THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN

In a number of thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment – David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and others less well known – the philosophical analysis of human nature and the 'empirical' analysis of human societies, human history and the natural world merged in a distinctive synthesis that led to the rise of the human and social sciences. This was not the only eighteenth-century mixture of philosophy with history and anthropology; some equally famous fusions are Gibbon's 'philosophical history' (which was influenced by Hume and Smith), Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalit é parmi les hommes (both of which were influences on the later Scottish Enlightenment). Yet the combination brewed in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, though akin in important ways to these works, was also quite distinctive.

One aspect of the manner in which Scottish authors analysed human nature has come to be called ‘conjectural history’. Dugald Stewart coined the term‘conjectural history’ to describe the methodology adopted by Adam Smith in ‘Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages’ and by Hume in the Natural History of Religion.