

little notice of his development from mental philosophy to a science of mind. This
explains why there are misconceptions about what he was trying to achieve and why he
employed the means that he did. While this thesis does not investigate his philosophical
development, my brief foray into intellectual biographical terrain reveals that, far from
setting out to summarise the Scottish school, by the time Stewart wrote Volume 2 of the

53
Naturally the primacy of philosophy was part of philosophical discourse, but there was no real tension
on this issue in Scotland prior to Stewart’s time. The challenge to the primacy of philosophy was
complicated at this time by the fragmentation and demise of natural philosophy which, previously, had not
 189
Elements he was trying to achieve a scientific legitimation for his methodologically
grounded science of mind.54 This was the lynch-pin in his lifelong campaign to defend
moral philosophy. My final chapter considers how, later in his life, Stewart added
another component of this affirmation: an account of the moral and intellectual persona
of the moral philosopher.

been in conflict with metaphysics/moral philosophy. Now the ‘sciences’ were beginning to claim their
own raison d’être.
54
Wood’s (1985:317) point about Stewart differing from Reid in highlighting the methodological reform
of the science of mind is relevant here.
 190

Chapter 8

Re-fashioning the moral philosopher

 191
The chapter entitled ‘Of the Varieties of Intellectual Character’, which appeared
in the final volume of Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1827), has not
been subjected to the critical gaze of historians.1 Here Stewart addressed the role of
moral philosophy in intellectual life. By 1827, although the primacy argument was no
longer explicit in Stewart’s work, it is crucial to understanding what he was doing in
attempting to trace the effects of intellectual pursuits on character. We should see
Stewart’s chapter not as detached reflection on varieties of intellectual character, but as
part of his engagement with the historical forces that moulded him.2 The ‘Varieties’
chapter was his last word in the Stewart-Jeffrey debate.3 Following a brief overview, I
canvass possible sources before discussing Stewart’s deployment of the ethos of
solitude, the professions he included and excluded, and his continuing engagement with
Jeffrey. I argue that it is only when we are able to locate the ‘Varieties of Intellectual
Character’ in the context of Stewart’s mission to resurrect the role of moral philosophy
that we can understand (a) his sudden attention to this subject at a late stage in his
career, especially when we consider the novelty of its inclusion in such a work (when
none of his predecessors had specifically addressed the issue); (b) his critique of
mathematics and poetry; (c) the inclusion of a section on women; (d) his silence on the
experimental sciences; and (e) his unstated anti-Baconianism.

Constructing a moral persona

When the status of the Scottish moral philosophers was institutionally protected,
their character was not usually an issue. However, the rising intellectual authority of the
experimental sciences coupled with the challenges to the Scottish educational system
produced a situation in which the value of moral philosophy was questioned. In
articulating a set of governing conditions common to his subjects, Greenblatt argues that
‘self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or
undermining, some loss of self’ (Greenblatt 1980:9). It also emerges when people are
seeking to create a new identity; for example, the natural philosopher. Robert Boyle,

1
A version of this chapter has appeared in BJHS (Tannoch-Bland 1997). Bryson (189) made brief,
dismissive mention of Stewart’s thoughts on women and education. More recently, Jacyna (39-40) has
visited the work in relation to Stewart’s response to the moral problem of specialisation.
2
At a time when philosophical learning seemed old-fashioned compared to the specialist learning on the
English model, it was also an expression of the Scottish struggle to adapt their system to modern
conditions, as described by Davie (1961:190).
3
His later Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828) consists mainly of his Lectures
given in 1792-3 and for twenty years afterwards (VI:111).
 192
Isaac Newton and George Cuvier all manifested self-fashioning: they sought, for various
reasons, to promote certain notions of the character of the natural philosopher (Shapin
1990; Outram 1978).4 Having argued for two decades that moral philosophy was of
more importance than the other sciences, Stewart turned his attention from moral
philosophy to the moral philosopher.
In 1802 as Reid’s biographer, in response to political turmoil, he had drawn on
the ethos of solitude to present the philosopher as apolitical and morally superior. And
in 1815, as an encyclopaedist he had positioned the philosopher as public intellectual.
In 1827, responding to the loss of institutionalised authority of moral philosophers, he
set about fashioning the character of the moral philosopher. Focusing on the effects of
the study of moral philosophy on the individual, he argued that it produced a person of
superior intellectual character.5 One immediate context was the Scottish University
Commission of 1826, made up mainly of lawyers and landowners who in 1830 mounted
a challenge to philosophy by arguing for a more substantial role for classics in the arts
curriculum, at the expense of philosophy (Williams 1992:91). Stewart died in 1828, but
in 1826 when he was writing on intellectual character, the tenor of the concerns of the
University Commission would have been known to him. He had seen the problem of
the shifting locus of intellectual authority at the turn of the century, and in this work
turned to addressing the problem anew.
Stewart’s character-fashioning project was not new. It was not even new to
Stewart, given that he had engaged in fashioning the philosophic persona in 1802.6 In
discussing Stewart’s attempt to ‘create a way to make what counted as a fact inaugurate
a future that the philosopher had already imagined’, Poovey (273) appreciates that he
was determined to make the professor of moral philosophy ‘an agent of change’. His
motivation, the defence of philosophy itself, and of the role of the philosopher, was new.
Moreover, the form of his character-fashioning – an analysis of the various ways in
which habitual intellectual pursuits affect the intellectual and moral character – was
new.
That this novelty went unremarked is not surprising. We have seen that Stewart
claimed to be a disciple, presenting his work as uncontroversial, taken-for-granted,

4
Henry Krips (1994) argues that in the text of New Experiments Boyle was engaged in the constitution of
a new form of subjectivity for scientists
5
While the claim that meticulous study produced moral benefits was not new, Stewart was doing
something new with the argument: he used it to construct the identity of the moral philosopher at a time
when the social role of the philosopher was unclear.
6
When the ‘Life of Reid’ was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
 193
unproblematic synthesis. Well known for his aversion to controversy, he developed a
literary style that sought to avoid contention. We have seen that, as a prominent Whig
during the Dundas despotism in Edinburgh, he was not always successful in this.
Nevertheless his reputation for calm, fastidious scholarship preceded him. Perhaps in
1827 his audience, not expecting novelty and originality, did not notice it. What they
found seemed reasonable and scholarly, exciting no public reaction.
The Scots were steeped in the idea of character, which was indeed a
preoccupation of moral philosophers. Nevertheless, none of Stewart’s predecessors had
constructed a detailed intellectual typology comparing the moral personas associated
with specific intellectual pursuits. Stewart himself claims originality in this methodical
examination of the ‘particular studies . . . which distinguish the different classes of
literary men from each other . . . to ascertain, with somewhat of logical precision, in
what respects their intellectual characters may be expected to be severally marked and
discriminated’ (IV:188).7 To this end he proposed a methodical study of the
‘Metaphysician . . . the Mathematician, the Poet, the Critic, the Antiquary’. In fact, the
sections on the Critic and the Antiquary were replaced by one entitled ‘The Sexes’. His
stated object in studying these ‘literary men’ (emphasis mine) was to describe the effect
of different intellectual pursuits ‘in modifying the principles of our nature, as
intellectual, active, and sensitive beings’ (IV:188,198).
Since Stewart talked of both intellectual and moral character being affected, we
must ask what he meant by ‘intellectual character’. Although William Forbes, Beattie’s
biographer, had referred in passing to ‘the moral and the intellectual character of man’,
he had not defined the terms (Forbes 1806:387). For Stewart, intellectual character
involved ‘the original conception of a magnificent design, and the arrangement of the
measures by which it is to be accomplished’ (IV:189).8 Hence ‘intellectual originality
and clarity’ might be close to what Stewart meant by intellectual character. Moral
character involved the ‘steadiness, perseverance, and force of mind displayed in carrying
[the magnificent design] into execution; and, above all, its ultimate tendency with

7
Stewart here used ‘intellectual character’ as shorthand for intellectual and moral character. I will do the
same when its meaning is clear from the context.
8
Hume’s ‘Characters’ in his History of England were accounts of eminent persons or groups (Wertz
1993:411). In the eighteenth century it was ‘often regarded as something directly displayed’ (Yeo
1996:158).
 194
respect to the happiness and improvement of our fellow-creatures’.9 At the same time
he spoke of the unfortunate moral effects of the cultivation of a poetical talent in terms
of weakening the ‘force’ and ‘independence’ of character (IV:189,232). Hence
‘independence’ is present in both intellectual and moral character.
Stewart insisted that strong ‘intellectual character’ almost always co-existed with
strong ‘moral character’. For Ferguson (1768[1767]:48), in contrast, ‘superiority of
mind’ involved both ‘promptitude of the head’ and moral character, which were not
necessarily found together. But the alliance of virtue and reason went back to Plato,
whom Stewart elsewhere endorsed on this point (VII:365-6); moreover, English
Baconianism emphasised the ‘virtuous scholar whose pursuit of knowledge was a civic
act’ (Shapin 1991:294). Stewart traced links between various intellectual pursuits and
virtue. Studies that led to a ‘comprehensive and enlightened understanding’ inevitably
produced corresponding moral strength. Conversely, ‘a weak, shallow, and contracted
head’, unimproved by correct education, would ‘contrive to shape, for its own ends, a
selfish, casuistical, and pettyfogging [sic] code of morality’ (IV:189).
Stefan Collini (1983:158) demonstrates that ‘character’ in its colloquial
Victorian sense meant ‘vigour and independence of view’. By the middle of the
nineteenth-century there was much talk of ‘national character’, and John Burrow points
out that public virtue was more typically rendered as ‘independence of character’ than
the eighteenth-century’s ‘patriotism’ or ‘virtue’ (Burrow 1983:173,205).10 These
elements of eighteenth-century language are conspicuous by their absence in Stewart’s
1827 study: nowhere does he mention ‘patriotism’ or ‘virtue’, and there is no mention of
politics, economy or the nation. Instead his focus is on the individual character, and the
way in which individual intellectual pursuits impact upon the character, although he
does include a claim that racial character can be distinguished (IV:247-8).11
Although Stewart’s definition of intellectual character involved originality, this
was not Romantic, organic genius. Throughout his works there is evidence that he
valued the fruits of painstaking analysis over streaks of brilliance, for it was only the

9
In 1792 he claimed that ‘a manly confidence in the clear conclusions of human reason . . . united (as it
generally is) with personal intrepidity, which forms what the French writers call force of character’, were
prerequisites for rendering a philosopher happy and ‘a blessing to mankind’ (II:71).
10
As J. S. Mill (1985[1859]:124) defined it, character was something a person possessed or did not
possess. It was independence of view. One whose desires and impulses were an expression of his own
nature, as developed and modified by his culture, had character.
11
If we are to understand the nineteenth-century discourse on national character, and independence of
character, there is value in getting the history right. Given the popularity of Stewart’s works, it is almost
inconceivable that nineteenth-century writers on the subject had not consulted his Elements.
 195
conclusions slowly arrived at through perseverance that could be trusted.12 As Lorraine
Daston has explained, the eighteenth-century usage of the term ‘intelligence’ does not
quite coincide with its current meaning. For many of the philosophes, ‘thought was a
combinatorial calculus, and . . . [f]orce of mind, individual or collective, was at bottom
the ability to analyse, compare, and recombine ideas’ (Daston 1994:191-3). Thus
Stewart used intellectual originality and magnificence in a Condillacian sense: they were
born of exceedingly fertile combinations and more penetrating analysis, rather than
being something mystical and spontaneous. And precisely because the process was
rational rather than mystical, the effects of intellectual pursuits on the character could be
traced. Unsurprisingly, given the argument of my earlier chapters, what emerges from
Stewart’s discussion is that only moral philosophers could attain the highest levels of
intellectual originality and moral force of mind. This took him on a path very different
from that of his natural philosophical contemporaries.
The earliest British discussion I have found of intellectual character outside the
debate on science and religion is in John Abercrombie’s Inquiries concerning the
intellectual powers and the investigation of truth (1830), but this post-dates Stewart’s
publication, and so does not help us to understand what might have prompted Stewart to
undertake this study (Abercrombie 1840[1830]:164,451-2).13 In an effort to locate
indications of earlier interest in the question, I have looked at the works of Scottish
moral philosophers Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Hugh
Blair, Thomas Brown and James Beattie, and can find no evidence that any of them had
done anything similar.14 Where these people wrote on taste or the fine arts, they
generally endorsed the arts as a valuable area of human endeavour and interest, implying
moral effects of specific intellectual activities, but they did not explicitly address the
question of the effects of intellectual activity on moral character.15 James Beattie

12
In 1793 he criticised ‘that blind admiration of original genius, which is one of the chief obstacles to the
improvement of the arts, and to the progress of knowledge’ (II:32).
13
Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) did not address intellectual character, but
the reconciliation of sense and reason.
14
Edinburgh Review articles quoting Stewart show that his ideas on intellectual character gained some
currency (ER 1828:280-1; Hamilton 1836:442-45). I do not suggest the Scottish moralists were not
interested in the question of intellectual and moral character. Indeed, they routinely drew on Bacon’s
interest in the culture of the mind and Malebranche’s fascination with character. Thus Stewart’s interest
in the subject grew out of these eighteenth-century moral philosophical preoccupations, but I am
interested in his concentration on the intersection of professional intellectual style with private life, which
is new.
15
Philosophy of the fine arts was a branch of moral philosophy. Whereas Ferguson (1757) did not
address the moral character of poets, he did, in response to charges by some intellectuals that the theatre
caused immorality, address the moral effects of poetry (theatre) on the audience, finding them to be
generally positive. This pamphlet was in Dugald’s library, bound together with the stage-play ‘Douglas’
 196
(1793:II:559-60), one of the common sense philosophers, warned that the ‘habit of
reading romances is extremely dangerous . . . and that many of the follies, and not a few
of the crimes, now prevalent, may be traced to the same source’. But Beattie did not
address the intersection of professional intellectual style with private life.16
Wood (1985:313) has shown that in the Life of Reid (1803) Stewart addressed
the social role of the moral philosopher, but Stewart’s 1827 work is much more
ambitious, amounting to a comparative survey of intellectual character. Although I have
been unable to find evidence of contemporary surveys of the moral character of the
intellectual, Yeo’s work on ‘images of Newton’ confirms the importance people placed
on the link between genius and virtue (Yeo 1988:257-284).17 Dorinda Outram
(1978:153-178) has found evidence of one particular aspect of this theme – the moral
persona of the natural philosopher – in the éloges of Georges Cuvier in the early 1800s,
and Shapin (1990:191-218) has discussed Robert Boyle’s attention to it in the 1600s.
The comments of Yeo, Outram and Shapin on intellectual style and its connection with
personal and private life offer useful tools for interrogating Stewart’s attention to the
subject.
Yeo points out that John Herschel and Henry Brougham, in ‘two important
apologias for science, asserted that scientific inquiry produced a moral effect on the
minds of its cultivators’. In 1827 (a year after Stewart had completed his Elements),
Brougham claimed that men of scientific genius were morally elevated, holding ‘a
station apart’ from other mortal men. As a result of this type of sentiment, some
theologians feared the growth of ‘a secular morality founded on science’. Thus when
Whewell reviewed Herschel’s Discourse (1830) and discussed the ‘moral conduct of
intellect’, one context was the debate on whether or not rational science was opposed to
religion. And it was to rebut the fears of atheism that Whewell argued in 1833 that
inductive and deductive mental habits produced different religious outcomes. The great

(D.S.f.5.52). Monboddo too was an outspoken champion of the theatre. Adam Smith, who did not see
poetry as instruction, waived the question of the effect of poetry on morals, insisting that it was an
essential means of recreation (Adler 1952:404).
16
An essay on political economy in Blackwood’s (1824b), heavily endorsing Stewart’s views, quoted
Stewart’s own passing reference to intellectual habits in Elements II (1814), where he contrasted the
effects of statistical and philosophical studies on intellectual character. It is possible that this review may
have stimulated Stewart to return to the topic.
17
Shapin (1996:483) identifies ‘a pervasive and a consequential connection between genius and virtue . . .
[running] right through the nineteenth century, in appreciations of Boyle, Newton and many other
scientists’.
 197
scientific discoverers reasoned inductively and this strengthened their piety (Yeo
1993:118-120).
Stewart himself had asserted in 1814 that the design in nature, as revealed by
scientific inquiry, produced appreciation of God’s greatness (III:289); but the new
apologias went beyond the usual natural theological claim that natural knowledge had
moral benefits for its students, even though they remained within the theological context
which had been so important to Boyle.18 Stewart took the question of intellectual
character outside the tradition of natural theology, and in Britain this was new.
Although he excluded natural philosophers and theologians from his study, this is not to
say that he secularised the issue. Rather, he addressed a different issue: he was re-
fashioning the character of the moral philosopher.
This brings us back to Boyle and Cuvier and their interest in the moral persona
of the natural philosopher, and to the work of Shapin and Outram on the idea of
scientific solitude in the construction of the natural philosopher as a moral knower.
Whereas Wood has drawn on Outram to expose Stewart’s recourse to solitude in his
Life of Reid, I want to interrogate Stewart’s deployment of the ethos of solitude in his
construction of the moral philosopher as moral knower. Faced with the problem of the
declining status of the moral philosopher at a time when experimental philosophy was
now strong, and given that moral philosophy was necessarily solitary, Stewart turned to
notions of moral experimentalism predicated on solitude.

Stewart’s Philosophical Solitary

Given the considerable extent to which Stewart had deployed Baconianism as an
argumentative resource in his work on methodology, it is not surprising that his
‘Intellectual Character’ drew on Bacon’s idols of the mind to make a point.19 In the
Novum Organum (1620) Bacon held that there were four perennial sources of error,
mental habits which were obstacles to true understanding.20 Stewart was particularly

18
Shortland and Yeo (1996:21) quote Joseph Priestley in 1775 to illustrate ‘how the Enlightenment
interest in generalisations about the nature of science coexisted with a concern about the qualities of its
individual practitioners’.
19
In his earlier work on philology and methodology, he had attributed great importance to the errors
related to the alliance of words and names, the idols of the market place (see chapter 7).
20
These idols of the mind were 1) the idols of the tribe which derive from human nature so that we all
share these errors; 2) the idols of the cave which belong to individuals as a result of individual nature plus
education and environment; 3) the idols of the market place which derive from the tyranny of language
and the way in which words inhibit and overrule understanding; and 4) the idols of the theatre which are
the received wisdoms, the dogmas of entrenched philosophies, religions and rituals (Bacon:263-65).
 198
concerned with Bacon’s idols of the cave, which derive from individual nature plus
education and environment, and argued that the philosophy of the human mind could
correct ‘those biases and erroneous habits of thinking that Bacon classes under the title
of Idola specus [idols of the cave]’ (IV:245). Bacon thought that solitary individuals
would fall prey to these individual prejudices of the inquirer, and he insisted that the
making of knowledge was profoundly collective.21 The Baconian inductive method was
to be implemented by a complex, organised collectivity (Shapin 1990:201).
What is at first surprising is that Bacon’s emphasis on scientific co-operation as
a corrective to the idols of the cave was missing from Stewart’s account. In his
encyclopaedic ‘Dissertation’ (1815), he had celebrated the ‘establishment of learned
corporations’ such as the Royal Society of London and the Royal Academy of Science
in Paris for ‘their influence on the general progress of human reason’ through correcting
the Idola specus which Bacon had linked to the ‘retired student’ (I:94-6). But in 1827
he promoted the rival ethos of solitude, in which the highest knowledge was gained
through solitary reflection, by the mind turning its attention ‘inwards upon its own
operations, and the subjects of its own consciousness’ (IV:193). Introspection is the
core of Scottish mental philosophy. But when Stewart endorsed the ethos of solitude, he
did so in direct contradiction of Bacon, because he could not afford to make a virtue of
co-operation.22 Moral philosophy was, after all, necessarily solitary.23
In the early nineteenth century there was a debate in Scotland on Bacon’s
significance and the relevance of his ideas. Whereas Macvey Napier, defending
Baconianism from the Quarterly Review’s attacks, implied that there was consensus on
the nature of Baconian method and its application to the physical sciences, David
Brewster denied that the natural sciences owed any debt to Bacon, and Thomas Brown
had attacked Bacon’s idea of the forms as too Aristotelian (Yeo 1985:265-6). Given
Stewart’s earlier strenuous Baconianism, it might seem surprising that he ignored this

21
Whereas the errors Bacon identified were intellectual, Stewart focused on the moral implications of
mental practices. The Baconian idea of errors having sources is embedded in Stewart’s analysis, so there
is a sense in which he extended Bacon’s idea of the idols, taking it into the realm of moral character.
22
Possibly also, it was in contradiction of civic humanism (Pocock 1972) with its emphasis on public
service.
23
This fact sat uncomfortably with the Scottish emphasis on sociability as the medium for clarifying
political/moral issues, and this is in part what Stewart is addressing in this work.
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debate in 1827.24 But if we accept that his aim in this chapter on ‘Intellectual Character’
was to establish the importance, the primacy even, of moral philosophy, we can see that
he studiously avoided introducing a current debate that would have distracted his
readers’ attention from his subtle point, the unique value of the moral philosopher.
Bacon specifically rejected the contemplative ideal which, ‘by exalting the
“pleasure and dignity of a man’s self”, perverts the end of learning’. In place of the
prideful contemplative ideal, the Baconian scientist embraced the optimism of ‘a
progressive and collective view’ (Prior 1964:46-7). In order to exalt the moral
philosopher, Stewart had to rehabilitate the contemplative ideal by marrying it to the
humanistic and naturalistic Baconian ideal of the mastery of nature for the benefit of all.
Thus he distinguished between intellectual and moral character in the individual in order
to endorse the contemplative ideal only when it co-existed with ‘above all, [an] ultimate
tendency with respect to the happiness and improvement of our fellow-creatures’
(IV:189). Shapin acknowledges the symbolic power of solitude in that it
expresses direct engagement with the sources of knowledge – divine and
transcendent or natural and empirical . . . Solitude publicly expresses
disengagement from society, identified as a set of conventions and concerns
which act to corrupt knowledge. (Shapin 1990:191)
In the seventeenth century, alongside the avowedly Baconian notion of the public
character of experimental science propagated by the early Royal Society, there existed
an image of the scientific solitary. In fact Robert Boyle (1627-91) himself successfully
cultivated the ideal of the experimental solitary as a ‘priest of nature’ working in
seclusion from the civic world, in the ‘holy’ solitude of his laboratory (Shapin:201-3).
Thus Boyle used solitude to construct the experimental philosopher as moral knower,
and Stewart knew and quoted this part of Boyle (VII:94). According to Yeo (1993:136-
7), although there was this version of solitude as isolated experimentalism, by the early
nineteenth century, in Britain, solitude was rarely mentioned without trying to qualify it
with Baconian collectivism.
Outram has shown how the pastoral ideal of the savant studying nature in
solitude was deployed by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), founder of palaeontology, in his
official eulogies for scientists in post-Revolutionary France. These were for the Institut
des Sciences and the Academie Francaise, and were read aloud to the élite of Paris at

24
Stewart was involved in the debate to the extent that his works were used by both sides. A
Blackwood’s (1818:658) reviewer was unrelentingly scathing and remarkably insulting to Napier,
declaring ‘it is with a miserable bad grace that he comes hobbling in the wake of such a writer as Mr
Stewart’.
 200
annual public sessions of the societies after 1800.25 Outram emphasises the rhetorical
value of solitude, seeing it as
an essential part of the chemistry of the moral authority of the natural
philosopher, because it decisively established his remoteness from the ordinary
pressures of human groups and allowed a ‘pure’ and immediate reaction to the
natural world (emphasis mine). (Outram:156-7)
Cuvier used the éloges to present science as isolated from politics. The insistence on
solitude allowed him to claim intellectual authority for the man of science independently
of a shifting institutional power base. In a politically turbulent age, such ‘independence
from the structures of dominance and dependence which organize human groups’ could
be crucial. By deploying the ideal of pastoral solitude in the academic funeral oration,
Cuvier presented science as politically neutral and therefore unchallengeable
(Outram:154-5,160). Not only did Stewart know Cuvier personally,26 but he read him in
the Biographie Universelle of 1812, quoting him with approval in 1821 (I:328,577).
His library also held Cuvier’s Receuil des éloges historique (1803) and Éloge historique
de Joseph Priestley (1805).27 Political neutrality doubtless had added appeal for
Stewart, given the politicisation of philosophy in Edinburgh following the French
Revolution. But the simple ideal of pastoral solitude employed by Cuvier, and by
Stewart himself in the Life of Reid, was at odds with Baconianism, and with Stewart’s
own definition of moral character, which, above all, was oriented towards our fellow-
creatures. I think we can see in Stewart’s work a new recourse to the ethos of solitude.
Cuvier used it to claim intellectual authority for scientists, and Stewart was unusual in
Britain in deploying solitude in a similar way. Specifically, Stewart developed a notion
of philosophical solitude to argue for the primacy of moral philosophy and the
superiority of the moral philosopher.
Stewart’s stress was on the philosopher who addressed the science of mind, the
highest subject of philosophy, so it was not simply the traditional notion of the pastoral
solitary to which he turned. In excluding natural philosophers from his study, and in
excluding poets and mathematicians from his notion of the retired scholar, he attempted
to create a notion of solitude peculiar to the moral philosopher. His ‘philosophical

