by Peter Watson
The brain, in fact, had been explored as early as the 1660s, by Thomas Willis, one of the generation of early scientists who, with Wren, Hooke and Boyle, was in at the birth of the Royal Society. Willis had carried out numerous dissections of brains–humans and dogs mainly–and had developed a new way of extracting the brain from the skull, from underneath, which helped preserve the shape intact. His careful observations and dissections, and some clever staining techniques, helped to show that the brain was covered in a fine network of blood vessels, that the ventricles (the central spaces where the cortex was folded in on itself) had no blood supply and were therefore unlikely to be the location of the soul, as some believed. He showed that the brain was much more complex than anyone had thought, identifying for example new areas, such as the corpus striatum (the striped body), and he traced the brain’s links–via the nerves–with the face, certain muscles, and the heart. His book The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves (1664) did much to move the seat of the passions and the soul from the heart, making him famous in the process. He invented the term ‘neurologie’, which he called the doctrine of the nerves. He dedicated his book to Archbishop Sheldon, to highlight to everyone that he wasn’t an atheist.
These changing attitudes and beliefs were embodied, perhaps inevitably, in a work which was to take them to extremes. This was L’homme machine (Man a Machine) by the French surgeon Julien Offray de La Mettrie, published in 1747, though to escape censorship in France he was forced to release his book in Leiden. In arguing that thought is a property of matter ‘on a par with electricity’, he was coming down on the side of determinism, materialism and atheism, all of which were to land him in hot water. His view was that human nature and animal nature were part of the same continuum, that human nature equated with physical nature and he insisted that there were no ‘immaterial substances’, thus casting huge doubt on the existence of the soul. Matter, he said, was animated by natural forces and has its own organisational powers. There was, he said, no essential difference between any living organisms: ‘Man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven.’51
Étienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac (1714–1780), argued that all mental activity is produced by the pleasurable or painful quality of sensations, but he also said that the soul preceded sensations. Charles Bonnet (1720–1793) thought that mental activity took place in the fibres of the brain but nevertheless this activity required a soul.
In line with these changes, from soul to mind, went an associated development, what Dror Wahrman calls the emergence of the modern idea of the self. In a survey of the way the different sexes were portrayed in the eighteenth-century theatre, in the way race was written about, the way animals were conceived (in particular the relationship of the great apes to man), in the study of portraits of the time, the changing character of the novel, the proliferating fashions in clothes, Wahrman shows that the understanding of the self was transformed, from something that was mutable, and due to climate, history or religion, to something that came from within. This was not yet a biological concept of the self, but showed instead a realisation that the self could be developed. The discovery of America, as was mentioned in Chapter 21 and will be returned to in Chapter 28, had a great influence on European thinking about race, biology, culture and history, but in this context it was the American War of Independence that was for many people a watershed. In that conflict, different nationalities–British, French, Germans, Italians–fought together against the British: this had a profound effect, forcing people more than in previous wars to consider exactly who they were. The animal–human boundary was also reconsidered in the context of identity, and compared with class and gender boundaries. Portraits, which earlier on in the century had distinguished sitters chiefly by their clothing, now began to stress distinguishing facial features. The rise of the novel, Wahrman says, was just the most vivid example of this ‘interiority complex’ of the late eighteenth century. In the early part of the century, characters in novels were usually regarded as examples of types; by the turn of the nineteenth century, character was esteemed for itself and for its singularity. Novels explored not the familiar ways in which traditional character types met typical problems, but introduced the reader to ‘strangers’, with inner lives that might be totally different from their own, and invited sympathy and understanding.52 It was in the late eighteenth century that the concept of development in character began to be stressed, the idea of Bildung in German, which reflected the view that in the course of a life the inner self may change in some areas while remaining consistent in others (Goethe’s thinking was especially powerful here). By the same token, there developed in art an interest in child portraits (in the work of Joshua Reynolds, for example) and associated with this was the new idea of children as ‘innocent blank slates’ rather than miniature adults.53 It was this new interest in character, identity, and where they both came from, which provoked the fashion for physiognomy, predicting character from facial features. All of which reflected and reinforced the Enlightenment concept of natural rights. Anonymous members of large class-groupings were unlikely to be as assertive or self-conscious as individuals with a strong sense of self.
That Paris–the home of Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, of Montesquieu and Descartes, of La Mettrie and Condillac–should be a centre of enlightenment, and the search for the laws of human nature, was not so surprising. The city had been a capital of intellectual excellence and new ideas since its schools and university were founded in the eleventh century (see above, Chapter 17). What was far more surprising was that a small town in the very north of Europe should emerge as a rival.
‘For a period of nearly half a century, from about the time of the Highland rebellion of 1745 until the French Revolution of 1789, the small city of Edinburgh ruled the Western intellect.’ This is James Buchan in his recent book The Capital of the Mind. ‘For near fifty years, a city that had for centuries been a byword for poverty, religious bigotry, violence and squalor laid the mental foundations for the modern world…“Edinburgh, the Sink of Abomination” became “Edinburgh, the Athens of Great Britain”.’ At one stage in the seventeenth century, and despite the fact that there were three mail coaches between Edinburgh and London every week, on one occasion the return mail contained only one letter from London to the whole of Scotland.54 Against this background, a raft of luminaries–David Hume, Adam Smith, James Hutton, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair–became the first intellectual celebrities of the modern world, ‘as famous for their mental boldness as for their bizarre habits and spotless moral characters. They taught Europe and America how to think and talk about the new mental areas opening to the eighteenth-century view: consciousness, the purposes of civil government, the forces that shape and distinguish society, the composition of physical matter, time and space, right actions, what binds and what divided the two sexes. They could view with a dry eye a world where God was dead…The American patriot Benjamin Franklin, who first visited Edinburgh with his son in 1759, remembered his stay as “the densest happiness” he had ever experienced. The famous Encyclopédie of the French philosophers had devoted a single contemptuous paragraph to Écosse in 1755, but by 1762 Voltaire was writing, with more than a touch of malice, “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening”.’55
The immediate spur to this renaissance of the north was the rebellion of 1745. The Highland rebellion, led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, to re-establish the (Catholic) Stuarts as the kings of Scotland (and Britain) briefly flourished in Edinburgh, before Charles, on his way to attack London, was defeated near Derby and forced to flee back to France. This concentrated minds in Edinburgh, forcing many to conclude that their future lay with England, that religious divisions, as reflected in the royal rivalries, did more harm than good, and that the future lay with the new learning rather than the old politics.
Almost as relevant to Edinburgh’s success
was the project to build Edinburgh New Town. ‘Edinburgh New Town,’ writes James Buchan, ‘is intriguing not merely as a suite of handsome buildings, but as the material expression of ideas of civilian life…They embody a new social existence that is suave, class-conscious, sensitive, law-abiding, hygienic and uxorious: in short, modern.’ The extension of the city to the north of the old town was an expression not just of its expanding population but of its ambition. The new bourgeoisie wanted a more amenable city, one that was more rationally planned, with better commercial facilities, better meeting places, reflecting the way society was changing both economically and in the human relations that were now better understood via the new sciences. Churches and pubs were no longer enough: had not Montesquieu, no less, said that concentrating people in capital cities increased their commercial appetites?56 The truth was that people came to realise what they had known in antiquity–that cities could be hugely pleasurable. (Until 1745, Edinburgh had been run in a very strict Puritan fashion–indeed, the phrase ‘Ten o’clock man’ reflected the fact that elders of the kirk would tour the city’s pubs at that hour, to ensure that no more alcohol was served.) Edinburgh New Town was built by public subscription, making it ‘the largest public work in Europe until the canal mania of the late 1760s’.57 While several individual buildings were the work of Robert Adam, or his brother John (or both), the overall conception of the New Town, its visual and intellectual integrity, owed most to James Craig. It was his plan–broad main streets, narrow service streets, with squares at either end and neoclassical, neo-Palladian, façades, all in perfect proportion–which gave Edinburgh its name as the ‘heavenly city of the philosophers’.58 ‘There is no city like Edinburgh in all the world,’ says James Buchan. ‘It is what Paris ought to be,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. And, with the old castle high on its crag, like the Parthenon, looking down on the Palladian regularities of the New Town, the city’s physical splendour was certainly more impressive even than Paris (whose grand boulevards and vistas date from the nineteenth century), the perfect example of eighteenth-century civic ambitions. Against this splendid backdrop, we may consider the Edinburgh luminaries.
