Scottish Philosophy in the 19th Century (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeScottish Philosophy in the 19th CenturyFirst published Tue Jan 29, 2002; substantive revision Thu Jun 30, 2005Philosophical debate in 19th century Scotland was veryvigorous, its agenda being set in large part by the impact of Kant andGerman Idealism on the philosophical tradition of the ScottishEnlightenment. The principal figures are Sir William Hamilton, JamesFrederick Ferrier and Alexander Bain, and later in the century, theso-called “Scottish Idealists” notably Edward Caird,Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, D.G. Ritchie and Sir Henry Jones.1. The Enlightenment Background2. Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856)3. James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864)4. Alexander Bain (1818-1903)5. The Scottish IdealistsBibliographyOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. The Enlightenment BackgroundWhile Scottish philosophy of the 18th century is studiedextensively, Scottish philosophy in the 19th century isneglected to the point of being virtually unknown. Francis Hutcheson,David Hume and Thomas Reid and are names familiar to almost allphilosophers; Sir William Hamilton, James Frederick Ferrier, AlexanderBain, Edward Caird and Andrew Seth to hardly any. Yet in their day,the names of these philosophers were not only prominent in Scotland,but widely known across Europe. To understand this decline inreputation, it is necessary to see 19th century Scottishphilosophy against the background of the century that preceded it.According to George Davie there is anopposition…between…two contrasting positions that intheir tension provided Scottish philosophy with its central problem:the Berkeleian system, according to which, in the interests ofreconciling progress with traditional standards, we are to set asidethe instincts of the farmer in favour of the sophistication of thephilosopher and to think with the learned while we talk with thevulgar; and the Hutchesonian system, according to which, with the sameaim of reconciling material advance with the intellectual principle,we are to respect the instincts of the farmer as against thesophistication of the philosopher and initiate a sort of dialoguebetween the vulgar and the learned, instead of talking down to thefarmer from the standpoint of the philosopher. (Davie 1994: 41-2)Cast in these terms it is easy to place the two most famousphilosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment on either side of thedivide. On the side of the first is Hume, whose skeptical conclusionsarise from the Berkleyan presupposition asserted in the very firstsentence of his Treatise of Human NatureAll the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into twodistinct kinds, which I shall call impressions andideas. The difference betwixt these consists in the degreesof force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind. (Hume1888: 1)On the other side is Thomas Reid, for whom the errors of Hume resultfrom the boldness of his starting point.It is genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy, andfills it with error and false theory. A creative imagination disdainsthe mean offices of digging for a foundation, of removing rubbish, andcarrying materials: leaving these servile employments to the drudgesin science, it plans a design, and raises a fabric. (Reid 1997: 15)The problem as Reid saw it was that a highly theoretical philosophywas trying to run before it could walk, because in sharp contrast tosubjects that are “really sciences”—mechanics,astronomy and optics are the examples he gives—when we turn our attention inward and consider the phaenomena of humanthoughts, opinions and perceptions, and endeavour to trace them to thegeneral laws and first principles of our constitution, we areimmediately involved in darkness and perplexity. And if common sense,or the principles of education, happen not to be stubborn, it is oddsbut we end in absolute skepticism. (Reid 1997: 16)It is well known that, on Reid's analysis, Hume's skepticism derivesin large part from his implicit subscription to the “way ofideas”, a conception of knowledge and experience that finds itsorigins in Descartes, Malebranche and Locke, and its most dramaticexposition in Berkeley who, though no skeptic, “proved byunanswerable arguments what no man in his senses could believe”(Reid 1997: 20). The antidote to such skepticism is common sense, butnot of the robust sort displayed by Dr. Johnson when he purported torefute Berkeley by kicking a stone. “Common sense” canmean two things, in fact: widespread popular conviction on the onehand, or the basic principles at work in human reasoning and beliefformation on the other. Widespread conviction can be false, of course,which is why the method of the School of Common Sense was thoughtsuspect by many, described by Kant, for example, as a stratagem bywhich “the stalest windbag can confidently take up with thesoundest thinker” (Kant 1951: 259). But in Reid at any rate,philosophical inquiry into the human mind is not a matter of makingpopular opinion the test of truth, but of initiating a “dialoguebetween the vulgar and the learned” (to repeat Davie's happyphrase) in which proper weight is attached to actual minds atwork.There is, then, this deep division within the philosophy of theScottish Enlightenment, yet it occurs within a context of strikingunanimity also. “Wise men now agree, or ought to agree in this,that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature's works; the wayof observation and experiment” Reid writes (Reid 1997: 11),thereby endorsing the express intention of Hume to “introducethe experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects” (thesubtitle of the Treatise). Both remarks reflect a commitmentto the project of a “science of mind”, a project common toall the major Scottish philosophers of the period. Thus GeorgeTurnbull (Reid's teacher) writing in 1740 says “I was led longago to apply myself to the study of the human mind in the same way asto that of the human body” (quoted in Davie 1994: 24)In short, both division and unanimity are present within eighteenthcentury Scottish philosophy, unanimity with respect to aim—ascience of mind—and division with respect to method—the“principles of common sense” versus “the way ofideas”. This is a tension, however, within only one part of18th century Scottish philosophy, namely the philosophy ofsensation and perception, and not perhaps the most influential part.The Scottish Enlightenment is in many ways more marked by the type ofthinking about social and political topics that we find in Adam Smithand Adam Ferguson, as well as Hume, who in this respect take their cuefrom Hutcheson. The example par excellence is Smith'sTheory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 6th edition1790), where the Humean ambition of countering the “books ofdivinity and abstruse metaphysics” (Treatise) wasfurther by a sympathetic attention to how human beings in societyactually are, and what social forms and political arrangements willbest work to their happiness and well being.In the 19th century, this strand of Enlightenment thinkingceased to be an important part of the philosophical agenda. Thatagenda was dominated, rather, by the “science of mind”more narrowly conceived, that is to say logic (i.e., the philosophy oftruth and reason) and the philosophy of perception. Consequently, from1810 onwards, when Thomas Brown (1778-1820) took up the Chair of MoralPhilosophy at Edinburgh, the story of Scottish philosophy is that ofrepeated attempts to resolve the tension that lay within that“science”. It is also a story of remarkable continuity.Brown (1778-1820) was a student of Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), who inturn was a student and friend of Reid and himself held the Chair ofMoral Philosophy at both Glasgow and Edinburgh. Stewart was enormouslyhighly thought of in his own day, but in retrospect his contributionto the central debate in Scottish philosophy is limited. Brown diedprematurely, but he was a prolific writer from an early age and leftbehind voluminous lectures. These lectures are critical of Reid(though on certain issues Brown way be said to side with Reid againstHume). On publication they were widely and rapturously received, butfell into almost total neglect by 1840. Perhaps their most enduringeffect on the debate arose from the re-interpretation and defence ofReid that they induced on the part of the most prominent philosopherof the period—Sir William Hamilton.2. Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856)Sir William Hamilton was a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow andOxford. At Glasgow he studied logic and moral philosophy under GeorgeJardine and James Mylne both of whom are figures included in JamesMcCosh's The Scottish Philosophy. In 1807 at Balliol CollegeOxford he held the Snell Exhibition, a scholarship that regularlyallowed Scottish students of philosophy to spend time at England'soldest university, and he gained an extensive knowledge ofAristotelianism there. From 1811-21 he worked at the Scottish Bar (notaltogether successfully) until being appointed Professor of Universaland Civil History at the University of Edinburgh, where he transferredto the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in 1836, a post he held untilhis death in 1856.At the height of his powers, Hamilton was regarded as a major Europeanintellectual figure, and evidence of his stature lies in the fact thatHamilton was included in the series Philosophical Classics,edited by William Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews,and thus ranked alongside Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, Kant andHegel. Such an estimation must now strike us as bizarre, yet there ispoint in asking why his times regarded him in such a favorablelight. The answer is that, thanks to two trips he made to Germanyduring his years as a lawyer, Hamilton acquired an extensive knowledgeof German philosophy, little of which had been translated into Englishand which he could read in the original language. At the same time, hewas not only thoroughly versed in the Scottish tradition of philosophythat he had acquired from Jardine and Mill, but an enthusiasticexponent of Reid, whose collected works he edited and annotatedextensively. He was thus perfectly placed to broaden the horizons ofScottish philosophy, to push it beyond the narrower confines of CommonSense by bringing to wider attention the importance of Kant, and yetto do so as one profoundly sympathetic to the native tradition. It isprecisely for these reasons, in fact, that he is praised by JohnVeitch in the Philosophical Classics volume devoted to hisphilosophy.Hamilton's writings are extensive but arguably his views can beadequately ascertained from three long essays which appeared in theEdinburgh Review—“The Philosophy of theUnconditioned” (1829), “The Philosophy ofPerception” (1830) and “Logic” (1833), subsequentlyrepublished in a collection of his writings. In the first of theseHamilton recounts the course philosophy had taken in France after“the philosophy of Descartes and Malebranche had sunk intooblivion”(Hamilton 1853: 2). At first there emerged a highlymaterialist version of Lockean empiricism “a doctrine somelancholy in its consequences, and founded on principles thus partialand exaggerated, [that it] could not be permanent” (ibid:3). Rescue came from two sources. The first of these was the ScottishPhilosophy of Common Sense which showed that there are mentalphenomena that cannot be interpreted as any form of sensation and that“intelligence supposed principles, which, as conditionsof its activity, cannot be the results of itsoperation” (ibid: 3 emphasis original). The other source ofrenewal was German philosophy after Kant, and in particular theAbsolute Idealism that was “founded by Fichte, but evolved bySchelling” (ibid.: 6). “The Philosophy of theUnconditioned” is an examination of the most prominent Frenchphilosopher to make use of this second source—VictorCousin—but this provides an occasion for Hamilton to formulatehis own solution to the tension between the philosophy of common senseand the way of ideas.The question at issue can be expressed in a number of differentways. Kant held that we can only have knowledge of phenomena, never ofnoumena or things in themselves. Clearly this version ofphenomenalism, though in many ways the antithesis of empiricism, haselements in common with the “way of ideas” to which Reidobjected, which holds that the mind apprehends the world indirectly,through “impressions”. The alternative position, referredto in the 19th century as “presentationism” isoften called “direct realism” and holds, as Reid contends,that we directly apprehend the world of real things. Both positionshave their difficulties. Those who followed Kant, notably Fichte andSchelling, sought to escape the “scandal” of unknowablethings-in-themselves, and those who followed Reid sought to overcomethe contention implicit in his approach that our knowledge of theworld is “conditioned” by the principle of commonsense. Hence the pursuit of a philosophy of the“unconditioned”.Hamilton's solution, ultimately, is to combine phenomenalism andpresentationism. In “The Philosophy of Perception” heengages in the debate by defending Reid against the criticism broughtagainst him in Thomas Brown's postumously published Lectures,and in a very vigorous manner—“It is always unlucky tostumble on the threshold. The paragraph (Lect. xxvii) in which Dr Brownopens his attack on Reid contains more mistakes than sentences”(ibid. 69). Brown claimed that a close analysis of Reid's writingsshowed that his position on perception was not really that of directrealism but “hypothetical realism”, that is the belief inan external world that cannot be known directly. It is thiscontention that Hamilton aims to refute, but it is arguable that hemisinterprets Brown. Moreover in his notes to Reid's CollectedWorks, which were composed rather later, he appears to come roundto something very like Brown's interpretation and to hold that Reidwas not, strictly speaking, a direct realist after all.If we construe Reid as holding that in the act of perception there arethree elements—the physiological modification of the organ, amental sensation and the perception of an object—then we cancontrast this with Hamilton's position which holds that the mentalsensation and the perception are simultaneous and in a sense two sidesof the same coin. Reid holds, of course, that we do not reason fromsensation to perception; the apprehending mind moves from one to theother by a natural, inbuilt instinct—one of the principles ofcommon sense. Hamilton too holds that there is no reasoning processhere, but he also thinks that the continuing division that Reid isemploying between sensation and perception is incompatible with theidea of immediate perception or direct realism between. Hence hisamendment, which so to speak ties the sensation and perceptiontogether. But how is this further contention to be sustained? Is it aconceptual truth of some kind, or an empirical observation about howthe mind works? Hamilton's writings in general tend to assertion morethan argument, and while he has a great deal to say on this point, itdoes seem that his “solution” to the problem of perceptionis a an arbitrary stipulation designed to overcome it. At any rate, ifwe do press the question of its defence, we quickly encounter a newversion of the old division, namely whether the perception is to beidentified as a manifestation of self-evident principles of commonsense, or as a psychological association of ideas. In this senseHamilton's thesis is still set within the fundamental parameters ofthe Hume/Reid debate. It was the next major figure in 19thcentury Scottish philosophy—Hamilton's student and friend JamesFrederick Ferrier—who made the most strenuous effort to take adifferent tack.3. James Frederick Ferrier (1808-1864)It is a notable fact that the identification of “Scottishphilosophy” with “Common Sense” is not one that the18th century philosophers themselves made. Indeed, it wasonly in the 19th century that something called“Scottish philosophy” came to self-consciousness, and onlythen that books with “Scottish philosophy” in their titlesbegan to appear. The most famous of these was James McCosh'sencyclopaedic The Scottish Philosophy (1875), and perhaps themost insightful Scottish Philosophy (1885) by Andrew SethPringle Pattison But from the point of view of the century's principlephilosophical debate, the most interesting is J.F. Ferrier'sScottish Philosophy, the Old and the New (1854). This isbecause it was expressly written in defence of the contention that itis possible to engage in something called “Scottishphilosophy” while departing radically from the tenets of Reid,Stewart and so on. Ferrier writes with great force and feeling.It has been asserted, that my philosophy is of Germanic origin andcomplexion. A broader fabrication than that never dropped from humanlips or dribbled from the point of a pen. My philosophy is Scottish tothe very core; it is national in every fibre and articulation of itsframe. It is a natural growth of old Scotland's soil and has drunk inno nourishment from any other land. Are we to judge the productions ofScotland by merely looking to what Scotland has hitherto produced? Maya philosopher not be, heart and soul, a Scotsman—may he not bea Scotsman in all his intellectual movements, even though he shouldhave the misfortune to differ in certain respects, from Dr Reid andSir William Hamilton (Ferrier 1854: 12)The explanation of the feeling with which Ferrier writes lies in thefact his little book is a response to the charge levelled against himin the contest for Hamilton's Chair of Logic and Metaphysics atEdinburgh (then still in the gift of the Town Council), when he wasaccused by the Free Church party of departing from “the Scottishphilosophy” in favour of some sort of Hegelianism. This chargewas almost certainly motivated by the ecclesiastical rivalriesgenerated by the Disruption in the Church of Scotland that took placein 1843, but it is nonetheless true that Ferrier expressly denounces acertain conception of “Common Sense” philosophy, and onewhich he identifies closely with Reid. Indeed he is not afraid torepeat his objections in his defence of himself.Suppose we are discussing the subject of salt, and that we say“salt is white and gritty, it is in some degree moist, it issometimes put into a salt cellar and placed on the dinnertable…”…No man would be considered much of achemist, who was merely acquainted with these and other suchcircumstances, concerning salt.…So, in philosophy, no man canbe called a philosopher who merely knows and says, that he and otherpeople exist, that there is an external world, that a man is the sameto day as he was yesterday, and so forth. These are undoubtedlytruths, but I maintain that they are not truths in philosophy, anymore than those just mentioned are truths in chemistry. Our oldScottish school, however, is of a different way of thinking. Itrepresents these and similar facts as the first truths of philosophy,and to these it has recourse in handling the deeper questions ofmetaphysics. I have no objections to this, for those who likeit—only my system deals with first truths of a very differentorder; and it denies that the first truths of the old Scottish schoolare truths in philosophy at all. This is one very fundamental point ofdifference between the old and the new Scottish system of metaphysics(ibid. : 7)It is important to note that Ferrier thinks this castigation of oneversion of “Common Sense” philosophy is quite compatiblewith claiming the right to be the inheritor of, though not restrictedby, the programme of Reid and Hamilton. And there are indeed severalpoints of contact to be observed. The first is this. Ferrier shareswith the school of Reid and Hamilton an almost unspoken assumptionthat the question of mind and world lies at the heart ofphilosophy. In this they all differ from the alternative conception ofmoral philosophy as social inquiry, which as we have already noted, isto be found in Ferguson, parts of Hume, and above all AdamSmith. Second, and more importantly perhaps, Ferrier's ownphilosophical reflections continue to fit Davies description ofScottish philosophy as a “dialogue between the vulgar and thelearned”.Ferrier's reputation rested upon an earlier series of essays onThe Philosophy of Consciousness which appeared in Blackwood'sMagazine between 1838 and 1843. In these essays he took his stand onthe contention that consciousness implies the impossibility of anaturalistic science of mind, and in a later essay robustly defends aversion of Berkeleyan idealism. While Reid thought that Berkeley'sphilosophical position was one that “no man in his senses couldbelieve”, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, Ferrier describesBerkeley as “the champion of common sense…who could havefoiled the prince of skeptics at his own weapons” (Ferrier 1865:301). “Among all philosophers ancient or modern, we areacquainted with none who presents fewer vulnerable points that BishopBerkeley. His language it is true, has sometimes the appearance ofparadox; but there is nothing paradoxical in his thoughts, and timehas proved the adamantine solidity of his principles.”