Journal
of
Scottish
Thought
Volume 2: Issue 1
Race, Scripture, Science
Centre for Scottish Thought, University of Aberdeen
JOURNAL OF SCOTTISH THOUGHT
Vol 2, 1
Race, Scripture, Science
Published by the
Centre for Scottish Thought
University of Aberdeen
2009
ISSN 1755 9928
Editor: Cairns Craig
© The contributors
2009
Centre for Scottish Thought
University of Aberdeen
The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed journal, published annually
by the Centre for Scottish Thought at the University of Aberdeen
Editorial corrspondence, including manuscripts for submission, should
be addressed to The Editors, Journal of Scottish Thought, Centre for
Scottish Thought, Humanity Manse, 19 College Bounds, University of
Aberdeen, AB24 3UG or emailed to [email protected]
Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne
CONTENTS
Introduction: Race, Scripture, Science
Cairns Craig
1
Accounting for Human Diversity
Michael Banton
35
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
David N. Livingstone
53
Race and Religion in the Hebrew Bible
Robert Segal
75
An Abolitionist too late? James Beattie and the Scottish
Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
Glen Doris
83
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
Alexander Broadie
99
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
Matthew Wickman
113
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
Tom McInally
127
Introduction: Race, Scripture, Science
Cairns Craig
This issue of the Journal of Scottish Thought addresses two overlapping
concerns. The first is the relationship between scripture and race, a topic
addressed at a conference on ‘The Pre-Adamites: Scripture, Science and Race’
held in Aberdeen in March 2009, from which the articles by Michael Banton,
David Livingstone and Robert Segal derive. The historical implications of
Enlightenment debates about race are taken up by Glen Doris’s article, which
was originally presented at the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative conference
in Aberdeen in September 2009. The second concern is the status of
‘canonical’ forms of knowledge, whether ancient and classical or modern
and scientific, in debates about the foundations of knowledge. Articles
by Alexander Broadie, Matthew Wickman, and Tom McInally explore the
ways in which Scottish thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
engaged with Aristotelian and Newtonian paradigms, providing insights into
the origins and development of what we have come to know as the Scottish
Enlightenment.
I The Dark Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment is a term which has, in recent times, been
accorded an almost entirely positive status in Scottish discourse – representing
the country’s contribution to the advancement of reason, to the development of science, to the understanding of human societies; indeed, to the
foundation of modernity – but while historians have, with increasing relish,
charted the achievements of ‘Enlightenment’, thinkers in other disciplines
have, with increasing vehemence, sought to characterise the Enlightenment
as the source of the evils which blight the modern world. As early as the
1930s, Edmund Husserl perceived the problems of the contemporary ‘Crisis
of European Sciences’ as the ineluctable outcome of falsehoods generated by the Enlightenment’s substitution of nature it experienced by human
2
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beings with a nature in which ‘true-being-in-itself ’ is ‘mathematical’;1 in the
1940s, for Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the world created by the
Enlightenment is a ‘mass deception’, prelude to a reduction of humanity to
‘helpless victims’ in a ‘society alienated from itself ’;2 in the 1950s, C. Wright
Mills argued that the political ideals ‘born of the Enlightenment’ had become
redundant in world where ‘increased rationality may not be assumed to
make for increased reason’;3 in the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas’s defence of the
‘uncompleted project of Enlightenment’ was met with hostility by a whole
range of emerging ‘postmodern’ theorists for whom Nietzsche’s analysis of
truth-claims as mere rhetoric, and his celebration of the unavoidable multiplicity of meanings, were invitations to replace the search for a singular
certainty with a joyful provisionality.
From a Scottish perspective, the case was put most incisively by Alasdair
MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981), in which he praised Nietzsche’s ‘historic
achievement’ of revealing that ‘what purported to be appeals to objectivity
were in fact expression of subjective will’;4 thus also revealing why the modern
world is the outcome ‘of the failure of Enlightenment project’.5 The sources
of this failure MacIntyre traces to the overthrow of Aristotelian conceptions
of morality initiated by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and
conceptualised in accounts of reason by the philosophies of the eighteenth:
‘Reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations
but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of
means. About ends it must be silent’.6 In attempting to create a ‘science of
man’, the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, according to MacIntyre, reduced
humanity from a species governed by an ‘ought’ to a species which had to
accept merely what it ‘is’: ‘What Hume identifies as the standpoint of universal
human nature turns out in fact to be that of the prejudices of the Hanoverian
ruling elite’.7
Among those prejudices, it appears, is race. As Colin Kidd frames the issue
in The Forging of Races (2006):
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans
David Carr (Evanstown, 1970), 54.
2
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1979;
1944), 120, 131, 121.
3
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth, 1983; 1959), 184.
4
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1985; 1981), 113.
5
Ibid., 62.
6
Ibid., 54.
7
Ibid., 231.
1
Introduction
3
The Enlightenment, it has been suggested, bore the unmistakable
imprint of white supremacy. Some figures, such as David Hume … who
achieved notoriety during the Enlightenment for their religious
heterodoxy have now obtained a new kind of notoriety in recent decades
for having endorsed the proposition that blacks were mentally inferior
to whites. While all racist statements are abhorrent, any racist statement
which wins the imprimatur of a figure hitherto securely ensconced in
the canon of philosophical greatness needs to be exposed and refuted.
Furthermore, the very existence of this sort of statement automatically
calls into question the vaunted wisdom of Hume as well as his very
status within the canon.8
The basis of the Enlightenment’s racialism – if not racism – was, according
to Kidd, its scepticism about the ‘monogenetic’ account of the origins of
humanity provided by ‘Genesis’. If all human beings are the offspring of one
original pair, then all, whatever their surface differences, are of the same kind.
That the Biblical account would be deemed inadequate to explain the diversity
of human beings encountered in the great expansion of the European world
from the beginning of the sixteenth century was, according to David Hume’s
kinsman, Henry Home (Lord Kames), inevitable: ‘Kames speculated that
a “local creation” of the aboriginal race appeared to be an “unavoidable”
conclusion from the evidence. Kames found that “every rational conjecture”
pointed towards “a separate creation”, to multiple origins. The biblical
account of the origins of mankind from a single pair of humans struck him as
incompatible with the facts of biology and geography’.9 Despite attempting to
align the ‘facts of biology and geography’ with the Bible, by envisaging Babel
as a second Fall, one which scattered mankind to different parts of the globe
where climatic conditions reduced people to the condition of ‘savages’,10
Kames’s name, according to Kidd, became a byword for polygenesis in the
later Enlightenment’.11
Whether David Hume (1711–76) agreed with the polygenetic or the
climatic account of human differences, the now apparently notorious footnote
in his essay ‘Of national characters’ has been read as evidence of his belief in
Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–
2000 (Cambridge, 2006), 80.
9
Ibid., 96.
10
Ibid., 98.
11
Ibid., 99.
8
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a fundamental difference between the capabilities of white-skinned and blackskinned peoples. While acknowledging the ways in which peoples could change
character over time – ‘we may observe that our ancestors, a few centuries ago,
were sunk into the most abject superstition, last century they were inflamed
with the most furious enthusiasm, and are now settled into the most cool
indifference’12 – Hume suggested that ‘there is some reason to think, that all
the nations, which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics, are
inferior to the rest of the species’,13 a view given further articulation in the
footnote, which begins: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior
to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion,
nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation’.14 For critics
such as Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze,15 this is symptomatic of modern racism’s
foundations in the Enlightenment, a racism equally evident in the works of
other major philosophers of the period, such as Immanuel Kant: what it
indicates, at the very least, is how easily the stadial theory of human progress,
which implied that all societies will journey through the same stages from
primitive hunting or simple pastoral farming to modern commercialism, could
be inverted to become a theory of the progress of some and the impossibility
of progress for others – the ‘primitive’, rather than being the starting point
for a journey that will be made by all, becomes the category of those who
have, because of innate inability, failed to start upon the journey of historical
progress. As Hume’s footnote would have it, ‘there are NEGRO slaves dispersed
all over EUROPE, of whom none ever discovered any symptom of ingenuity;
though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish
themselves in every profession’.16 The history of the human race comes to be
defined by the nature of the races in human history.
The significance of Hume’s footnote is shaped by the fact that his
philosophy claimed to be more than just another speculative system based on
‘extravagant hypothesis’,17 but, as the original title page announced, ‘an attempt
to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’, and
to provide all knowledge with a proper foundation in the understanding of
the nature of man:
Eugene F. Miller (ed.), David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (Indianapolis,
1985; Third Edn., 1748), 206.
13
Ibid., 207.
14
Ibid., 208.
15
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford, 1997).
16
Hume, Essays, 208.
17
L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, 1888), xviii.
12
Introduction
5
’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human
nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from
it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even Mathematics,
Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent
on the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognizance of men,
and are judged by their powers and faculties … 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.18
The ‘certainty’ that Hume sought was the kind revealed by Newtonian physics;
his study of the workings of the mind would show ‘the principles of union or
cohesion among our simple ideas’, and ‘a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the
mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural’.19
Hume’s philosophy would bring order to the human world in the same way
that Newton’s ‘gravity’ brought order to the physical. But is a theory of ‘race’
necessary to such an order – and if so, will it be a racist theory?
If we take Robert Knox (1791–1862) as one of the descendents of the
Scottish Enlightenment, the answer would appear to be ‘yes’. Knox, notorious
for his role in the Burke and Hare scandal as the receiver of the corpses of
their victims, was, like Hume, attempting to bring the principles of Newton
(1643–1727) into what he considered to be fundamental to all other forms
of knowledge – the structure and developmental history of the human body.
What Knox describes as ‘transcendental anatomy’ brings to the biological
world the ‘great law of unity of the organization’ that Newton had revealed in
the physical world: indeed, the discoveries of ‘transcendental anatomy’ Knox
believed to have been already glimpsed by Newton: ‘Newton seemed to think
that there existed only one kind of matter; he was amongst the earliest to
announce the doctrine of unity of the organization. His vast mind foresaw
the truth, to be afterwards more fully brought out: Divine mind! In advance
of his age by a century at least’.20 The understanding of the world that the
application of Newtonian principles produced was one in which
Human history cannot be a mere chapter of accidents. The fate of
nations cannot always be regulated by chance; its literature, science, art,
Ibid., xix.
Ibid., 13.
20
Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia, 1850), 33.
18
19
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wealth, religion, language laws, and morals, cannot surely be the result
of merely accidental circumstances. If any one insists with me that a
Negro or a Tasmanian accidentally born in England becomes thereby
an Englishman, I yield the point; but should he further insist that he, the
said Negro or Tasmanian, may become also a Saxon or Scandinavian, I
must contend against so ludicrous an error. With me, race, or hereditary
descent, is everything; it stamps the man.21
Knox’s The Races of Men of 1850 argues that race and only race is the
permanent reality of human history: nations, by contrast, are merely passing
accidents. To understand the development of world history one has to
understand the characteristics of the different races of the world, and what
such an understanding of race reveals is that it is the Saxon race that will shape
humanity’s future: ‘No race interests us so much as the Saxon … He is about to
be the dominant race on the earth; a section of the race, the Anglo-Saxon, has
for nearly a century been all-powerful on the ocean’.22 The Saxon is ‘destined
some day to rule the world’.23 Knox would have agreed with his influential
contemporaries in the United States, Josiah Nott and George Glidden, that,
‘human progress has arisen mainly from the war of races’ because ‘all the great
impulses which have been given to it from time to time have been the results
of conquests and colonizations’.24
Significantly, however, Knox’s race theory, though based on a secular
scientific world-view, was not built on a foundation of polygenesis,25 and
therefore does not fit with the expectations of Kidd’s thesis. The key evidence
which, for Knox, proved polygenesis false, and which had been established
as early as the 1820s by the work of the French natural historian Étienne
Geoffroy, and his Scottish correspondent Robert Edmond Grant (who had
been Darwin’s tutor at Edinburgh University),26 lay in the development of the
embryo, which revealed that ‘in the structure of one animal all the forms are
Ibid., 12–13.
Ibid., 15.
23
Ibid., 16.
24
Josiah Clark Nott, George Robinson Gliddon et al., Types of Mankind (Philadelphia,
1854), 53.
25
Many intellectual historians have misunderstood Knox’s arguments and assimilated
him to the polygenist account of human origins; see, for instance, John Sutherland’s
account of him in The Life of Walter Scott (London, 1995), 229.
26
See Adrian J. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and
Reform in Radical London (Chicago, 1989).
21
22
Introduction
7
included’,27 ‘that the fully-developed, or grown-up brute forms of birds and
fishes, of reptiles and mammals, are represented in the organic structures of
the human embryo’,28 with the result that throughout the living world there
is ‘but one living principle, one animal, one eternal law’.29 This fundamental
unity – ‘Mankind is of one family, one origin. In every embryo is the type of
all races of men’30 – did not prevent humanity being divided into separate
‘types’ or ‘species’, constituting different races. The unity of mankind meant
that individuals of different types could inter-breed, but the distinction of the
types meant that the offspring of such relationships would either themselves
be infertile or would revert to the pure type of one of their parents. The hybrid,
he insisted, was a deformation which, like any other individual deformation,
would not be passed on to the next generation. Nor did the unity of mankind
prevent the types of human beings from being necessarily at war with each
other, for in the struggle of life ‘destroy and live, spare and perish, is the stern
law of man’s destiny’:31 ‘might is the sole right’, and, like the beasts who have
been hunted to extinction following the migrations of European peoples,
native peoples must give way before the Saxons, for ‘now the aim of the Saxon
man is the extermination of the dark races of men – the aborigines – the men
of the desert and of the forest’.32
Because nation and race in the modern world do not share the same
geographical spaces, nations and their empires are, for Knox, inherently
unstable and involved in inevitable internal as well as external conflicts. In
Scotland, Knox found the perfect evidence for the influence of race on history,
for Scotland, like Ireland, was a country divided between Saxon and Celt: it
was ‘the Caledonian Celtic race, not Scotland, fell at Culloden, never more
to rise; the Boyne was the Waterloo of Celtic Ireland’.33 Such defeats were
inevitable because of the inferiority of the Celts to their Saxon neighbours:
700 years of absolute possession has not advanced by a single step the
amalgamation of the Irish Celt with the Saxon English; the Cymri of
Wales remain as they were: the Caledonian still lingers in diminished
numbers, but unaltered, on the wild shores of his lochs and friths,
Knox, Races of Men, 296–7; Knox is quoting from Geoffroy.
Ibid., 29.
29
Ibid., 296–7; Knox is quoting from Geoffroy.
30
Ibid., 297.
31
Ibid., 307.
32
Ibid., 314.
33
Ibid., 15.
27
28
8
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scraping a miserable subsistence from the narrow patch of soil left him
by the stern climate of his native land … . carry him to Canada, he is still
the same … 34
Knox’s conclusion was that ‘the Caledonian Celt of Scotland appears a race
as distinct from the Lowland Saxon of the same country, as any two races
can possibly be: as negro from American; Hottentot from Caffre; Esquimaux
from Saxon’.35
It was a conclusion which echoed an earlier Scottish writer, Sir Walter Scott
(1771–1832), who had made a similar comparison in Chapter 15 of Waverley,
in describing the response the of the citizens of Edinburgh to the arrival of
Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland army during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion:
So little was the condition of the Highlands known at that late period
that the character and appearance of their population, while thus
sallying forth as military adventurers, conveyed to the South-Country
Lowlanders as much surprise as if an invasion of African Negroes or
Esquimaux Indians had issued forth from the northern mountains of
their own native country.36
The opposition of Saxon to Celt had also been the burden of Scott’s ‘The
Lady of the Lake’ (1810), which presents late-medieval Scotland as divided
between its ‘Saxon’ rulers and its aboriginal Celtic peoples;
The Gael beheld him grim the while,
And answer’d with disdainful smile, –
“Saxon, from yonder mountain high,
I mark’d thee send delighted eye,
Far to the south and east, where lay,
Extended in succession gay,
Deep waving fields and pastures green,
With gentle slopes and groves between: –
These fertile plains, that soften’d vale,
Were once the birthright of the Gael;
The stranger came with iron hand,
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 14.
36
Andrew Hook (ed.), Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (Harmondsworth, 1972; 1814), 324.
34
35
Introduction
9
And from our fathers reft the land.
Where dwell we now! See, rudely swell,
Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell.37
The defeated Gaels have retreated before the advancing Saxons and ceded
them the fertile territory over which they now rule. Scott uses the term ‘Saxon’,
but in Knox’s account this Saxon – who is James V in disguise – is in fact a
Norman, descendant of one of those who came to Britain with William the
Conqueror, and the condition of the original Saxons of Britain is, according
to Knox, little different from that of the Celts:
I was, I think, the first, or, amongst the first, to point out to the
reading world the antagonism of the present Norman government of
England to her presumed Saxon population. From ‘the elements of
race,’ advocated by me as a leading feature – the leading feature in human
thoughts and actions, the deduction was direct. No right-thinking
person could avoid coming to the conclusion, that, in the present
dynasty and aristocracy of Britain, the descendants of William and his
Norman robbers had a perfect representative. What the sword enabled
him to do, the sham constitution of England qualifies the present
dynasty to attempt.38
Knox’s claim to primacy was vastly overstated: the argument for a continuing
Norman domination over a fundamentally Saxon population had been
evolved steadily through the seventeenth century in resistance to the Stewart
monarchs, and had become a key part of the development of eighteenthcentury literature, as poets began to use the techniques of the what they saw to
be native literary forms – ballads, and accentual rather than syllabic verse – to
restore a ‘native’ Anglo-Saxon culture.39 Walter Scott’s early ballad collecting
was part of this effort to take modern literature back to the nation’s ethnic
foundations, but the work of Scott’s which most emphatically presented British
history as founded on racial conflict was Ivanhoe, published in 1819. As Michael
Banton has noted,40 Ivanhoe is one of the earliest works to use the word ‘race’
Scott, ‘Lady of the Lake’, Canto V, vii, Robert Ford (ed.), The Poetical Works of Sir Walter
Scott (London & Glasgow, nd; c 1863), 247.
38
Ibid., 247
39
See Laura Doyle, ‘The Racial Sublime’ in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (eds),
Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture 1780–1834 (Bloomington, 1996), 15ff.
40
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1987), 13: ‘It is probable that no single
37
10
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with the implications that it came to acquire through the nineteenth century:
for Scott, Norman and Saxon are distinct races who are deeply conscious of
‘the great national distinctions’ between them. The racial theme is underlined
by the subplot of the Jew, Isaac, and his daughter, Rebecca, who is told by
her Norman abducter that ‘no race knows so well as thine own tribes how to
submit to the time’.41 Race is character. The world of Ivanhoe is segregated on
racial lines because of the need ‘to maintain a line of separation betwixt the
descendants of the victor Norman and the vanquished Saxons’.42 The possible
crossing of races is dramatised by Rebecca’s relationship with Ivanhoe, who is
saved from death by her medical skills and who in turn saves her from being
burned at the stake as a witch, but Ivanhoe, descendant of Saxon kings, will
marry Rowena, ‘a fair Saxon’,43 maintaining the purity of the Saxon race, even
if, thereafter, the ‘recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity’ recurred
to him ‘more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether
have approved’.44 Walter Scott, it would seem, is one of the links that binds
Hume to Knox in a tradition of intensifying racial theorising.
II Old Worlds in New
Ivanhoe Elementary School is situated in the Silver Lake area, some five miles
from downtown Los Angeles, California, an early centre of the film industry
and an area full of Scottish names and names from Walter Scott novels –
Rowena, Kenilworth, Ben Lomond, Hawick. The original naming of the
district as ‘Ivanhoe’ was made in the 1830s by Hugo Reid (1809–52), one of
the earliest anglophone landowners in Southern California and later, in 1849,
one of the delegates at the constitutional convention which prepared the way
for California’s entry into the United States.45 It is said that Reid, who grew up
in Cardross in Dumbartonshire, thought the rolling green hills of Southern
book or event did more to introduce the word race into popular use than Scott’s
historical romance’. See also Banton, The Idea of Race (London, 1977), 15ff.
41
Ian Duncan (ed.), Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Oxford, 1996; 1819), 428.
42
Ibid., 27.
43
Ibid., 502.
44
Ibid.
45
For the details of Reid’s life, see Susanna Bryant Dakin, Scotch Paisano in Old Los Angeles:
Hugo Reid’s Life in California, 1832–1852, derived from his correspondence (Berkeley, 1978);
for Silver Lakes, see http://www.silverlake.org/about_silverlake/aboutSL_frmset.
htm.
Introduction
11
California were like the hills of his native Scotland – which probably meant he
first arrived in California’s two-week winter wet season! Climatic disjunction is,
however, not the least of the ironies in the naming of the district of ‘Ivanhoe’.
For a start, Ivanhoe was in fact the first of Scott’s novels not to be set, at least
in part, in Scotland: it is the novel with which he set out to prove that he was
not constrained to remain forever within the limits of those ‘Scottish manners,
Scottish dialect, and Scottish characters of note … with which the author was
most intimately and familiarly acquainted’.46 To apply the name ‘Ivanhoe’ as an
emblem of California’s Scottishness was, therefore, in one sense, profoundly
misplaced: Ivanhoe is the symbol of Scott’s departure from Scottishness. On
the other hand, it may have had an unconscious appropriateness, since Scott’s
effort to colonise the English novel was symptomatic of the ways in which
the arrival of a Scot like Reid was a harbinger of the anglophone colonisation
of California, then still in the dominion of Mexico. And Ivanhoe is itself, of
course, a novel about the processes of colonisation.
At the very time when Hugo Reid was imposing his ‘Scottish’ names on
the California landscape, however, on the other side of the rapidly expanding
country, Scott – and especially Ivanhoe – was also extraordinarily popular, for
the novel’s theme of racial difference made it a favourite text of the antebellum slave states of the American South, where re-enactments of the
jousting tournaments in Ivanhoe became popular public spectacles, designed
to reinforce the South’s sense of itself as an aristocratic and chivalric society.
The Richmond Enquirer in September 1845 noted a recent ‘Tournament of
Knights’ at Fauquier White Sulphur Springs where ‘the costumes and skill of
the riders and knightly horsemen will rival any previous display of the kind,
and do honour to those days of Chivalry’, and where the knights took their
names from Ivanhoe.47 This celebration of medieval aristocratic manners was
part of a complex race mythology by which Southerners justified both their
slaveholding and their superiority to the puritans of the Northern States: ‘As
part of the defense of the institution of chattel slavery, they proclaimed the
superiority of the white race over the black race. And as part of a defense
against Northern attacks on the barbarity of southern culture, they advocated
a racial myth that demonstrated to the region’s satisfaction the superiority of
a southern American race over a separately descended northern American
Scott, Ivanhoe, 3.
Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr, Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the
Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 47.
46
47
12
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race’.48 For the Southern theorists, Southerners were the descendants of
aristocratic Normans, the Northerners descendants of the defeated Saxons.
According to Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., in the 1850s, the decade of Knox’s
influence on race theory,
the leaders of Dixie’s political and journalistic establishments would
begin feverishly concocting the myth of the South’s aristocratic and
chivalric Norman racial inheritance, and it would imagine this newly
minted Norman race to be in a fight for survival with an implacable
foe: a northern Saxon race descended from the middling commercial
and yeoman classes of England and imbued with deeply imprinted
racial qualities of Puritan self-righteousness and intolerance that made
peaceful co-existence and mutual accommodation within a national
framework impossible.49
Such an identification between the South, Ivanhoe and Scott’s historical
romances produced yet another irony in Ivanhoe, California, for Hugo Reid
became a landowner there by marrying a Native American woman of the
Gabrieleno tribe, whose four children from her first marriage to a local
Native American man he adopted, as well as having with her two further
children of his own. In Ivanhoe, California, Reid was engaged in precisely
the kind of miscegenation that the narrative of Ivanhoe resisted, a resistance
that underpinned its appeal to the race theorists of the Southern States.
Hugo Reid would go on to be a defender of the rights of the native peoples
of California – though he failed to get those rights secured in the California
constitution – and a documenter, in a series of letters published in the Los
Angeles Star, of their customs and traditions.50 Indeed, without Reid’s account
of their customs and beliefs their history would be almost unknown. In a
further irony, it was California’s entry into the Union in 1850 as a ‘free state’
– one in which slaveholding was not permitted – that meant the Southern
States could no longer muster a majority against their Northern critics, and
that led to the increasingly vociferous demands for secession which were a
prelude to the Civil War.51
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 17–18.
50
Reid’s letters form an Appendix to Susan Bryant Dakin’s Scotch Paisano in Old Los
Angeles, 195ff.
51
Watson, Normans and Saxons, 25.
48
49
Introduction
13
Scott’s text, however, is not as clearly racist as some readings of it would
suggest,52 for despite the racial oppositions which, for Scott, characterise the
post-Conquest period in England, the outcome is a fusion of the two peoples
through the emergence of a language which combines both of their traditions:
‘the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed
inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual
formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon,
in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and
from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English
language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been
so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved
by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the
southern nations of Europe’.53 The English language, like the British people,
are a ‘fusion’. (Let us not forget that Scott was married to a Frenchwoman and
that during most of his marriage Britain was at war with France). Similarly,
the king in disguise in ‘The Lady of the Lake’ confronts in the Highlands a
racial ‘other’, but through his foolhardy entry into the Highlands, he learns
to respect and to forgive his Celtic subjects, and to begin the process of their
introduction into the polity of the Scottish state. Racial antagonism turns into
cultural unity, which was precisely the aim of Hugo Reid’s account of the
Native Americans of Southern California: his own children were, after all,
the inheritors not only of Scottish and Indian traditions, but of the Spanish
culture to which both Reid and his wife had become integrated before their
marriage – originally named Bartolomea, she had become Doña Victoria on
becoming a Mexican citizen; Reid himself had to become a Catholic in order
to marry her, and chose the name Perfecto, and much of his correspondence,
even with other Anglophones, was conducted in Spanish and inscribed as
from ‘Don Perfecto’.
Scott’s much ridiculed creation of a tartan-clad, ‘Celtic’ Edinburgh to
greet George IV in 1822, can be read not as the absurd betrayal of his own
Lowland Scottish heritage for a Highland illusion,54 but as the transformation
of a past ‘racial’ antagonism into a future cultural harmony. Ivanhoe may
be the descendant of pure Saxons but he has learned the manners and the
Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, notes that ‘The most objectionable form of racism
given currency by Ivanhoe is anti-semitism’ (230).
53
Scott, Ivanhoe, 27.
54
Most stridently by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his essay ‘The Invention of Highland
Tradition’, in Eric Habsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge, 1983).
52
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technological advantages of the Normans. Ivanoe is, quite literally, dressed as
a Norman, is addressed as a Norman, even by his own father, and will regain
power in the territory which his people have lost because he is able to act like
Norman. The freedoms of which the Saxons have been deprived can only
be saved for the future by adopting – or, at least, adapting to – the cultural
traditions of their conquerors.
III The Wisdom of the Ancients
That both Hume and Knox should take Newton as exemplary scientist is
not simply a matter of Newton’s pre-eminence in the physical sciences in the
hundred years after his death: Newton, as George Davie has shown in The
Democratic Intellect, was a deeply symbolic figure in Scottish cultural life. Not only
had the Scottish universities been first to teach Newton’s theories in the 1690s,
Scots such as David Gregory (1659 – 1708), John Keill (1671 – 1721) and Colin
Maclaurin (1698 – 1746) had been amongst Newton’s closest associates and
supporters,55 and the Newtonianism they did much to establish came to be
regarded as crucial to the Scottish intellectual tradition. Subsequently, defence
of Scotland’s independent intellectual tradition in the 1830s turned on the
issue of its continued support for Newton’s mathematics as against ‘the great
Continental movement, originally Cartesian and Leibnitzian, which by this
time had become naturalised in Cambridge’.56 A key figure in these debates
was Knox’s almost exact contemporary, Sir David Brewster (1781 – 1868),
whose commitment to Newton was such that he produced two biographies,
each designed to challenge suggestions that Newton’s mind had not always
been ‘Divine’.
The first, The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, published in 1831, was written to
refute a French account of Newton by Jean-Baptiste Biot, which suggested
that Newton had suffered some kind of mental breakdown in 1692–3, a
breakdown which had permanently affected his intellectual capabilities.57
This was significant because the eighteenth-century Scottish accounts of
Newton had emphasised the integration of Newton’s physics with his
See David B. Wilson, Seeking Nature’s Logic: Natural Philosophy in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Pennsylvania, 2009), 33ff.
56
George Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the
Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1981; 1961), 180.
57
See Rebekah Higgit, Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of NineteenthCentury History of Science (London, 2007), 12ff.
55
Introduction
15
theology, a theology which Biot regarded as the product of his intellectual
enfeeblement. Brewster, who was amongst the first to have access to Newton’s
correspondence, insisted both on his continuing intellectual powers and the
coherence of his theology with his physics:
During this period of bodily indisposition, his mind, though in a state
of nervous irritability, and disturbed by want to rest, was capable of
putting forth its highest powers. At the request of Dr Wallis he drew
up an example of one of his propositions on the quadrature of curves
in second fluxions. He composed, at the desire of Dr Bentley, his
profound and beautiful letters on the existence of the Deity. 58
For Brewster, Newton’s pre-eminence in mathematical physics was a guarantor
of the validity of the Christianity to which both of them were committed:
If such, then, is the character of the Christian faith, we need not be
surprised that it was embraced and expounded by such a genius as Sir
Isaac Newton. Cherishing its doctrines, and leaning on its promises,
he felt it his duty, as it was his pleasure, to apply to it that intellectual
strength which had successfully surmounted the difficulties of the
material universe … the investigation of the sacred mysteries, while it
prepared his own mind for its final destiny, was calculated to promote
the spiritual interests of thousands. This noble impulse he did not
hesitate to obey, and by thus uniting philosophy with religion, he
dissolved the league which genius had formed with skepticism, and
added to the cloud of witnesses the brightest name of ancient or of
modern times.59
In his first biography, Brewster gave short shrift to another suggestion that
might have sullied the reputation of the ‘Divine mind’ – that Newton had
been steeped in alchemical lore and had been an active alchemist. Although
he had found some evidence of notes on alchemical subjects in Newton’s
handwriting, he treated them as an offshoot of Newton’s researches into
‘chymical subjects’ relating to ‘fire, flame and electric attractions’.60 By the
time of his second biography, however, Brewster had become acquainted with
David Brewster, The Life of Isaac Newton (New York, 1840; 1831), 222.
Ibid., 264.
60
Ibid., 268.
58
59
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previously unresearched papers held by the family of Lord Portsmouth, a
collateral descendant of Newton’s. In these Brewster discovered that Newton
had pored over the writings of, and taken copious notes from, alchemical
‘philosophers’, studying them with as much intensity as he had pored over
theological issues. Given that these were texts and activities ‘commencing in
fraud and terminating in mysticism’, Brewster could find no excuse but the
‘mental epidemics of a past age’:
In so far as Newton’s inquiries were limited to the transmutation and
multiplication of metals, and even to the discovery of the universal
tincture, we may find some apology for his researches; but we cannot
understand how a mind of such power, and so nobly occupied with the
abstractions of geometry, and the study of the material world, could
stoop to be even the copyist of the most contemptible alchemical
poetry, and the annotator of a work, the obvious production of a fool
and a knave.61
The Newton who had brought light to the world was a Newton also lost in a
darkness that defeated his biographer’s understanding.
As we now know, however, the real extent of Newton’s involvement in
alchemy was much greater than even Brewster imagined – his notes have
been reckoned to amount to more than a million words.62 In 1936 the papers
which Brewster had looked into came up for auction, after having been
refused by Cambridge University because they were of no scientific interest. About half were acquired by John Maynard Keynes, who decided, after
reviewing them, that ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He
was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians,
the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world
with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance
rather less than 10,000 years ago’.63 The Enlightenment account of Newton
as the founder of a rationalist science which would be pursued by all those
interested in discovering the truths of the universe – d’Alembert’s article on
David Brewster, Memoirs of Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh,
1855), II, 374–5.
62
Jan Golinski, ‘The Secret Life of an Alechemist’, in John Fauvel, Raymond Flood,
Michael Shortland and Robin Wilson (eds), Let Newton Be! A NewPerspective on his Life
and Works (Oxford, 1988), 147.
63
John Maynard Keynes, ‘Newton the Man’, in The Royal Society Newton Tercentenary
Celebrations 15–19 July 1946 (Cambridge, 1947), 27.
61
Introduction
17
the Histoire des sciences in the Encyclopédie announces that Newton had given
‘philosophy a form which apparently it is to keep’64 – is contradicted by
Newton’s own scripts, which reveal him to be committed not to a knowledge
which progresses from darkness into light by cutting itself free from the
past, but to the recovery of an esoteric body of knowledge which had been
known to the ancients. As Piyo Rattansi has argued, Newton ‘in his secret
thoughts held a vision of history which would very much have astonished
the philosophes ’:
It reduced all he had discovered to a rediscovery of scientific truths
well known to some of the great thinkers of the ancient world. One
of the few public hints of this attitude was conveyed in a letter which
Newton’s young protégé, the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de
Dullier, wrote some five years after the publication of the Principia. For
a brief time Fatio had been entrusted with preparing a second edition
of the Principia. In 1692 he wrote to the great Dutch physicist and
Cartesian, Christian Huygens, that Newton had discovered that all the
chief propositions of the Principia had been known to such ancients as
Pythagoras and Plato, although these worthies had turned them into a
‘great mystery ’.65
Newton toyed with incorporating his historical researches into new editions
of the Principia, but left only hints; David Gregory, however, in his Newtonian
account of Elements of Astronomy, Physical and Geometrical (first published in
Latin in 1702) was more forthcoming:
… the famous Theorem about the proportion whereby Gravity
decreases in receding from the Sun was not unknown at least to
Pythagoras. This indeed seems to be that which he and his followers
would signify to us by the Harmony of the Spheres: That is, they feign’d
Apollo playing upon an Harp of seven Strings, by which Symbol, as it
is abundantly evident from Pliny, Macrobius and Cenforinus, they meant
the Sun in Conjunction with the seven Planets, for they made him the
leader of the Septenary Chorus, and Moderator of Nature; and thought
Quoted Derek Gjersten, ‘Newton’s Success’, in Fauvel, Flood, Shortland and Wilson
(eds), Let Newton Be!, 26.
65
Piyo Rattansi, ‘Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients’, in Fauvel, Flood, Shortland
and Wilson (eds), Let Newton Be!, 187.
64
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that by his Attractive force he acted upon the Planets (and called it
Jupiter’s Prison, because it by this Force that he retains and keeps them
in their Orbits … )66
The new astronomy is not modern discovery but ancient truth resurrected.
It was only a year after David Gregory’s assertion of this Newtonianism
of the ancients that Newton became President of the Royal Society.
According to Richard Westfall, one of those who have studied Newton’s
alchemical papers in detail, Newton had by that time ceased to engage with
alchemy: his final notes on the subject date from the mid-1690s, and the only
alchemical books in his library published later than 1700 are ones gifted to
him.67 By 1703, it might be thought, Newton had ceased to be the ‘alchemical Newton’ and had become the Newton of rational modernity, but the
very organisation over which he presided had itself been founded by a firm
believer in alchemy and in the secret continuation of ancient truth into the
modern world – Sir Robert Moray, friend of Richelieu and of Charles II, and
the first man inducted into freemasonry on English soil (while he was acting
as quarter-master general to the army of the Covenanters, then encamped
at Newcastle). Moray was the driving force behind the establishment of the
Royal Society and it was by Moray’s persuasion that Charles II granted it its
Royal charter. According to historians of masonry, the success of the Royal
Society was not only based on the fact that many of its original members
were masons, but that Moray informed the Society with the procedures of
the Masonic Lodges – election of the Master (President), no discussion of
politics or religion, commitment to equality and fraternity.68 Scottish Masonic
tradition, with its assumption of an ancient wisdom continually renewed
through the induction of its aspirants, was incorporated into the foundations
of the world’s first state organisation devoted to the pursuit of new scientific
knowledge.
This conjunction of Scottish tradition and modern institution might have
seemed an incidental product of Moray’s very tangled personal history, which
had involved him in spying in Britain for the French monarch and spying on
the Continent for a British monarch, except that it was subsequently from
David Gregory, Elements of Astronomy, Physical and Geometrical (London, 1715), ix–x.
Richard S. Westfall, ‘Newton and Alchemy’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific
Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), 315–35.
68
See Robert Lomas, The Invisible College: The Royal Society, Freemasonry and the Birth of
Modern Science (London, 2002).
66
67
Introduction
19
the ranks of the Royal Society that the modern form of masonry emerged in
1717, through the influence of one of Newton’s most committed followers,
John (or Jean) Desaguliers. Often cited as ‘the Newtonian’, Desaguliers, a
French Huguenot exile who became an Anglican clergyman, made a career
of lecturing on Newton’s system and performing experiments related to
it. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1713, but in the following years
was one of the leaders of a movement to bring the various Masonic lodges
in London together under the authority of the Grand Lodge of London,
which was achieved in 1717. He is attributed with devising much of the
structure that was codified in James Anderson’s The Constitutions of Freemasons,
and which was adopted by the Grand Lodge in 172169 but it is much more
likely that Anderson himself provided the structures, since he was originally
from Aberdeen, where his father had been a Master of the Masonic Lodge.
Anderson’s account of the history of masonry makes Scotland central to its
modern survival:
The Kings of SCOTLAND very much encourag’d the Royal Art, from
the earliest Times down to the Union of the Crowns, as appears by
the Remains of glorious Buildings in that ancient Kingdom, and by
the Lodges there kept up without Interruption many hundred Years,
the Records and Traditions of which testify the great Respect of
those Kings to this honourable Fraternity, who gave always pregnant
Evidence of their Love and Loyalty, from whence sprung the old
Toast among the Scots Masons, viz. GOD BLESS THE KING AND
THE CRAFT.70
Anderson also attributes the development on masonry in England to the
influence of the Scots:
Yet the great Care that the SCOTS took of true Masonry, prov’d
afterwards very useful to ENGLAND; for the learned and magnanimous
Queen ELIZABETH, who encourag’d other Arts, discourag’d this;
because, being a Woman, she could not be made a Mason, tho’ as other
See Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans
(London, 1981), 122ff.
70
Benjamin Franklin edition of The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (1734), electronic
edition Libraries at University Nebraska-Lincoln, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/
libraryscience/25/, 34
69
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great Women, she might have much employ’d Masons, like Semiramis
and Artemisia.*
But upon her Demise, King JAMES VI. of SCOTLAND succeeding
to the Crown of ENGLAND, being a Mason King, reviv’d the English
Lodges; and as he was the First King of GREAT BRITAIN, he was also
the First Prince in the World that recover’d the Roman architecture from
the Ruins of Gothic Ignorance.71
The work of Moray, Anderson and Desaguliers, meant Scottish-inspired
masonry and the Royal Society were each infused with the same principles and
beliefs, as well as an overlapping membership. As Margaret C. Jacob notes in
her study of The Radical Enlightenment,
The Newtonian and Whig leadership of the Royal Society, whose
authority had been enhanced by Newton’s own presidency, guided the
Grand Lodge in its formative years. Whig control over the Royal Society
resulted from a political struggle in which Sir Hans Sloane, Desaguliers,
and Martin Folkes emerged as victorious. At the same time, over a
fourth of the early Masonic membership also belonged to the Royal
Society … 72
This successful transmission of Scottish masonry into the new British imperial
polity after the Union of 1707 was to provide the world of the British Empire
with one of its key civic institutions. As Jessica-Harland has argued,
At the same time that lodges were travelling with army regiments as
they moved around the empire enforcing Britain’s will, Freemasons
were also engaged as the shock troops of imperial ceremony. Their
ceremonial role was not confined to the privacy of the lodge. Though
assumed to be draped in mystery and intrigue, Freemasonry was … as
much a public institution as an esoteric club. Everywhere one went in
the empire, one could witness Freemasons marching in processions,
occupying prominent places in official ceremonies to greet or bid
farewell to imperial officials, and observing milestones in the life of
the monarch. And everywhere they laid foundation stones . . . In these
Ibid., 35.
Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 112.
71
72
Introduction
21
elaborately staged public appearances, Masons put their fine regalia and
tools on display, deposited the coins of the realm, and anointed the
architecture of empire with the symbols of their order.73
Where medieval masons, tramping between jobs, would be sure of support
from their brethern in local lodges, in the itinerant world of Empire, the
masonic lodge provided a sense of community in a potentially hostile world,
a sense of community based on the belief in an ancient wisdom of which the
Freemasons were the keepers.
The role of Scots in the diffusion of freemasonry was not, however,
confined to the anglophone world. At exactly the same time as Anderson
was constituting British masonry, Jacobite exiles in France were establishing
an alternative version that would have radical consequences across Europe.
The first Grand Masters in France were all Jacobite exiles – including Lord
Derwentwater, who would be executed for his part in the 1745 Jacobite
Rebellion – and the Continental tradition, known to this day as the rite
écossaise, was given definition in 1736 by Andrew Michael Ramsay, a long-term
exile in France. Ramsay, too, however, was a Fellow of the Royal Society,
inducted along with Montesquieu in 1729, almost immediately after which
he was initiated into London Masonry in 1730: he was also a pupil of one of
Newton’s students and closest friends of the 1690s, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.74
His vision of freemasonry was that of a worldwide enlightenment:
We desire to reunite all men of enlightened minds, gentle manners and
agreeable wit, not only by a love of the fine arts but, much more, by the
grand principles of virtue, science and religion, where the interests of
the Fraternity shall become those of the whole human race, whence all
nations shall be enabled to draw knowledge and where subjects of all
kingdoms shall learn to cherish one another without renouncing their
own country. Our ancestors, the Crusaders, gathered together from all
parts of Christendom in the Holy Land, desired thus to reunite into
one sole Fraternity the individuals of all nations.75
Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1707–
1927 (Chapel Hill, 2007), 14.
74
Scott Mandlebrote, ‘Newton and Eighteenth Century Christianity’, in I. Bernard
Cohen and George E. Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge,
2002), 413.
75
http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/ramsay_biography_oration.html, accessed
September 2010.
73
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Despite his own deep commitment to monarchy, to social hierarchy and to the
Catholic faith, Ramsay declared that, ‘The world is nothing but a huge republic,
of which every nation is a family, every individual a child. Our Society was at the
outset established to revive and spread these essential maxims borrowed from
the nature of man’. Both the French monarchy and the Papacy disagreed with
Ramsay’s account of the ‘nature of man’: freemasonry was banned, with the
effect that it became, in the next half-century, the vehicle of radical opposition
to every ancien régime across Europe. The ideology of freemasony, quietist in
Britain, became as radical in Europe as it proved to be in North America.
The Scottish Rite, however, also crossed to the United States and Canada and
became a major strand of North American freemasonry, despite the earlier
arrival of Anderson’s version through its adoption by Benjamin Franklin, and
by his publication in 1734 of Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons.
It was Ramsay who identified the Knights Templar as the organisation
emerging from the Crusades from which Freemasonry had derived its
symbolic language, thereby initiating that vast historical detective novel that is
the search for the Holy Grail hidden in some Masonic vault. A prime candidate
is, as we know from the Da Vinci Code,76 Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, not
only because its intricate sculptures can be read as versions of masonic lore,
but because it was constructed by the Sinclair (St. Clair) family, who were
traditionally believed to be the hereditary patrons of all Scottish masons.77
The ceiling of Rosslyn chapel was copied by Walter Scott for the ceiling of
his library in baronial Abbotsford, and in 1823 Scott declined, because of
age and health, the offer of being proposed as Grand Master of the Masonic
Order of Knights Templar in Edinburgh.78 In Ivanhoe, however, the Templars
are portrayed as the Freemasons have often been portrayed – a secret society
claiming beneficent purposes but bent on world domination. ‘Our immense
possessions in every kingdom of Europe’, Brian de Bois-Guilbert tells
Rebecca, ‘our high military fame, which brings within our circle the flower
of chivalry from every Christian clime – these are dedicated to ends of which
our pious founders little dreamed, and which are equally concealed from
such weak spirits as embrace our Order on the ancient principles, and whose
Dan Brown’s novel is based on Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Temple and
the Lodge (London, 1989); for the most recent version of this transmission of
ancient wisdom via the Sinclairs, see Alan Butler and John Ritchie, Rosslyn Revealed:
A Library in Stone (Ropley, Hants, 2006).
77
See David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590–1710
(Cambridge, 1988), 52ff.
78
Duncan, Ivanhoe, ‘Introduction’, xxiv–xxv.
76
Introduction
23
superstition makes them our passive tools’.79 Bois-Guilbert’s apparently ‘wild
and unnatural’80 desire for Rebecca is the equivalent, at a personal level, of the
Order’s desire to rule the Jewish homeland, and to have grasped to itself the
ancient truths of the Temple of Solomon, that central symbol of masonic
lore.
That desire for possession of the Holy Land and of the knowledge to
which it had been home was no less intense in Newton himself. Newton
had not only been an alchemist, but an equally dedicated student of the Old
and the New Testaments, determined to prove that all ancient wisdom was
descended from the Jews, and that all ancient civilisations – even those which
appeared to predate them – had derived whatever knowledge they possessed
from the Jews: such a genealogy underlined that ‘the rediscovery of the true
system of the world must then form an essential part of the process of
recovering the lost Adamic knowledge’.81 The body of truth both ancient
and modern could only be resurrected through an intimate – an initiated –
knowledge of the scriptures of the Jews, for all truth was gifted originally to
only one race.
IV Newton’s Rings
In an essay published in 1970, Paul K. Feyerabend compared Newton’s
conception of scientific truth with the Reformation’s conception of religious
truth. He concluded that there were precise parallels: in religion, Luther and
Calvin both declared ‘Holy Scripture to be the foundation of all religion’,
but this rule ‘does not provide any means of identifying scripture (no version
of scripture contains a passage to the effect that “the preceding … and the
following … pages are Scripture”);82 equally, in Baconian and Newtonian
science, the appeal is to ‘experience’ but ‘experience’ does not contain any
rules for identifying or describing its contents:
Experience, taken by itself, is mute. It does not provide any means of
establishing a connection with a language unless one already includes
Scott, Ivanhoe, 257.
Ibid., 395.
81
Rattansi, ‘Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients’, Let Newton Be!, 198–9.
82
Paul K. Feyerabend, ‘Classical Empiricism’, in Robert E. Butts and John W. Davis, The
Methodological Heritage of Newton (Oxford, 1970), 152–3.
79
80
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in it some elementary linguistic rules, that is unless one again refers to
a tradition.83
Neither ‘scripture’ nor ‘experience’, as defined by the Reformation and the
‘scientific revolution’, can declare itself to be what it is required to be if it
is to provide the founding basis of faith or knowledge. Since we are not
allowed to use what cannot be justified by ‘scripture’ or ‘experience’ to give
them definition, the commitment to them can have no logical or rational basis:
they are, in Feyerabend’s terms not only ‘logically vacuous’ but have to be so in
order to function as an apparent foundation for the knowledge they make
possible. As Scott Mandlebrote has noted, Newton’s theology depended on
a ‘strict biblical literalism’ in which ‘the text of scripture both confirmed and
interpreted itself ’84 and, if Maurizio Mamiani is correct, Newton’s approach to
the reading of scripture, and his development of a typology which will explain
the figural language of Apocalypse, is actually the basis for the ‘Rules of
Reasoning’ which makes possible the logic of the Principia.85 Newton’s science
was able to give support to religion precisely because it was the application to
the text of the natural world of principles which had been developed to read
the text of scripture.
It was this implicit circularity of Newtonian method – whether framed
in terms of the ‘occult’ causes of gravitation or the ‘mysteries’ of fluxions
– that exercised those anti-Newtonians who refused to accept either the
philosophical or theological consequences of Newtonian physics, even
when they accepted the validity of his mathematics.86 Newton’s account of
gravitation, like his account of Apocalypse, depended on smuggling into the
rules for analysing the data the very outcomes which those rules were claimed
to generate: gravity is the implication of the mathematical account of the
laws of motion but also the assumption on which they are based, so that
much of the debate between Newton and his critics was about the status of
gravity as a ‘cause’ of planetary motion – was it an ‘occult’ assumption or
Ibid., 154.
Scott Mandlebrote, ‘Newton and Eighteenth Century Christianity’, in I. Bernard
Cohen and George E. Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge,
2002), 420–1.
85
Maurizio Mamiani: ‘Newton on prophecy and the Apocalypse’, in Cohen and Smith,
Cambridge Companion to Newton, 396ff.
86
See Geoffrey Cantor, ‘Anti-Newton’ in Fauvel, Flood, Shortland and Wilson, Let
Newton Be!, 203ff.
83
84
Introduction
25
did the mathematics prove that ‘gravity does really exist’?87 This circularity
meant that Newton assumed his particular experiments to have demonstrated
the truth of his method and his method to have revealed the validity of his
experiments – even when, as Feyerabend shows, the experiments might equally
fit with an alternative set of hypotheses. Thus Newton’s ‘ray theory’ of light,
which is proved by experiment – the ‘experimentum crucis’ – is in fact dependent
on the theory for the structure of the experiment by which it is proved: as
Feyerabend puts it, ‘the wave theory, too, has its paradigmatic experiments
which exhibit its principles at once, and with only a minimum of abstraction
and generalization: the phenomena of refraction and reflection follow from
this theory as swiftly and naturally as the experimentum crucis follows from
Newton’s account’.88 Newtonian science worked, but worked by defining the
world on the presuppositions of the science: science revealed the order of
the universe through mathematics – but only by assuming that reality was
already, by God, mathematically ordered. If Feyerabend is right, the problems
of Newton’s hermeneutic exegesis of biblical texts were identical with the
problems of his science.
It was in part this uncertainty in Newton’s science that led Immanuel
Kant (1724–1804) to attempt to salvage Newtonian space and time not as
the objective realities of the universe but as the categories through which
we necessarily perceive it: Newton’s assertions that ‘absolute, true and
mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equally without
relation to anything’, and that ‘absolute space, in its own nature, without
relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable’,89
are made inevitable by constituting them as the lenses through which we
encounter the world. The consequence, of course, is that we can never see
the world as it is in itself, because we can never see it except by means of
the categories by which our perceptions structure it. Ultimate truth is beyond
the reach even of Newtonian science. In following through the implications
of this, Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) developed the notion of the
fundamental limitation of all human knowledge, for which he invented the
term ‘nescience’:
Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles, trans A. Motte, rev. by Florian Cajori (Berkeley,
1960), 547. See Gerd Buchdahl, ‘Gravity and Intelligibility: Newton to Kant’, in Butts
and Davis (eds), The Methodological Heritage of Newton, 76.
88
Feyerabend, ‘Classical Empiricism’, in Butts and Davis (eds), The Methodological Heritage
of Newton, 167.
89
Newton, Principia, 7.
87
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Loath to admit that our science is at best the reflection of a reality
we cannot know, we strive to penetrate to existence in itself; and what
we have laboured intensely to attain, we at last fondly believe we
have accomplished. But, like Ixion, we embrace a cloud for a divinity.
Conscious only of, – conscious only in and through, limitation, we think
to comprehend the Infinite; and dream even of establishing the science
– the nescience of man, on an identity with the omniscience of God. It
is this powerful tendency of the most vigorous minds to transcend
the sphere of our faculties, which makes a “learned ignorance” the
most difficult acquirement – perhaps, indeed, the consummation of
knowledge.90
‘Nescience’ was to lead a vigorous life through the rest of the nineteenth
century in debates about the existence of God, and about whether knowledge
of God’s existence was possible for human beings. ‘Nescience’ was used to
justify both traditional religion – only revelation and faith could make God
knowable – and to justify agnosticism – ultimate reality was simply beyond
human comprehension.91
But ‘nescience’ was also to become embroiled in the understanding of
race. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the
twentieth, anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer ‘discovered’ that the Arunta
people of central Australia had no understanding of the relationship between
the sexual act and procreation: their ‘nescience’92 – lack of knowledge – of
this fundamental aspect of human life identified them as the most primitive
surviving human group, quite literally ‘a stone age people’, as the subtitle
of his book of 1927 put it.93 The very first stage of the stadial progress
of humanity had been discovered, a people so primitive that they had no
conception of their own conception. As Patrick Wolfe has traced, however,
this ‘discovery’ was the fulfilment of a theoretical account – a ‘conjectural
history’ – of human development based on the theories of J. F. McLennan
Sir William Hamilton, ‘Philosophy of the Unconditioned’, Edinburgh Review (October
1829), 37–8.
91
See James C. Livingston, ‘British Agnosticism’, in Smart, Clayton, Katz and Sherry
(eds), Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1985), 234ff.
92
It was Andrew Lang, in his The Secret of the Totem (London, 1905), 193, who applied
Hamilton’s term to the nature of the Arunta’s lack of knowledge of conception.
93
Sir Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People (London,
1927).
90
Introduction
27
(1827–81), E. B. Tyler (1832–1917), and J. G. Frazer (1854–1941).94 Two issues
came together in this account. First, that in primitive societies, as McLennan
puts it, ‘we find marriage laws unknown, the family system undeveloped, and
even the only acknowledged blood relationship that through mothers’;95 the
consequence is that it impossible to know who is father to any child. Second,
that primitive societies are organised around ‘totems’: as Frazer describes it,
‘the reason why a tribe revere a particular species of animals or plants (for a
tribal totem may be a plant) and call themselves after it, must be a belief that
the life of each individual of the tribe is bound up with some one animal or
plant of the species, and that his or her death would be the consequence of
killing that particular animal, or destroying that particular plant’;96 people’s
spirits are, in some sense, ‘contained’97 in the totem. But if creatures and plants
can ‘contain’ human spirits, and if human spirits can migrate between human
bodies and other bodies, then, to ‘that infantine state of mind’, as Edwin
Sidney Hartland (1848–1927) described it in his Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry
into Fairy Mythology (1891), ‘not only our fellow men and women but all objects
animate and inanimate around us’ will be seen ‘as instinct with a consciousness,
a personality akin to our own’.98 Nescience of fatherhood as a practical issue
in primitive societies with no family structure must, he suggested, have been
preceded by an even earlier stage in which it was believed that people could
enter into relations with animals and objects on the same basis as with other
human beings – including marriage, ‘wherein one party may be human and the
other an animal of a different species, or even a tree or plant’.99 Totemism, for
Hartland, was a means of acknowledging ancestors who had not been human,
a stage in human evolution when the relationship between sex and conception
had not been understood and which had left behind, as its cultural deposit,
myriad tales of carnal unions with beasts.
Hardly had Hartland envisaged this historical stage than, to his astonishment,
Spencer, and his co-researcher Gillen, discovered it still surviving among the
Arunta:
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and
Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York, 1999).
95
John Ferguson McLennan, Studies in Ancient History (London, 1886).
96
J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Edinburgh, 2004; 1890),
641.
97
Ibid., 640.
98
Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry into Fairy Mythology
(London, 189), 25.
99
Ibid., 27.
94
28
Cairns Craig
Some years ago I ventured to suggest that certain archaic beliefs and
practices found almost all over the world were consistent only with,
and must have arisen, from imperfect recognition of fatherhood. I
hardly expected, however, that a people would be found still existing in
that hypothetical condition of ignorance. Yet, if we trust the evidence
before us, it is precisely the condition of the Arunta. They hold the
cause of birth to be simply the desire of some Arunta of earlier days
to be reincarnated.100
Frazer rushed to proclaim the problem of totemism solved: ‘after years of
sounding, our plummets seem to touch bottom at last’.101 The category of
the ‘nescient’ having been invented, it allowed Spencer to ‘see’ what must be
the state of mind of his ‘stone age’ people. A category created by armchair
anthropologists poring over ancient texts allowed Western ‘science’ to
distinguish the ‘nescience’ of those it was seeking to fit into the development
of humanity – without considering the nescience (in Hamilton’s sense) of
its own methodology. As Jonathan Friedman has argued, ‘in the process
of representation, only one side of the we/they opposition became the
anthropological object, precluding the systemic relations involved in the
constitution of that object’.102
Thus, despite the presentation of the Arunta as man in his earliest stages of
development – and, therefore, in some sense the equivalent of ‘our’ ancestors
– another piece of nineteenth-century discourse allowed them to be strictly
separated from their white discoverers: ‘it is not yet certain’, Frazer opined in
1890, ‘that the Aryans ever had totemism. On the other hand, it is quite certain
that many Aryan peoples have conceived of vegetation as embodied in animal
forms’.103 Even amongst the primitive, race differentiates.
Spencer’s assumption, when he was appointed as ‘Protector of the
Aborigines’ as a result of his scientific understanding of their culture, was that
he was overseeing a dying race, one which could not progress to modernity.
The attitude of official Australia that he represented seemed to be that of
Robert Knox towards ‘the dark races’:
Hartland, ‘Presidential Address to the Folk-Lore Society, Folk-Lore 9 (1900), 52–80; 65;
quoted in Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 21.
101
‘The beginnings of religion and totemism among the Australian Aborigines’, Fortnightly
Review, (n.s.) 78 (1905), 457–8; quoted Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 24.
102
Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London, 1994), 2.
103
Frazer, Golden Bough, 382.
100
Introduction
29
No one seems much to care for them. Their ultimate expulsion from all
lands which the fair races can colonise seems almost certain. Within the
tropic, climate comes to the rescue of those whom Nature made, and
whom the white man strives to destroy; each race of white men after
their own fashion: the Celt by the sword; the Saxon, by conventions,
treaties, parchment, law. The result is ever the same – the robbing the
coloured races of their lands and liberty.104
If race is history then history is nature: its course is as inevitable as Newtonian
physics, as inescapable as Kantian categories, as self-evident as the evidence
of anthropologists.
V Forging Race
In the final section of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen
Dedalus, preparing to leave Ireland, writes in his diary:
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race.105
The word ‘forge’ hovers between two meanings: to forge, to bring into being,
as metal beaten on an anvil, and to forge, to counterfeit, to simulate. The
balance is crucial: ‘the reality of experience’, of the external world, is to be
reconstituted into spirit, ‘conscience’, the two being bound together by the
insubstantial medium of the soul. The irony, however, is that Stephen has never
encountered the ‘reality’ to which ‘experience’ points except as the projection
on to it of his own subjectivity. The ‘reality of experience’ is decidedly not
the same as an ‘experience of reality’, so that the ‘uncreated conscience’ of
his race will only come into existence as a result of his own subjectivity being
imposed, God-like, on the chaos before creation.
Joyce’s dramatisation of the act of forgery by which reality – both external
and internal – is constituted, is an ambiguity which finds no echo in Colin
Kidd’s The Forging of Races. For Kidd race is simply a projection of subjectivity
Knox, Races of Men, 210.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth, 1960; 1916),
253.
104
105
30
Cairns Craig
on to the screen of reality – ‘race … belongs not so much to the realm of
objective biology as to the quite distinct realm of human subjectivity’106 – and
on to the screen of a text – ‘the Bible says nothing about race, and functions,
in this respect, merely as a screen on which its so-called interpreters project
their racial attitudes, fears, and fantasies’.107 There is, on the one side, the
‘objective’ world of science and, on the other, the subjective world of fantasy:
‘the world of racial classification is, to all intents and purposes, a realm not of
objective science, but of cultural subjectivity and creativity, for “race” involves
the arbitrary imposition of discontinuities on the continuous variation of the
world’s peoples’.108 This is a division, however, which the history of science
itself will hardly support: it is not just in the area of theories of race that
past science has proved to be the wilful imposition of subjectivity on reality,
nor is it only racial discourse which has found ‘concealed’ meanings in the
Bible (as Newton’s emblematic readings prove). Once race is ‘forged’ it cannot
simply be erased by pointing to its subjectivity, for it is one of the categories
by which our public world is constituted. How otherwise could we have ‘race
relations legislation’, or laws against ‘incitement to racial hatred’? Because
‘race’ does not have any confirmed scientific basis does not mean that it is an
empty concept, for all concepts – even the concepts of science, some would
argue – ‘are examples of cultural construction superimposed upon arbitrarily
selected features’ of reality. Kidd’s project was framed as one in which ‘the
dethroning of biblical authority was a necessary prelude to the emergence of
modern racism’ because ‘the message of the Christian scriptures constrained
the development of polygenist ideas of multiple human origins’. Race and
racialism were the products of ‘a secularised doctrine untramelled by the
monogenist anthropology clearly articulated (or so it seemed) in Genesis,
and reiterated in the message of universal brotherly love found in the New
Testament’.109 What he discovered, however, was that the text of the Bible was
much more fluid in the ‘smithy of the soul’ than he had imagined:
The human imagination is equally capable of interpreting the Christian
scriptures in a racialist manner. It often depends less, it seems, on
the logic of the scriptures than on the objectives of the interpreter,
or indeed on the logic of the system developed conjointly out of the
Kidd, The Forging of Races, 18.
Ibid., 3.
108
Ibid., 7.
109
Ibid., 271.
106
107
Introduction
31
scriptures and their theological accompaniment … As it transpires,
polygenist theories of plural creations of races and theories of the
pre-Adamic creations of other races did find their way into otherwise
traditional readings of the scriptures. Genesis, it turned out, yielded
both polygenist and monogenist lessons in anthropology.110
But what is true of the Biblical text is no less true of that other text – the text of
Nature as read by science. It is forever under revision and reinterpretation, its
‘objectivity’ a function of a method whose assumptions shape its conclusions.
As we saw in the case of Newton’s alchemy and theology, science is shaped by
much more than what can be proven ‘objective’, and what counts as science is as
much a matter of ‘the arbitrary imposition of discontinuities on … continuous
variation’ as are theories of race.111 Telling science from pseudoscience is not
any easier than distinguishing the ‘objective’ from the ‘subjective’.
The fundamental weakness of Kidd’s argument, however, is that it assumes
racism to be unacceptable but reveals that the Judaeo-Christian tradition
provides no bulwark against it. The Bible may say nothing about race, but
that does not mean – indeed, as Kidd shows in extenso, has not meant – that
it can not be made to support racial arguments, despite the New Testament’s
‘message of universal brotherly love’.112 This is not because of the perversity
of readers of the Bible or because of the evil intent of racists but because of
the very nature of scriptural textuality. Nor would Kidd’s arguments against
racism cease, one assumes, if it turned out that there were genetic differences
corresponding to some definition of ‘race’ – such differences would be, I
assume, for those of us who share Kidd’s rejection of racism, irrelevant to our
conception of the rights of human beings as human beings. Notably, it is in
the very era of the ‘dethroning of biblical authority’ that the language of the
‘rights of men’ emerges, replacing ‘brotherly love’ with the ‘Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity’ that the French derived from the traditions of Freemasonry. That
Freemasonry was no less likely to succumb to racism despite principles of
brotherhood is clear from the outcome of the American Revolution and the
shaping of the US Constitution in which masons were so prominently involved
– being the President of a nation committed to equality as well as a Freemason
committed to brotherhood, did not prevent Jefferson from being a slaveholder.
Freemasonry could become, however, the vehicle for those in search of rights,
Ibid., 271–2.
Ibid., 7.
112
Ibid., 271.
110
111
32
Cairns Craig
as in the case of Prince Hall and the ‘African Lodge’. Hall had been made a
mason by a British soldier, and then gained a charter for the establishment of
the African Lodge from England in 1785, and went on to build a fraternity
that now claims over 4,500 affiliated lodges.113 According to Steven Bullock,
‘by invoking fraternity as a member of an international brotherhood, Hall
gained the moral authority necessary to challenge the inconsistencies of a
white orthodoxy that praised equality, religion and fraternity yet treated blacks
as inferiors’.114 Similarly, those elite members of the colonised who were
invited to join Freemasonry as a way of consolidating their commitment to
British imperial hegemony could, as Jessica Harland-Jacobs suggests, learn ‘to
use the brotherhood’s ideology of cosmopolitan fraternalism to challenge the
“rule of colonial difference” that underlay imperial powers and to demand
equality with his British “brothers”. After all, Freemasonry, a highly elastic
institution, had a history of being put to subversive ends’.115
It will come as no surprise that ‘Ivanhoe’ continues to be one of the most
popular names for Masonic Lodges throughout the world. A novel which can
be read as an affirmation of racial distinction, or as its transcendence; a novel
which places the racially abused – the Jews – at the very heart of its moral issues,
by creating in Rebecca the novel’s most popular character, and yet ensures
their removal from the society at its conclusion, both enacts and critiques the
contradictions of our understanding of race since the Enlightenment. The
‘science of man’ proposed by David Hume, and developed by later Scottish
thinkers, turned mankind itself into the object of scientific scrutiny. It seemed
to Hume that it was ‘impossible to tell what changes and improvements we
might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent
and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas
we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings’.116 But in
what scientific space did Hume’s ‘man’ exist? – his own writings offered many
alternatives: Newtonian space? The space of impressions and ideas? the space
of conjectural history? the space of national history? the social space of an
imperial and commercial modernity? As each of these was explored it was
assumed that understanding would reveal a ‘harmony’ in which truth would
always be at one with itself – a harmony equivalent to that which Newton
discovered between the truths of the ancients and the truths of the moderns,
http://www.mindspring.com/~johnsonx/whoisph.htm, accessed September 2010
Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood 158–60.
115
Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 15.
116
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A.Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888), xix.
113
114
Introduction
33
when he decided/discovered that the colours that composed white light were
equivalent to the notes of the harmonic scale as described by Pythagoras, and
that the same mathematical relations determined the orbits of the planets.117
The harmony of the universe, the parallelism of its mathematical relations and
the analogical equivalence of the ways in which it could be read, whether as
‘nature’ or as ‘scriptural text’, ensured a ‘harmony’ in which truth was one and
everywhere the same. Scott’s Ivanhoe, on the other hand, threatens to undermine
such harmonies: to Rowena’s offer that Rebecca stay in England, the Jewess
replies: ‘that may not be. I may not change the faith of my fathers like a
garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell, and unhappy, lady,
I will not be’.118 Rebecca refuses to conform to the demands of progressive
history and insists on the importance of a tradition which seems redundant
to her ‘fair’ inquisitor. The power of tradition shapes the nature of the truth
which defines the life of woman; the science of man, and its assumption of
the singularity of truth, is what the experience of woman will put in doubt:
as Hume was to discover, his rational exploration of the human mind proved
only how irrational was its fundamental structure: ‘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’.119
VI Another Ivanhoe
Agnes Armstrong is an Australian Aboriginal artist: her landscapes are based,
in colour and structure, on the traditions of Aboriginal art, and done with
ochre on canvas. She lives on the Mirima Reserve in Western Australia. One of
her paintings is of the landscape where she grew up – Ivanhoe Station.
University of Aberdeen
See Penelope Gouk, ‘The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science’, in Fauvel, Flood,
Shortland and Wilson (eds), Let Newton Be!, 122ff.
118
Scott, Ivanhoe, 501.
119
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 425.
117
Accounting for Human Diversity
Michael Banton
A Nobel-prize-winning physicist at M.I.T., Frank Wilczek, warned his colleagues: ‘If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough
problems. And that’s a big mistake.’
In an article four years ago I claimed that I had earlier made two intellectually
interesting mistakes. I was pleased to be able to make such a claim, because
many academics go through their careers without ever making an interesting
mistake. Now I am claiming to have discovered a third mistake.
In a textbook published in 1967 I maintained that race was used as a role
sign, indicating a person’s social entitlements. That was my first mistake. I
should have said that it was phenotype, or outward appearance, that was so
used. Aware that appearance had different significance in different societies, I
also took steps towards a possible theory by differentiating what I called ‘six
orders of race relations’. That was my second mistake. No-one can create a
sociological theory on the basis of a concept that is culture-bound, limited to
certain societies and certain historical periods. Some said that because popular
conceptions of race derived from a misunderstanding of biological differences,
the word was better avoided. Wishing to help correct such misunderstandings,
I collaborated with a microbiologist to publish a book titled The Race Concept.
That title was my third mistake.
I have been led to this recognition of error by Robert Bernasconi, who,
assuming that there is what he calls ‘a scientific concept of race’, has asked
‘who invented it?’. He has then pointed a finger at the philosopher Immanuel
Kant. In my view, he reads the past in the light of his own, modern, conception
of race, and that is a mistake, though not an interesting one.1 His argument has
led me to the conclusion that at no time in the five hundred years that the word
race has been used in west European languages, has there ever been sufficient
Some recent discussion of `Who invented the concept of race?’ appears to be
motivated by a desire to assign responsibility for the origination of racial ideologies.
For example, Andrew Valls’s collection of essays, Race and Racism in Modern
Philosophy (Ithaca, 2005) is primarily concerned to establish whether various eminent
philosophers were racists.
1
36
Michael Banton
agreement upon its use as part of an explanation to justify anyone’s calling it
a concept. A scientific concept has to be much more than an ordinary language
word. It has to form part of a set of concepts that, applied in association, can
make possible an explanation. The concepts of anthropology may not have
the explanatory power of the concepts of physics, but they aspire to scientific
status.
I was wrong to contrast the idea of race with the concept of race. The
proper contrast is between the ordinary language vocabulary of everyday life
and the kind of technical language needed to resolve intellectual problems.
The technical, or analytical, concepts that help explain human diversity are
those of inheritance, both genetic and environmental. The latter include
social, economic and cultural factors. So I concluded that both race and ethnicity
were folk concepts rather than analytical concepts. Seeking to go further,
I contended that ‘the processes of inclusion and exclusion are, at least in
embryo, analytical concepts which will help explain the observations with
which the study of racial and ethnic relations is concerned’.2 That was as far
as I could then go.
The two dimensions
Historians who read the past in the light of present-day conceptions of race
neglect the differences in the meanings that have been given to the word, and
the changes over time. It is easier to identify the differences if we recognise that
the word race, in all the languages in which it features, has necessarily both a
vertical and a horizontal dimension of meaning. In the Oxford English Dictionary
the vertical dimension is seen in its definition as ‘The offspring or posterity of
a person’; this is illustrated with an instance from 1570: ‘Thus was the outward
race and stocke of Abraham after flesh refused’. The next four examples in the
Dictionary reflect what I call the horizontal dimension, evident in the definition
of race as ‘A set or class of persons … having some common feature or
features’. This dimension is exemplified by a verse from the Scots poet Dunbar,
penned between 1500 and 1520, that refers to ‘Bakbytteris of sindry racis’. The
vertical dimension identifies the historical origins of the distinctiveness of a
set of persons, emphasizing heredity and genealogy. The horizontal dimension
identifies the nature of that distinctiveness. It is represented in the Linnean
Banton, ‘Analytical and Folk Concepts of Race and Ethnicity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies,
2 (1979), 127 – 138, at 136
2
Accounting for Human Diversity
37
taxonomy that assigns persons, or other living things, to appropriate taxa.
Usage of the word race in the vertical sense is sometimes politically innocent;
employed in the horizontal sense it is rarely so.
Linnaeus, writing in Latin, pioneered the construction of a technical
language. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, authors wrote works
of natural history in the European vernaculars, the situation changed. Kant
was among the leaders. He first addressed the subject in an essay titled ‘Of
the Different Human Races’; in it he distinguished Naturbeschreibung (or the
description of nature) from Naturgeschichte (or natural history). The former
was static, embodying classifications at moments in time that were based upon
similarities, and which built up into an ‘artificial system’ that divided specimens
into genera, species and varieties. It captured the horizontal dimension. The
latter dealt with relations between specimens over time. Kant’s notion of a
‘natural genus’ captured the vertical dimension; and it was with this that he was
primarily concerned. By contrast with the ‘artificial system’, it was ‘a system for
the understanding’. It showed that nature, or environmental influence, could
produce a distinctive stock which ‘might even be called a race’.
Though at this time Kant’s ideas were changing in the light of new evidence,
and in response to new philosophical currents, he maintained his distinction
between the two systems of thought. When, thirteen years later, he returned to
the subject, Kant wrote `What is a race?3 The word certainly does not belong in
a systematic description of nature’, and then repeated this assertion, adding that
in the description of nature the proper word to use was variety. In Naturgeschichte,
however, the word race was rightly used to identify ‘conjunction of causes placed
originally in the line of descent of the genus itself in order to account for a selftransmitted peculiarity that appears in different interbreeding animals but which
does not lie in the concept of their genus’. On this reading, were he not opposed
to the doctrine of evolution, Kant could be said to have anticipated Darwin’s use
of race as sub-species.
He went on to assert that in Naturgeschichte a genus could be divided into lines
of descent, races, but they did not ‘contain invariable characteristics passed on
according to a given law’ and, consequently, could not be divided into classes. He
was here concerned with a differentiation that had to be interpreted teleologically.
As Bernasconi writes, Kant insisted that ‘nature is organized purposively’.4 Were
Immanuel Kant, `On the Use of the Teleological Principle in Philosophy’ (1788), in
Robert, Bernasconi, Race (Malden, 2001), 37 – 56 at 40.
4
Robert Bernasconi, `Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the
Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in Bernasconi (ed.), Race, 23.
3
38
Michael Banton
these the Creator’s purposes? Kant explained: `Purposes are either purposes
of nature or of freedom. No human being appreciates a priori that there must be
purposes in nature, but we can very well appreciate a priori that there must be a
connection between causes and effects. Consequently, the use of the teleological
principle is, in the consideration of nature, always empirically conditioned.’5 Kant
seems to be asserting that, while humans could not identify the Creator’s purposes
(the purposes in nature), they (in the realm of freedom) had to regard organisms
as if they were part of such a design. This has been felicitously expressed by
Susan Shell:
We understand living beings teleologically, on Kant’s account, not
because we have immediate access to their ‘natures’, but because
we cannot think the possibility of such a living system without
presupposing a concept of what the organism is ‘to be’ in the mind of
some hypothetical, infinitely artful author.6
Though Kant believed that environmental influences could be occasions for
change, he did not accept that they could be part of the ‘conjunction of causes
placed originally in the line of descent of the genus itself ’. Naturgeschichte
would uncover the original natural endowment of the species and explain its
actualization in variety over time in different environments.7
Kant’s sometime pupil Johann Gottfried von Herder may have had Kant’s
first essay in mind when, in 1784, he objected that: `Some have for example
ventured to call four or five divisions among humans, which were originally
constructed according to regions or even according to colours, races; I see no
reason for this name. Race derives from a difference in ancestry that either
does not occur here or includes the most diverse races … For each people is a
people … ’.8 The relations between the teacher and his pupil had soured, which
Kant, `On the Use of the Teleological Principle in Philosophy’, 52.
Susan M. Shell, ‘Kant’s Concept of a Human Race’, in Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore
(eds), The German Invention of Race (Albany, 2006), 55 – 72, at 60.
7
Contrary to my interpretation, Mark Larrimore – who knows far more about Kant’s
writing than I ever will – has maintained in ‘Race, Freedom and the Fall in Steffens
and Kant’ (The German Invention of Race, 91 – 120) that, `The necessity Kant claimed
to find [in his account of human history] showed something non-accidental in
the unfolding of human diversity. It presaged a study of nature that could move
beyond mere `description of nature’ (Naturbeschreibung) to a true `natural history’
(Naturgeschichte).’ (Larrimore 2008). In my view, he and Bernasconi do not reflect
sufficiently on the meaning(s) Kant ascribed to the word race.
8
Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (eds), The Idea of Race (Indianapolis, 2000), 26.
5
6
Accounting for Human Diversity
39
makes it the more possible that Herder had misunderstood Kant. However
much they may have disagreed about other matters, their views about use of
the word race were not far apart.
On my reading, Kant used the word race as an ordinary language expression
in an attempt to understand Creation; he had in mind the vertical dimension.
This attempt was to be distinguished from the part of his work that may
be seen as contributing to science. He did not want to find a place for race
as a division within a Linnean taxonomy, which would reflect the horizontal
dimension. Kant was writing `in an intellectual milieu in which race had not yet
made the shift from … a climate in which monogenesis implied a theological
and not merely a historical narrative’.9 Kant’s rhetoric of freedom led to a
philosophical reflection upon human difference, decoupling the word from its
use in the empirical analysis of difference.
Had scholars continued to write in Latin some of the confusion might
have been avoided. French and English anthropologists began to use race as
if it were a taxon in what Kant would have called Naturbeschreibung. They
tried to insert it into the Linnean schema of genus, species, and varietas without
securing any agreement about how it related to the existing taxa. Thus in his
magisterial work Le Règne animal of 1817, Cuvier used race as a synonym for
variety, stressing the horizontal dimension. The leading English anthropologist of the period, James Cowles Prichard, protested in 1836 about the way a
word that denoted a succession of individuals propagated from a given stock
was being wrongly used to imply a distinction in the physical character of
a series of individuals.10 He identified the concept of race with the vertical
differentiation.
Prichard’s protest did not stem the wave of interest in the utilisation of the
word race in its horizontal sense. Because of its significance for contemporary
politics, this expansion of meaning attracted intense interest and, in the Victorian
era, generated great confusion. Eleven representative essays written between
1864 and 1880 have been assembled in a volume, Images of Race.11 This opens
with a reminder that in 1863 the President of the London Anthropological
Society lamented that hardly any two persons were fully agreed upon the word’s
meaning. Three of the eleven (including a clergyman who became Dean of
Canterbury) developed typological or polygenist arguments; three elaborated
Darwinian arguments. One contended that the mixing of two European races
Larrimore, `Race, Freedom and the Fall in Steffens and Kant’, 92, 115.
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1998; second edition), 45 – 6.
11
Michael Biddiss (ed.), Images of Race (Leicester, 1979).
9
10
40
Michael Banton
produced a superior race. Another, the historian E. A. Freeman, anticipated a
social constructionist view when he maintained that races were not distinctive
physiologically but became so politically if they accepted the doctrine that a
common nature entitled a people to their own nation state. Among the eleven
contributors was Sir Francis Galton, a notable propagandist for eugenics, who,
here and elsewhere, used the word in at least five different senses. When he
employed expressions like `judges are by no means an infertile race’ he kept
alive the metaphorical literary usage. Galton was not embarrassed to use race as
a synonym for genus, for species, and, apparently, for variety as well. Notably,
he also used it in yet another sense, as a synonym for heredity.12 If someone
of his intellectual stature could in this respect be so unsystematic, it should
occasion no astonishment that the practice of other contemporary writers was
no better.
This confusion continued well into the middle of the twentieth century
and there is a simple explanation for much of it. Many scholars, particularly
anthropologists, were starting their studies from the wrong end. They
assumed that if they collected and classified observations, explanations or
theories would emerge by induction. Darwin in one of his letters expressed his
bafflement that they should do so; he wrote ‘How odd it is that anyone should
not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of
any service’.13 Science begins with problems, and progress is most rapid when
a research worker has a fruitful problem to address. A good problem is one
which, if solved, casts light over a wide span of causal relationships. Darwin
found a first class problem, and persevered with it.
The right approach for a nineteenth century anthropologist would have
been to seek a good problem and then consider what theory might help
its resolution. Race, in some sense of that word, might be part of such a
theory. Its definition would be decided by its utility. The wrong approach
was to take some conception of race and try to prove that it was valuable.
That was to base an argument on an ordinary language word. This was the
procedure recommended by one of the most widely-read exponents of a
racial philosophy of history, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who asked
‘What is the use of detailed scientific investigations as to whether there are
distinguishable races? ... We turn the tables and say: it is evident that there are
Michael Banton, `Galton’s Conception of Race in Historical Perspective’, in Milo
Keynes (ed.), Sir Francis Galton FRS: the legacy of his ideas (London, 1993), 170 – 9.
13
Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward (eds), More Letters of Charles Darwin: a record of his
work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters, 2 vols (London, 1903), 195.
12
Accounting for Human Diversity
41
such races: it is a fact of direct experience that the quality of race is of vital
importance’.14
Only in the 1930s did the various new lines of research start to come
together again in a synthesis which has enabled the student to appreciate
why, in biology, the replacement for the concept of racial type was that of
population. The foundation of this synthesis was population genetics, the
branch of genetics which investigates the changes in gene frequencies. The
new synthesis initiated in 1930 by R. A. Fisher’s landmark book, The Genetical
Theory of Natural Selection, necessitated a reorientation on the sort of scale that
takes a generation to effect. There must always be lines of inquiry that lead
into dead ends or become no longer worth pursuing. There were several of
these in physical anthropology and in zoology.
The mid-twentieth-century transition in the biological study of human
variation may have been accelerated by a political intervention that exposed
the oppositions between competing schools of thought. Discussion within
the United Nations led in 1950 to an instruction to the Director-General
of UNESCO to collect scientific material concerning questions of race.
His staff began by assembling an international committee of experts, who
prepared a fifteen-paragraph ‘Statement on Race’, published in the same year.
Among other things, it stated that ‘the biological fact of race and the myth of
“race” should be distinguished’ and that ‘it would be better when speaking of
human races to drop the term “race” altogether and speak of ethnic groups’.
‘According to present knowledge there is no proof that the groups of mankind
differ in their innate mental characteristics...’15
To assert that race was a myth was to use both words too loosely. The
various schemes of racial classification were founded on the best available
data. The key issue was whether they were useful. To account for the incidence
of sickle cell anaemia, an understanding of the Mendelian principles of
inheritance was essential. To give a patient an appropriate blood transfusion,
the several classifications of human blood types were similarly essential.
No-one could identify a practical problem that could be solved by recourse
to racial classification. UNESCO consulted further, produced a second
Statement, and, in a booklet entitled The Race Concept, published a selection
of observations and comments, three alternative suggested statements, and
a further formulation. These documents show that at the time in question
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols
(London, 1911), 271.
15
Four statements on the race question (Paris, 1969), 31-4.
14
42
Michael Banton
physical anthropologists tended to employ the word race with a meaning that
emphasized the horizontal dimension, whereas the geneticists used it with a
meaning that stressed the vertical meaning.
The realm of practice
In Britain the political elite adopted the idiom of race in the mid-nineteenfifties. This was a conscious decision that set the country on a particular path.
The first British proposal for legislation, in 1950, had been a Colour Bar Bill.
International and European law now defines racial discrimination so as to cover
unequal treatment on grounds of colour and ethnic and national origin as well
as on the grounds of race, but a proposal in Britain to legislate against ethnic
rather than racial discrimination would have been less effective politically. The
war against Nazism had defined racial discrimination as morally offensive. So
the first statute was the Race Relations Act of 1965.
To present relations between incomers and the settled population in racial
terms was to polarize them as the relations between two, or several, categories of people. This facilitated the mobilization of opinion in support of
innovative policies. Adoption of the racial idiom was, I believe, central to
policies that made Britain the leading country in Europe in the discharge
of the obligations undertaken by states that are parties to the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, in
the introduction of ethnic monitoring, and in other policy spheres. It seems
improbable that as much would have been achieved had discussion of the
issues continued to be framed in terms of `the colour problem’ or `the colour bar’.
The racial idiom was employed to stigmatize expressions and actions
believed to derive from obsolete and misconceived ideas about human
differences. It therefore empowered the minorities by opening up a line of
criticism of majority attitudes and assumptions. The word racist became an
epithet carrying a heavy charge of moral condemnation. This was illustrated by
the use of the expression institutional racism in the Macpherson report of 1999.
The favourable public reception of this report enabled the Home Secretary to
move the case for action against racial discrimination and disadvantage to the
head of the political agenda. It shattered the complacency of the Metropolitan
Police and of some other bureaucratic institutions. Macpherson’s rhetoric was
politically effective.
Accounting for Human Diversity
43
The shift from the idiom of colour to that of race therefore had many
positive outcomes. Some other developments were less clear-cut. For example,
in the nineteen-sixties there was a marked tendency for references to ‘race’ to
be equated with disputes over immigration. There might have been a more
productive debate about immigration policy had it not been confounded with
‘race’, so in this connection adoption of the racial idiom may have had both
positive and negative consequences.
In the USA, the continuing influence of the black-white division was
evident in the Census of 2000. Question 5 asked, ‘Is this person Spanish /
Hispanic / Latino?’ and required the person answering to tick an appropriate
box. Question 6 asked, ‘What is this person’s race?’ and offered a set of boxes,
beginning with three categories: ‘White’, ‘Black, African Am., or Negro’ and
‘American Indian or Alaska Native’.
Question 5 and Question 6 were not consistent with each other. A
European would have expected both kinds of diversity to be encompassed
within a single question. Yet the Bureau of the Census had to devise two
questions because most residents in the USA thought of the Hispanic/
Non-Hispanic and Black/White distinctions as different: as if one were cultural and the other biological. The popular mode of thinking was in conflict
with the scientific evidence showing that the demographic distinctions were
cultural.
Most residents in the USA did not, and still would not, query the wording
of Question 6. If the person in question identified himself or herself as
‘Black’ he or she was to be assigned to that category even if his or her ancestry
was more European than African in origin. Ancestry was usually judged, not
by knowledge of genealogy, but by skin colour. If Question 5 was about
geographical origin, Question 6 was about colour or phenotype, not about
race in any intellectually defensible sense of that word. The other connotations
that the word had acquired since the late seventeenth century were excluded
as logically irrelevant to the census.
Humans are not always logical. Many Americans believe, like Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, that it is evident that there are races. It looks as if
this contemporary commonsense conception is the source of Bernasconi’s
assumption that there is a concept of race.
Question 6 had its origins in a time when there were two distinct social
categories. Most Americans have continued to think in these terms, as
if persons of mixed origin and intermediate colour were anomalies. The
inauguration of a President who is of equally black and white origin, and of
44
Michael Banton
intermediate colour, should gradually undermine the tendency for the word
race to evoke an obsolete conception of distinct social categories.
In twentieth-century Britain, use of race in the vertical or literary sense may
be more common than in the USA. A striking example of the vertical sense,
and of a politically innocent usage, can be found in the 1986 statement about
The Nature of Christian Belief from the House of Bishops of the Church of
England. This declared ‘Jesus is also the “second Adam”, the Head of a new
race of God’s children in the Spirit’.16
In the census of 2001 residents in England and Wales were asked to classify
themselves by ethnic group, not race, but racial nomenclature persists, as with
individuals who describe themselves, or are described, as ‘mixed race’. The
main source of trouble is the ‘one size fits all’ philosophy of definition. A
classification suited to one purpose may be quite unsuited to another purpose.
Race in social science
Because the idiom of race is so important in the realm of practice, the
arguments for superseding its employment in the realm of social theory
have been neglected. Since it is generally accepted that racial doctrines have
an ideological character, and that it is in the nature of ideology to distort
perceptions of reality, the task for sociologists is to analyze that reality in a
manner that escapes such distortion.
It was with this in mind that I took ‘race as a social category’ as the title for
my inaugural lecture in 1966. I have since come to appreciate that this line of
analysis requires a theory of social categories. I have devised such a theory in
the form of ten propositions.
It starts, first, with the proposition that human individuals have distinctive
characteristics. Some are physical, such as those of sex, stature and the variation
in skin colour that can be measured with a photospectrometer.17 Some are
cultural, including the significance attributed to physical characteristics, but
mainly to those of descent, including those of ethnic origin. Second, that the
attribution of significance to such characteristics results in the creation of social
House of Bishops of the General Synod of the Church of England, The Nature of
Christian Belief (London, 1986), 31.
17
See Pierre L. van den Berghe & Peter Frost, `Skin Colour Preference, Sexual
Dimorphism and Sexual Selection: a case of gene culture co-evolution?’ Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 9 (1986), 87 – 113.
16
Accounting for Human Diversity
45
categories; the characteristics may then be treated as signs of social entitlement.
In all but the simplest forms of human society individuals are graded in terms
of socio-economic status and where there are phenotypical differences these
are given value in that scale. Third, that individuals share these characteristics with
others, which may make them a basis for ascribed roles. Fourth, that phenotypical
characteristics are transmitted from one generation to another, though there may be
variation of colour within a family. Fifth, that common characteristics become the
bases for collective action, either to defend shared privilege or to challenge less
favourable treatment.
Implicit in the third, fourth and fifth propositions is a sixth, that social
relations are multidimensional. They are the relations between individuals, whereas
relationships are relations between roles. Relations may be conducted on the
basis of different relationships. John Doe and Rachel Roe might interact as
male and female, teacher and pupil, landlord and tenant, driver and passenger,
etc. Each role relationship defines a dimension of the relations between the
two persons. Relations have an ethnic dimension when significance is assigned
to the parties’ ethnic origins.
Then come two closely related propositions. The seventh states that the
significance attributed to any particular characteristic is determined by the society’s relation
to its environment and to material circumstances. Thus, for example, pastoral
societies in which human groups move around together with their animals
according to seasonal variations in the availability of pasture, are composed of
groups defined by patrilineal descent. No other characteristic could provide a
comparably effective organizing principle. The eighth proposition states that
the significance attributed to any particular characteristic is also culturally determined. There
are societies – like plantation economies – in which manual labourers (possibly
slaves or indentured workers) are controlled by a relatively small number of
landowners and their agents. The workforce can be controlled more easily if
there is an ideology of biological difference between the social categories (the
classic example is Plato’s thesis that it would be easier to rule his ideal republic
if the members of the various categories had been brought to believe that
God had made the rulers of gold, the auxiliaries of silver, and the farmers
and craftsmen of copper and iron). If descent were used as a characteristic
for assigning individuals to fixed categories of this kind it would not provide
an organizing principle for a progressive society seeking to make best use of
individual talent.
The eighth proposition recognises that human individuals are socialized
into their natal societies, learning the importance of co-operation, and thus of
46
Michael Banton
different kinds of relationship with others. Each individual becomes familiar
with a particular social order and a particular population composition. These
orders are rarely static. As the social world expands, so the sense of a person’s
duty to his or her neighbour is affected by an expanding conception of who
counts as a neighbour.
The seventh and eighth propositions help explain why more significance is
attributed to one characteristic than another. For example, they explain why,
in a given pastoral society, and in given circumstances, more significance is
ascribed to patrilineal than to matrilineal descent, and more significance is
ascribed to descent than to any variation in physical appearance. There may
be none of the differences of costume, speech and education that can be
important to the calculation of socio-economic status in industrial societies.
In industrial societies individuals differ in the relative significance they ascribe
to such characteristics, and the explanation of the variations is an important
sociological problem.
To state, without qualification, that an individual is socialised into a natal
society is to assume that this society is homogenous. Many are not. There may
be differences associated with class, or status, or differences that result from
migration and encounters between persons of different origin.
In the course of human history human societies have become more
diverse. New social institutions have been created. One of the most important
developments has been the creation of the state, often thought of as the
nation-state. This adds a new social category to the list, nationality, and a new
dimension to social relations, namely the civic dimension.