In Britain, and particularly in Scotland, there was a special gloss on the way the relationship between the soul and psychology was conceived, which was known as moral philosophy. This was an ancient term, dating back to late medieval times, which reflected the view that the soul, human nature and the arrangement of social conditions were all linked, and that the study of human nature would reveal God’s purposes for morality. (Moral philosophy was also taught in the early American colleges.59) There were those who argued that the moral sense was a faculty of the soul–this was how God showed man how to behave–but the man who grounded morality in the study of human nature was David Hume, the same Hume who we met in the last chapter attacking the rational defence of religion. Born in the Lawnmarket area of Edinburgh in 1711, the son of a Berwickshire laird, he developed a passion for literature and philosophy at college. His most important work was done while he was in his twenties but he was never made a professor, possibly because his scepticism bewildered and even frightened Edinburgh. On his deathbed, his friend Katharine Mure implored him to ‘burn a’your wee bookies’ before it was too late.60
In January 1739, at the age of twenty-eight, Hume published the first of two volumes, A Treatise of Human Nature. This set out to provide the groundwork to establish a science of man that would provide a rational moral code (its subtitle was: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects). ‘There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.’61 He took out some of the strongest points, as likely to be very offensive to Christians, but even so, as one observer noted, he showed a level of scepticism ‘not seen since antiquity’.62 Like Locke, Hume based his approach on Newton but he cannily observed that the physicist, while he had described gravity, had not really explained it. For example, he argued that the basis of knowledge is causation. We know something is because we experience it becoming so. But Hume insisted that this is illusion: we can never demonstrate causality. Famously, he said that when one billiard ball ‘strikes’ another, knocking it across the table, this does not reveal causation, only conjunction.63 Experience orders life, ‘knowledge becomes belief, “something felt by the mind”, not the result of a rational process.’ On this basis, all religion–with its ultimate causes and miracles–is complete nonsense.64 Hume thought reason was completely in thrall to passion, and to that extent all science was suspect. There are no laws of nature, he said, there is no self, there is no purpose to existence, only chaos. Likewise he did not think it possible to explain ‘the ultimate principles of the soul’ but thought that there were four ‘sciences’ relevant to human nature. These were logic, morals, criticism and politics. ‘The sole end of logic is to explain the principles and operations of our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas: morals and criticism regard our tastes and sentiment: and politics consider men as united in society, and dependent on each other.’65 Although his book was in three parts, on understanding, the passions, and morality, he argued that at base human nature is composed of two principal parts, affections and understanding. It was, he insisted, passion rather than reason that drove actions, that passion is always divisible into pleasure and pain and that these feelings affect what we think of as good and bad.66 Hume too replaced soul with mind, which, he believed, could eventually be ‘perfectly known’.67 Though he placed the passions centre-stage, Hume was a moderate man in his own habits. He found many of his contemporaries ‘agreeable’ and, towards the end of his life, often cooked for his friends, who included several clergymen.68
Adam Ferguson, the son of a clergyman, was born on Tayside, the main eastern road into the Highlands, in June 1723. He grew up with a ‘peppery’ character and, according to Joseph Black, his physician, tended to wear ‘an uncommon amount of clothing’. After a series of adventures and appointments, including chaplain to the Black Watch regiment, and service in Ireland and America, he was eventually appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in Edinburgh. His best known and most influential work was An Essay on the History of Civil Society, which received much criticism in Edinburgh, not least from David Hume, but found many enthusiastic readers in London, where it went through seven editions in Ferguson’s lifetime. It also made a deep impression on the continent, giving to German philosophy the phrase ‘civil society’, bürgerliche Gesellschaft.69 James Buchan says ‘the Essay forms the essential bridge between Machiavelli and Marx: between an aristocratic dream of civic participation and the Leftist nightmare of an atomised and “alienated” personality.’70
Ferguson’s argument is that progress is neither linear nor inevitable. There was never any golden age, from which humanity has fallen; instead, human beings are defined by four qualities: men are ingenious, cautious, obstinate and restless.71 Humans are sociable and can only be understood ‘in groupes, as they have always subssisted’. The rational world is not quite as the French philosophes would have us believe, and history proceeds in a mist. ‘Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of any human design…No constitution is formed by consent, no government is copied from a plan…’72 While part of him welcomed the development of industrial society (he had views about the ‘stages’ of history), Ferguson was one of the first to point out that manufacturing ‘reduces the human being to a simple moving hand or foot, men become narrow-minded and specialised, they lose their notion of publi
c good…we make a nation of helots and have no free citizens’. ‘Wages and liberty,’ he said, ‘are not synonyms.’73 For Ferguson, we can love progress too much.
Until the seventeenth century there was no conception of ‘the economy’ as an entity in its own right. In the university curriculum, centred on Aristotle, the management of affairs was regarded as a branch of ethics. Only in the eighteenth century was there a separation of economic from moral questions. Until then the ‘just price’ for goods was set by guild corporations and royal representatives, not (at least not directly) by the market. The emergence of modern states in the seventeenth century–France, Austria, Prussia, Sweden–was a significant step, as they sought to understand the links between population levels, manufacturing and agricultural productivity, and the variable effects of the balance of international trade. As a result the eighteenth century saw in several of these countries (but not yet Holland or Britain) the establishment of university chairs of economics and the management of the state–political economy.74
