Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith wrote in opposition to a group of early eighteenth-century philosophers known as the “British rationalists,” which included Samuel Clarke, John Balguy, and William Wollaston. Richard Price was a later entrant in this debate on the rationalist side as, in some ways, was Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, though Reid, like Butler, was hesitant to characterize himself as a rationalist. In this chapter, we shall focus on the central elements of eighteenth-century British rationalism, beginning with Clarke and Balguy, but concentrating mostly on the more philosophically developed and interesting versions in Price and Reid.

The philosophical claims dividing rationalists and sentimentalists were primarily epistemological and metaphysical. Concerning epistemology: How and through what faculties do we judge, and perhaps know the truth of, moral and ethical propositions? And metaphysically: In what do moral and ethical properties consist (if they exist)? Epistemological differences were often grounded in metaphysical disagreements. It has not often been noticed, however, that these also had a fundamental conceptual aspect: The British moralists were concerned with deontic morality and presuppositions of accountability in a way the sentimentalists generally were not.

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empirical, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.

In the decades before the Origin, a split arises between two very different concepts of analogy, and so two views of argument by analogy. Some people, taking 'analogy' as a synonym for 'similarity',came to a new understanding of 'argument by analogy': suppose A and B are known to share a number of properties, then the probability is increased that B also possesses some other property which A is known to possess. This account remains widely assumed even today. Other people, largely within Anglican theology and concerned with the analogy between God and the world, insisted that the only correct use of the word 'analogy' was in its original Greek sense, including the Aristotelian commitment to proportionality, and so to relational comparisons, as when God is related to his creatures as a human father is to his children. This commitment grounded a view radically different from the new similarity view. In analysing what an argument by analogy is, Richard Whately, and following him J. S. Mill, specified explicitly the conditions for such an argument to be valid. It is this account that is relevant to an understanding of Darwin’s use of analogy.

Locke’s skeptical semiotics suggested that language could never grasp reality, but Reidian Common Sense philosophers insisted we could know the world directly and intuitively. Dickinson’s poems engage Common Sense theories which seem to discount the role of language in forming our perceptions. In her poetry, she works through and plays with Common Sense ideas about language, perception, and knowing, testing them against skeptical associationist ideas she found congenial to her work as a poet. In fact, Dickinson’s Upham textbook struggles to fend off the skeptical consequences of Brown’s Humean associationism as it undoes the Reidian realism in the perceptual process. In the course of reading several poems, I show that Dickinson’s poems work out the idea that language presents to us the only world we can know. Dickinson’s epistemological thinking works out a poetics content with “terms” and uncertainty, since the mediations of language produce and nurture human community.

This chapter examines the awareness of modern philosophy and its methods that Scottish thinkers brought to bear on the workings of the human mind. Both George Turnbull and Thomas Reid extend elements of Newton’s regulae, while they and others also deploy methods from Bacon, natural history, and the experimental philosophy more generally. Locke figures also as an important source of explanation for perception, and the Scots, principally Francis Hutcheson, extend this perceptual model to account for the sense of beauty and the moral sense. Both Turnbull and David Hume are notable for their constructive development of associationism, while Reid, emphasizing the objects of the mind s conscious awareness, introduces a new realism into Scottish philosophy.

What impact did the Scottish Enlightenment have on the American founding? Given the variegated, feisty composition of the Scottish Enlightenment, this chapter resists the idea that that movement had any single, unequivocal effect on America. It instead surveys the rich array of ways in which Scottish thought found its way into America and then examines a series of interactions between particular Scottish thinkers and particular American activists. What was Frances Hutcheson’s influence on Thomas Jefferson? Did David Hume or Adam Smith have a greater influence on Madison? What lessons did various American educational leaders take away from Thomas Reid’s response to David Hume? By looking in detail at these three cases, the chapter attempts to convey the flavour, as well as the content, of the reception of Scottish philosophy in America.

James Wilson, born in Scotland and educated during the Scottish Enlightenment, became one of the most influential jurists and statesmen of the American founding era. He signed the Declaration of Independence, served as an influential delegate to the Constitutional Convention, became one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, and was the first law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As a framer, jurist and educator, he consistently argued for recognizing the sovereignty of the people themselves, which he believed was a central component of a God-given natural law. Many of Wilson’s views that were innovative or controversial at the time – such as the concepts of popular sovereignty, one person-one vote, and the power of the Supreme Court to strike down unconstitutional laws – have become important elements of modern American government.