In modern times, one society is distinguished from others primarily by
its constitutional laws. These bring together the recognition of natural (or
presumed natural) characteristics, cultural characteristics and political norms,
declaring what characteristics shall determine rights and obligations in particular
circumstances. This leads to an ninth proposition, that shared sentiments are given
effect in the processes of law-making and law-enforcing that provide foundations for the
definition of social roles and reward conformity with social norms. Legislating is one way
in which bottom-up and top-down processes are reconciled.
Citizens elect representatives to make laws which they themselves will have
to observe. This proposition has a special significance for the study of ethnic
relations, for sentiments are not evenly shared and group norms may influence
the extent to which laws are enforced. When ethnic categories are associated
with distinctive religions, religious norms complicate relations.
A tenth proposition then holds that categories are under pressure, such that, if
Accounting for Human Diversity
47
they are not maintained, they change. Partly because of political processes, such as
those associated with state institutions, the significance of one category relative to other
categories varies over time. If categories are to persist, they have to be reinforced
by the norms of everyday behaviour. The historical record shows that an
ethnic minority may take control of a country (e.g., the Norman Conquest
of England), that for one or two generations there is ethnic conflict, but
two generations later the ethnic categories are no longer significant. Equally,
members of what becomes an ethnic minority may enter, or be brought into,
a country in a subordinate status, but, over time, the social division is reduced
or bridged. Categories may also change in character. The gender category is
a case in point. In many societies the nature of the gender dimension has
changed greatly in the past century.
Fredrik Barth observed forty years ago that stable inter-ethnic relations
presuppose a systematic set of rules ‘governing situations of contact, and
allowing for articulation in some sectors or domains of activity, and a set of
proscriptions on social situations preventing inter-ethnic interaction in other
sectors, and thus insulating parts of the cultures from confrontation and
modification’.18 Such rules are embodied in social institutions, notably those
of government, religious observance, employment, education and residence.
It is in the operation of institutions that categories are maintained or modified,
for in many kinds of society inter-ethnic relations are far from stable.
One illustration of the way categories change can be seen when individuals
migrate and enter other states. Frequently they find that either the state or
members of the public assign them to a social category based on ethnic or
national origin. They can find themselves categorised together with individuals
who, in their country of origin, they would have regarded as socially very
different from themselves. If they are subject to pressure from the ethnic
majority, they may come to identify with their co-nationals and form an ethnic
group at the same time as they are members of an ethnic category.
Physical appearance and ethnic origin
The significance ascribed to a characteristic like descent or skin colour can
be a basis either for evaluating the entitlement of an individual or for the
creation of a social category. That significance can create either a colour scale
Fredrik Barth (ed.) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture
Difference (Oslo 1969), 16.
18
48
Michael Banton
(in which individuals are ranked by socio-economic status with complexion
as one of the constituent elements that is taken into account) or a colour line
(in which individuals are divided into distinct social categories of differential
entitlement). In the same society there may be both a colour scale and a colour
line. In the USA the colour line is usually seen as a major feature of the total
society and the colour scale (more usually referred to as ‘colorism’) as a basis
for distinction within the black population, but white attitudes also reflect
recognition of a colour scale.19
In analyzing the operation of the colour scale, it is helpful to note the
distinction (drawn by Kretch and Crutchfield in Theory and Problems of Social
Psychology) between relative willingness to be (i) exposed to an individual and
(ii) identified with an individual.20 The first kind of preference, for differential
exposure, can be important in interpersonal social contacts and be evident in a
desire to associate with persons of a particular skin colour. The preference for
lighter colour was challenged by the ‘Black is Beautiful!’ campaign, yet research
by social psychologists shows that very many black children in the USA still
prefer a pale complexion. The second kind of preference, for differential
identification, underlies the colour scale. It can be important in political
contexts, for election campaigns often cultivate the inclination of voters to
identify with candidates on the basis of skin colour. A candidate who seeks
the votes of black voters can be assessed according to whether he or she is
sufficiently dark to evoke identification.
There are also situations in which individuals prefer an intermediate
complexion. Advertisers seek to appeal to as wide as possible a consumer
market. They prefer to employ models with whom potential purchasers may
identify themselves. A fair rather than pale-skinned model may be one with
whom both blacks and whites can identify.
The significance ascribed to ethnic or national origin varies between societies
and can vary over time within the same political unit (when sociologists refer
to societies in the plural it is usually political units they have in mind). In the
former Yugoslavia, for example, Serbs, Croats, and others, often lived together
in the same villages. Sometimes they intermarried. Consciousness of ethnic
difference was low. Then, when conflicts escalated elsewhere within the Federal
Republic, relations changed. Many inter-ethnic marriages were broken. Ethnic
Joni Hersh, `Profiling the New Immigrant Worker: The Effects of Skin Color and
Height’, Journal of Labor Economics, 26:2 (2008), 345 – 86.
20
David Kretch, and Richard S. Crutchfield, Theory and Problems of Social Psychology (New
York, 1948), 222 – 4.
19
Accounting for Human Diversity
49
identification became important to the personal security of individuals. After
the dissolution of the Federal Republic and some population movements,
ethnic consciousness could decline again. It has been conventional to conceive
of ethnogenesis as a process by which a set of individuals come to conceive of
themselves as a people, but it would be more accurate to speak of ethnoacclivity
and ethnodeclivity as processes by which the significance attributed to ethnic
identification rises and declines. From a sociological standpoint it is as important
to account for the absence of ethnic identification as for its presence.
Ethnic identification is a composite of self-conception and categorization
by others. It gives an additional dimension to a social relation, influencing
the disposition of each party towards the other. It is more than simply selfconception, in that the existence of a norm specifying differential treatment
itself creates or sustains any self-concept. It has also to be seen as an interaction
between the individual and his or her social environment. The environment
exerts a top-down pressure, yet, important as this may be, it is not all-powerful.
There is always upward pressure for change.
Race in bio-medical science
The disagreements of the nineteen-fifties have been transcended by
discoveries that have made possible the mapping of the human genome and
the elaboration of new and more powerful concepts. Instead of either/or
conceptions of inheritance there are measures of heritability. Computer-based
information technology facilitates more complex analysis. So race does not
feature in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature 2000. The multivariate
analysis of variation within and across species has proven more informative
than the division of species into subspecies. The advance in knowledge
has been accelerated by the ability of biologists to ask better, more precise,
questions than their predecessors, building upon each discovery to go further
in the next stage.
This growth in knowledge is not easily digested. Obsolete assumptions
linger. Some confusions stem from a failure to differentiate use of race as
a term in the explanandum and its use in a proposed explanans. For example,
a study of US high school biology textbooks found that the attention paid
to racial differences declined from the 1950s to the 1990s, but has since
increased. ‘Racial categories are now ubiquitous in textbook lessons on
the mechanisms of genetic disorders [such as] sickle-cell anemia … cystic
50
Michael Banton
fibrosis … [and] Tay-Sachs disease’.21 Within the population, disease
susceptibility rates vary, and the variation can be traced to genetic inheritance.
That is a proposed explanation, and, where a clear line of inheritance can be
identified, the individuals in question could be said to constitute a race in the
Darwinian sense. It could be argued on moral grounds that such usage would
be neither necessary nor desirable, but it would be scientifically defensible.
The usage would reflect the vertical dimension.
However, the textbooks ‘continue to use visual illustrations of human
diversity’. One from 1998 reproduces four portraits of persons that
the student might well think of as Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid and
Mediterranean in the terms of an older classification. It states: ‘Scientists
disagree about how and when different racial groups, some of which are represented by the people above, evolved.’ They are described as representing
‘racial groups’. Racial has been used in the horizontal sense. As no justification for the use of this adjective is provided, the reader is likely to confound
it with the explanation of inheritance. The inheritance of sickle-cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs, is explained in the terms of genetics.
To account for the innumerable differences between persons classified as
Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid and Mediterranean, an exhaustingly long
account would be required of the environmental factors embodied in ecology and history; in this account genetic inheritance would play only a small
part. So the textbook presentation makes it appear as if genetic inheritance is
a sufficient explanation of human diversity.
Another review by Gissis found that the biomedical literature scarcely ever
made reference to race in the years from 1946 to the early 1960s; between
then and the early 1980s, usage in the US and British journals differed; US
journal articles compared samples identified in racial terms whereas UK
articles accounted for observed differences in terms of environmental factors,
and started to consider the possibility that racial discrimination might restrict
access to medical services.22 Between the late 1980s and 2003, especially in the
US journals, there was a process of ‘geneticisation’; because environmental
factors could not be fitted into the model of genetical inheritance, their
explanatory value was neglected. Specialist opinions diverged; some scientists
considering that, despite all their deficiencies, racial/ethnic categories were
Ann Morning, ‘Reconstructing Race in Science and Society: Biology Textbooks,
1952 – 2002’, American Journal of Sociology, 114 (2008), Suppl. S106 – S137.
22
Snait B. Gissis, ‘When is “Race” a Race? 1946 – 2003’, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 39 (2008), 437 – 50.
21
Accounting for Human Diversity
51
useful surrogates for measures of environmental factors. Others thought
their use inappropriately encouraged ‘biologised thinking’. They thought
it inappropriate, I suggest, because such usage opened the environmental
perspective and therefore required a separate discussion that was never
undertaken.23
A third review by Martin et al in 2007 examined biomedical periodicals
from 1994 – 2004 and interviewed 36 specialist researchers. It concluded
that ‘race/ethnicity is a difficult concept to operationalise’ because ‘it means
such different things’ and ‘has meanings and uses that exist beyond scientific
control’.24 The issue had become more prominent because the US Food and
Drug Administration had licensed the heart failure drug BiDil exclusively for
use in the treatment of ‘black’ patients of ‘African descent’.25 The researchers
found that ‘there is no single, stable or robust meaning of race/ethnicity in
genetics and biomedical research’ but noted that some specialists thought that
‘genotyping techniques had the potential to supersede racial/ethnic categories
as crude proxies of collective genetic affinity’. Genetic science ‘presents an
opportunity to explore medically important variation in disease susceptibility
amongst different racial/ethnic groups, and to reverse entrenched inequalities
in ostensibly ‘universal’ medical technologies’. The authors here treat race as
part of the description of the patient sample, the explanandum, not as part of
the explanation of disease susceptibility.
Two specialists in biomedical research, Mountain and Risch, after
acknowledging ‘the potential for furthering racism by discussing race and
genetics together’, conclude that ‘Given current health disparities, however,
and assuming that our society values the goal of understanding the underlying
basis of those disparities, the continued use of labels [racial categories] in
epidemiological research and clinical practice seems justified’.26 These authors
The section ‘The Two dimensions’ summarises an argument developed in an essay
on ‘The Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of the Word Race’ to be published
in the journal Ethnicities with a rejoinder by Robert Bernasconi. The section ‘Race
in social science’ summarises an argument I plan to develop at greater length in
future publications. Two of the articles discussed in the section ‘Race in Bio-medical
science’ were drawn to my attention by Professor Ann Morning.
24
Paul Martin, Richard Ashcroft, George T. H. Ellison, Andrew Smart, and Richard
Tutton, ‘Reviving “Racial Medicine”? The Use of Race/Ethnicity in Genetics and
Biomedical Research, and the Implications for Science and Healthcare’ (London,
2007).
25
On the commercial background to this decision, see Jonathan Kahn, ‘Race in a Bottle’,
Scientific American, 297:2 (2007), 26 – 31.
26
Joanna L Mountain and Neil Risch, `Assessing genetic contributions to phenotypic
23
52
Michael Banton
also are ready to accept racial categories as surrogates for elements that form
part of the explanandum.
It is essential to keep the explanandum and the explanans separate. To use race
as a term in both, is to fall victim to a logical fallacy, that of petitio principi. It
looks to me as if some commentators have fallen into this trap, and I leave it to
you to consider whether this constitutes an interesting mistake. My suggestion
is that it may be easier to avoid the trap if we distinguish the vertical and
horizontal meanings of the word. When writers treat race as an explanandum,
they have the horizontal dimension in mind and need to look to the social
environment, whereas it is within the vertical dimension that explanations are
being found, and they are of a kind very different from those in scripture.
University of Bristol
differences among `racial’ and `ethnic’ groups’ Nature Genetics 36:11 (2004), S48 – 53.
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
David N. Livingstone
Genetics, Genesis and Genealogy
On 11 January 1988, Newsweek magazine ran as its cover story the results of
a research project, reported by Rebecca Cann and Allan Wilson in Nature the
previous year, on Mitochondrial DNA.1 The gist of the findings was that
because Mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from mothers and remains
unchanged in transmission from generation to generation, save for chance
mutations, it can be used to ‘define the maternal lineages of living individuals
all the way back to a common ancestor’.2 The Newsweek headline screamed:
‘The Search for Adam and Eve’. Mitochondrial Eve had appeared on the
genetic stage and, echoing the words of Cann herself,3 Newsweek announced
her arrival to the public:
Scientists are calling her Eve, but reluctantly. The name evokes too
many wrong images – the weak-willed figure in Genesis, the milkskinned beauty in Renaissance art, the voluptuary gardener in
‘Paradise Lost’ who was all ‘softness’ and ‘meek surrender’ and waistlength ‘gold tresses.’ The scientists’ Eve – subject of one of the most
provocative anthropological theories in a decade – was more likely a
dark-haired, black-skinned woman, roaming a hot savanna in search
of food. She was as muscular as Martina Navratilova, maybe stronger;
she might have torn animals apart with her hands, although she probably preferred to use stone tools. She was not the only woman on
earth, nor necessarily the most attractive or maternal. She was simply
the most fruitful, if that is measured by success in propagating a cer Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan C. Wilson, ‘Mitochondrial DNA and
Human Evolution’, Nature 325 (1987): 31 – 6.
2
Rebecca L. Cann and Allan C. Wilson, ‘The Recent African Genesis of Humans’,
Scientific American 13, 2 (2003), 54 – 61, at 58. This article, updated, was originally
published in the April 1992 edition of the Scientific American.
3
Rebecca L. Cann, ‘In Search of Eve’, The Sciences 27 (1987), 30 – 7. See also the account
in Michael H. Brown, The Search for Eve (New York, 1990).
1
54
David N. Livingstone
tain set of genes. Hers seem to be in all humans living today: 5 billion
blood relatives. She was, by one rough estimate, your 10,000th-greatgrandmother. When scientists announced their ‘discovery’ of Eve last
year, they rekindled perhaps the oldest human debate: where did we
come from?4
It was only to be expected that Eve’s annunciation would soon herald the
hunt for her male counterpart. And, sure enough, genetic research on the
male sex-determining Y chromosome (which is passed with little change from
father to son) presently ushered humanity’s most recent patrilinear common
ancestor onto the scene. In October 1997 participants at a Cold Spring Habor
Laboratory symposium in New York were told that ‘Y-chromosome’ Adam
was an African, a finding that confirmed the Eve story.5
Adam and Eve – or at least their metaphorical alter egos – have thus taken
centre-stage in the human story once again. As Priscilla Wald tellingly
comments: ‘Like all creation myths, genetics … offers a story of origins and
a genealogical system that maps not just relationships but rules that govern
relatedness’.6 After all, with E.O. Wilson longing for the creation of ‘a new
epic based on the origins of humanity’,7 Bryan Sykes, a human geneticist at the
University of Oxford, has devised a suite of science-based, myth-like scenarios
for the so-called seven daughters of Eve – Ursula, Xenia, Velda and the like
(clan mothers as he calls them) – whose mitochondrial DNA has triumphantly
spread to all the inhabitants of Europe.8
Genesis narratives are invariably political, of course, and genetics
sagas are no exception. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, rapidly recruited
Mitochondrial Eve in support of anti-racist politics. In a widely distributed
public video lecture in 1987 dealing with ‘Evolution and Human Equality’,
he concluded his exposé of scientific racism by turning to what he himself
described as the ‘centerpiece’ of his argument: the use of mitochondrial DNA
John Tierney, Lynda Wright, and Karen Springen, ‘The Search for Adam and Eve,’
Newsweek, January 11, 1988, 46 – 52 at 46.
5
See the report in Ann Gibbons, ‘Human Evolution: Y Chromosome Shows that
Adam was an African’, Science 278, no. 5339 (31 October 1997), 804 – 5.
6
Priscilla Wald, ‘Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes, and Geography’, New Literary History
231 (2000), 681 – 708, at 705.
7
Edward O. Wilson, ‘Talking About Tomorrow’, Wall Street Journal (1 January
2000), available online at: http://interactive.wsj.com/millennium/articles/
SB944517252461240160.htm#top. See also Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Dark Mother:
African Origins and Godmothers (Lincoln, NE, 2001).
8
See Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (New York, 2002).
4
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
55
to reconstruct the biological genealogy of modern humans. As Lois Magner
put it in her review: ‘Calling this his “bottom line”, Gould concludes that
there is astonishingly little genetic difference between human groups.’9 And
indeed the following year Gould was reported in Newsweek as insisting that
this ‘tremendously important’ finding ‘makes us realize that all human beings,
despite differences in external appearance, are really members of a single
entity that’s had a very recent origin in one place. There is a kind of biological
brotherhood that’s much more profound than we ever realized.’10 As he later
put it in a piece for the Natural History magazine in 1997, tellingly entitled
‘Our Unusual Unity’, the out-of-Africa theory of human origins ‘made our
so-called races effectively equal’.11
As for Y-chromosome Adam, the political implications were no less
conspicuous. As the Stanford medical geneticist Peter Underhill, who headed
up the international research team which pioneered the relevant laboratory
technique, observed, ‘We are all Africans at the Y chromosome level and we
are really all brothers’.12 The ripples have quickly spread in other directions.
The BBC News for 10 May 2000, for example, commenting on a related
haplogroup research project centred on the Middle East,13 announced that
Y chromosomal research had shown how ‘Jews and Arabs are “genetic
brothers”’.14 In these scenarios common descent underwrites human equality.
Adam’s bloodline courses its way through human history, and unites every one
of us in a common humanity. That is Adam and Eve’s gift us – a compelling
basis for a new politics of ‘sisterhood’ and ‘brotherhood’.15
Lois N. Magner, Review of Stephen Jay Gould, Evolution and Human Equality. 42-minute
videocassette, 1987. Isis 80 (1989), 163 – 4 at 164.
10
Quoted in Tierney et al., ‘Search for Adam and Eve’.
11
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Our Unusual Unity’, in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of
Worms (London, 1998), 197 – 212, at 211.
12
Quoted in Nicholas Wade, ‘The Human Family Tree: 10 Adams and 18 Eves’, New
York Times, 2 May, 2000.
13
M. F. Hammer, A. J. Redd, E. T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karafet, S.
Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M. A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer, and B.
Bonné-Tamir, ‘Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common
Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes’, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 97, No. 12 (2000), 6769 – 74.
14
‘Jews and Arabs are “Genetic Brothers”’, BBC News, Wednesday, 10 May 2000, available
online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/742430.stm. See also, ‘Jews Are the
Genetic Brothers of Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese’, ScienceDaily, 9 May 200),
available online at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000509003653.
htm.
15
Gould, ‘Our Unusual Unity’, 212.
9
56
David N. Livingstone
The genetic tracking of humanity’s DNA bloodline all the way back to
Adam or Eve and the elaboration of what might be called the ‘politics of
phylogenetic trees’, do not exhaust contemporary fascination with Adamic
patrimony. Far from it, as I discovered – to my dismay – one afternoon a couple
of years ago. I was checking online used book stores for fugitive literature on
the subject of pre-adamites (fully expecting to find nothing new as I was far
advanced in writing a book on the subject), when suddenly eight or ten titles
sprang out of the screen at me. I was taken aback. But I soon discovered that
all of them were supplied from a single bookseller in St Louis Missouri called
Westward Trek Books. A quick glance at the store’s website made me realise that
I was in contact with a deeply conservative, fundamentalist white supremacist
group calling themselves Kingdom Identity Ministries, also known as the
Christian Identity Movement. Some rapid research, including an enlightening
conversation with Colin Kidd, revealed that this far right neo-Nazi group with
its religion of race hatred and roots in British Israelism, was already the subject
of several major studies.16 They too, it turned out, were fascinated with Adam’s
bloodline; but for very different political ends from the geneticists. According
to their articles of faith: ‘the Man Adam … is father of the White Race only’
and ‘Race-mixing is an abomination … a satanic attempt meant to destroy the
chosen seedline.’ As part of the group’s propaganda strategy, it had mailed a
six-foot glossy scroll entitled ‘The Adamic Race Pure Blood Seedline’ to three
thousand households in northern Idaho in 1998. Viciously anti-Semitic, the
poster was designed to separate out a pure white ‘Adamic seedline’ that served
to dehumanise other non-Adamic lineages. This dual seedline theory, as it is
called, has long been part of the group’s virulent theology which posits Adam
as the father only of the white ‘race’; other races are of non-human pre-Adamic
stock – the spawn of Satan as they put it.
For all its labrythine exegetical manoeuvrings, identity political theology
is simple. The white races are adamic, the others pre-adamic. Adamic races
Assessments include Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the
Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); W. L. Ingram, ‘God and Race:
British-Israelism and Christian Identity’, in T. Miller (ed), America’s Alternative
Religions (Albany, N.Y., 1995), 119 – 126; James A. Aho, The Politics of Righteousness:
Idaho Christian Patriotism (Seattle, 1990); Carol M. Swain, The New White Nationalism
in America: Its Challenge to Integration (Cambridge, 2002); David Ostendorf, ‘Christian
Identity: An American Heresy’, Journal of Hate Studies 1 (2001/02), 24 – 55; Mattias
Gardell, Gods of the Blood: the Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, N.C., 2003);
Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World,
1600 – 2000 (Cambridge, 2006)
16
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
57
are superior and possessed of some intrinsic spiritual and cultural capacities
denied to others. They apparently enjoy a tripartite constitution – body, soul
and spirit – while non-adamic races lack the latter component and are thereby
spiritually destitute. And so it is the duty of the adamic race to preserve its
bloodline from pollution through inter-racial mixing. A pathological fixation
with breeding has long captivated the movement and its predecessors.
Bertrand Comparet (1901 – 83), staged as a San Diego Attorney, began one of
his typical sermons with the assertion that ‘the Bible is the history of OUR
people – the White people of the race that loosely we group under the term
Anglo-Saxon’ and within a few breaths was railing against the ‘mongrelization’
of ‘purebred Adamites’. Discrimination against non-white races, his hearers
were told, was entirely justified for after all God ‘discriminated in favor of
Adam and against all the pre-Adamic people’.17 Instances of this tedious
refrain could be repeated ad libitum. Pamphlets privately printed in the last ten
years, for example, have carried titles such as The Negro and the World Crisis,
Racial Difference: More than Skin Deep, Species of Men: A Polygenetic Hypothesis, False
Biblical Teachings on the Origins of the Races and Interracial Marriages and Not of
One Blood.18 Their titles amply convey their sentiments. Even with a smattering
of genetics and blood chemistry thrown into the mix, these do little more
than demonstrate the Identity supremacists’ continued obsession with Adam’s
bloodline to satisfy its lust for material to justify excoriations of non-white
peoples and vicious attacks on inter-racial marriage.
This use of polygenism to underwrite racial hierarchy, of course, was not
without precedent. Indeed a substantial body of writings on which these latterday supremacists could draw was already in existence and their apologists
turned to these for self-justifying sustenance. One particularly malicious
source was a volume that appeared in 1900 by Charles Carroll ferociously
attacking the black race as ‘not an offspring of the Adamic family’ and thus
‘not of the human family’.19 In this offering, Carroll had been able to call
Bertrand L. Comparet, By Divine Appointment (San Diego, Ca., n.d.), , 2, 8. Numerous
sermons by Comparet are available online with titles like ‘Adam Was not the First
Man’; ‘Christianity Discriminates’, ‘God’s Immigration Laws’, ‘The Cain-Satanic
Seedline’; see: http://www.churchoftrueisrael.com/comparet/
18
Thomas Coley Allen, Species of Men: A Polygenetic Hypothesis (Franklinton, N.C., 1999);
Charles A. Weisman, Not of One Blood: A Biblical, Historical and Scientific Evaluation
of the Racial Equality Doctrine (Apple Valley, MN, 2001); Thomas Coley Allen, False
Biblical Teachings on the Origins of the Races and Interracial Marriages (Franklington, NC,
2001).
19
Chas. Carroll, ‘The Negro a Beast’ or ‘In the Image of God’ (St. Louis, 1900), 22, 48.
17
58
David N. Livingstone
on the support of a library of nineteenth century anthropological writers
like Quatrefages, Broca, Topinard, Haeckel, Blumenbach and Winchell all of
whom had championed the plural origins of humanity. With these resources
in hand Carroll turned his guns on Darwin’s theory of evolution since its
account of common descent rubbed polygenism the wrong way. It was, he
complained, only through this atheistic theory of descent that ‘the Negro
obtained his present unnatural position in the family of man’.20
Given the political complexion of these earlier polygenetic accounts of
human origins, it is not surprising that palaeo-anthropologists supportive of
what is called the multi-regional theory and thus critical of Mitochondrial
Eve – and the fanfare that heralded her arrival – have felt the need to defend
themselves from the charge of racism. Perhaps the most conspicuous of
these is to be found in Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari’s Race and Human
Evolution: A Fatal Attraction which appeared in 1997. The Mitochondrial Eve
story, they insisted, benefited from the way its advocates staged fossil hunters
as old-fashioned dodderers, from their trumpeting of the power of the latest
scientific technologies, and – most of all – from its implications for human
unity. As they put it:
Eve was new. Eve was modern. Eve was glamorous and sexy … Eve
gave answers and represented 20th-century technology providing
answers – telling us about our origins. Eve implied the brotherhood of
all humankind and was politically correct. Eve was perfect in every way,
actually too good to be true.21
What particularly irked was the way their own multi-regional theory suffered
guilt by association with the racial politics of earlier polygenetic narratives.
Bristling with indignation at Gould’s implication that multiregionalism implied
that all human races were not ‘brothers under the skin’ and that ‘Eve theorists
claimed the high moral ground for themselves’, Milford and Caspari worked
hard to distance their account from its polygenetic predecessors.22 Their
quasi-biographical narrative traced polygenism in various stripes from Isaac
La Peyrère via Paul Broca, Ernst Haeckel and Gustav Schwalbe to Earnest
Hooton, Arthur Keith and Carleton Coon. Their overriding passion was to
Carroll, ‘The Negro a Beast’, 39.
Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction
(New York, 1997), 43.
22
Wolpoff and Caspari, Race and Human Evolution, 54, 46.
20
21
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
59
defend multiregionalism from the charge of polygenism, to record their horror
at those who welcomed multiregional evolution for naked racist purposes,
and to protest that ‘knee-jerk reactions against’ polygenism had prevented
multiregionalism from securing a fair hearing. Nevertheless, they insist that
proposals to exorcise racial vocabulary from palaeoanthropology ‘because it
is complicated and uncomfortable and increasingly not politically correct’ are
misguided.23 In one way or another bloodlines continue to matter.
Many ironies attend these most recent mappings of Adam’s genetic
lineage – whether of the chromosomal or scriptural variety. Even while secular
geneticists exult in the tracing of humanity back to a DNA Adam and Eve,
the most right-wing fundamentalists are populating the human past with an
entire suite of non-Adamic races whose seed continues to snake its malign
way through history. Tracking Adam’s bloodline is critical to both – but for
entirely different political reasons. Indeed the project of elucidating human
ancestry has routinely been surrounded by political controversy.
In October 2007, the celebrated geneticist and Nobel Prize winner, Jim
Watson, who more than half a century ago unravelled the structure of DNA
with his co-worker Francis Crick, found himself at the centre of public
controversy. Newspapers screamed their disapproval with headlines like:
‘Watson makes humiliating return to the US’ and ‘Disgrace: How a Giant
of Science was Brought Low’.24 What precipitated the row was an interview
Watson had given to Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe reported the previous weekend
in The Sunday Times. Here Watson confessed that he was ‘inherently gloomy
about the prospect of Africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the
fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says
not really’.25 This observation was the spark that set the tinderbox ablaze.
Numerous public engagements on both sides of the Atlantic – including
lectures at the Science Museum in London and Rockefeller University in New
York City – were cancelled and he was forced to stand down from his position
as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.26 But
Watson’s considered outlook was clear. As he put it in the book that appeared
a few weeks earlier: ‘There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual
capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove
Wolpoff and Caspari, Race and Human Evolution, 356.
The Independent 20 October 2007; The Observer 21 October 2007.
25
‘The Elementary DNA of Dr Watson’, The Sunday Times 14 October 2007.
26
Cornelia Dean, ‘James Watson Quits Post After Remarks on Races’, New York Times,
26 October 2007.
23
24
60
David N. Livingstone
to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as
some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so’.27
Adam’s Ancestors
In one sense Adam’s Ancestors is a history of the present. It is my attempt to
provide something of a genealogy of genealogy. The lingering allure of the
idea of Adam and Eve, the fascination with bloodline ancestry, the passion
to trace out different human lineages, and the resort to science or scripture
to justify racial politics, continue to reverberate down through the twentieth
century to our own day. Here I want to pick out a few dominant landmarks
on the horizon and to identify some of the spheres into which the idea of
Adamic genetics have been drawn.28
Monumental Heresy
While the suspicion that Adam might not be the progenitor of all humanity
goes back at least to the early Middle Ages – and in all likelihood well before
that – I think it would be fair to say that it found its first sustained voice
in the monumental heresy of a little known French Calvinist, Isaac de la
Peyrère. On 18 June 1646, La Peyrère, put the finishing touches to a letter
to François La Mothe le Vayer, a sceptical French anti-rationalist. It was a
treatise on Greenland. Here La Peyrère rejected the two standard accounts of
the peopling of the New World – Acosta’s suggestion that the continent was
settled via the Behring Strait, and Grotius’s insistence that they were of Viking
descent. As for Greenland, La Peyrère proposed that its native peoples were
aboriginal to the region itself. The implications were momentous. As Richard
Popkin has put it, what was at stake was ‘the question of whether the Bible
is adequate as an account of how the world developed … If Eskimos were
found in Greenland by the Viking explorers, where did they come from?’29
In so arguing La Peyrère raised profound doubts about the adequacy of the
traditional story of human descent from a single source. In place of that
monogenetic narrative he favoured a polygenetic version.
James D. Watson, Avoid Boring People and Other Lessons from a Life in Science (Oxford,
2007), 326.
28
This section draws on David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion and the
Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore, 2008).
29
Richard Popkin, Isaac la Peyrère (1596 – 1676). His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden, 1987),
11.
27
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
61
If the sceptical thrust of Peyrère’s Greenland thesis remained thoroughly
implicit, there was no mistaking its signature in the grand profanity he published
in 1655, Prae-Adamitae. In this work, the idea that human beings existed before
the biblical Adam found it first sustained champion. The idea was simple. Only
the Jews were descended from Adam. All other world peoples were derived
from non-Adamic progenitors. On the surface, the Peyrèrian formula was an
exercise in biblical hermeneutics. Internal matters of biblical exegesis were thus
to the forefront as Peyrère sought to explicate a section of St. Paul’s epistle
to the Romans. Yet if exegetical issues were the ostensible mainsprings of
La Peyrère’s intervention, external geographical and anthropological data were
even more decisive. Using material akin to that for his Greenland dissertation,
he culled pagan chronicles, genealogies, and Renaissance travel books in search
of supporting testimony. The implications were of epic proportions. The preadamite theory queried scriptural authority by insinuating that the Bible was a
human creation that had emerged over a long period of time. It questioned the
universality of the doctrine of the Fall. It restricted the demographic scope
of Noah’s Flood. It queried the taken-for-granted relationship between nature
and scripture. And its influence spiralled out into other domains too – not least
in its implications for the sacred history of human language. It profoundly
challenged the European search for a perfect, pre-fallen, rational language.
La Peyrère’s plural account of human origins provided the biblical text
with elegant relief from the burden of pagan history. At the same time it
delivered a persuasive account of the genesis of New World peoples. Such
attractions however were not widely felt. The preadamite theory received
widespread condemnation and its author branded a sceptic for, as Leo Strauss
commented, La Peyrère was ‘among the first of those who openly declared
their departure from unquestioning acceptance of the Bible’.30 A furore
resulted as many scholars have noted, and La Peyrère himself was arrested in
February 1656 and escorted to Rome where he recanted to Pope Alexander
VII.
Defenders and Detractors
Despite the aroma of heresy that long clung to Preadamism, the theory did
attract an increasing number of sympathetic critics and outright advocates
in succeeding generations, not least among those exploiting its potential for
explaining racial difference. It is important though, to stress that La Peyrère’s
Leo Strauss, ‘Isaac de la Peyrère’, in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York, 1982;
1931), 64.
30
62
David N. Livingstone
own version was bereft of racial supremacism. While Adam was only the father
of the Jewish peoples, the Gentiles being of pre-adamic stock, he insisted that
all nations participated in the benefits of God’s election of Israel. In its later
incarnation, very different racial politics would be extracted from polygenism.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a prolonged and
acrimonious feud was engaged between those who believed that the human
race had descended from a single point of origin and those who advocated
a multiple-origins interpretation. One of the most conspicuous challenges
to the traditional understanding of the Genesis narrative came from the
Scottish jurist Lord Kames who, in 1774, published his Sketches of the History
of Man. Unconvinced by Montesquieu’s environmentalism and by Buffon’s
resort to climate to account for human diversity, Kames was helplessly
attracted to polygenism. To him climate did not produce human variety.
Rather, human varieties were created for particular climates. Kames did much
to bring polygenism prominence and others – less unnerved by its seeming
profanity – promulgated the thesis with even more vigour.
Griffith Hughes (1707 – ca.58), an Anglican clergyman-naturalist in
Barbados and a fellow of the Royal Society, was equally certain that climate’s
imperial rule was not without limits. In Book I of his Natural History of
Barbados he declared that ‘the Whites, the Indians, and the Blacks, differ not
accidentally, but originally and really’.31 The Royal Navy Surgeon, John Atkins
(1685? – 1757) who became something of an expert in tropical diseases,
confessed himself drawn to the conclusion that ‘White and Black must
have descended of different Protoplasts; and that there is no other Way of
accounting for it’.32 He reiterated this judgment a couple of years later in his
account of A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies where he announced
that ‘tho’ it be a little Heterodox, I am persuaded the black and white Race
have, ab origine, sprung from different-coloured first Parents’.33 Plainly the idea
of multiple-Adams was now receiving a more widespread airing. It surfaced
too in the work of the English surgeon Charles White (1728 – 1813) who came
to the conclusion that ‘the various species of men were originally created
Griffith Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados. In Ten Books (London, 1750), Bk I, 14.
John Atkins, The Navy-Surgeon: Or, a Practical System of Surgery. Illustrated with Observations
on such Remarkable Cases as have Occurred to the Author’s Practice in the Service of the Royal
Navy (London, 1734), 23, 24. Atkins’ commitment to co-Adamism is noted in Philip
D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780 – 1850 (London, 1965), 41.
33
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies; In His Majesty’s Ships, the
Swallow and Weymouth (London, 1735), 39.
31
32
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
63
and separated, by marks sufficiently discriminative’.34 White had devised his
multiple creation hypothesis after poring over the cabinet of human skulls
in the possession of John Hunter and announced the opinion in his Account
of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) as a means of explaining the apparent
graduated orders of human and animal species. White reported that he could
find no way of drawing a stable boundary between humans and apes. As he
put it, if ‘we admit that such great varieties can be produced in the same
species as we find to exist in man, it would be easy to maintain the probability
that several species of simiae are but varieties of the species Man … And if
the argument be still further extended, almost all the animal kingdom might be
deduced from one pair, and be considered as one family; than which a more
degrading notion certainly cannot be entertained’.35 Contrary to common
assumption, monogenesis did not preserve human dignity; it subverted it. To
cap things he provided a classification table of race mixtures elaborating on
the differences between a mulatto, a quadroon, a samboe, a mestize, and so
on, in terms of the proportions of white and black in the race mixture down
to detail of 15/16 black and 1/16 white.36
The lawyer and antiquary Edward King (1734/5 – 1807), who was elected
to the Royal Society in 1767, pressed the internal biblical evidence for nonAdamic humans in his ‘Dissertation concerning the Creation of Man’ which
appeared in 1800. Questions about Cain’s wife, the inhabitants of his city,
the identity of the giants recorded in the Pentateuch, and the like, were chief
among the niggles that had long troubled attentive Bible readers, and King
presented the pre-adamites as the solution par excellence. The central plank of
his argument was that ‘Man … was at first created of one GENUS indeed, – and
all of one blood, ­and in the image of GOD; – but of different species; – with different
capacities, – and powers, – and dispositions, – for very wise purposes’.37 It was,
he confessed, ‘almost impossible to rest satisfied with believing … that the
White European, – or Asiatic, – and the Black long-haired South American, – the
Black curled-haired African Negro, – the Cossack Tartar, – the Eskimaux, – and the
Malayan, – were all descended from one common ancestor’.38 The political
Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and
Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter (London, 1799), 125.
35
White, Regular Gradation in Man, 133.
36
Ibid., 117.
37
Edward King, ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Creation of Man’, in Morsels of Criticism:
Tending to Illustrate Some Passages in the Holy Scriptures, Upon Philosophical Principles and an
Enlarged View of Things 2nd edition, vol. 3 (London, 1800), 69 – 169 at 74.
38
Ibid., 76.
34
64
David N. Livingstone
complexion of King’s project is easily discerned. His advocacy of different
species or classes or what the ‘Brahmins, in India, would call … Different Casts’
of human, albeit within a single genus, for example, soon led him into talk
about hybrid marriages, adulterated heritage, and the evils of racial mixing.39
While Kames’s proposals were thus attracting some staunch defenders, they
remained deeply troubling to many, and not least to Samuel Stanhope Smith,
a transatlantic advocate of the self-same Scottish Common Sense philosophy
in which Kames himself was intellectually domiciled. To Smith, Adam’s
blood ran in every human vein. Human variability was entirely explicable in
terms of human adaptation to climate and he vigorously protested both the
doctrinal propriety and scientific plausibility of this account. His motivation
for so doing, however, was intensely political. Plural origins of the human
race, Smith believed, necessarily disrupted the idea of universal human nature
and thereby subverted the very possibility of a public moral order. His own
environmentalist schema, by contrast, preserved a common and cosmopolitan,
if flexible, human constitution. To Smith, Kames’s polygenetic speculations
were not only scientifically erroneous; they were morally repugnant and
politically subversive. Here is how he put it in his famous Essay on the Causes of
the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species:
I must repeat here an observation which I made in the beginning of
this essay … that the denial of the unity of the human species tends to
impair, if not entirely destroy, the foundations of duty and morals, and,
in a word, of the whole science of human nature. No general principles
of conduct, or religion, or even of civil policy could be derived from
natures originally and essentially different from one another, and,
afterwards, in the perpetual changes of the world, infinitely mixed and
compounded … But when the whole human race is known to compose
only one species, this confusion and uncertainty is removed, and the
science of human nature, in all its relations, becomes susceptible
of system. The principles of morals rest on sure and immutable
foundations.40
The Kames-Smith exchange, of course, did not secure closure on this
controverted issue. In nineteenth century America, figures like Samuel G.
Ibid., 79.
Samuel Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the
Human Species (Cambridge, Mass, 1965; 1810), 149.
39
40
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65
Morton, Josiah Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz deployed
‘scientific’ polygenism in the cause of racial apologetic. The ostensible
motivation of these individuals was anthropological and archaeological, but
their collective project was an ideologically driven one. Thus while polygenism
came to pervade pre-Darwinian American anthropology, the enterprise was
profoundly implicated in the manipulation of statistical information about
head size, brain weight, height, weight and so on – anthropometric data – so as
to ensure lower scores on what were perceived to be key variables for certain
racial groupings.
Preadamites as Peacemakers
Where efforts were made to maintain cordial relations between ethnology
and theology, versions of the preadamite theory began to assert themselves
throughout the nineteenth century. Take, for example, the 1856 volume
entitled The Genesis of the Earth and Man, which was edited, introduced, and
endorsed by the distinguished British archaeologist and orientalist Reginald
Stuart Poole. The anonymous author is widely thought to be the Arabic
scholar, lexicographer, and traveller, Edward William Lane (1801 – 1876). He
was a skilled artist too and author of the Arabic – English Lexicon which is still
an indispensable reference tool for the classical Arabic language. In The Genesis
of the Earth and Man, Lane’s intention was to integrate biblical religion with the
findings of the pioneer American anthropologists and in doing so he turned
to the preadamite theory. To him the scheme had considerable advantages, not
least for philological concerns, and he launched an attack on the monogenetic
account of linguistic development put forward by such authorities as Bunsen
and Müller. His own formulation proposed a polygenetic taxonomy of
language systems which necessarily presupposed that ‘there have existed PreAdamites of our species’.41 Crucially the schema also required a recent Adam as
a linguistic forebear, and it thus assumed an extended preadamic chronology.
Such a strategy was far from unique. But perhaps the most sustained midVictorian effort to use preadamism to maintain – as the subtitle of his treatise
put it – the Harmony of Scripture and Ethnology, was Dominick McCausland’s
Adam and the Adamite which appeared in 1864. His passion was to uphold
the detailed accuracy of scripture in the face both of scientific challenges and
of proposals like Essays and Reviews. If the standard monogenetic account
Reginald Stuart Poole (ed.), The Genesis of the Earth and of Man: Or the History of Creation,
and the Antiquity and Races of Mankind, Considered on Biblical and Other Grounds (London,
1860, 2nd edn), 201.
41
66
David N. Livingstone
continued to receive support, he argued, the challenges of the geologists,
historians, archaeologists, philologists and ethnologists would reduce the book
of Genesis ‘to the fanciful speculations of some visionary mythologist’.42
Happily such a judgement would be too precipitate, for the biblical Adam was
only the last of a series of human types that God had created. Superior to
his forebears, Adam’s appearance ex nihilo in the image of God was recorded
for all posterity, although in a short time the pure Adamic line would be
sullied through intermarriage with preadamite stock. In McCausland’s case
the preadamite theory was deployed to safeguard the integrity of scripture from the
assaults of higher critics – a quite remarkable reversal of its earlier engagement
as a source of scepticism.
That the polygenist thesis was thus finding favour with Christian apologists
and scientific racists alike certainly does not mean that monogenist adherents
to the traditional Adamic narrative had disappeared. Throughout the middle
decades of the century the conventional monogenist history continued to
be defended by successors of Stanhope Smith. In America’s southern states,
for example, some ministers stood out against what they saw as the malign
implications of polygenism. Rev John Bachman thus defended the unity of
the human race on scientific and scriptural grounds by arguing that polygenism
was born in infidelity and nurtured in scepticism.43 Yet this certainly did not
imply that they were committed to egalitarianism. The idea of black inferiority
was just too ingrained for that. Bachman, for example, staunchly defended
Southern slavery and argued, on the basis of the biblical curse on Ham,
that the black race was designed, and destined, for servitude. For Bachman,
polygenism threatened not only the authenticity of scripture, but also the
ideological fabric of what he considered Christian civilisation.
Thomas Verner Moore, a Presbyterian minister from Richmond,
Virginia, likewise excoriated both Agassiz and his polygenist predecessors.
Anthropological theorists who were for ever going on about the parallels
between apes and races, he noted wryly, had been inclined, with all due
‘magnanimity and abnegation’, to ‘generously disclaim the honour of this
simial relationship, and benevolently bestow it upon poor Quashee’! To
Moore the difference between the human races was ‘not nearly so great as
Dominick McCausland, Adam and the Adamite; or, the Harmony of Scripture and Ethnology
5th ed (London: Richard Bentley, 1882, 5th ed, 1864), 160.
43
John Bachman, The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of
Science (Charleston, 1850). See the discussion in Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 123 – 136;
and more especially Lester Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion in the American South:
John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815 – 1895 (Chapel Hill, 2000).
42
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
67
that between the little, shaggy Shetland pony, and the gigantic dray-horse of
London’, and Agassiz’s attempt to enlist the Bible in his cause of different
human species was odious. ‘We would be glad to know’, Moore sniped, ‘how
he has discovered that Adam and Noah belonged to the white race at all’. In
all, there was to Moore something utterly ‘cold blooded’ in Agassiz’s ‘haughty
assignment of more than half the human race to a doom of hopeless,
irreversible degradation’.44
Among Catholics a sustained opposition to polygenism was forthcoming.45
Drawing on Cardinal Wiseman’s insistence that polygenism threatened the
foundation of Catholicism, American Catholics saw it as the greatest challenge
of nineteenth century science – more significant even than uniformitarian
geology or Darwinian biology. To them the consanguinity of the human race
had to be preserved at all costs and this theological control belief prompted
some, like Clarence Walworth, to actively pursue alternative theories of
heritable variation and organic saltation. For this reason Catholic encyclopedias
persisted in printing refutations of La Peyrère’s 1655 treatise right up into the
twentieth century.
Darwinian Mutations
While on the surface it might seem that the advent of Darwinism must have
sounded the death knell to polygenetic speculations, in fact polygenism
lingered long in the thinking of post-Darwinian anthropologists. What is also
readily detectable is that, among some scholars with Christian commitments,
preadamite theories began to be rejuvenated to meet the newest challenge
of evolutionary theory. Typically such champions severed preadamism from
polygenism by arguing that Adam had human, or proto-human, predecessors
from whom he was descended.
Perhaps chief among those whose thinking prepared the way for such
moves was Alexander Winchell, a leading American geologist and Methodist
whose Adamites and Preadamites of 1878 earned him considerable notoriety at
the time, including dismissal from Vanderbilt University. Winchell’s version
of the theory departed from much historical precedent in that he argued for
a monogenetic rendition of the doctrine that indirectly enabled him to retain
Thomas Verner Moore, ‘Unity of the Human Races’, British and Foreign Evangelical
Review 1 (1852), 207 – 32, at 207, 214, 231.
45
William J. Astore, ‘Gentle Skeptics? American Catholic Encounters with Polygenism,
Geology, and Evolutionary Theories from 1845 to 1875’, Catholic Historical Review 82
(1996), 40 – 76.
44
68
David N. Livingstone
a Lamarckian account of evolution. Basically Winchell proposed that humans
had first emerged in Africa, were likely black and were graced with what he
called ‘the divine spark of intelligence’. He goes on: ‘The time arrived, at
length, when, under the law of progressive development, a grade had been
reached nearly on a level with that of modern civilized man, in respect to
native capacities. Now appeared the founder of the Adamic family. His home
was in central Asia’.46
By this move, Winchell opened up a pre-biblical chronology that could
be exploited for scientific purposes. His rupturing of the ties between
preadamism and polygenism helped prepare the way for an apologetic use of
monogenetic preadamism as a strategy for harmonising biblical anthropology
and human evolution. For all that, Winchell’s monogenism did not prevent
him from indulging in some pretty crude racial stereotyping. Racial lineages
segregated in the earlier stages of human history had stabilised and now
bred true. Accordingly his description of black inferiority, and the intensity
of his disgust at miscegenation were as exuberant as any racial polygenist
might exhibit. Adamic and non-adamic bloodlines still mattered, and he could
happily rail about the way in which certain groups had been ‘adulterated with
Negro blood’ or elevated (at too great a cost) with the ‘infusion of Caucasian
blood’.47All this serves to remind us that, however convinced some of Darwin’s
followers were that his theory of common descent militated against racial
hierarchy, and however humanitarian Darwin himself was on the question of
slavery, Darwinism was entirely compatible with versions of scientific racism.
Ever since his encounter with Malthus in the late 1830s, Darwin had been
speculating on racial struggle, and toying with the idea that inferior intellect
doomed certain races to extermination in their encounter with European
colonialism; racial extinction was an unavoidable consequence of natural
selection.48 Later Huxley, repeating Morton’s statistical findings, make it clear
that it was entirely possible to ‘[a]dmit that Negroes and Australians, Negritos
and Mongols are distinct species, or distinct genera and you may yet, with
perfect consistency, be the strictest of Monogenists’. For himself, he was
Alexander Winchell, Adamites and Preadamites: or, A Popular Discussion Concerning the
Remote Representatives of the Human Species and their Relation to the Biblical Adam (Syracuse,
1878), 26 – 27.
47
Alexander Winchell, Preadamites; or a Demonstration of the Existence of Men Before Adam;
Together with a Study of their Condition, Antiquity, Racial Affinities, and Progressive Dispersion
over the Earth (Chicago, 1880), 252.
48
See the discussion in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race,
Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (London, 2009), 147 – 50.
46
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69
convinced that it was Darwin who succeeded in ‘reconciling and combining
all that is good in the Monogenistic and Polygenistic schools’.49
In the long run, pre-adamism proved to be a tactic to which a variety
harmonizers resorted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
By now the strategy was more or less exclusively restricted to Protestant and
Catholic – and perhaps Jewish – conservatives, namely those for whom the
idea of a literal Adam retained serious doctrinal significance. Their project to
retain continuity with their own theological traditions and at the same time
take palaeo-anthropology with real seriousness, encouraged the thought that
pre-adamic hominids might stand as evolutionary precursors of Adam – the
first true human who shared the imago dei. A. Rendle Short (1880 – 1953), a
distinguished surgeon, a vigorous apologist for evangelical Christianity and
the Royal College of Surgeons Hunterian Professor, is illustrative. In the latter
capacity, he took up the subject of the ‘Problem of Man’s Origin’ in a volume
on science and the Bible that appeared during the 1930s. Here he suggested
there ‘might conceivably have been pre-Adamite creatures with the body and
mind of a man, but not the spirit and capacity for God and eternity’.50 By 1942
such speculations had become convictions: now he was confident that the
Neanderthals could well be preadamite and that it was likely that the biblical
Adam was formed by the infusion of spiritual qualities into some preadamic
creature.51
Preadamism, Fundamentalism, and Anti-Evolutionism
It would be mistaken, however, to think that support for Preadamism was
restricted to those conservative Christians who wanted to make peace with
evolutionary theory. The fact that the theory flourished among some early
twentieth century anti-evolutionists is therefore all the more instructive.
One of the most remarkable, albeit terse, expressions of support among
theological conservatives for the preadamite theory in its traditionally nonevolutionary guise is to be found in the writings of Reuben A. Torrey
(1856 – 1928). Torrey was, in many respects, a fundamentalist par excellence.
He had served his time as one of D.L. Moody’s foremost chiefs-of-staff, and
undertook editorial management of The Fundamentals. Torrey applauded James
Dana’s concordist reading of Genesis, an understandable enthusiasm given
Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘On the Methods and Results of Ethnology’ (orig. 1865), in
Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (London, 1894), 248.
50
A. Rendle Short, The Bible and Modern Research (London and Edinburgh, n.d.), p. 57.
51
A. Rendle Short, Modern Discovery and the Bible (London, 1961; 1942).
49
70
David N. Livingstone
the fact that he had studied under Dana at Yale. And while he could not find
it possible to negotiate a similar accommodation of scripture to Darwinian
biology, he welcomed the preadamite as a peacemaker between biblical religion
and archaeological science:
It should be said further that it may be that these ancient civilizations
which are being discovered in the vicinity of Nineveh and elsewhere
may be the remains of the pre-Adamic race already mentioned … No
one need have the least fear of any discoveries that the archeologists
may make; for if it should be found that there were early civilizations
thousands of years before Christ, it would not come into conflict
whatever with what the Bible really teaches about the antiquity of man,
the Adamic race.52
A much more sustained defence of preadamism in the early twentieth century
is to be found in the writings of the British anti-evolutionist, Sir Ambrose
Fleming FRS, president of the Victoria Institute, first president of the
Evolution Protest Movement, and forty-one years’ Professor of Electrical
Technology at University College London. With his twin commitment to
science and Christianity, it was not surprising that Fleming would sooner
or later turn to the challenges to Christian theism arising from pre-historic
archaeology and anthropology. He took up the subject for his presidential
address to the Victoria Institute on Monday 14 January 1935. The Daily
Telegraph gave prominent coverage to the lecture in its columns the following
day, and the anti-evolutionary sentiments that Sir Ambrose had expressed
provoked comments from various quarters. In the newspaper’s Saturday
edition he replied to his critics, and here spelled out his own strategy for
reconciliation, a strategy subsequently elaborated in The Origin of Mankind.
It was, fundamentally, the pre-adamite theory of McCausland. Of course
since McCausland’s time new archaeological and anthropological findings had
become available. In particular various skeletal fragments widely regarded as
evidence for a primitive hominid had been unearthed. In general, Fleming
was suspicious of these and either argued, in typically creationist fashion, that
illustrators had let their imaginations run wild by constructing both facial and
skeletal profiles from the scantiest of fragments, or generally questioned the
extravagant claims being made on the basis of negligible data.
R. A. Torrey, Difficulties and Alleged Errors and Contradictions in the Bible (London, n.d.,
circa 1907), 36.
52
Tracking Adam’s Bloodline
71
But his approach to the evidence for ‘Neanderthal man’ was very different
however. He fully acknowledged that the skull-cap and skeletal remains
excavated at Düsseldorf in 1856, in 1887 near Spy in Belgium, and in the
years up to 1914 in Krapina, Croatia, and southern France were compelling
evidence. But he went on to suggest that this Neanderthal race was replaced
in Europe by the superior Cro-magnons, complete skeletons of whom had
been found in the Pyrenees and the Dordogne. It was at this juncture, that
the preadamite theory came to his rescue. Quite simply, Fleming suspected
that the Neanderthals were a preadamic stock, whereas the specially created
Cro-magnons were the Adamic antediluvians of the biblical narrative. By this
means Fleming could at once take seriously the patterns of early migration,
crack those hoary exegetical chestnuts about Cain’s wife and city, and yet
again press the theory into the service of racial ideology. For to Fleming the
preadamites were, in some significant way, psychically deficient and thereby he
convinced himself that the Caucasians possessed some spiritual superiority
over other racial stocks. It was thus bad enough that inter-racial miscegenation
produced physically degenerate offspring; that it produced spiritual mulattoes
was too great to bear. From the beginning, it seemed, ethnic intermixture was
spiritual illegitimacy too.
Fleming’s resort to the preadamite theory was not, needless to say,
universally welcomed. It certainly rubbed the anatomist and anthropologist
Sir Arthur Keith the wrong way. In point of fact it was largely because of
Fleming’s proposals that Keith put pen to paper to produce in March, 1935,
a tract for the times entitled Darwinism and Its Critics. Here Keith had Fleming
clearly in his cross-hairs as he turned his big guns on those anti-Darwinians
who still held to the ‘impossible theory’ of special creation. As for Fleming’s
preadamism, Sir Arthur asked the question: ‘Is not Sir Ambrose taking an
unwarranted liberty with the inspired word by introducing acts of creation
and types of humanity of which there is no mention in the Mosaic record?’
Adam’s Long Shadow
This thumbnail sketch of the fortunes of Adam and his ancestors speaks,
I think, to the extraordinary persistence of the passion to track Adam’s
bloodline, and at the same time the remarkable versatility of the idea that the
Adamic family tree might not embrace all branches of the human species.
Born in sacrilege and nurtured in scepticism, the idea of pre-adamic humanity
72
David N. Livingstone
came to reside in the writings of the most conservative of theological writers
who found in it a means of accommodating their faith to science. Among
other things, this highlights the contingency of theological labelling – from
heresy to orthodoxy. No less remarkable is the realisation that while the
most conspicuous pioneer of pre-adamism, La Peyrère, mobilised it in the
cause of humanitarian universalism, it has been embraced – right down to our
own day – as a tactic to legitimate the grossest forms of white supremacy.
With roots in the political theology of seventeenth century Messianism, it
has become an ideological weapon in the arsenal of an ugly anti-Semitism.
Championed by creationists and evolutionists alike, it has attracted the eye
of both polygenists and monogenists, and serviced their respective political
preferences. But underlying all these variants, there remains a persistent suite
of themes – a profound sense that Adam’s bloodline matters, that human
origins and human identity go hand in hand, and that race, religion and destiny
are inextricably netted together. For these reasons, questions of human origins
were never simply about science and species or theology and texts; they were
about society and sex, cultural identity and racial purity; they were about labour
economics, voting rights, marriage laws and church membership; they were
about the elaboration of moral maps of the globe, the ethics of plantation
economies, the management of domestic polities. All were folded into the
passion to determine just who was, and who was not, of Adam’s lineage.
At the tail end of 2007, just a few months before the publication of
Adam’s Ancestors, Peter Harrison’s The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science
made its appearance. The legacy of Adam’s corruption took centre stage in
Harrison’s account of the development of science – in the English world at any
rate – during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Challenging head-on the
view that the emergence of modern science represented the triumph of secular
reason over religious belief, Harrison prosecuted, with impressive empirical
detail, the claim that the early modern study of the natural world was directly
and deeply informed by theological reflection on the nature of Adam’s fall
from grace and its implications for the warped workings of the human mind
and the fallibility of the senses. The epistemic gloom cast by Adam’s fall, with
the scepticism that it induced about reliable knowledge, was a fortunate fall so
far as the emergence of modern science was concerned. According to Harrison
doubts about human cognitive faculties were the trigger that kick-started
methodological discussions that resulted in the experimental philosophy.53 It
Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007)
53
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73
was precisely the need to police human bias, the inclination towards error and
the indiscipline of the mind that issued in the efforts of natural philosophers
to establish strict regimes of epistemic regulation.
In an essay review of Harrison’s volume and of Adam’s Ancestors, Matt Day
raises an intriguing question. ‘The story of Adam, Eve and the Fall’, he writes,
‘has been an idée fixe of the Western imagination for millennia’. But how, if at
all, ‘has the story compensated us for this unrelenting devotion?’ His answer
is, I think, highly suggestive.
On the one hand … modern scientific reflection first took shape against
a horizon dominated by Adam’s haunting silhouette. The techniques
and instruments of Baconian investigation were all ad hoc remedies for
what had been lost in the Fall. On the other hand … it is impossible
to recount the history of the human sciences – much less English and
European colonialism – without noticing the ways in which a given
population’s imagined descent or non-descent from Adam, represented
a kind of switch-point for fixing how they would be analyzed and
governed. Since the seventeenth century part of what it has meant to
be a particular kind of Western subject has been determined in part by
an Adamic pedigree. Simply but dramatically put, Adam has played a
crucial part in giving us science and our selves.54
If, as Paul Riceour once observed, Adam’s fall from grace is ‘the anthropological
myth par excellence’,55 the mission to track Adam’s bloodline must surely rank as
the archetypal quest of Western culture.
Queen’s University, Belfast
Matthew Day, ‘Is This My Recompense To Thee? Adam’s Long Shadow in the History
of Science’, forthcoming.
55
Paul Riceour, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, 1967), 281.
54
Race and Religion in the Hebrew Bible
Robert A. Segal
Genesis 1 – 11: the universal worship of the biblical God
The biblical genealogy from the beginnings of humanity to Abraham, the
founder of the Jewish people, is less than clear-cut. To begin with, there are
two stories of creation, each from a different one of the sources from which
the Bible comes. In the first story (1.1 – 2.4a) humans are created last. An
indefinite number of them are created, and at once. Males and females are
created simultaneously. Wherever on earth they start from – no location is
provided – they are commanded by God to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill
the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over
the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’
(1.28). From the outset, then, humans occupy or are expected to occupy the
whole earth.
In the second story of creation (2.4b – 2.25), which cannot be reconciled
with the first one, humans are the initial creation. Only one human is
created – Adam. He resides in Eden and is expected to remain there forever.
He is given dominion over the garden, just as humanity collectively is given
dominion over the whole earth in the first story. Eve is then created as his
partner. Sex and reproduction are permitted, with all subsequent generations
to remain in Eden – until, that is, Adam and Eve sin and get evicted.
Only once the primordial couple are outside Eden do they actually have
children – Cain and Abel. One would assume that all humanity thereafter
comes from the sons – better, from the son left standing after he has killed
his brother. And Cain does indeed beget Enoch, who begets Irad, who begets
Mehujael, who begets Methushael, who begets the notorious Lamech.
But immediately upon killing Abel, Cain fears for his life. In response to
God’s making him ‘a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth’, he bemoans that ‘I
shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who finds me will
slay me’ (Genesis 4.14). But if Adam and Eve were the first humans and begat
only Cain and Abel, from where does the rest of humanity feared by Cain hail?
An additional confusion is that Eve, following the murder of Abel, bears Seth,
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Robert A. Segal
whose lineage is almost identical with that of his brother Cain! Again, we have
different sources.
The Lamech who descends from Seth’s line is the father of Noah, who
has three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Once the flood subsides and Noah
leaves the ark and offers sacrifices to God, God commands him, just as God
had commanded all humanity in Genesis 1, to ‘be fruitful and multiply, and
fill the earth’ (Genesis 9.1). All humanity comes from Noah’s sons and their
wives, just as in Genesis 2 – 5 all humanity comes from Adam and Eve. The
world has been destroyed and recreated, so that human life, like life generally,
is starting over, albeit not ex nihilo. To all humanity is again given dominion
over the world, just as in Genesis 1.
Do we yet have a division into races? No. While Cain is ‘a tiller of the
ground’, or a semi-nomad, and Abel ‘a keeper of sheep’, or a farmer (Genesis
4.2), this division is one of vocation, not of race. Cain does settle ‘in the land
of Nod, east of Eden’ (Genesis 4.16). But geography and race, while often
operating in sync, do not automatically do so. Furthermore, Cain’s offspring
themselves become farmers (see Genesis 4.20). And since Abel dies before
marrying, no race can come from him. Hence there is not even a clear-cut
vocational divide on which to rest a racial one.
From the three sons of Noah, we are told, ‘the whole earth was peopled’
(Genesis 9.18). But before the sons disperse, there occurs what American
police would call an ‘incident’: son Ham ‘sees’ his drunken father naked and
fails to cover him up. Ham is then actually cursed by Noah. Yet it is not Ham
but his son Canaan who is cursed. Again, we have separate traditions. The
curse is the subjugation of future Canaanites to the descendants of both
Shem, from whom come Israelites, and Japheth. Both Shem and Japheth, by
contrast, to Ham refuse to look at their father naked. For the first time we get
a division into at least nations, though still not yet races.
With the succeeding lineage of each of Noah’s sons, we get the association
of nations with languages.1 For example, we are told that ‘These are the
descendants of Japheth in their lands, with their own language, by their families,
in their nations’ (Genesis 10.5). The same phrasing is used of the descendants
of the other two sons. At the same time the groupings are primarily political.
In, especially, the nineteenth century it was above all language, even more than
physiognomy, that was the criterion of race. Culture, of which language was the most
distinctive aspect, was assumed to be biological and was the mental manifestation
of race. Jews were deemed non-Aryans because Hebrew is a Semitic rather than an
Indo-European language. In the twentieth century culture came to be severed from
biology.
1
Race and Religion in the Hebrew Bible
77
The kingdoms established by each group are what are key.
Despite the association of each group with a distinctive language or set
of languages, the succeeding story of the Tower of Babel begins as follows:
‘Now the whole earth had one language and the same words’ (Genesis 11.1).
Once more, we have different sources. Seemingly, all humanity gathers and
settles ‘upon a plain in the land of Shinar’ (Genesis 11.2) and decides to build
both a city and ‘a tower with its top in the heavens’ (Genesis 11.4). Somehow
humans already fear dispersion by God, for they seek to build the city and
the tower lest they be ‘scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ by
God (Genesis 11.5). Yet the building of the city and the tower is what causes
God to halt construction and to disperse the builders: ‘The Lord came down
to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said,
“Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only
the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will
now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their
language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech” ’ (Genesis
11.5 – 7). So God and his fellow divinities scatter humanity ‘over the face
of all the earth’ (Genesis 11.8). Geographical separation is assumed to yield
linguistic separation.
The Bible then turns to the lineage of Shem, from whom eventually comes
Terah, the father of Abram as well as of Nahor and Haran. Haran is the
father of Lot, who is thus Abram’s nephew. Terah and his family had been
living in Ur of the Chaldeans, in Mesopotamia. For reasons not given, Terah
decides to migrate from Ur of the Chaldeans to Canaan. With him come
Abram and his wife, Sarai; Nahor and his wife, Milcah; and Lot. (Haran dies
before the migration.) Yet when the party reaches a place also named Haran,
Terah decides to settle there. Again, no reason is given.
Genesis 12 on: worship of the biblical God by one nation and one race
In Haran, God comes down to Abram and directs him to leave his father’s
family and to proceed to a strange, new land ‘that I will show you’. There ‘I will
make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great,
so that you will be a blessing’ (Genesis 12.2). Abram goes – God’s was one of
those offers that could not be refused – and goes with not only Sarai but also
Lot. A famine in Canaan obliges them to relocate to Egypt, but eventually they
return to Canaan, where they prosper. Feuding between Abram and Lot over
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Robert A. Segal
the land leads Lot to move to Sodom, with Abram remaining in Canaan. God
renews his promise to make Abram the father of a great nation in Canaan.
Here at last the factors of religion, nationality, and race converge. To
backtrack: in Genesis 1 – 11 everybody worships the same God – the biblical
God known as God (P source) or Lord God (J source). Even when there
arise divisions into nations, all still worship the same God. And the worldwide
equivalent of, if not ten commandments, at least a few, is assumed. Adam and
Eve know that they have violated the prohibition against eating from the Tree
of Knowledge, and they do not question the justification of their eviction
and other punishments. Cain worries that because he has murdered, he is
vulnerable to being murdered wherever he goes, though the Bible never makes
clear what the provocation to murdering him would be. Still, God protects him
with the universally recognized ‘mark of Cain’.
More significant is the establishment by God after the Flood of the
so-called Noachite laws, which restore the assumed prior universal prohibition
both of murder and of the eating of a slain animal – itself permitted – with the
blood still in it: ‘Only you shall not flesh with its life, that is, its blood. For your
lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and
of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man’ (Genesis 9.4 – 5).
An eye for an eye is declared: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall
his blood be shed’ (Genesis 9.6). To be precise, it is murder and not, say, killing
in war that is being barred, but the same is true of the Ten Commandments,
which are given to Israelites exclusively.
If from Genesis 1 to 11, the universal worship of the biblical God is
assumed, the selection of Abram by God in Genesis 12 assumes the opposite:
the same God selects Abram to be the founder of a nation that alone will
worship God. Till now not even Abram has worshiped the biblical God.2 All
other nations now worship their own gods and will continue to do so, and
properly. Other nations are expected to acknowledge the biblical God, but as
the god of the Israelite nation. They are not expected to worship the Israelite
god, any more than Israelites are expected, not to say allowed, to worship their
gods.
In the first two of the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai,
God declares to the Israelites that ‘you shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a graven image …. You shall not bow down
to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous god’ (Exodus
In post-biblical Jewish lore there is the story of Abraham’s destroying his own father’s
idols, which had been his gods as well.
2
Race and Religion in the Hebrew Bible
79
20.3 – 5). The actual existence of other gods, not merely the belief in their
existence, is thus taken for granted, as is the propriety of the worship of them
by other nations. Only Israelites are barred from worshiping them.
The Ten Commandments begin with the Israelite God’s identification of
himself not as the god of all peoples but as the god of Israelites alone: ‘I am
the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage’ (Exodus 20.2). Where in Genesis 1 – 2 God is the creator
of the world, and where in Genesis 1 – 11 God is the god of all humanity,
from Genesis 12 on through the end of the Hebrew Bible God, while still
the creator, is the god of just one nation and therefore just one religion. The
world is now assumed to be filled not merely with multiple nations – we get
this plurality back in Genesis 1 – 11 – but with multiple religions. Each nation
now has its own god or gods.
In the Hebrew Bible conflicts between nations are not merely political
but also religious exactly because nationality and religion go hand in hand.
Apostasy and treason are coextensive, even identical. When Moses and Aaron
first appear before Pharaoh to tell him to free the Israelites from slavery, they
back up their political demand with miracles, or ‘signs and wonders’, so that
Pharaoh will recognize the divine power behind them. As God instructs them
to do, Moses tells Aaron to throw down his cane, which immediately becomes
a snake. But Pharaoh’s magicians are able to duplicate the feat, even if Aaron’s
snake proceeds to ‘swallow up’ all the Egyptian snakes (Exodus 7.12). Magic
here is not sleight of hand. It is not illusory. It is real. And it can only come
from a god, not a mere human. Therefore the reality of the Egyptian gods
is presupposed. Which nation’s god is the stronger is the issue. If Moses
and Aaron denied the reality of Pharaoh’s gods, there would be no contest.