25
Cuvier had a precursor in so far as Condorcet’s seventy-seven Éloges des académiciens de l’Académie
royale des sciences composed between 1772 and 1791 were vehicles for enlightenment propaganda
(Williams 1985:495).
26
See Stewart’s letter to Baron DeGerando, 17 July 1814 (MS.5319,ff.34-62:NLS).
 201
solitary’ (not his term), while it drew on the traditional idea of pastoral retreat, a
pervasive theme in Western culture from the Greeks onward, owed something more
immediately to the idea of Boylean experimental seclusion and to Cuvier’s solitary and
neutral natural philosopher.28 It is partly because these are post-Baconian strategic
deployments of solitude that they are relevant to Stewart’s project. Furthermore, Boyle
and Cuvier deployed the solitary in the area of the natural or experimental philosophy,
that is, in the area of Bacon’s concern, thus directly flouting Bacon’s prescription. This
could well have alerted Stewart to the strategic value of the retired scholar as an
argumentative resource.
Even greater illumination is provided by Shapin’s work on the radical opposition
of scholars and gentlemen in early modern Europe. He argues that the British natural
philosophical community developed and promoted the idea of the experimental natural
philosophical gentleman-scholar through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and
well into the nineteenth century. In the promotion of a new type of knowledge and the
construction of a new type of knower, the imputation, to traditional scholarship, of
pedantry, incivility, seclusion, abstraction and uselessness was an important rhetorical
resource, not least to Bacon himself (Shapin 1991:293-5,300). In 1667 Thomas Sprat
claimed that ‘Experimental Knowledge’ offered the ‘best remedies for the distempers’
that solitary scholarly pursuits were thought to bring with them (quoted in Shapin
1991:296). In the mid-eighteenth century Dr. Johnson linked pedantry, or ‘the
unseasonable ostentation of learning’, to solitary meditation and retirement. Although
the ‘new science’ was not exempt from the critique of pedantry through this period, and
indeed many critics, such as Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), found little
contrast between antiquarian pedants and Newtonians, nevertheless apologists for
experimental natural philosophy employed the critique of pedantry and solitary
retirement as an argumentative resource in their discourses on natural philosophical
comportment (Shapin:303,305,308,311).
When we place Stewart against this background of the self-fashioning of the
experimental natural philosopher, in which seclusion and solitude were routinely
painted as inimical to the new knowledge, we can appreciate the significance, for him,

27
He also admired Jacques Necker’s (1773) Éloge de Colbert (X:64).
28
A long poem, author unknown, The Elegy of an Aged Hermit (1812), bound into a collection of poems
in Stewart’s library, epitomises this traditional notion of hermitic seclusion which idealises meditative
seclusion in the sheltering bosom of the wild, setting it against worldly concerns. Stanzas 32-35 address
the inferiority of natural knowledge compared to moral and divine knowledge. While the purely hermitic
 202
of Cuvier’s rhetorical move. To be sure, Boyle had done something similar in the
seventeenth century, but the emphasis on the Baconian co-operative ethos dominated
eighteenth-century efforts to legitimise the new knowledge and institutionalise the new
knower’s role. A new tack was taken in Stewart’s own time when Cuvier rehabiliated
scholarly solitude in the service of self-fashioning the experimental natural philosopher.
Since Stewart was seeking to set moral philosophers apart from and above other
investigators, the Baconian strictures on solitude could be ignored, but in their place he
needed to offer a distinctive concept of philosophical solitude that would apply only to
moral philosophers. The idea of the meditative and solitary nature of the work of the
moral philosopher was common to the Scottish moral philosophers. Hence in one sense
Stewart was merely endorsing a Scottish perception, but it is interesting that he did so
without using the word ‘solitude’ or ‘solitary’. To do so would have brought to mind
the usual corrective of this, namely, Baconian collectivism. Rather he employed terms
such as ‘insulated’, ‘withdrawing’, ‘independence’ and ‘inwards’ (IV:193-5). He
strategically deployed the ethos of solitude to construct a notion of the philosophical
solitary that implied the pre-eminence of the moral philosopher. Since by 1827 there
was clearly no possibility of an institutional re-establishment, he sought to affirm the
primacy of moral philosophy in the minds of his readers, through an appeal to the
prevailing passion for self-improvement.
It is interesting to consider Stewart’s audience in terms of this expectation of
self-improvement, a theme for which he could anticipate a sizeable readership in Great
Britain and abroad. From 1792 with the publication of Elements Vol.1, he had had
influence in the world outside the university through his publications, as well as through
his students, and the students of those who promoted his work outside metaphysics.29
By the turn of the century he was acknowledged to be the foremost Scottish literary man
residing in Scotland (Phillips:288), and this opinion was fortified by his subsequent
publications, including the widely-read Britannica ‘Dissertation’ in 1815 and 1821. It
was therefore not an unprepared audience he addressed in 1827. His immediate
audience was the (educated) type who read the Edinburgh Review and who would
probably have read him in the past. Stewart emphasised the benefits of moral
philosophy for the improvement of the individual character, which would have appealed

seclusion is precisely what Stewart had to distance himself from, the poem reflects the contemporary
debate about science and religion.
29
For instance, John Thompson’s students at the Royal College of Surgeons from the 1790s to 1830
(Jacyna:4-23,135-7).
 203
immediately to the desire of the contemporary audience for self-improvement.
Baconian collectivism was aimed at the general advancement of learning and power
over nature. It had nothing to do with the impact of practice on individuals. Rather than
address the question of the rival ideals of co-operation and solitude directly, Stewart
confined his study to the effects of intellectual habits on individual intellectual and
moral character. This enabled him to argue that there was something inherently
elevating about the study of moral philosophy, and he hoped that this held direct
relevance for readers, who expected their philosophical reading to have ‘practical
benefits and self-enhancing consequences’ (Price 1982:175). Thus, within the argument
about the nexus between professional intellectual styles and moral character, there is
another insistence – that the educated person could optimise his or her intellectual and
moral character only through an education with moral philosophy at its core. Thus he
constructed a moral persona for the moral philosopher while instructing his readers in
individual self-improvement.

Intellectual solitude and ‘looking abroad’

Stewart examined the effects of intellectual activity on character by addressing
the intellectual and moral character of four distinct groups: the Metaphysician, the
Mathematician, the Poet, and Women. Although he found advantages and
disadvantages in the intellectual habits of all four, it is always clear that the
Metaphysician (or moral philosopher – Stewart used the terms interchangeably in this
work) was pre-eminent among them. Addressing only metaphysics proper, Stewart
disdained the vulgar application of the term to ‘scholastic discussions concerning the
nature and essence of the soul, and various other topics on which experience and
observation supply us with no data as a foundation for our reasonings’. The ‘first’ or
most important of the metaphysical studies, in terms of ‘dignity, as well as utility’, was
that of the human mind, which included human understanding, the theory of morals,
universal grammar, the philosophy of rhetoric and of the fine arts. Metaphysics
included also abstract speculations upon mathematics and physics (IV:192).
Always implying that the moral philosophical questions were of a higher order
than the concerns of other disciplines, Stewart thought it was evident that
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those individuals who are habitually occupied with [metaphysical studies]
cannot fail to acquire a more than ordinary capacity of withdrawing their
thoughts from things external, and of directing them to the phenomena of mind.
They acquire, also, a superiority to the casual associations which warp common
understandings. Hence an accuracy and a subtlety in their distinctions on all
subjects, and those peculiarities in their views, which are characteristical of
unbiassed [sic] and original speculation. But, perhaps, the most valuable fruit
they derive from their researches, is that scrupulous precision in the use of
language, upon which, more than upon any one circumstance whatever, the
logical accuracy of our reasonings, and the justness of our conclusions,
essentially depend. Accordingly, it will be found, on a review of the History of
the Sciences, that the most important steps which have been made in some of
those apparently the most remote from metaphysical pursuits, (in the science, for
example, of Political Economy,) have been made by men trained to the exercise
of their intellectual powers, by early habits of abstract meditation. (IV:194-5)

Here was a depiction of the way in which the withdrawn or solitary nature of moral
philosophical pursuits developed independence of character. At the same time it was
metaphysicians who, trained in the habits of abstract meditation, made the discoveries in
other sciences. This reflected the superiority of (metaphysical) philosophy over
(physical) sciences that informed Stewart’s earlier works (Corsi 1988:43; Morus
1991:605). Here he was implying that metaphysicians were, in a special sense, better at
the other sciences. In response to the attacks on the position of moral philosophy,
Stewart was fashioning the character of the moral philosopher as one who, though
capable of excellence in various sciences, was most importantly a mental philosopher.
That the science of the human mind was necessarily a solitary activity set the mental
philosopher apart from those philosophers whose attention was directed outward, on the
world, and whose sciences were built up co-operatively. Moral philosophy contributed
to all fields, and Stewart wanted to emphasise not the fields, but the contribution of
moral philosophy. Thus he did not offer a section on political economists, but on moral
philosophers, who did political economy better than others. Implicitly, he was arguing
that Smith was a great political economist because he was a great moral philosopher –
and that he was first a moral philosopher (IV:195).
It is pertinent that Stewart did not choose an experimental science as his example
of those sciences ‘most remote’ from metaphysical pursuits. Since political economy
was one of the human sciences, and strictly non-experimental, and since it was
traditionally taught by moral philosophers as part of the Scottish moral philosophical
curriculum, it is hard to see how it was one of those sciences most remote from
metaphysics. Surely astronomy, optics, biology, medicine, chemistry, mechanics (or any
 205
of the physical sciences) would have been more remote? I suggest that Stewart was
reluctant to divert attention from the philosophical solitary and towards the new
experimental sciences, precisely because the dominant discourse on experimental
practice in Britain was the Royal Society of London’s ethos of Baconian co-operation.30
Moreover, although political economy had once been the exclusive province of moral
philosophers, by 1827, thanks in large part to Stewart’s own separate course on political
economy which commenced in 1800, many political economists were not
metaphysicians. As a result, a weakness had been introduced: political economy
suffered from the assumption of Lockean ‘intermediate principles’, which served in
mathematics as ‘unquestionable truths to prove other points depending on them’. In the
moral sciences, such as political economy, there were few intermediate principles that
could be ‘safely assumed as data’ (IV:215-7). The implication was that only those
political economists who were metaphysicians were safe from the fault.
Without signalling the experimental sciences, Stewart did refer obliquely to
natural philosophers. He claimed that whereas those studying minutiae were suited to
‘delivering the first elements of knowledge’, philosophers were best fitted for
‘establishing conclusions of important and general application’ (IV:199). Since those
studying minutiae were likely to be those using microscopes, Stewart thereby subtly
relegated experimental scientists such as biologists and chemists to a lesser position
than metaphysicians.
From Stewart’s account, it is fairly clear that moral philosophers spent their
working lives attempting to overcome the Baconian idols of the mind. Mental
philosophers, in particular, were constantly striving to attain knowledge of the mind, and
they did this through a systematic practice of reflection on the processes of their own
minds – in solitude. What Stewart did not say, but implied, is that since the core work
of the moral philosopher could not be carried out co-operatively, Baconian collectivity,
while it advanced learning in the area of the experimental sciences, had no relevance for
moral philosophy. Not only was solitude anti-Baconian, but it also left aside the
Scottish tradition of scholarly co-operation, the vaunted willingness of the Scottish
intellectual leaders to learn from one another (Lothian 1971:xxii). There is a tension
here between Stewart’s customary intellectual humility and the equally traditional
Scottish idea, as expressed by Beattie (657), of the meditative solitary. Also, Stewart’s

30
There is a further sense in which the chapter was un-Baconian: given Bacon’s approval of the
mechanical arts, it is interesting that there were no references to trades or the mechanical arts.
 206
philosophical solitary ignored the co-operative ethos of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
of which he was a founding member. Though he referred to the Idola speca, nowhere
in this study did he refer to its Baconian corrective: scholarly co-operation. Instead he
offered an alternative corrective: ‘looking abroad’.
Curiously, in Stewart’s account mathematicians, poets and women were prone to
moral dangers, but metaphysicians were not. Stewart did acknowledge one intellectual
danger (besides scepticism): that is, excessive metaphysical studies could cause
intellectual narrowness which could ‘shut up all the channels of intellectual
improvement’. Only by ‘looking abroad’ could moral philosophers counter the solitary
nature of their intellectual habits(IV:195,199). Oz-Salzberger has revealed the centrality
of this theme in Ferguson, who insisted on the importance of ‘looking abroad’ into the
general order of things, of being politically aware and active. It was inherent in his
masculinist ideal of civic virtue, which involved military exertion and opposed the
moral corruption of political indifference (Oz-Salzberger:44,98-9,114-6). Provided
moral philosophers looked abroad, Stewart claimed, they were the finest and most
comprehensive thinkers, acting on a ‘greater scale’ than others, addressing the
‘important’, higher order issues (IV:199).31
One of Jeffrey’s (1810:179) claims was that observing mental phenomena
merely gratified or allayed curiosity, implying that curiosity in itself had no value to the
progress of science. In his exploration of the moral economy of intellectual pursuits,
Stewart turned Jeffrey’s criticism around, rehabilitating the notion of curiosity. Indeed,
there was a danger that the ‘insulated nature’ of the metaphysician’s pursuits could lead
to withdrawal of curiosity from the world about him and the cessation of intellectual
improvement. Warning against excessive metaphysical studies, he recommended that
the philosopher ‘look abroad for objects to furnish an exercise to his powers, or to
gratify his curiosity’ (IV:195-6). Since solitary intellectual activity tended to suppress
curiosity, or misdirect it, curiosity had to be protected or rehabilitated through ‘looking
abroad’ for optimum effect on the intellectual character. In the section on ‘the Sexes’ he
argued that a major effect of different education for boys and girls was that girls
commonly lacked curiosity about the causes of physical phenomena, which he saw as a

31
The question of how we ought to live and organise society, and the question of the nature and
organisation of the human mind, were of a higher order than, say, questions that could be answered by
looking into a microscope. The moral philosophers’ attention to the ought question agitated Jeremy
Bentham to such an extent that he said that ‘it “ought” to be banished from the vocabulary of morals’
(quoted in Whewell 1836:17).
 207
major impediment to intellectual attainment (IV:241-2). The remedy lay in a correct
moral philosophical education.32
The notion of a philosophical hierarchy informs Stewart’s essay on intellectual
character. Not only was the moral philosopher’s work quite distinct from the
experimentalist’s, it was of a higher order. Moral philosophers were most capable of
addressing the important questions about the happiness of human society, concerns that
should be a goal of the physical sciences, quite apart from satisfying curiosity. The core
work of the moral philosopher, who headed the philosophical hierarchy, had to be
carried out in solitude, but, to prevent any unwelcome effects of solitude, such a person
needed to be aware of the natural, social and political world. Other activities could be
undertaken co-operatively, but the important work of moral philosophy was solitary.
Thus the moral philosopher was not a hermit in the tradition of pastoral solitude, but nor
was he an experimentalist operating in a densely interactive collectivity tempered by
solitude. To avoid the danger of the hermitic pastoral tradition, Stewart fashioned a
notion of the philosophical solitary suited to the moral philosopher: the solitary who
looks abroad.
Recalling some details of Stewart’s life might help us understand what he was
doing here. From the time of his second marriage in 1790 until his retirement to
Linlithgowshire in 1809, Stewart’s home was a major centre of social and intellectual
life in Edinburgh, and during his long retirement he and Helen were frequently seeking
and enjoying company. In 1814 he claimed that he had been unable to carry out his
important work on the analysis of Reason until he had achieved the uninterrupted time
for deep thought possible in the seclusion of retirement (III:1). Stewart had experienced
the importance of both intellectual solitude and ‘looking abroad’. The images of the
solitary then available to him were inadequate. The pastoral solitary did not look
abroad, and the scientific solitary did not look ‘inwards’ (IV:193). I suggest that
intellectual solitude and Fergusonian looking abroad are constitutive of Stewart’s
notion of the philosophical solitary.

32
Davie has located the Stewart-Jeffrey debate in the Scottish debate on education, and I think that in
‘Intellectual Character’ Stewart is still arguing for the reinstatement of the centrality of a moral
philosophical education. The education theme was not new. Schiller in Germany had argued the
importance of an aesthetic education, and Helvetius (1759:xiv,159), a copy of which was in Dugald’s
library, argued that the difference of genius was due to difference of education, and that virtue and genius
were linked in men born for great things.
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The mere mathematician
The trouble with mathematics was that it exercised only the faculty of reasoning
or deduction, giving ‘no employment to the other powers of the understanding
concerned in the investigation of truth’. Mathematics simply did not address moral truth
and first principles. Stewart likened the materialism and blind atheism of some
Continental mathematicians to the blind religious faith that yields to ‘the creed of the
infallible church’. This blindness of the ‘mere mathematician’ was strengthened by his
‘confidence . . . in his powers of reasoning and judgement’. Stewart insisted on a basic
distinction between mathematics and the other sciences: that mathematics enables us ‘to
arrive at demonstrative certainty, while, in the others, nothing is to be looked for beyond
probability’. Even the greatest of mathematicians erred in misapplying their intellectual
habits to ‘the investigation of metaphysical or moral truths’. Moreover dogmatic,
rigorous mathematical thinking had led to absurd conclusions in medicine as well as
morals (IV:202-6,210).33
One of the main targets of the common sense school was scepticism, an
occupational hazard for philosophers (III;X;IV:196). Stewart was aware that his image
of the dogmatic mathematician was inconsistent with the popular image of the
mathematician as moral sceptic. But he argued that mathematicians were anything but
sceptical; they were credulous, acknowledging ‘the authenticity of those sources of
evidence which are admitted by the philosophers who have turned their attention to
other inquiries’. They did not question the sources of knowledge. Stewart declared he
had ‘never met with a mere mathematician who was not credulous to a fault’ (IV:206-
9). This dismissal of mere mathematicians has a Baconian ring. Attacking the
‘daintiness and pride’ of mathematicians, Bacon declared mathematics ‘but the
[handmaid] of Physic’; it was a solitary occupation useful only to the mind of the
student (Bacon 1970[1905]:476).34 Nowhere did Stewart call attention to the solitary
nature of mathematics.35 Instead he reserved his deployment of the ethos of solitude for
the moral philosopher, insisting that the moral philosopher was the most solitary

33
He refers particularly to the medical reasoning of the Scottish physicians, Archibald Pitcairn and
George Cheyne.
34
There was a general understanding in the seventeenth-century that mathematics was a solitary activity,
that ‘[e]stablishing mathematical knowledge did not involve the pooling of individual stocks of empirical
experience’ (Shapin 1990:204).
35
Poetry too was a solitary occupation, a fact which went unremarked by Stewart.
 209
because the focus of his study was his own mind. The philosophical solitary looked
‘inwards’ (IV:193).
At the same time, Stewart’s derision of the mere mathematician should be seen
in the context of the impact of Continental mathematics via the Cambridge influence on
Scotland.36 Against the general view of mathematicians as unimaginative, Stewart
admitted what at first seemed like evidence to the contrary: at Cambridge, whenever ‘a
spirit of [religious] fanaticism has infected . . . a few of the unsounder limbs of that
learned body, the contagion has invariably spread much more widely among the
mathematicians’.37 The ‘fits of religious enthusiasm’ and ‘temporary insanity’ of
mathematicians were the ‘natural effects of the torpid state in which [the imagination
was] suffered to remain in the course of their habitual studies’ (IV:218-9). Again
Stewart drew a direct line from intellectual habit to character, this time to moral
character, and the passage represents a barely veiled criticism of revealed theology.
Stewart recommended mathematical studies as ‘the most effectual remedy for
that weakness of mind’ in which scepticism originated (IV:208). Herein lay the chief
merit of mathematics, as a defence against philosophical scepticism. Given the negative
theological, psychological and sociological implications Stewart drew from Humean
philosophical scepticism, mathematics in this sense improved the moral as well as the
intellectual character. There is an implicit suggestion here that moral philosophers who,
like Stewart, had a training in mathematics, were immune from the intellectual and
moral threat of scepticism. Whereas in inquiries into the constitution of the Material
and Intellectual worlds, scholars were ‘constantly presented with instances of design
which lead up our thoughts to the contemplation of the Almighty Artist’, a
mathematician was not by his studies led to contemplate the argument from design
(IV:210-211).38 Since Stewart here traced the direct link between natural philosophy
and the moral mind, why did he not include ‘The Natural Philosopher’ in this study of
intellectual character? The answer is, as I have already suggested, that Stewart’s focus
is the metaphysician, and that the other professions are included mainly to act as

36
Stewart championed Greek geometry over the ‘modern methods’ (IV:201). He implied that the
Cambridge interest in Continental analysis (and especially algebraic calculus) was a bad move away from
geometry, which Hamilton and Whewell later saw as more appropriate, than analysis, for the moral and
intellectual development of undergraduates. See Yeo (1993:218-22). Also Fisch (1991a:31-66);
Ashworth (648); and Davie (1961:170-7).
37
For an account of the contagion which swept Cambridge in 1793, see Kevin C. Knox (34,167-200).
38
This was Whewell’s argument in 1833, when he distinguished between inductive discoverers and mere
mathematicians (Yeo 1993:119).
 210
contrasts to metaphysicians and their superior qualities.39 In fact, he argued that
metaphysicians, since they saw in analogies ‘the unity of contrivance which appears in
nature’, were best suited, in studying natural philosophy, to recognise design (IV:214).
Whereas Whewell chose the inductive natural philosopher as a witness of morally
positive mental habits, Stewart could not do this. Such a move would have been
inconsistent with his goal of establishing the superiority of the moral philosopher.
Stewart’s contention that many mathematicians were particularly bad at sciences
based on experience and observation provided one of the work’s few acknowledgments
of the experimental and empirical sciences (IV:212). In his view, when metaphysicians
had ruled the Scottish intellectual roost, the experimental sciences had been pursued by
metaphysicians and mathematicians. The experimental sciences had been embedded in
philosophy and scientific advances had reinforced philosophy. But as the independence
of the physical sciences increased, the overarching authority of metaphysics decreased
(Hakfoort 1995a:381-92). Since it was precisely the autonomy of the experimental
sciences that Stewart was rejecting, we should see this text as part of the continuing
Stewart-Jeffrey debate.40

The corrupted poet

Stewart thought that there was something unsavoury about poetic conduct, and
he made it clear that ‘poetical’ intellectual habits were inimical to metaphysical
pursuits.41 The poetical mind was too frequently accompanied ‘with indolence, and
with an over-weening self-conceit, . . . thoughtlessness and improvidence with respect to
the future’. This ‘infirmity’ resulted very naturally from poetical studies. They tended,
‘by cherishing a puerile and irritable vanity, to weaken the force and to impair the
independence of the character’. The fact that artistic compositions were ‘calculated for
no end but to please or to entertain’ produced an ‘unmanly desire for praise’,
restlessness and a ‘dependence on the capricious applause of the multitude’
(IV:223,231-3). For Stewart’s purposes, the ‘unmanly’ poetic infirmity provided a

39
In addition, the natural philosopher was linked in the public mind to the ethos of Baconian co-
operation, something to which Stewart could not draw attention.
40
Given the obvious location of Upham (1831) in the Stewart-Jeffrey debate (see Appendix) , the fact that
Stewart’s ‘Varieties’ was appended to it supports my argument that ‘Varieties’ too belongs to the debate.
41
Stewart classed all artists, literary, visual and musical, as poets, since all addressed themselves to the
‘culture of the arts which are addressed to the imagination’ (IV:222). His definition is different from
Plato’s and Aristotle’s, for they meant to include the composers of tragedy, drama, history and rhetoric,
but not painters, sculptors or musicians.
 211
useful contrast to the manly, Fergusonian ‘looking abroad’ and independence of
metaphysicians.42
There was a classical precedent for Stewart’s critique of poetry as a source of
corruption. Plato saw poets and philosophers in competition, albeit unequal
competition: the poet tried to do on the level of imagination what the philosopher was
better able to do on the level of reason (Adler 1952:403). There are traces of this
Platonic idea in Beattie’s account of the ‘incompatibility of philosophical and poetical
genius’ (Price:187) and in Stewart’s rationalism. Like Plato, Stewart addressed the
‘moral problem of the influence poetry can have on human character or virtue’
(Adler:403). A more recent precedent was Horner’s 1797 Essay ‘On the political effects
of the general diffusion of knowledge’, which it is possible to place in the Platonic
tradition that saw poetry as politically dangerous due to its effect on the emotions and
behaviour. Horner, Stewart’s pupil, suggested philosophy as a sort of corrective to the
fine arts, which had a deleterious, corruptive effect on the intellectual character. They
were in the feminine realm, and while they did ‘humanize’, they were dangerous if
unchecked by the manly study of philosophy. Significantly, in his letters Horner
professed a great intellectual and spiritual debt to Stewart, and displayed the mark of
Stewart’s Baconianism when he linked the benefits of philosophy to the Baconian ideal
of shared knowledge (Bourne & Williams :87-90).
Notwithstanding that analogical thinking and invention could occasionally
benefit scientific researches, generally the ‘influence of poetical habits on the
intellectual faculties’ inhibited the powers of discrimination in the search for truth.43
Locke had warned that through the use of similes, metaphors and allegories, ‘the thing
they are brought to explain and elucidate is thought to be understood too’. Stewart used
Pope’s phrase, a ‘mob of metaphors’, to criticise Jeffrey and Burke for their use of such
language as a ‘rhetorical engine to subjugate the reason’ of their readers. Poetical genius
did not accompany clear judgement and deep reason (IV:225-9).
It is instructive to view Stewart’s critique of poets in the light of his friendship
with Robert Burns, a neighbour who could not decide, when submitting his work to
Stewart for appraisal in 1790,

42
In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had published Lyrical Ballads which
contained their poetic manifesto. But even Wordsworth had not endorsed the notion of solitude, arguing
instead that ‘poetic genius is not aloof, but nurtured by “social sympathy”’ (Yeo 1993:137).
43
This wariness of figurative language was not new. A. D. Nuttall (1983:2) notes that Thomas Sprat in
his History of the Royal Society (1667) described how the leaders of the scientific revolution ‘deliberately
disdained the use of figurative language’.
 212
whether it is owing to my prejudice in favour of a gentleman to whom I am so
much indebted, or to your critical abilities; but in the way of my trade as Poet, I
will subscribe more implicitly to your strictures than to any individual on earth.
(X:cxlix)
Burns honoured Dugald and his father in ‘The Vision’, saying Scotland was to be proud
of her contemporary philosophers and mathematicians, as well as of her ancient warriors
(Smith 1996[1970]:118-9). Whereas it seems then that Stewart’s critique of poetic
habits must have been purely strategic, I suggest that there was, in his memoir of Burns,
an apprehension of the moral danger of poetic praxis. The Edinburgh Review
(1828:280-1) expressed the opinion that Stewart wrote with some ‘surprise’ in 1800 of
Burns’ philosophical sophistication. What is implicit in Stewart’s posthumous
accolades, which appeared alongside his detection of character flaws, is that Burns was
no mere poet. In fact, Stewart insisted that ‘the attentions [Burns] received during his
stay in town, from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would have turned
any head but his own’, and he took pains to distinguish Burns from most poets, noting
the usual ‘unaccountable disparity between their general talents, and the occasional
inspirations of their more favoured moments’. Fortunately, Burns’s genius was not
‘exclusively adapted’ to poetry (X:cxlii-cxliii). Already there was the suspicion of the
poet’s dependence on the public’s pleasure, of most poets, and of mere poets. Thus the
disjunction between Stewart’s piece on Burns and his unrelenting critique in ‘Varieties’,
of poetical habits, may not be so marked as it first appears.
According to Helen, herself a poet and friend of Burns, both she and Dugald
enjoyed the novels of Walter Scott, who was an intimate of her brother and sister
(Constable:40-1). Thus it is interesting that in portraying poets as self-centred
undesirables, Stewart refrained from openly criticising the agonistic Romantic ideal that
many felt had infected poetry. Jeffrey (1807;1808) was notorious for his scathing
denouncements in the Edinburgh Review of the Romantic ‘Lake School’ and Byron, and
Stewart himself had criticised the Romantic tendency in history writing.44 We can

44
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey comprised the ‘Lake School’. To the wounded Byron, Jeffrey and
the reviewers were ‘Northern wolves’, a ‘coward brood which mangle as they prey,/By hellish instinct all
that cross their way’ (in Allan 1993:16). Wollstonecraft (1790:61-2) too criticised the romantic tendency
in poetry in Vindication of the rights of men, a copy of which was in Stewart’s library. On the contents
page, he wrote ‘Being a woman, she published it anonymously’. It was the feigned history or romanticism
of Robertson’s writing that Stewart found disturbing (see chapter 4). His critique contains traces of
Plato’s concern with the disruptive potential of poetry.
 213
explain Stewart’s failure to include historians as men of letters, and to name current
topics such as Romanticism, in terms of his project. Whereas he thought history writing
should be an exercise in method and not an exercise in poetic imagination, he was
careful to keep ‘Varieties’ free of diversions.
I have claimed that several of Stewart’s omissions were tactical, and A.M.C.
Waterman (1991:134) has found strategic omission in Stewart’s political economy,
where he reinterpreted Malthus for his readers. Waterman argues that Stewart realised
that certain defects of the Malthusian doctrine could, by inviting the ridicule of the
hostile, deflect attention from the important anti-utopian argument. Clearly Stewart
appreciated the fact that aspects of content could be counter-productive, and I think we
can see this appreciation at work in this piece on intellectual character.45

The sexes and education

In treating ‘The Sexes’ as part of ‘Varieties of intellectual character’, Stewart
was belatedly entering the lively debate which followed the publication of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the rights of woman (1792). He did not mention
Wollstonecraft, and I suggest that this was another strategic omission.46 In a letter to
Stewart dated 21 January 1793, Reid asked, ‘Have you read a Vindication of the Rights
of Women? I think a Professor of Morals may find some things worthy of his attention,
mixed, perhaps, with other things which he may not approve’ (X:148).47 Like Reid,
Stewart must have realised Wollstonecraft had a significant point – his argument that
the root cause of the intellectual differences was education was in line with her
contention – but he would also have thought that her work lacked the hallmarks of a
thorough education. His wife had both volumes of Elizabeth Hamilton’s (1801-2)
Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, containing instruction to mothers on
how to treat girls and boys and bemoaning the defective education of girls which

45
Gaukroger (1995:13) argues that Descartes avoided contentious modes of argument because he realised
they could be counter-productive.
46
Stewart was well aware of the Wollstonecraft’s notoriety following the publication of William
Godwin’s (1798) Memoir of her, and Godwin was in 1816 a visitor to Kinneil House (Constable:41).
Details of her life and attitudes were revealed in a review of Godwin’s book in Stewart’s possession. Such
contentious matters he characteristically avoided.
47
While The rights of woman is not in Stewart’s library now, there is every possibility that Stewart had a
copy (his library was bequeathed by his son, Matthew, to the United Service Club in London in 1852,
where it remained until 1910). In any case it is unlikely he would have ignored the urging of his respected
mentor to read her. He did have a review of her Maria, or the wrongs of woman (1798), a novel
illustrating the doctrines of her Rights of woman.
 214
doomed the female sex to disadvantage.48 She recommended the mental philosophy of
Reid and Stewart for the education of both females and males.49 Stewart’s study was
significant for its insistence that intellectual habits and education, rather than nature,
determined the intellectual and moral character of women. ‘The Sexes’ marked
Stewart’s entry into the contemporary debate on ‘the woman question’.
In order to appreciate the contemporary significance of Stewart’s insistence on
the role of education in the construction of sexual difference, it is important to
understand that eighteenth-century France and England were characterised by what
Madelyn Gutwirth (1978:18-23) describes as the ‘rejection of female intelligence’. She
reports that the ‘masculine attempt, seconded by servile women, to discourage feminine
achievement’ worked through ‘mockery and moral outrage’ to make even the most
accomplished female writers turn against the development of all talent in women. When
even such ‘decidedly superior’ women as Mme d’Epinay and Mme de Staël at times
denied that women could or should contribute to human knowledge, and when, as
Condorcet put it, arguments for equal rights were met by nothing but jokes and ridicule,
Stewart’s position can be appreciated as liberal and progressive.
Still, the audience Stewart addressed was very different from that which
Wollstonecraft had addressed. The intervening years had seen the Napoleonic Wars,
and Colley (260-1,254,265,273) argues that war work took women out of the house and
taught them how to lobby, run committees and organise. Through their ‘patriotic
activism’ they ‘demonstrated that their domestic virtues possessed a public as well as a
private relevance’. Also the trial of Queen Caroline had taken place in 1820, and it
failed because of a national campaign by women who acted in the public sphere to
protect the private sphere. Stewart’s readers were versed in debate about the sexes, and
were used to the deployment of separate-spheres ideology in defence of the status quo.

48
Beattie too, before Stewart, had thought that were women and men ‘to have the same education and
opportunities, the minds of the two sexes would be found to approach more nearly to equality’ (Forbes
1806:II,221). John Gregory, a common sense philosopher, also addressed the subject of women’s moral
and religious education in A father’s legacy to his daughters (1774). Following the Revolution,
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, and the Napoleonic Wars, Stewart wrote in an entirely different intellectual
climate from that inhabited by Gregory’s treatise on the sexes. I do not here pursue a comparative study
with all those who had previously addressed the question, although Gregory’s book was probably known
to Stewart, who admired his medical science (see chapter 7).
49
It is almost certain that Helen and Dugald, given their closeness and intellectual compatibility would
have discussed these ideas. She was, after all, the final arbiter on his work before it went to the press
[Constable:31-3; Romilly:3], and indeed Stewart espoused these sentiments in ‘The Sexes’. Whereas
Hamilton can be counted among ‘anti-feminist writers’ by modern commentators, this usually refers to her
attacks on the Jacobin feminists and fails to acknowledge her call for equality in education (Luria 1974:8).
 215
Though to talk of ‘The Sexes’ was to enter a contentious arena, Stewart was saying
nothing new, merely lending his weight to the argument for education of women, and
his overarching argument was always for proper education.
In arguing that moral philosophy should be the central organising principle of
knowledge production, Stewart’s very subject was education. The woman question,
because it involved education, provided the opportunity to demonstrate a causal link
between intellectual habit and character. Drawing attention to the differences in the
formal education of boys and girls, he found the ‘intellectual and moral differences
between the sexes . . . to be entirely the result of education’. He insisted that education
could shape, and should be used to shape, intellectual character. Traditional womanly
intellectual pursuits influenced their proneness to ‘hysteric affections’ and to contagious
‘religious enthusiasm’. Stewart’s argument in this section was that moral philosophy
should guide all pursuit of knowledge. Women lacked it, and as a result there was a
deficiency in their intellectual and moral capacities. Even the illustrious exceptions, like
Maria Edgeworth and Mme de Staël, did not handle the philosophical subjects well
because they were not adequately educated (IV:238,242,246-7).50 In locating the cause
of female deficiency in the lack of a moral philosophical education, Stewart thereby
fortified moral philosophy.
It is also useful to locate this discussion of the sexes in relation to the dividing
lines within the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular to the debate on virtue. As
well as the ethical ideal of ‘civic virtue’, the Scottish Enlightenment nursed ‘an ideal of
moral character-building, couched in the language of sensibility and sociability’. This
discourse of ethical formation advocated domestic virtues and feminine sensitivity, and
there was a fruitful tension between the new language of domestic sensibility and the
dominant language of classical virtue and ‘manly’ ethics (Oz-Salzberger:107). Olson
(143) argues that given the new and positive implications of emotion, those who sought
to support male dominance had to revise their theories linking women’s inferiority to
passion and emotion. Hence Wollstonecraft, and Stewart after her, responding to the
assertions of Rousseau and Burke, moved away from claims of moral superiority and

50
Stewart, who had been teacher, host and father-figure to Edgeworth’s brothers Lovell and Henry,
appeared in her Forester (1801) as a wondrous teacher and source of wisdom (Butler 1972:198). She and
her family were guests in the Stewart household in Edinburgh and Kinneil in 1803, 1818 and 1823
(Romilly:3). Madame de Staël’s chapter on Schiller in Germany (1814:275) is interesting for what she
says about the moral danger of the poet’s dependence on ‘public opinion’, and of the ‘vanity and the love
 216
inferiority grounded in gender differences. Ferguson, with his glorification of the noble
masculine love of play and fight, of civic strife, occupied an extreme position on the
spectrum from classical virtue to domestic sensibility, and though we might say that
Stewart, like Ferguson, was ‘no educator of women’ (Oz-Salzberger:107), in that he
devoted only ten pages to them in his entire corpus, in fact his treatment of women was
in stark contrast to Ferguson’s dismissal of them.51
In the eight pages on ‘The Sexes’ Stewart mounted an argument for the
education of women. Although he endorsed Rousseau’s negative view of the
intellectual character of women, he did not attribute the sexual difference to natural
causes. Although he expressed a certain Leibnizian optimism in that the mental
constitutions of the sexes were ‘happily adapted to the different provinces allotted to
them in life’, he did not claim woman’s role was to please and he did not mention her
financial dependence.52 Whereas he thought it appropriate that women of ‘good sense
and good taste’ who had achieved in the abstract sciences should ‘draw a veil’ over their
attainments, and that it was ‘more appropriate’ for a woman to be a poet than a
philosopher, he found women best able to ‘accommodate their minds to new
situations’.53 The ‘weakness of their reasoning powers and . . . their complete want of
reflection’ rendered them better at acquiring foreign languages, and their docility
translated into a ‘greater . . . aptitude to learn than men’ (IV:159,221,242-45). While
Stewart avoided Wollstonecraft’s discussion on the nature of female virtue, ‘The Sexes’
is in a sense an outcome of the complex Scottish Enlightenment debate on virtue. Most
significantly though, it is a vehicle for Stewart’s argument that moral philosophy should
guide all pursuit of knowledge.

of fame . . . [that] lies cunningly in wait’. Lord Dudley, and indeed Stewart’s own daughter Maria,
repeatedly reported de Staël’s veneration of Stewart and desire to meet him (Romilly:220-236).
51
These eight pages on ‘The Sexes’ (IV:238-45) built on ideas in two pages of his Political Economy
lectures delivered between 1800 and 1809 and published for the first time in 1856 (VIII:55-6). ‘Apart
from a brief reproach of the Greeks and Romans for debasing their women and slaves, Ferguson mentions
women only to complain that, unlike men, they “never look abroad”’ (Oz-Salzberger:115).
52
Stewart had claimed that the poet’s desire to please and his dependence were ‘unmanly’. If we read
‘unmanly’ as womanly, it is significant that Stewart did not acknowledge women’s dependence. Women’s
behaviour generally would then have been not merely different but undesirable.
53
Both Dugald and Helen seem to have drawn a veil over their own attainments. Lord Dudley said of
Helen: ‘She has as much knowledge, understanding, and wit as would set up three foreign ladies as first-
rate talkers in their respective drawing-rooms, but she is almost as desirous to conceal as they are to
display their talents’. The Edinburgh Evening Courant reported that Stewart ‘never considered a piece of
his composition to be finished until she had reviewed it. He himself said that, although she did not
probably understand the abstract points of his philosophy so well as he did himself, yet when he had once
made out a truth into an intelligible shape, she helped him to illustrate it by a play of fancy and of feeling
which could only come from a woman’s mind’ (Romilly:2).
 217
It is useful to recognise that Stewart was addressing not the sexual imbalance in
the Scottish educational system, but the emerging crisis of faith in that system. His
concern was to defend the role of the moral philosopher in the Scottish tradition. In
quoting Rousseau, in finding some pursuits inappropriate for women, in finding the
male and female ideally fitted for their respective roles, and in encouraging intellectual
modesty in women, his work on the sexes appears to confirm the sexual status quo. But
in fact, in challenging the purely ‘natural’ explanation of difference, he undermined the
most powerful instrument of those seeking to reinforce that status quo. Hence we see
that Stewart, in his customary manner, had very quietly held up for examination another
of the cherished orthodoxies of his day.

Stewart’s last word

In this late work on intellectual character, Stewart’s long-term defence of moral
philosophy became a reassertion of the special persona and role of the moral
philosopher – and it remained a defensive manoeuvre. While he warned against the
effects of narrow scientific and literary pursuits, he was anxious to conclude that a
headlong race towards the ‘opposite error’ – the pursuit of universal knowledge or
knowledge as an accomplishment – was equally to be discouraged. He quoted Seneca to
argue that the ‘undue prosecution of liberal studies makes men intolerable, wordy,
absurd, self-sufficient, and little disposed to acquire a knowledge of what is necessary,
seeing they are furnished with what is superfluous’. Even Diderot was called in to
expose the injury that an overstocked memory could do to judgement (XI:160). He was
concerned with the explosion of knowledge: its effect on the individual involved a
tension between knowledge as understanding and knowledge as mere accomplishment.
He quoted Jeffrey’s ‘lively description of the accomplishments supposed “now-a-days to
be essential to enable a man to pass current in the informed circles of society”’, but he
lamented the new universal hurry, seeing dangers in the modern ‘passion’ for
encyclopaedic knowledge (IV:248-9).54
Thus as late as 1827 the Stewart-Jeffrey controversy, begun in 1804, remained
alive for Stewart. He was still arguing for the ascendancy of the science of mind, not on
experimental grounds (as he had previously argued), but in terms of its influence on
individual character. More than ever there was a need to defend moral philosophy, and

54
Jeffrey saw it as a sign of progress, although he regretted that it had depressed ‘the sciences requiring
deep thought and solitary appreciation’ (Jeffrey 1810:169-70).
 218
Stewart seized the opportunity to turn Jeffrey’s own argument of 1810 against him. He
agreed that Jeffrey was right to notice the rush to universal knowledge, but this did not
mean that mental philosophy was outdated and unnecessary: Jeffrey had misinterpreted
the signs. Rather, the explosion of knowledge indicated that something was wrong in
society – mental philosophy offered a remedy to the degradations caused to the human
mind by this lamentable universal hurry.

Read in isolaton, the chapter seems unconnected to his other work – a rather odd,
inconsequential piece. But it makes sense in light of his concerns about moral
philosophy, though in a slightly new way. It represents a shift from the outright defence
of the subject to an attempt to profile the persona of the moral philosopher. When
Stewart was revising this image, he was not constructing the moral philosopher as
something entirely new; traditionally in Scotland, the moral philosopher as pedagogue
was seen to be fulfilling the important moral duty of contributing to the formation of
moral citizens (Haakonssen 1990a:3). But when the established, central, cultural role of
the moral philosopher was questioned, Stewart set about re-fashioning the figure of the
moral philosopher against incursions or encroachments by the figure of the experimental
scientist. In this sense, ‘Intellectual Character’ can be seen as the culmination of his
life’s work, for here he reshaped the image of the moral philosophical self.
 219

Chapter 9

Conclusion
 220
In this thesis I have explored aspects of the work of Dugald Stewart, the last
major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Although I have drawn upon models from
intellectual biography, I have not attempted a full biography (which in any case would
have been restricted by the destruction of relevant primary materials). Nor have I
attempted a comprehensive intellectual history of Stewart’s works. This thesis is not an
assessment of Stewart’s philosophy in relation to absolute standards, and it does not
consider his defence of Reid and common sense in this context. I study him as a thinker
who, as a significant representative of the discipline of moral philosophy, faced a new
situation during the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The
distinctively secular institutional system of education at Edinburgh, with academic
moral philosophy at its apex, contrasted with that of Oxford and Cambridge, which
were under the direct control of the Church of England; but Edinburgh’s distinctive
balance proved fragile under pressure. The establishment of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh in 1783, Stewart’s new political economy course in 1800, and the Leslie
affair of 1805 signalled the breakdown of equilibrium in the system. The Dundas
despotism and the political and cultural reaction to the French Revolution challenged
the high level of consensus that had characterised intellectual life in Edinburgh, and
moral philosophy faced significant threats from the rising authority of the physical
sciences. In the latter part of his life Stewart became caught in this institutional
breakup, and I study him as an embodiment of this problem.
Among Stewart’s early responses to the politicisation of philosophy and the
challenge to the authority of moral philosophy, his biographies of Adam Smith (1794),
William Robertson (1796), and Thomas Reid (1803) represent attempts to profile
significant lives as exemplars of the philosopher. His introduction of a separate political
economy course in 1800 shows what a moral philosopher in a secular university such as
Edinburgh was able to do, even with a controversial subject in the post-Revolutionary
climate. Although political economy was not even considered at Cambridge University
at this time, Stewart could promote it under the aegis of moral philosophy, and in
opening it to the public he extended the domain of the Scottish moral philosopher.
To the extent that Francis Jeffrey forced Stewart to defend the very role of
philosophy and the philosopher in the light of the growing impact of the experimental
sciences, the Stewart-Jeffrey debate is central to this thesis. Jeffrey’s direct attack came
from within the educational tradition of Edinburgh, from within Stewart’s own circle of
influence, and reflected the threat to this peculiar balance. Jeffrey not only branded the
science of mind as useless, unscientific, irrelevant and outdated, but he did so in the new
 221
Edinburgh Review, thus proclaiming that these issues were appropriate for public
scrutiny.
Stewart had to respond in the critical public forum that had emerged, and he did
so on various levels. One of his responses was to use the medium of philosophical
literature which was traditionally open to the moral philosopher and, indeed,
Philosophical Essays (1810) contained his first direct retort to Jeffrey. But to a degree,
his very public involvement in the Leslie Case in 1805, when he wrote two pamphlets
and spoke heatedly in public, was an early reply to Jeffrey. In 1815 he entered a new
public forum when Constable launched his ambitious Supplement to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Re-imagining the nature and role of encyclopaedic preliminary discourses
on the sciences, Stewart used the opening ‘Dissertation’ to create a role for the moral
philosopher as public intellectual in changing circumstances, speaking from the high
ground of historical and epistemological reflection.
In addition to these examples, Stewart’s two main affirmations of the importance
of moral philosophy were a methodological/philosophical overview, and an essay on
moral character. The political climate, the widening domain of experimental, physical
science, and the reorientation of Scottish intellectual life challenged the established
cultural role of the moral philosopher. Jeffrey’s attack on the science of mind, the core
element of Scottish moral philosophy, was launched on the battleground of
methodology, and it was in the same arena that Stewart mounted his major defence.
This methodological response was contained in the second volume of the Elements of
the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1814), in which Stewart sought to ground the
science of mind on a sound experimental basis, while at the same time seeking to
subsume the experimental sciences under the recognised category of metaphysical
philosophy. This methodological treatise was the lynch-pin in his campaign to reinstate
the primacy of moral philosophy.
Stewart’s final move involved a shift in focus from moral philosophy to the
moral philosophical self. In his ‘Of the varieties of intellectual character’ in the third
volume of the Elements (1827), he positioned moral philosophy as the crucial
framework for science, and developed a notion of the philosophical solitary specifically
suited to the moral philosopher: the philosophical solitary who ‘looks abroad’. This
was an argument for the science of mind on the grounds of its moral/intellectual
influence on individual character. In an essay addressing the intersection of
professional intellectual style with private life, Stewart re-fashioned the figure of the
moral philosopher against incursions by the figure of the experimental scientist,
 222
arguably by contrasting the philosopher with easier targets: the mathematician, the poet,
and women. In these rejoinders, Stewart was deploying a characteristic of the moral
philosophical tradition: namely, the capacity to represent itself as offering intellectual
overviews. But unlike the stance of his predecessors (such as Reid), his was a defensive
posture.
Stewart’s attempt to assert the intellectual authority of moral philosophy, and to
contain the experimental sciences in a curricular framework informed by moral
philosophy, failed. It would be interesting to examine this failure in relation to the
subsequent development of the sciences. Lorraine Daston (1992) argues that ideals
(such as detachment, impartiality, disinterestedness) from eighteenth-century moral
philosophy migrated to science in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.
Stewart’s methodological work provides an instance of moral philosophy informing
nineteenth-century philosophy of science. The way is open to explore the location of
Stewart’s failure (to retain a moral philosophical framework for the sciences) in relation
to the development of scientific axiology: we might use his work to investigate the
general question of the relationship between moral philosophy and the philosophy of
science. For example, I have argued elsewhere that Daston’s thesis helps to locate the
feminist successor science project historically, as an attempt to have moral philosophy
once again inform science (Tannoch-Bland 1997a).
Stewart lived and wrote at a time when philosophy had a wide appeal, well
before it became a purely technical subject with no audience, which is effectively what
analytical philosophy became in the twentieth century. In an age when philosophy had
a place in the public sphere, Stewart did not write only for narrow technical reasons, or
solely for the scholarly community, but for every educated person. Nineteenth-century
clashes between science and philosophy took various forms depending on local
circumstances. I have explored the shift in intellectual authority in the Scottish case, in
which there are particular reasons for looking at moral philosophy, and at Dugald
Stewart, the acknowledged representative of that subject in the final days of the Scottish
Enlightenment.
 Appendix 223
Outline of Stewart-Jeffrey Debate 1804-1840

Year Author/Controverter Document/Lecture/Issue

1804 Francis Jeffrey in
Edinburgh Review
1805 Dugald Stewart
1805 R. E. Scott
1806 Dr. John Inglis
Sir David Brewster
Andrew Calvin
*On Leslie Case, see also A
summons of awakening
(1807), Chalmers (1805), ER
(1806), Horner (1806),
Macfarlan (1806), One of the
ministers (1806), Playfair
(1806), all EUL, and Thomson
(1806).
Review of Life of Reid, arguing Stewart’s project is
not useful; science of mind is non-experimental and
has no potential.
Public support of John Leslie during controversy
over Chair of Mathematics, forum for supporting
Reid.
Elements of Intellectual Philosophy, strongly
supportive of Reid and Stewart on the utility of
mental philosophy
Highly critical Examination of Stewart’s Pamphlet
in Leslie Case
Critical of Stewart’s Postscript in Leslie Case,
saying Stewart is ignorant of issues.
Satyrical poem ‘Honest Dug’ lampooning Stewart
for standing out in Leslie affair, painting him as
self-inflated, corrupt, uncouth, conniving, abusive,
all under a mask of sweet temperedness.

1810 Dugald Stewart Philosophical Essays, including refutation of

Jeffrey’s objections.
1810 Francis Jeffrey in Review of Philosophical Essays, including
Edinburgh Review response to Stewart’s refutations and rejection of
Stewart’s project.

1810 R. E. Scott Inquiry into the limits and peculiar objects of

physical and metaphysical science, dedicated to
Stewart and refuting prevalent attitude to science of
mind
1811 M. Napier in Quarterly Review of Philosophical Essays, criticising
Review Jeffrey’s argument as wholly unfounded, and
confirming the utility of mental philosophy.
1814 Dugald Stewart Elements Vol.2
1815 W. R. Lyall in Quarterly Review of Elements 2, critiquing Stewart’s
Review founding principle of Common Sense, faulting his
reasoning and his critique of Aristotle, finding him
an unwitting danger to religion, and defending
English universities against Stewart’s criticism.
 224
Year Author/Controverter Document/Lecture/Issue

1815 Dugald Stewart ‘Dissertation’ prefixed to the Supplement to the

Encyclopaedia Britannica

1816 J. Mackintosh in Review of ‘Dissertation’, disagreeing with

Edinburgh Review Stewart’s critique of Baconian classification of the
faculties.

1817 W. R. Lyall in Quarterly Review, disdaining Stewart’s project and his

Review subject, challenging his logic, philosophical powers
and reading of Bacon.

1817 Blackwood’s Magazine Review, in support of Stewart, refuting views

expressed in Quarterly Review

1821 Dugald Stewart ‘Dissertation’ prefixed to the Second Supplement to

the Encyclopaedia Britannica

1822 W. R. Lyall in Quarterly Review, questioning Stewart’s philosophical

Review soundness, finding Stewart’s work unplanned,
inconcise.

1824 Blackwood’s Magazine Review of Magalotti, approving the critique of

Stewart and Scotch metaphysics

1827 Dugald Stewart Elements Vol.3, critical of Thomas Brown and

containing ‘Of the Varieties of Intellectual
Character’

1830 Latham Wainewright A vindication of Dr. Paley’s theory of morals,

disagrees with Stewart’s defence of Reid but
upholds utility and relevance of science of mind
and Stewart as its greatest exponent.

1831 Thomas Upham, Boston Elements of mental philosophy, refuting Jeffrey’s

charges and appending ‘Of the Varieties of
Intellectual Character’.

1833 Student marginalia In Maurice Cross Selections from the Edinburgh

Review, critical of Stewart, confirming uselessness
of mental philosophy and its exclusion from
academical instruction.

1839 James Douglas On the philosophy of the mind, defence of science

of mind by a non-philosopher, critical of Stewart.

1840 Edinburgh Review Review of Douglas, in defence of Stewart’s science

of mind.
 225

Published Works of Dugald Stewart

This is a list of all Stewart’s works with their original publication dates as well as their
location in the Collected Works. The publication details are not exhaustive: often there
were separate and simultaneous publications in London and Edinburgh. Publication
details of the Collected Works follow this listing.

Stewart’s Works
Stewart, Dugald (1792) Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind vol.1 (6th
edition 1818), A. Strahan and T. Cadell, London, in vol.2 of Works.
_____ (1793) Outlines of Moral Philosophy, for the use of Students in the University of
Edinburgh (6th edition 1837), W. Creech, A. Constable & Co., Edinburgh, in
vols 2, 6, and 8 of Works.
_____ (1794) ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’, in Transactions of
the Royal Society of Edinburgh:55-137, in vol.10 of Works.
_____ (1801) Account of Life and Writings of William Robertson (originally read
before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1796), T. Cadell & W. Davies,
London, in vol.10 of Works.
_____ (1803) Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid (originally in
‘Transactions’ of Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1802), W. Creech, Edinburgh,
in vol.10 of Works.
_____ (1805) A Short Statement of some Important Facts, relative to the late election of
a mathematical professor [John Leslie] in the University of Edinburgh, W.
Creech, A. Constable & Co, Edinburgh.
_____ (1805) Postscript to Mr. Stewart’s statement of facts relative to the election of
Professor Leslie, A. Constable & Co, Edinburgh.
_____ (1810) Philosophical Essays (3rd edition 1818), William Creech and Archibald
Constable & Co, Edinburgh, in vol.5 of Works.
_____ (1811) Biographical Memoirs (including Account of the Life and Writings of
Adam Smith, together with Life of Robertson and Life of Reid), A. Constable &
Co, Edinburgh, in vol.10 of Works.
_____ (1812) ‘Some account of a boy (James Mitchell) born deaf and blind, in
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, (7):1-78. The account forms an
Appendix to vol.4 of Works.
 226
_____ (1814) Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind vol.2 (4th edition 1822),
W. Creech, T. Cadell & W. Davies, London, in vol.3 of Works.
_____ (1815) ‘Dissertation, exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Metaphysical,
Ethical, and Political Philosophy, since the Revival of Letters in Europe - Part
First’ (prefixed to the Supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica), A. Constable &
Co, Edinburgh, in vol.1 of Works.
_____ (1821) ‘Dissertation Part Second, Progress of Metaphysics during the Eighteenth
Century’ (prefixed to the Supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica), A.
Constable & Co., Edinburgh, in vol. 1 of Works.
_____ (1827) Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind vol.3 (4th edition 1818),
T. Cadell & W. Davies, London, in vol.4 of Works.
_____ (1828) Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, 2 vols, Adam Black,
Edinburgh, in vols 6 and 7 of Works.
_____ (1854) ‘Dissertation Part Third: Progress of Ethical and Political Philosophy
during the Eighteenth Century’, published for the first time in vol. 1 of Works.
_____ (1856) ‘Lectures on Political Economy’ (first delivered in 1800), published for
the first time in vols 8 and 9 of Works.

Publication of Stewart’s Works in Hamilton’s Edition

Hamilton, William (ed.) (1854-60) The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Vols 1-11,
Thomas Constable and Co, Edinburgh.

(1854) Volume 1 ‘Preface Containing Some Critical Remarks on the Discourse

Prefixed to the French Encyclopedie’
‘Dissertation: Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political
Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe, Parts 1, 2 and
3’
Volume 2 ‘Outlines of Moral Philosophy, Part 1’
‘Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Volume 1’
Volume 3 ‘Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Volume 2’
Volume 4 ‘Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Volume 3’
Volume 5 ‘Philosophical Essays’
(1855) Volume 6 ‘Outlines of Moral Philosophy, Part 2’
‘Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, Volume 1’
Volume 7 ‘Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, Volume 2’
 227
(1856) Volume 8 ‘Outlines of Moral Philosophy, Part 3’
‘Lectures on Political Economy’
Volume 9 ‘Lectures on Political Economy’
(1858) Volume 10 John Veitch, ‘A Memoir of Dugald Stewart, With Selections
From His Correspondence’
‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’
‘Account of the Life and Writings of William Robertson’
‘Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid’
(1860) Volume 11 ‘Translations of the Passages in Foreign Languages Contained in
The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart with General Index’
 228

Primary and Nineteenth-Century Bibliography

Unpublished sources
I have consulted manuscript collections at Special Collections, Edinburgh University
Library (which houses the Dugald Stewart Collection), and at the National Library of
Scotland (Correspondence of Helen D’Arcy Stewart and her daughter, Maria;
Miscellaneous correspondence of Stewart; Notes taken at lectures given by Stewart).
Little use has been made of these in the thesis, but in each case their location has been
identified in the text. I have also drawn on the microfilm resources of Columbia
University Library, New York, in the form of the Journal of Constable & Co,
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1812-1822), referenced in the text as ‘Constable & Co
Journal (1812-1822)’. Where I have utilised the collections of the American Library
of Congress via its web resources, this is noted in the text.

Published sources
Where it is relevant that particular items are in Dugald Stewart’s Library, housed in
Special Collections, EUL, this has been noted in the text. The location of a few
obscure publications is given in this bibliographic listing.

A Country Gentleman (1807) General observations upon the probable effects of any
measures which have for their object the increase of the regular army,
Manners and Millar, London.
Abercrombie, John (1840)[1830] Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and
the Investigation of Truth, John Murray, London.
Anon. (1807) A summons of awakening, Hawick.
Anon. (1812) The Elegy of an Aged Hermit, Anderson and Arnot, Edinburgh.
Anon. (1805) The True origin of the present war betwixt France and England, with
observations on the expediency and advantages of an immediate peace,
Second edition, J.C. Hinrichs, Leipzig.
Anon. (1849) A Defence of the Universities of Scotland, by a Graduate, Edmonston &
Douglas, Edinburgh.
 229

Bacon, Francis (1970)[1905] The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, eds Ellis,
Spedding, and John. M. Robertson, Books for Libraries, Freeport.
Beattie, James (1971)[1778] Essays on poetry and music as they affect the mind,
Garland, New York.
_____ (1793)[1790] Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols, William Creech, Edinburgh.
Black, Robert Couper (1850) Some Consideration on the educational system of the
Scottish Universities as compared with those of England, D. Bryce, Glasgow.
Blackie, John S. (1848) University Reform: Eight Articles reprinted from the
Scotsman Newspaper; with a letter to Professor Pillans, Sutherland,
Edinburgh.
Blackwood’s Magazine (1817) ‘Remarks on the review of Mr Stewart’s Dissertation
in the Quarterly Review’, 2: 57-65,159-64.
_____ (1818) ‘Remarks on Macvey Napier’s Essay on the Scope and Influence of
Lord Bacon’s Writings’, 3(18):657-61.
_____ (1824a) ‘Magalotti on the Scotch School of Metaphysics’, 16:227-29.
_____ (1824b) ‘The Political Economist, Essay III, Part I’, 16:202-214.
_____ (1825) ‘The Political Economist, Essay III, Part II’, 17:207-220.
Brewster, David (1806) An Examination of the Letter Addressed to Principal Hill on
the Case of Mr. Leslie, Mundell & Son, Edinburgh.
Britten, John (1969) Modern Athens, displayed in a series of views, compiled by John
Britten (1771-1857), B. Blom, Bronx, N.Y.
Brougham, Henry (1827) Discourse on the objects, advantages and pleasures of
science, London.
Buxton, H. W. (1988) Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage,
ed. Anthony Hyman, MIT, Cambridge Mass.
Calvin, Andrew (1805-6) The Ignoble Interruption of the Liberal and Tranquil
Pursuits of Honest Dug, Oliver & Co Printers, Edinburgh (New College
Library, Edinburgh).
Carlyle, Alexander (1973) Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, ed. James Kinsley,
OUP, London.
 230

Chalmers, Thomas (1805) Observations on a passage in Mr. Playfair's letter to the

Lord Provost of Edinburgh relative to the mathematical pretensions of the
Scottish clergy, R. Tullis, Cupar-Fife.
Chambers, Ephraim (1728) Cyclopaedia, London .
Church of Scotland, General Assembly (1805) Report of the proceedings respecting
the election of Mr. Leslie to the mathematical chair in the University of
Edinburgh, James Ballantyne, Edinburgh.
Cockburn, Henry (1874)[1852] Life of Francis Jeffrey, Adam and Charles Black,
Edinburgh.
_____ (1874)[1856] Memorials of His Time, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1969) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Volume 4:1 - The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Routledge & Kegal Paul,
Princeton.
Constable, Thomas (1873) Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents, 3
vols, Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh.
Copleston, Edward (1807) Advice to a Young Reviewer, J. Parker and J. Cooke,
Oxford.
_____ (1810) A reply to the calumnies of the Edinburgh Review against Oxford,
Mackinlay, London.
_____ (1821) An enquiry into the doctrines of necessity and predestination in four
discourses preached before the University of Oxford, John Murray, London.
_____ (1822) Remarks upon the objections made to certain passages in the Enquiry
concerning necessity and predestination,
_____ (ed.)(1841)[1840] Letters of the Earl of Dudley to the Bishop of Llandaff, John
Murray, London.
Cross, Maurice (ed.)(1833) Selections from the Edinburgh Review, 4 vols, Longman,
Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, London.
Cuvier, G. (1805) Éloge historique de Joseph Priestley, Baudouin, Paris.
_____ (1803) Recueil des éloges historiques prononcés a l’institut national,
Baudouin, Paris.
Dalzel, Andrew (1862) History of the University of Edinburgh from its foundation, 2
vols, Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh.
 231

Davidson, J. (1810) ‘Review of [Edward Copleston’s] A reply to the calumnies of the

