Scottish Enlightenment

Scottish Enlightenment, the conjunction of minds, ideas, and publications in Scotland during the whole of the second half of the 18th century and extending over several decades on either side of that period. Contemporaries referred to Edinburgh as a “hotbed of genius.” Voltaire in 1762 wrote in characteristically provocative fashion that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening,” and Benjamin Franklin caught the mood of the place in his Autobiography (1794): “Persons of good Sense…seldom fall into [disputation], except Lawyers, University Men, and Men of all Sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.”

Adam Smith

The personalities were fundamental: most prominent in retrospect are the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, matched at the time by Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. However, the Scottish Enlightenment was neither a single school of philosophical thought nor a single intellectual movement. But movement it was: a movement of ideas and the disputation of those ideas. The men who developed and disputed those ideas as they met in the societies and ate and drank in the taverns of the Old Town in Edinburgh created momentum on many fronts. It was a movement of taste in architecture—Robert Adam and his brother James, followed in due course by William Playfair; a movement of taste in literature and belles lettres—Hugh Blair, the holder of the first chair of rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh, and the poets James Thomson, Allan Ramsay, and the incomparable Robert Burns, as well as the playwright John Home; a movement in the arts, especially in portraiture—the portrait artists Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn and the miniature wax and paste portraitists James Tassie, his nephew William Tassie, and John Henning. Equally central were those who made lasting and formative impacts on the development of the sciences of mathematics (Colin Maclaurin), medicine (William Cullen), chemistry (Joseph Black), engineering (James Watt and Thomas Telford), and geology (James Hutton).