(ibid. p. 291) By Ferrier's account, Berkeley settles theissue of sensation and perception with which Hamilton struggled, byseeing that there is a false abstraction here.The external world in itself, and the external world inrelation to us, was a philosophic distinction which he[Berkeley] refused to recognize. In his creed, the substantive andphenomenal were one. And though he has been accused of sacrificing thesubstance to the shadow, and though he still continues to be charged,by every philosophical writer, with reducing all things to ideas inthe mind, he was guilty of no such absurdity…There does notappear to be much justice in the ordinary allegation, that Berkeleydiscredited the testimony of the senses, and denied the existence ofthe material universe. He merely denied the distinction between thingsand their appearances, and maintained that the thing was theappearance and the appearance was the thing. (ibid. : 302-3emphasis original)On this interpretation Berkeley espouses a sort of idealism butgenuine idealism, looking only to the fact, and instructed by theunadulterated dictates of common sense, denies…that we canseparate in thought objects and perceptions at all; hencethis system has nothing whatever to do either with the preservation orthe destruction of the material universe; and hence, too, it isidentical…with genuine unperverted realism. (ibid. : 309emphasis original)In this way Ferrier, despite his disagreements, actually concurs withReid's strictures on the kind of philosophical theorizing that triesto deploy Newtonian methods in the way that Hume does. Indeed,Ferrier thinks that “the inert and lifeless character of modernphilosophy is ultimately attributable to her having degenerated into aphysical science” (ibid.: 191), and he condemns the resulting“picture of man” as “a wretched association machine,through which ideas pass linked only by laws over which the machinehas no control” (ibid. : 196). His alternative to thisexternalist conception of “the science of mind” is areturn to the introspective examination of human consciousness.“Consciousness is philosophy nascent; philosophy isconsciousness in full bloom and blow. The difference between them isonly one of degree, and not one of kind; and thus all conscious menare to a certain extent philosophers, although they may not knowit” (ibid. :197) In short, the proper engagement of philosophyis a matter of bringing consciousness to a better understanding ofitself, which is at least one interpretation of the ambition of Reid'sInquiry.Ferrier's philosophy, then, constitutes a further excursion in thecommon sense tradition, but one that sets itself at some considerabledistance from Reid. For Reid, Berkeley is the principal architect of“the way of ideas”, and hence though not himself askeptic, the purveyor of a philosophy that makes radical skepticisminevitable. In sharp contrast, for Ferrier, Berkeley's philosophy(with some additions of Ferrier's own) is the answer toskepticism. It hardly needs to be said that this was a highlycontroversial position. Moreover, it throws the whole subject of mindand consciousness back into the realms of metaphysical philosophy andhence seems to abandon the shared methodological assumption that, toquote Reid again, “there is but one way to the knowledge ofnature's works; the way of observation and experiment” asupposition he wholeheartedly shared with Hume. Thisimplication—that the methods of the sciences are inapplicable tophilosophy—somewhat isolated Ferrier within Scottishphilosophy. Though he was regarded with great acclaim in continentalEurope, Scottish philosophers moved in different directions, some toan intensification of the experimental method, and some to AbsoluteIdealism. Of the first group, the most prominent and influential wasAlexander Bain.4. Alexander Bain (1818-1903)Alexander Bain was Regius Professor of Logic at the University ofAberdeen from 1860 to 1880. A man of remarkable gifts, he wasappointed to the Chair largely on the strength of distinguishedphilosophical work he had published while working as a journalist inLondon. Dissertations on Leading Philosophical Questions(1903), is a collection of his essays published in retirement, thoughalmost all had originally appeared in the journal Mind, ajournal he was instrumental in founding, In several of these essays,Bain takes Reid and Hamilton as his starting point and, broadly,follows the same methods. But he pushes them in a much more stronglyempirical direction. The most interesting of hisDissertations, in this connection, is entitled“Associationist Controversies” and at the heart of thesecontroversies we can find a distinction between philosophy andpsychology which both reveals the significant difference between Bainand Ferrier, and establishes the discipline of experimental psychologyin its own right.We are, at the moment, in the midst of a conflict of views as to thepriority of Metaphysics and Psychology. If indeed the two are closelyidentified as some suppose, there is no conflict; there is in fact,but one study. If, on the other hand, there are two subjects, eachought to be carried on apart for a certain length, before they caneither confirm or weaken each other. I believe that in strictness, adisinterested Psychology should come first in order, and that, aftergoing on a little way in amassing the facts, it should revise itsfundamental assumptions…I do not see any mode of attaining acorrect Metaphysics until Psychology has at least made some way upon aprovisional Metaphysics (Bain 1903: 38)Bain can be interpreted as a practitioner of the “science ofmind” no less than Reid or Hume. But whereas in Reid and Humethe distinction between philosophy and psychology as the modern worldunderstands it, was unclear, it is one of Bain's chief claims toenduring significance that, as this quotation reveals, he brought thedistinction between psychological and metaphysical questions toprominence, and in what we would call his research programme he gavepriority to the former. The conclusion to be drawn is that Bain, likeFerrier, can be seen to stand in the tradition of Scottish philosophyin the sense that he adopted its methods. But in contrast to Ferrier,he did so in ways that further removed the question of sensation andperception from the realms of traditional metaphysics, and pressed thestudy of the mind in the direction of empirical psychology.One notable feature of this development lies in the fact that Bain wasone of the principal exponents and defenders of“associationism”, whose origins, arguably, are to be foundmost clearly in Hume's Treatise. Associationism is theapplication of empirical observation to the relation between ideas andexperiences. What it seeks is observed regularities, in the hope offormulating psychological laws that will enable us to order thecontents of mind. Two such principles—Contiguity andSimilarity—were widely accepted, and identified by Bain as beingemployed by Reid and Hamilton. A third—Contrast—was moredisputable, and in “Associationist Controversies' Bain isprincipally concerned with the nature and identifiable independence ofprinciples such as these.However, for present purposes his arguments are interesting chieflynot so much for their elaboration of associationism, but for the lightthey throw on the development of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenthcentury. One point in particular seems to me illuminating. In thedispute between Reid and Hume with respect to the operations of themind one of the fundamental points of difference is this. Reid istrying, in the main, to establish basic principles of the mind'soperation which will vindicate its rationality, and hence avoid thedepths of skepticism into which Hume's account forces it. Hume, on thecontrary, declares that “reason is nothing but a wonderful andunintelligible instinct in our souls which carries us along a certaintrain of ideas…[and that this] habit is nothing but one of theprinciples of nature, and derives all its force from thatorigin” (Hume 1888 : 179), Reid's purpose is precisely to showthat the basic operations of the mind are those ofintelligibility. Now in terms of this difference, Bain is of Hume'spersuasion. This is revealed not merely in his striking deployment ofdecidedly Humean terminology when, for instance, he contrasts theperception and the memory of a thing in terms of“vividness” (Bain 1903: 42). It is even more evident whenhe asserts that “The flow of representations in dreaming andmadness offers the best field of observation for the study ofassociations as such” (ibid: 45).What this remark reveals is that Bain is interested first inestablishing empirical laws with respect to the contents of the humanmind. The reason that he thinks dreaming and madness are the bestplaces to start is precisely because he sees that the pursuit ofrational principles, that is to say, philosophically coherentprinciples, is likely to distort our observation by inclining us tosee rational connections rather than empirical associations, or as heputs it “associations as such”. In this respect he isemploying Hume's rather than Reid's conception of humannature. Certainly he reserves judgement on the final outcome of theseinvestigations with respect to philosophy, arguing only for thepriority of psychology over metaphysics and not, as Hume may be saidto do, for the elimination of the second by the first. But so far asthe science of mind that had been such a marked feature of Scottishphilosophy goes, Bain clearsightedly pursues its more empiricalambitions.For Ferrier the empirical laws of association that Bain seeks are not“truths in philosophy”. No one can be called a philosopherwho merely knows and says, that in dreaming or madness this mentalrepresentation tends to be associated with that. The philosopheraspires, rather, to make sense of experience, and the whole pointabout the experience of the dreamer or the madman is that no sense isto be made of it. By contrast, the empirical psychologist, seriouslycommitted to the experimental method, does not, in the end, renderconsciousness intelligible; he or she simply describes how the mindworks.With Ferrier and Bain, then, the tension within Scottish philosophythat Davie has identified is resolved in radically different ways, thefirst by a return to metaphysics, the second by an advance topsychology. Both can claim to be inheritors of the Scottish tradition,but both in their different ways may be said to have brought about itsdemise. With Bain, the nature of the demise is evident; the philosophyof mind is replaced by empirical psychology. With Ferrier, the natureof the demise is rather different. Faced with the prospect ofreturning to Berkeleyan metaphysics, several prominent Scottishphilosophers preferred to look elsewhere, namely to Germany andHegel. The result was that as the century ended a group ofphilosophers based chiefly in the Universities of Glasgow and StAndrews and known as the Scottish Idealists came to prominence.5. The Scottish IdealistsIn his illuminating study Scottish Philosophy, importantlysubtitled A comparison of the Scottish and German answers toHume, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison remarks:The thread of national tradition, it is tolerably well known, hasbeen but loosely held of late by many of our best Scottish students ofphilosophy. It will hardly be denied that the philosophical productionsof the younger generation of our University men are more stronglyimpressed with a German than with a native stamp (Seth Pringle-Pattison1885:1-2)Pringle-Pattison does not say who it is he has in mind, but aknowledge of the period makes it relatively easy to surmise. In factSeth himself (he changed his name to Pringle-Pattison in 1898) isnormally identified as one, being joint editor with R B Haldane ofEssays in Philosophical Criticism (1883), which came to beregarded as the Scottish Idealists' philosophical manifesto. Thereference to “a German stamp”, however, may be somewhatmisleading. An interest in, and a knowledge of, Kant can be found togo back to Hamilton, and far from being regarded as a threat to theScottish tradition was recognized (by Veitch, for instance) as animportant part of its enrichment. The German philosophy referred tohere, then, is that which emanated from Hegel.The Secret of Hegel is the title of a very large book byJames Hutchison Stirling, first published in 1864. Stirling iscredited with bringing Hegel to the attention of British (and not justScottish) philosophy for the first time, though a wit at the timeremarked that if Stirling did know the secret of Hegel, he had kept itto himself! Though Stirling was, in modern terms, a layman (he heldno university post) the book was well received, and it is a matter ofsome consequence that it contained significant criticism ofHamilton. In fact, Stirling subsequently published a short but highlycritical volume entitled Sir William Hamilton: being thephilosophy of perception. An analysis (1865). With these twobooks we can chart the diminishing interest in and influence of theCommon Sense tradition within Scottish philosophy and the increasinginfluence of German Idealism and Hegel in particular, culminating inthe first complete translation into English of Hegel'sPhenomenology of Spirit in 1910 by J.B. Baillie, RegiusProfessor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.Of the Scottish Idealists the most prominent and influential wasEdward Caird (1835-1908). A graduate of the University of Glasgow,after a period at Oxford he returned in 1866 to become Professor ofMoral Philosophy at Glasgow, a post he held for almost 30 years, beforereturning to Oxford to become Master of Balliol. Caird was an admirerof Kant, who believed nevertheless that Kant had failed to capitalizefully on his own insights, and that the full import of his philosophycould be uncovered with the help of Hegel. The aim of philosophy, onthis interpretation, was the ultimate reconciliation of seeminglyincompatible elements in human experience—religion and science,freedom and causality, reason and desire, for instance, but above alland at its most abstract, subject and object (or mind and body). Theemployment of these distinctions is essential to making humanexperience intelligible, but once they are held to be absolute errorand confusion arises. Materialism makes the distinction between mindand body absolute and seeks to explain the former in terms of thelatter; Cartesianism works in reverse. Both result in rendering therelation mysterious.The solution lies in the Hegelian perception that our knowledge isperfected conceived when its objects are conceived as parts of awhole, or Absolute. This way of understanding, however, is notsomething to be accomplished simply. Human understanding evolves ashuman experience increases and our knowledge expands. Accordingly,Caird, Pringle-Pattison and the other Scottish Idealists welcomed thegrowth of natural science, and especially biology, as providingimportant new material for the further evolutionary development ofhuman understanding as a whole.Three consequent problems can be said to have occupied them chiefly.The first was to avoid the charge of “mentalism” or“panpsychism”. The Idealist contention that materialism isfalse leads easily to the counter accusation that the world is made ofmental stuff. This charge is often leveled at Berkeley, interest inwhom greatly increased among Scottish philosophers at this time(Alexander Campbell Fraser, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at theUniversity of Edinburgh being the editor of a new collected edition ofBerkeley's works). Ferrier, Fraser and Seth all deny that Berkeley'simmaterialism amounts to mentalism, but it became common todistinguish between “subjective Idealism” and“Absolute Idealism”, the latter being the doctrine theScottish Idealists espoused.Appeal to “The Absolute”, however, brings anotherdanger—a threat to the reality of individual finite minds. Thereis a risk that the individual subject is reduced to a modification ofthe one Absolute universal mind. Pringle-Pattison addresses this pointin several of his writings, partly because he sees it to be a problemthat the other Idealists (notably Caird) failed to avoid.The third issue is religion. How does “the Absolute”relate to “God”? This was not simply a question internalto Idealist philosophy, but of far wider cultural and intellectualconcern, partly because of the threat that Darwinian biology andBiblical “higher” criticism seemed to pose for Christiantheism, and partly because of the rise of anthropological inquiry andthe new “science of religions”. A special opportunity toaddress these questions arose with the establishment in 1882 of theGifford Lectures at the four Scottish Universities. Several series ofthese important lectures were given by the principal ScottishIdealists, and subsequently published—The Evolution ofReligion (1891-2) by Edward Caird (widely regarded as hisphilosophical masterpiece), Naturalism and Agnosticism(1896-8) by J.S. Ward, and The Idea of God in the light of recentphilosophy (1912-13) by A.S. Pringle-Pattison, are three of themost important. All of them deploy the resources of Idealistphilosophy to defend a version of theism that is compatible withevolutionary biology. They do so in part by interpreting the conceptof “evolution” philosophically so that both thought andreligion are understood to evolve, no less than biologicalorganism.Did Scottish Idealism constitute a revitalization and continuation ofthe Scottish philosophical tradition, or its demise? Ferrier wasferocious in his criticism of Reid, though adamant about theScottishness of his philosophical endeavours. Caird expresslyidentifies what he sees to be a crucial defect in the appeal to“Principles of Common Sense”, and has been generally beenregarded as a something of a fifth columnist as far as Scottishphilosophy was concerned. George Davie describes him as “a veryuntypical Scotsman and one quite exceptionally apathetic toeducational customs of the country” (Davie 1961: 86). However,this remark reflects the fact that over the course of the nineteenthcentury Scottish philosophers were concerned not only withphilosophical debates of the kind reviewed here, but with the place ofphilosophy in the university curriculum. As a result, from Hamiltononwards, several of them wrote essays on educational reform and gaveevidence to the many commissions of inquiry into the universities thatwere held. Caird's indifference to the national tradition ofphilosophical education, if that is what it was, was simply the otherside of his desire to bring Scottish philosophers into the widercontext of contemporary European philosophy which was, of course,dominated by German Idealism. That he was neither alone norunsuccessful in this ambition is evidenced by the fact that heinspired and recruited so many other subsequently distinguishedfigures. Ferrier and Pringle-Pattison were Idealists independently ofCaird, but Sir Henry Jones, who also came to occupy the Chair of MoralPhilosophy at Glasgow, and J.H. Muirhead, founder of the enduringMuirhead Library of Philosophy, a long series of major philosophicalworks published in London, were students of Caird.The continuity or otherwise of Scottish Idealism with Reid and CommonSense, however,is less important to philosophy in Scotland than thefate of Idealism. In 1903, the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moorepublished an essay entitled “The Refutation of Idealism”.It is arguable that Moore did not understand what he was aiming torefute, but his essay began a return to ascendancy by the Britishempiricist tradition that spelt the end of British Idealism. For overfifty years, both Reid and Hegel disappeared from thecurriculum and conscientiousness of philosophers in Scotland.BibliographyBain, Alexander. (1903) Dissertations on Leading PhilosophicalTopics, Longmans, Green, and Co., New York and Bombay.Boucher, David. (ed.) (2004) The ScottishIdealists, Imprint Academic, Exeter.Caird, Edward. (1907) The Evolution of Religion (2 vols)Maclehose, Glasgow.Cross, R.C. (1971) “Alexander Bain”, AberdeenUniversity Review 44 pp. 1-9.Davie, George. (1961) The Democratic Intellect, EdinburghUniversity Press, Edinburgh.-----. (1994) A Passion for Ideas: Essays on the ScottishEnlightenment Vol. II, Polygon, Edinburgh.-----. (2001) The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century ofEnlightenment in Scotland, Routledge, London and New York.Ferrier, J.F. (1875) Philosophical Works of Ferrier,Blackwood, Edinburgh.-----. (1856) Scottish Philosophy, the Old and theNew, Edinburgh and London.Hamilton, William. (1853) Discussions on Philosophy andLiterature, Education and University Reform, MacLachlan andStewart, Edinburgh.McCosh, James. (1875) The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical,Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton, MacMillan andCo., London.Haldane, Elizabeth S. (1991) James Frederick Ferrier,Thommes Books Bristol. Reprint of 1899 edition with a new introductionby John Haldane.Haldane, R.B.S. and Seth, A. (eds.) (1883) Essays in PhilosophicalCriticism, Clarendon Press, Oxford.Hume, David. (1888) A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A.Selby-Bigge, Clarendon Press, Oxford.Kant, Immanuel. (1951) Prolegomena to any future metaphysictrans. L.W. Beck, New York.Reid, Thomas. (1997) An Inquiry into the Human Mind on thePrinciples of Common Sense (a critical edition, edited by DerekR. Brookes), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.Seth, Andrew. (1885) Scottish Philosophy: A Comparison of theScottish and German Answers to Hume (third edition), Blackwood,Edinburgh and London.Seth Pringle-Pattison, Andrew. (1917) The Idea of God in thelight of recent philosophy Clarendon Press, Oxford.Stirling, James H. (1865) Sir William Hamilton: The Philosophyof Perception (an analysis), Longmans, Green and Co., London.Thomson, Arthur. (1985) Ferrier of St Andrews: an academictragedy, Scottish Academic Press.Veitch, John. (1882) Hamilton, Blackwood, Edinburgh andLondon.Ward, James. (1899) Naturalism and Agnosticism Adam andCharles Black, London.Other Internet ResourcesEntry on William Hamilton, (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J. Fieser, ed., U. Tennessee)Entry on Frederick Ferrier, (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J. Fieser, ed., U. Tennessee)Entry on Edward Caird (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, J. Fieser, ed., U. Tennessee)Chapter on Alexander Bain, in Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, by Robert M. YoungRelated Entries Hume, David | Reid, Thomas Copyright © 2005 byGordon Graham<gordon.graham@ptsem.edu> |
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