Edinburgh Review against Oxford and A second reply to the Edinburgh
Review’, Quarterly Review, 4(7): 177-206.
Douglas, James (1839) On the philosophy of the mind, publisher unknown.
Dunbar, George (1848) A defence of the Junior Humanity and Greek classes in the
University of Edinburgh, Maclachlan, Stewart & Co, Edinburgh.
Edinburgh Review (1803) ‘Review of Stewart’s Life of Robertson’, 2:229-49.
_____ (1806) ‘Review of Dugald Stewart’s Short Statement’, 7:113-134.
_____ (1810) ‘Review of Reply to the calumnies of the Edinburgh Review against
Oxford’, 16:158-87.
_____ (1812) ‘Review of Stewart’s “Some account of the boy born blind and deaf”’,
20:462-71.
_____ (1826) ‘Review of Combe’s A system of phrenology’, 44:253-318.
_____ (1827) ‘Review of Franz Horn’s The poetry and oratory of the Germans’,
46(92):304-351.
_____ (1828) ‘Review of J. G. Lockhart’s The Life of Robert Burns[1828]’,
48(96):267-312.
_____ (1840) ‘Review of James Douglas’s On the Philosophy of the Mind[1839]’,
70:362-391.
Enfield, William (1791) The history of philosophy from the earliest times to the
beginning of the present century, drawn up from Brucker’s Historia critica
philosophiae, J.Johnson, London.
Ferguson, Adam (1757) The morality of stage-plays seriously considered, Edinburgh.
_____ (1766) Analysis of Pneumatics and moral philosophy, A. Kincaid & J. Bell,
Edinburgh.
_____ (1768)[1767] An essay on the history of civil society, A. Millar and T. Cadell,
London; A. Kincaid and J. Bell, Edinburgh.
_____ (1785)[1769] Institutes of Moral Philosophy, John Bell & William Creech,
Edinburgh.
_____ (1792) Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols, W. Creech,
Edinburgh.
 232

Forbes, William (1806) An account of the life and writings of James Beattie, L.L.D., 2
vols, Archibald Constable & Co and William Creech, Edinburgh.
Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (1838) ‘Humours of the North:
Recollections of Dugald Stewart’, 19:50-6.
Godwin, William (1798) Memoir of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, Johnson, London.
Grant, Alexander (1884) The story of the University of Edinburgh during its first three
hundred years, Longmans, Green and Co, London.
Gregory, John (1774) A father’s legacy to his daughters, W. Strahan, T. Cadell, W.
Creech, London.
Hamilton, Elizabeth (1801) Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, Vol. I,
Bath, printed by R. Cruttwell for G. and J. Robinson, London.
Hamilton, William (1836) ‘Review of William Whewell’s Thoughts on the study of
mathematics as a part of a liberal education’[1835]’, Edinburgh Review,
62:409-455.
_____ (1838) ‘Review of William Whewell’s The Mechanical Euclid’[1837],
Edinburgh Review, 67:81-102.
Helvetius, Claude-Adrien (1759) De L’esprit: or Essays on the Mind and its several
faculties, London.
Horner, Francis (1806) ‘Review of Dugald Stewart’s Short Statement’, Edinburgh
Review, 7:113-134.
Hume, David (1975)[1748]: An enquiry concerning human understanding, eds L.
Selby-Bigge & P. Nidditch, Clarendon, Oxford.
_____ (1976)[1779] Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, eds A. Wayne Colver
and J. V. Price, Clarendon, Oxford.
_____ (1932) The letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Grieg, Clarendon, Oxford.
_____ (1987)[1779] Essays: Moral Political and Literary, ed. E. Miller, Liberty,
Indianapolis.
Hunter, William (1806) Reasons for not making Peace with Buonaparté, John
Stockdale, London.
Inglis, John (1806) An Examination of Mr. Dugald Stewart’s Pamphlet, Peter Hill,
Edinburgh; Longman Hurst Rees & Orme, London.
 233

Jeffrey, Francis (1804) ‘Dugald Stewart’s “Account of the Life and Writings of
Thomas Reid”’, Edinburgh Review, 3: 269-87.
_____ (1807) ‘Review of Wordsworth’s Poems in two volumes’, Edinburgh Review
11:214-31.
_____ (1808) ‘Review of Byron’s Hours of idleness’, Edinburgh Review 11:285-9.
_____ (1810) ‘Dugald Stewart’s Philosophical Essays’, Edinburgh Review, 17:167-
211.
Johnson, Samuel (1805) A Dictionary of the English Language, Volume 4, ninth
edition, Longman Hurst Rees & Orme, London
Kant, Immanuel (1979)[1784] ‘Answer to the Question: What is “Enlightening”?’, in
The Age of Enlightenment, Vol.2, eds Simon Eliot & Beverley Stern, Ward
Lock Educational, London.
Lawrence, William (1822) Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History
of Man, Benbow, London.
Locke, John (1968)[1693] The Educational Writings of John Locke, Intro. James L.
Axtell, CUP, Cambridge.
Lorimer, James (1854) The Universities of Scotland, Past, present, and possible; with
an appendix of documents relating to the higher instruction, W. P. Kennedy,
Edinburgh.
Lyall, William Rowe (1815) ‘On Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the
Human Mind, Vol.ii’, Quarterly Review, 12: 281-317.
_____ (1817) ‘Dugald Stewart’s Dissertation prefixed to the Supplemental Volumes of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica’, Quarterly Review, 17:39-72.
_____ (1822) ‘Dugald Stewart’s A Second Dissertation prefixed to the Supplemental
Volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’, Quarterly Review, 26(52): 474-
514.
Macaulay Graham, Catherine (1790) Letters on Education, with observations on
religious and metaphysical subjects, C. Dilly, London.
Macfarlan, Duncan (1806) A short vindication of the minority in the last General
Assembly of the Church of Scotland, John Scrymgeour, Glasgow.
Mackenzie, George S. (1820) Illustrations of Phrenology, with Engravings, Archibald
Constable & Co, Edinburgh.
 234

Mackintosh, James (1791) Vindiciae Gallicae, Robinson, London.

_____ (1816) ‘Review of Dugald Stewart’s Introduction to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica’, Edinburgh Review, 27(53):180-244.
_____ (1821) ‘Review of Dugald Stewart’s Introduction to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica’, Edinburgh Review, 36:220-267.
_____ (1836) Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, chiefly during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Preface William Whewell, Adam and
Charles Black, Edinburgh.
Maclaurin, Colin (1748) An account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries,
in four books, printed for the author’s children by A. Millar, London.
McCosh, James (1864) ‘Memoir: the Life and Writings of the Author’ in Dugald
Stewart, Outlines of Moral Philosophy, with a Memoir, a Supplement, and
Questions by James McCosh, William Allan & Co, London.
_____ (1966)[1875] The Scottish Philosophy, Georg Olms, Hildesheim.
Mill, John Stuart (1971)[1873] Autobiography, OUP, London.
_____ (1985)[1859] On Liberty, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
_____ (1867)[1843] A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive; Being a
Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific
Investigation, Harper & Brothers, New York.
Monthly Review (1793) ‘Review of Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the
Human Mind Vol.1’, 10:57-64,203-210,366-373.
_____ (1819) ‘Review of J. Fearn’s A Letter to Professor Stewart: on the Objects of
General Terms, and on the axiomatical Laws of Vision’, 89:429-32.
Mudie, Robert (1825) The Modern Athens: A dissertation and demonstration of men
and things in the Scotch capital, London.
Napier, Macvey (1811) ‘Review of Dugald Stewart’s Philosophical Essays’,
Quarterly Review, 6(9):1-37.
_____ (1879) Selections from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, edited
by his son, Macmillan and Co, London.
One of the ministers of Edinburgh (1806) An examination of Mr. Dugald Stewart's
pamphlet, Peter Hill, Edinburgh.
Phillips, R. (pub.) (1801) Public Characters of 1800-1801, London.
 235

Pillans, Professor (1848) A Word for the Universities of Scotland; and a plea for the
Humanity classes in the College of Edinburgh: in reply to certain letters lately
published in the ‘Scottish Press’ and ‘Scotsman’ Newspapers, Maclachlan,
Stewart, & Co, London.
Playfair, John (1806) Letter to the author of the examination of Professor Stewart’s
short statement of facts, Abernathy & Walker, Edinburgh.
Priestley, Joseph (1978)[1774] An Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry, Garland, New
York.
Reid, Stuart J. (1884) A Sketch of the Life and Times of The Rev. Sydney Smith,
Second edition, Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, London.
Reid, Thomas (1970)[1764] An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, on the Principles of
Common Sense, ed. Timothy Duggan, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
_____ (1973)[1774] Lectures on the Fine Arts, intro. Peter Kivy, Martinus Nijhoff,
The Hague.
_____ (1937) Philosophical Orations of Thomas Reid: delivered at graduation
ceremonies, No. 113, ed. Walter Robson, Aberdeen University Studies,
Aberdeen.
_____ (1967) Philosophical Works: With notes and supplementary dissertations by
Sir William Hamilton, with an introduction by Harry M. Bracken, 2 vols.,
Georg Olms, Hildesheim.
_____ (1995) Thomas Reid on the animate creation: Papers relating to the life
sciences, ed . Paul Wood, Pennsylvania State University Press.
Russell, John (Lord) (1831) ‘Lines written at Kinneil’, in The Keepsake: 42.
Schiller, Friedrich (1993)[1801] Letters on the aesthetic education of Man(1795), ed.
Walter Hinderer & Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Continuum, New York.
Scott, R.E. (1805) Elements of Intellectual Philosophy, Archibald Constable & Co,
Edinburgh.
_____ (1810) Inquiry into the limits of physical and metaphysical science, Brown,
Crombie, Oliphant, Balfour & Black, Edinburgh.
Sidgwick, Henry (1962)[1874] The Methods of Ethics, Seventh edition, Macmillan,
London.
 236

Slade, J. (1838) Colloquies: imaginary conversations between a phrenologist and the

shade of Dugald Stewart, Parbury & Co, S. McDowall, London.
Smith, Adam (1971)[1795] Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Garland, New York.
_____ (1971)[1763] Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. John M. Lothian,
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
Smith, Sydney (1953) Letters, 2 vols, ed. Norwell Smith, Clarendon, Oxford.
Staël Holstein, Baroness (1813) Germany, John Murray, London.
Stewart, Dugald, Mackintosh, Sir James, Playfair, John & Leslie, Sir John (1835)
Dissertations on the History of Metaphysical and Ethical, and of Mathematical
and Physical Science, Thomas Allan & Co, Edinburgh.
Stewart, Matthew (1829) ‘Dugald Stewart, Esq.’, in Annual Biography and Obituary
for the year 1829, Vol. XIII, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green,
London:256-69.
The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, July 1798.
The Scots Magazine (1771) ‘The pensive philosopher in his solitudes’, August:428.
Thomson, Andrew Rev (1805) Letter to the Rev. Principal Hill on the Case of Mr.
John Leslie, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh, Mundell
and Son, Edinburgh (New College Library, Edinburgh).
Tracts (1805/6) Publications and papers concerning the Leslie case bound together:
1)Anon. A letter to the Rev. Principal Hill on the case of Mr John Leslie. 2)
Report of the proceedings and debate in the general assembly of the Church of
Scotland respecting the election of Mr Leslie, Constable & Co, Ogle &
Aikman, Edinburgh. 3)Anon. Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the
doctrine of Mr Hume, concerning the relation of cause and effect, Mundell &
Son, Edinburgh. 4)Letter from Dalzel. 5)Handwritten draft by Stewart.
Tracts on the Scottish Universities (1848-50), into which are bound Blackie, John S.
(1848), Pillans, Professor (1848), Dunbar, George (1848), Anon. (1849) A
Defence of the Universities of Scotland, by a Graduate, Black, Robert Couper
(1850), all separate entries in bibliography.
Tytler, Alexander Fraser (Lord Woodhouselee) (1807) Memoirs of the Life and
Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2 vols, Edinburgh.
 237

Upham, Thomas C. (1831) Elements of Mental Philosophy, 2 vols, S. Colman,

Portland; Hilliard, Gray & Co; and Wells & Lilly, Boston.
Veitch, John (1858) ‘A Memoir of Dugald Stewart, With Selections From His
Correspondence’, in Stewart’s Collected works, X:i-clxxvii.
_____ (1882) Hamilton, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.
Venn, John (1973)[1889], The Principles of Inductive Logic, Chelsea Publishing, New
York.
Wainewright, Latham (1830) A vindication of Dr. Paley’s theory of morals from the
principal objections of Mr Dugald Stewart; Mr Gisborne; Dr Pearson; and Dr
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