Scottish Enlightenment Quotes

“In some respects, the Scottish Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, had been an anticipation of later developments in Vienna: the same desire to systematise, to overthrow outworn structures, to rationalize. The secularisation of the Calvinist mind, and the secularisation of the Jews, gave early twentieth-century intellectual life its characteristic stamp.”
― Norman Stone, Europe Transformed, 1878-1919

“[There is] a certain continuity between the quartet on nineteenth-century philosophers I examine, namely Stewart, Brown, Hamilton and Ferrier, and that of the eighteenth-century quartet composed of Hutcheson, Hume, Reid and Smith. The title serves to mark off the debates engaged in by the philosophers in England and Ireland. It distinguishes a set of philosophical problems that have less affinity with the latter than with questions being treated then and to be treated later by philosophers on the continent of Europe.”
― George Elder Davie, The Scotch Metaphysics: A Century of Enlightenment in Scotland

“Of, course, Chinese economic developments forms the great background for the rise of research into British political economy of the eighteenth century. Chinese policymakers and academics are increasingly interested in economic growth and the nature of international competition and tensions between the different nations. Hume and Smith discussed these questions in the eighteenth century and were a source of guidance for Great Britain in that transformative period. China has been undergoing a massive transformation from a traditional society to a modern one, from an agricultural society to a commercial one, and needs a new kind of political economy and moral philosophy to underpin this. The Scottish thinkers, Hume, Smith and Ferguson and their contemporaries debated political and economic problems and also reflected on the most appropriate ethic for the emergence of commercial society. One of the most striking features of their advice wa that it did not lead to the sort of violent revolution often associated with the French Enlightenment philosophers. On the contrary, they managed to contribute to the development and progress of Great Britain without aligning themselves with revolutionary movements. It is this aspect of their thinking that makes them attractive to many in contemporary China.”
― Zhang Zheng-ping, The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry

“In 1766, James Boswell, having returned from a grand tour accompanied by Rousseau's mistress, left London for his native Edinburgh, where he took his final law examination and joined the Scottish bar. Meanwhile, ensconced in the Advocate's Library, the Professor of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, Adam Ferguson, was completing his pioneering work, shortly to appear (despite David Hume's misgivings) as An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). These were heady days in the precincts of the Scottish Parliament Building, when cultural conversation in the Old Town was as high as the odours of its teeming streets. On 16th August 1773, Ferguson dined at Boswell's house, with Samuel Johnson who had just begun his Scottish journey. They debated the authenticity of Ossian's poetry, and their colleague, Lord Monboddo's ideas about human evolution, Johnson ridiculing the latter's notion that men once had tails.”
― Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory

“Humphrey Clinker provides an enlightenment survey of Scotland, its landscape, sociability, industry, and progress, while at a fictional level, it places Scotland as the harbinger of returned health and vigor.”
― Aileen Douglas, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“Scotch novels and Scotch reviewers were the most brilliant constellations in a northern literary galaxy which included - besides the historical romance and critical quarterly - a professional intellectual class, the entrpreneurial publisher, the nationalist ballad epic, and the monthly magazine. If not all absolutely original, here these genres and institutions acquired their definitive forms and associations, and a prestige they would bear throughout the nineteenth century.”
― Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh