The Scottish Enlightenment can help us see the light in winning indy

The Treaty of Union of 1707 says it all: “That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name Great Britain.” In other words, no matter how feloniously it was achieved, the two nation-states became one ruled over by Anne and the Parliament of Great Britain.

It is no use denying it. Scotland as a nation-state ceased to exist in 1707, and though this is still a country and a nation as defined by the dictionary, the United Kingdom has been the controlling unitary nation-state in which we have lived for nearly 311 years.

For that matter, in strictly legal terms, until the British Nationality Act of 1948 we were not citizens but subjects of Her Majesty. In some legal matters, we still are subjects, but we are all now citizens of the UK if we meet the relevant criteria and we are citizens of the European Union, though not for much longer by the looks of things.

It is the job of historians to chart the past but it should be the vocation of historians, professional and amateur, to make sure that the people of the present do not repeat the follies of the past. History has much to teach us at this point in time in the life of Scotland, but I see precious few historians teaching from a pro-independence viewpoint.

That is a pity, because I very much fear that we who believe in independence are about to repeat the mistakes of our recent history.

In 2014, the Yes side lost the argument for many reasons, but principally over the fears raised by Better Together’s adherents on five issues – the economy including oil wealth or lack of it, pensions, currency, identity, and the constitution including European Union membership. There were other minor scraps on lesser matters, but Yes lost the argument on enough of these five issues to make the eventual difference. You can protest all you like about the media bias and the lies, but on the day, No won because Yes failed to make the arguments well enough, and that was all that mattered.

Look at the list of five and ask yourself this — what has changed? Where is the intellectual process that will provide the answer to these arguments next time? Who is making the Yes case on these issues?

In short, who is doing the thinking to underpin the new independence manifesto? For that is what is needed now — a manifesto that shows the Scottish people above all that they will only get the democratic choice on such matters as EU membership, our currency and whether or not we become a republic or retain the monarchy, when Scotland is once again a nation-state.

Yet apart from Paul Kavanagh and Common Weal, I see no organisation, and precious few individuals, standing up to say “this is how we win the arguments next time, and here are the credible answers to all the Better Together fear-raising”. I see precious little enlightenment happening, though I have great hopes for the Scottish Independence Convention and the growing grassroots movement that hopefully will grasp the nettle and tackle the issues.

We need to get a new Scottish Enlightenment going, and so we need to know about the first one, and how it happened.

Over the next three weeks I will be profiling three people who made this country the go-to place for philosophical thought in the latter half of the 18th century — David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. I will introduce other characters from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in part three I will give a short history of the Scottish Enlightenment. You may consider this series my personal rallying cry to all who want independence to start using the heid and no’ jist the heart …

So firstly to a true giant of the Scottish enlightenment and a world class thinker. Though some would favour Thomas Hobbes, John Locke or John Stuart Mill, there is little doubt that the most influential philosopher to have written in English was David Hume. Born as David Home on April 25, 1711, he enjoyed a writing career that saw him earn a living as a historian while his development of rational empiricist philosophy saw him come to be regarded as one of the key figures in the history of Western philosophical thought. Yet apart from his essays and his histories, Hume considered himself a failure for most of his life.

HE was the son of an Edinburgh advocate, Joseph Home of Ninewells, whose ancestors had been members of the aristocracy. His mother was the Hon. Katherine Falconer, whose brother was Lord Falconer of Halkerton.

Joseph Home died when David was just three and he was raised by his mother who never remarried. Precociously gifted, Hume — he changed his name’s spelling when he was published in his 20s — was sent to Edinburgh University at the age of just 12. He never graduated, having abandoned his studies and a possible career in law for philosophy, writing that he had “an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.”

He was just 18 when he began to write down his own philosophical ideas, and he decided to spend ten years writing them. This included his criticism of organised religion which saw him branded as an atheist though nowadays we would call him an agnostic. So intense was his focus on his learning that he had a nervous breakdown before he was 20, an illness from which he recovered by eating and drinking to excess, something he would do for most of his life.

His family were not rich and Hume had to earn a living so he moved to France to become a merchant’s assistant. While in La Flèche in Anjou, he wrote his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, which was basically an entirely new philosophical system.

The Treatise over three books attempted to show that philosophical explanations of human nature should be based on observation — empiricism, in other words. It contains the famous phrase: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” It was not a success at first, though now it is recognised as one of the seminal texts in Western philosophy that influences people to this day.

Hume’s disappointment at the poor critical and public reaction to “A Treatise”, which had taken him four years to write, saw him turn to writing essays and he was more successful with these, publishing Essays Moral and Political in 1741. His lack of religious beliefs then thwarted him as he was turned down for the chair of Moral Philosophy at both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. It was one of the previous holders of the Glasgow chair, Enlightenment figure Francis Hutcheson, who greatly influenced Hume, who was inspired to write “Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding” which became known as “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” and which he followed with “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals”.

By now Hume’s philosophical ideas were spreading far and wide, but to his disappointment his thoughts on morality were largely ignored in favour of his sheer genius in describing what we now know as cognitive science.

His statement “that the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no contradiction, than the affirmation that it will rise” summed up his approach — experience was all, yet thought must not exclude life. “Be a philosopher, but amidst all your philosophy be still a man,” he wrote.

Hume took up various positions in England and the Continent, acting as a tutor and then becoming secretary to General James St Clair, envoy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. During that time he began his History of England which ran to six volumes and over a million words, and took him 15 years to complete — it was a best-seller and made him famous as a historian.

During his time writing the History he returned to Edinburgh where he associated with the early stars of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Charles Darwin’s forerunner Lord Monboddo and in 1751 he was offered the job of librarian to the Faculty of Advocates. He now had access to the finest library in Scotland which he made great use of.

Still needing to earn a living he became secretary to the British Embassy in Paris before moving to London in 1766 to take the post of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. He returned to Edinburgh in 1769 and lived out his life writing and meeting his many friends, including Adam Smith and James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson — it was their meeting a few weeks before Hume’s death which was dramatised for the BBC as Dialogue in the Dark by Michael Ignatieff.

We have many descriptions of Hume’s conviviality. He liked nothing better than a discussion over a jar of claret or a glass of port, and he did become rather overweight before contracting his final illness.

Knowing that Hume was dying of some form of abdominal cancer, Smith complained at the cruelty of the world in taking him from them, to which Hume replied: “No, no. Here am I, who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies; except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.”

Hume died on 25 August, 1776. He was 65. Within a few decades his influence on the likes of Immanuel Kant — his famous work “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) was a reply to Hume — would make him famous as a philosopher.

ADAM Smith wrote this tribute to a mutual friend of theirs: “Thus died our most excellent and never to be forgotten friend; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion.

“His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known. Even in the lowest state of his fortune, his great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasions, acts both of charity and generosity. It was a frugality founded, not upon avarice, but upon the love of independency.

“The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind or he steadiness of his resolutions. His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good nature and good humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men.

“That gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”

Even allowing for the hyperbole occasioned by friendship, that is a powerful and moving tribute by Smith.

Next week we will learn about the author of Wealth of Nations.