Subsequent feats of Israelite magic, including the first two of the ten plagues,
are duplicated by Pharaoh’s team.
Even in the contest between Elijah and the priests of Baal (see 1 Kings 18)
the reality of Baal, or of the Baalim, is not questioned. True, the priests of
Baal cannot get their god to cause the rain to fall and the drought to end. For
all their self-mutilation, nothing happens. Elijah, a single priest pitted against
hundreds of ‘prophets’ of Baal, easily manages to get the Israelite God to
cause fire, which consumes the sacrifice, and then to cause ‘a great rain’ (1
Kings 18.45). The Bible is mocking the impotence of Baal, but there would be
nothing to mock if the reality of Baal were in doubt.
Just as each nation now has its own religion, so each now has its own
morality. The laws that begin with the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20
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Robert A. Segal
and that continue through Deuteronomy are for Israelites only. Israelites are
required to obey them as part of the quid pro quo established by the covenant
with God. Some laws do oblige Israelites not to mistreat non-Israelites: ‘You
shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were
strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 23.9). But the laws are still for Israelites
only. Admittedly, God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah bears on
Israel only if the immorality of the cities is considered a future temptation (see
Genesis 18.16 – 19.28).
The covenant with Noah is between God and all future humanity: ‘Behold,
I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with
every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast
of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark’ (Genesis 9.9 – 10). In
exchange for not committing murder and not eating killed animals with the
blood still in them, God will never again send a worldwide flood (see Genesis
9.1 – 17).
By contrast, the covenant with Abram is between God and future Israel
only: ‘I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your
name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,
and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth
shall bless themselves’ (Genesis 12.2 – 3). Abram, for his part, must leave his
family and trek to Canaan and forever obey God. Throughout Abram’s life
God renews the covenant, as in ‘On that day the Lord made a covenant with
Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt
to the great river, the river Euphrates …”’ (Genesis 15.18).
When God commands Abram to circumcise all males, the commandment
applies to even his slaves, but it does not apply to anyone outside Israel.
While Ishamel is circumcised, only descendants of Abram and Sarai, whose
names have in the meantime been changed to Abraham and Sarah, are to
be circumcised. The Egyptians also practiced circumcision, but not all other
peoples of the ancient Near East did.
From Genesis 12 on, nationality means not only religion but also race.
Abraham is chosen to be the biological, not merely the political, founder of a
nation. His descendants will constitute the Israelite nation. Therefore religion
now becomes identical with not only nationality but also race. Sarah, initially
barren, gives her slave girl Hagar to Abraham as a wife, and with her Abraham
fathers Ishmael. But Hagar’s status as a slave precludes Ishmael’s serving as
Abraham’s heir. Finally, God makes good his hoary promise, and Sarah gives
birth to Isaac when she is ninety and Abraham one hundred. Membership in
Race and Religion in the Hebrew Bible
81
the Israelite nation is to be through Isaac. A wife for Isaac is chosen not from
anyone in Canaan but from Abraham’s kin back in Haran. Rebecca, Isaac’s
bride, is the granddaughter of Nahor, Abraham’s uncle, and Milcah.
The name Israel does not arise till later. Just as God changes the names
of Abram and Sarai, so he changes the name of Isaac’s younger son and heir,
Jacob, to Israel (see Genesis 35.10).
From God’s selection of Abram on, religion and nationality and race are
coextensive, if not identical. To be Israelite, or to use the still later term Jewish,
is to be born Jewish. And Jewishness means more than religion. It also means
nationality. It is true that some non-Israelites, of whom the greatest example is
Abimelech, recognize and fear the power of the Israelite God. As Abimelech
says to Abraham, ‘God is with you in all that you do; now therefore swear
to me here by [your] God that you will not deal falsely with me or with my
offspring or with my posterity …’ (Genesis 21.23). But Abimelech does not
worship the Israelite God.
There are some biblical books that venture beyond Israel. Wisdom
literature is not limited to Judaism. Job, who lives in what is probably Edom,
may not even be Jewish. Judaism takes the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 to
refer not to any one figure, least of all to Jesus, but to the nation of Israel,
which bears responsibility for the rest of the world. Even God’s promise to
Abram declares, as quoted, that ‘by you all the families of the earth shall bless
themselves’. Still, the bulk of the Hebrew Bible is directed to Jews alone.
Post-biblical and later Judaism
The linkage of religion with nationality with race does not remain forever. Once,
especially, the one-time southern kingdom of Judah loses its independence
and becomes a province of the Roman Empire, a restored Jewish nation
becomes a mere hope, one not realized till 1948. Yet conversions to Judaism
become not only possible but, in Roman times, exceedingly popular. It
has even been estimated that at one point 10% of the Roman Empire was
Jewish – a percentage that did not come primarily from reproduction. Religion
was clearly independent of nationality, not to say race.
After the fall of Rome and the division of the Empire into individual
countries, Jews could not be citizens of the countries in which they resided,
for they were not Christian. They were the equivalent of permanent resident
aliens. Only in modern times, beginning with France during the Revolution,
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Robert A. Segal
were Jews eligible to become citizens, as they had once been in the Roman
Empire (from 212 CE on). With the French Revolution began the Western
separation of church and state, which means the privatization of religion.
Exactly because religion was now private rather than public, one could
consistently be French or British or American in one’s citizenship and Jewish
in one’s religion. Whether or not nationality was still associated with race, it
was now wholly severed from religion.
The fullest expression within Judaism of this separation of religion from
nationality was the development in the nineteenth century of Reform Judaism.
Like most, though not all other, modern movements in Judaism, Reform
arose not in France but in Germany. Reform Judaism defined Jewishness
as exclusively religious and not at all national, let alone racial.3 The Jewish
‘homeland’ ceased to be a yearned-for Israel and became one’s present home.
The opposite of Reform Judaism was Zionism. While there have always been
religious as well as secular varieties of Zionism, the dominant modern variety
has been secular. Antithetically to Reform Judaism, secular Zionism defines
Jewishness as exclusively national and not at all religious.
Since World War II, Jews have defined themselves variously, but in wake of
the Nazis, never racially. Sometimes the phrase ‘Jewish race’ is used, and even
by Jews. But the term is not meant strictly, for even the most recalcitrant Jews
grant that it is possible both to give up Jewishness and to become Jewish. In
the biblical period the options were limited. One could scarcely either give up
Jewishness or, ordinarily, become Jewish. One either was born Jewish or was
not Jewish. Jewishness was at once one’s religion, one’s nationality, and one’s
race.
University of Aberdeen
Ironically, it was also above all in Germany and in the nineteenth century that Jews
began to be defined racially, as members of the Semitic race.
3
An Abolitionist too late?
James Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost
chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
Glen Doris
The connection between the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and the popular
movement to Abolish the Slave Trade has been treated ambiguously by
scholars of both abolition and the Enlightenment. The seemingly progressive
and humanistic tendencies of the Enlightenment thinkers has led some to
argue that it was their ideas that sparked the abolition debate, however many
of the writers cited were themselves ambivalent about eradicating slavery.
David Brion Davis argued that neither of the enlightenment notions of
empiricism or natural law ‘provided the basis for perceiving a single institution
as an unmitigated evil.’1 Studies of slavery have lauded Scottish thinkers such
as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and others and while it
cannot be denied that these University Professors taught their students that
slavery was inconsistent with enlightened values, when it came to the public
discourse, these men were often reluctant to promote any measures for its
removal.
When it came to deliberate action to remove the slave trade, there was
hardly a literatus that would put the weight of his opinion in favour of such
action. One of the Scottish professors who came closest to making a mark for
the cause of antislavery was James Beattie of Aberdeen. As professor of Moral
Philosophy at Marischal College, Beattie was a colleague of Thomas Reid and
an apologist for what acme to be known as ‘common sense’ philosophy. It
is Beattie whom, toward the end of the eighteenth century, key individuals
looked to as a figure to rally the intellectual elite to influence the popular
campaign to abolish the Slave Trade. Modern scholars of Beattie have argued
that his last major work, the summation of his lectures, Elements of Moral Science,
gave a full account of his thoughts on the illegality and moral evil that slavery
represented. However this detailed critique was only published in 1793, after
the crucial period of antislavery activism and lobbying had tried and failed to
outlaw the British Slave Trade. Though one Beattie scholar, Roger Robinson,
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (London, 1970), 458.
1
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Glen Doris
has argued that his ‘dedication to the abolitionist movement was not in doubt’,2
it cannot be asserted that the arguments Elements contained were in any way
significant to the British debate, considering the author himself had suggested
that his thoughts had come out too late to be of any influence.3
What this paper will suggest is that though Beattie had ample opportunity
to add his literary weight to the antislavery movement early on, he repeatedly
refused to publish anything on slavery despite numerous pleas to do so
over an extended period. This refusal to publish removed from the Scottish
Enlightenment thinkers the initiative to take the primary action against
slavery and removed Beattie from any place of prominence in antislavery
consciousness. This paper will examine an early, unpublished antislavery work
of Beattie and explore the rationale behind the Aberdeen professor’s refusal to
publish what could have been a significant contribution to the early arguments
against the Slave Trade.
In the decades before the establishment of the London Society for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Scottish literati had been among the first to
write against the institution of slavery. Writers such as Francis Hutcheson had,
without specifically addressing the enslavement of Africans, undermined the
age old legitimacy of slavery first proposed by Aristotle by arguing that the
division of humanity into masters and slaves was unreasonable.4 Following
in Hutcheson’s wake Adam Smith began to address the specific problem of
Europe’s use of African slaves as part of his wider philosophical agenda, but
as he was not writing against the morality of slavery within British society his
arguments were based around an assessment of the unprofitability of the slave
system for agriculture. Smith’s protégé John Millar wrote more extensively
against the slave system in his treatise on the origin of ranks in European
society, adding more thoughts with each new edition of his work. However,
Millar’s agenda was not specifically to address the morality of slavery, rather its
erosion in Europe over time and through economic forces. For both Millar and
Smith, slavery was an institution that had passed its usefulness and lingered
on in the Americas due to the ignorance of the slaveholders. If they could be
made to understand that their plantations and farms could better be served
by using hired labour, as had occurred in Europe during the gradual erosion
of the villein system, then modern slavery would become extinct as well. The
James Beattie, The Works of James Beattie: Miscellaneous Items (London, 1996), xviii.
James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, Vol. 2 (London and Edinburgh, 1793), 218.
4
Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, in Three Books., Vol. I (Glasgow and
London, 1755), 301..
2
3
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
85
purpose of their arguments was to persuade the slaveholders that it was in their
best interests to free their slaves, however they drew the line at condemning
the practice as morally evil. To their own dismay, these men acknowledged that
the keeping of slaves held more attraction than just economic gain. Slavery
was attractive because of its allowance of undiluted dominance of one human
being over another. Smith confessed to his students as early as 1762 that he
feared the institution would be perpetual.5
James Beattie, having been lionized for his 1770 attack on the sceptical
Philosophy of David Hume in his Essay on the Nature of Truth in Opposition to
Sophistry and Skepticism, a work which won him nationwide fame, an honorary
doctorate from Oxford University and a Pension of £200 per year from
the King, was, for a time, seen as The popular scholarly voice standing for
moral virtues in Britain. Regarded today for his skill as a poet rather than
as a philosopher, Beattie has come to be defined by his antagonism toward
Hume, rather than any lasting contribution to metaphysical thought. However
in recent scholarship his name has become associated with Abolition due to
his writings on slavery, certainly his detailed critique in Elements of Moral Science,
but also as early as in his Essay on Truth Beattie had expressed some brief but
strong sentiments against the practise and criticized Hume’s racially polygenist
ideas. After its publication and continued success, the demand for Beattie’s
work required four further additions, published up until 1776. Beattie found
friends in literary circles from Edinburgh to London, the latter being where
he became firm friends with the likes of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir
Joshua Reynolds and the actor David Garrick. One of the key friendships
formed was with Elizabeth Montagu, organizer of the Blue Stockings society,
who encouraged Beattie to turn his literary skill to attacking slavery in the
hopes of engaging the public in discussion of its abolition. The material for
just such an attack was close at Beattie’s hand.
Lecture notes from Beattie’s class on moral philosophy, dated around
1764, contained a different kind of argument against slavery from that offered
by Smith or Millar. Beattie took the view that slavery was unlawful and that,
despite the rationale given for its contemporary usage, nothing could justify
its continuation except political and economic expediency; the fact of its
continuance cast aside any illusion of the idea of a moral British society.6 In
R.L.Meek, D.D.Raphael and P.G. Stein (eds), Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence
(Indianapolis, 1982), 187.
6
James Beattie, “MS 555 Lecture Notes on Moral Philosophy” (Manuscript, James
Beattie Papers, Aberdeen University Library, c.1764).
5
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Glen Doris
1778 these early ideas were written into an essay intended for publication in
his collection Dissertations Moral and Critical. However almost immediately after
its completion Beattie decided to suppress it. The essay, confusingly titled ‘On
the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery, especially that of the Negroes’,
was never published as a stand alone piece, its arguments only making their
way into print as part of the later Elements of Moral Science. In a footnote in
that work Beattie attempted to account for his disinclination to have his essay
published earlier:
These pages on slavery [he recalled] contain in brief the substance of a
treatise composed in the year one thousand seven hundred and seventyeight, from materials which I had gradually been collecting for almost
twenty years. I then had thoughts of publishing the whole; but was
prevented, partly by my not having at that time access to all the books
I wished to consult, and partly by the fear of having misrepresented
some things, in consequence of false or partial information. I find
however, since this matter, having attracted the notice of the legislature,
came to be minutely investigated, that my information was in general
but too well founded.7
The circumstances of Beattie writing his essay on the Lawfulness (or more
particularly the unlawfulness) of slavery are a mystery. In a letter to his friend
and later biographer Sir William Forbes written in late 1778, Beattie detailed
the essays he had written since March of that year. Forbes and Beattie’s other
close friend Robert Arbuthnot were proof readers of much of his work and
in the letter the Marischal professor gave an account of three essays written on
memory, imagination and dreaming. Beattie also mentions writing a pamphlet
on ‘Church musick’ which he wanted, if published, to be anonymous. He
mentions writing a total of 370 pages of publishable work, but never mentions
the essay on slavery that he described later as being written that year.8
The first mention of the essay appeared in a letter to Mrs Montagu dated 21
December 1779 where Beattie mentioned the three treatises already described
to Forbes a year earlier but then also made detailed mention of another essay.
I have finished the following treatises. – On Memory and Imagination…
On Dreams… – On Slavery, particularly that of the Negroes… – On
Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 217 – 18.
Letter James Beattie to Sir William Forbes, Aberdeen UL MS 30/1/154.
7
8
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
87
the Principle of Marriage. – On Language and Univeral Grammar. – On
Sublimity in Writing – The last is not yet finished. … If all these things
were to be printed, they would make two pretty good octavos. But some
of them I fear it would be better to suppress than to publish; particularly
the discourse on slavery; of which there is reason to apprehend that,
it would rather create enemies to the author, than promote justice
and benevolence. It is indeed the keenest remonstrance I have ever
attempted: but though written with a good intention toward White
men as well as Negroes, I dare not hope, that it would obtain a candid
hearing, except from those who have no concern in the subject. … 9
The reasons given to Mrs Montagu in 1779 for suppressing this work make
no mention of lack of assurance of his information, nor of a fear of
misrepresentation of the facts. To his close friend Beattie admitted that it
was to avoid the enmity that such a treatise would bring to himself that he
desired to suppress the essay. It is unclear why Beattie would only give detailed
mention of his slavery essay to Mrs Montagu and not to Forbes, however the
letter to Mrs Montagu presents us with an aspect of Beattie’s character that
prevents him from taking on controversial views, particularly if he is unsure
of the weight of public opinion.
This seems to have been a common trait. At various times his letters
describe a desire to avoid potential conflict or anything that might subject
him to negative attention. His first and only dalliance with controversy was
his essay against Hume, a work written in full confidence of the unpopularity
of the sceptical philosophy. However even standing on the sure ground of
popular support Beattie felt keenly the resulting persecution at the hands of
Hume’s supporters, something he was entirely discomforted by. His letters
describe repeatedly a desire to be at peace with the world and to avoid any
sort of renown that might also draw the unwanted attention of those who in
his words, ‘have been pleased to let the world know that they do not wish me
well’.10
Beattie’s Essay on Truth brought him fame, but not fortune and he earnestly
sought some sort of remuneration for his work, particularly in the form of a
stipend from the crown. However he would not sacrifice his peaceful life for
such a reward. In 1773 his fame brought him to the notice of the University
James Beattie, ‘Letter to Mrs Montagu, 21 December, 1779’. Aberdeen UL MS
30/1/177.
10
Margaret Forbes, Beattie and His Friends (Altrincham, 1990), 103.
9
88
Glen Doris
of Edinburgh, where the chair of Natural Philosophy had become vacant due
to the death of Dr James Russell. The Town Council asked Sir William Forbes
to approach Beattie with the offer of the chair, or, once he had agreed to take
the post, to encourage Dr Adam Ferguson to exchange the Chair of Moral
Philosophy for that of Natural Philosophy in order to allow the Aberdonian
the role more suited to his experience.11 Beattie refused the offer, not once but
twice, each time giving the reason that his peace and quiet was worth more
to him than even the greater pay and easier workload the Edinburgh Chair
would guarantee him. Additional pressure was brought to bear on the subject
a year later when Ferguson’s rumoured retirement brought renewed vigour to
the Edinburgh Town Council’s desire to fill the post with Beattie. Requests
for a positive answer came from as far afield as London, but Beattie’s firm
view that any offer, should it be made, would be refused ‘for private reasons’12
ensured that, in this situation, the Marischal professor would be left alone.
His experience of controversy after the publication of the Essay on Truth did
little more than accelerate his growing fear of making enemies, and it is in
this personal climate of fear that Beattie now decided that any of his writings
which had the slightest chance of ruffling feathers should be either published
anonymously or suppressed entirely.
The manuscript of Beattie’s essay On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery,
particularly that of the Negroes exists among his papers in the Aberdeen University
Library. It is possibly a later handwritten copy of his original as the subscript
‘written in the year 1778’ is appended to its title. The small handwriting is
clearly Beattie’s own and its seventeen numbered pages are neatly laid out
as if ready for submission to a publisher. It contains a clear argument on
the nature of contemporary African slavery and presents clear and logical
arguments for its unlawfulness. It is remarkable for its passionate attack while
still maintaining a strong philosophical logic and avoidance of emotive appeals
to the sentiments, as was the mainstay of most antislavery works of the time.
Beattie’s essay did not begin with a condemnation of slavery but a
philosophical justification for the honest rankings in society of master and
servant, the latter being hired to ‘cooperate’ in the endeavours of the former.
He acknowledged that such rankings are as much a work of providence as a
result of the ‘natural effect of the diversity of character.’13 In true philosophical
Ibid., 102
Ibid., 104
13
James Beattie, “On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery, Particularly that of the
Negroes, Written in the Year 1778.” in Roger J. Robinson (ed.), The Works of James
11
12
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
89
form, he introduced the idea of slavery with a definition of its various forms
and effects on the individual. The title of the work is drawn from his desire to
answer the positive assertions that slavery was both lawful and expedient made
even by some members of the philosophical elite in Britain.
In arguing against slavery, it may perhaps be thought that I dispute
without an opponent; for that no man in his senses could ever be so
absurd, as to offer reasons for vindication of a practice so unjust and
inhuman. But they who think so are mistaken. I myself met with a
native of Great Britain, a person of some rank and learning, who
maintains, that the lower orders of people in this country ought still
to be, as they once were, slaves; and to be annexed … to the soil, and
bought and sold along with it.14
In making this accusation, Beattie quotes from a source referred to in a footnote
as ‘Lord M------o’, the barely disguised Lord Monboddo, whose identity as
the provider of the quote was revealed privately in a letter to the bishop of
Chester Bielby Porteous.15 While Monboddo was hardly representative of the
scholarly consensus, his opinions on slavery were shared by some and Beattie
set out to demonstrate that any justification for holding slaves was illegitimate,
and that slavery was not only unlawful and immoral, but (echoing Smith),
inexpedient.
The argument tracks the history of slavery from antiquity but makes clear
that the issue at hand is not merely to critique the past, but to address the
present justifications for the enslavement of Africans. Beattie addressed all
of the contemporary apologists of the slave trade who cited not only classical
arguments for slavery as a natural state, but also the legalists who professed the
legitimacy of enslaving captives taken in wars, the most common justification
for the buying of African slaves. His words convey the atmosphere of the
classroom, not the pulpit, and his work avoids descriptions of the horrors of
slave conditions. The purpose of his argument was to undermine the moral
and legal justification of the slave state in British colonial society, just as the
ruling in the Knight vs Wedderburn case of 1778 had established the legal
precedent for abolishing it in Scotland.
Beattie: Miscellaneous Items, (London, 1996), 1.
Ibid., 6
15
James Beattie, ‘Letter to Bielby Porteous, dated 17th December 1779’. Aberdeen
University Library MS 30/1/176.
14
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Glen Doris
Beattie’s words are not merely a dry dissertation of the facts and his lively
literary style makes the essay highly readable. While his argument resounds
with an obvious passion, he made clear that passion alone would not win the
slaves their freedom.
In protesting against such a practice [that of holding slaves], it is not
easy to preserve that lenity of language and coolness of argument,
which philosophy recommends: and a certain author16 has not sought
to preserve it, but explicitly declares, that he who can argue seriously
in vindication of slavery deserved no another answer than the stab of
a poniard. I am not, however, so bloody-minded; and shall endeavour
to justify what I have said by an appeal to the reason, rather than the
passions of the reader.17
Beattie’s prose presents the reader with a clear argument boiling with passion
but maintaining a focus on the facts of the nature of slavery. As in his essay
against Hume’s scepticism, the power of his writing is not in its originality but
in the popularizing of the ideas of the more esoteric philosophies and thinkers
of his day and before. Beattie’s ideas reflect those of Hutcheson, Smith
and Montesquieu, the latter from whom he drew much of his foundational
critique of slavery. He also drew upon more recent material such as Abbé
Raynal18 and particularly John Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery, a source the essay
acknowledges at its conclusion. The possibilities of the influence that this
essay could have had cannot be known, of course, but it should be noted that
Beattie wrote this seven years before Thomas Clarkson’s prize-winning essay
on the slave trade that started the popular antislavery movement in Britain.
Such an essay had the potential to draw Beattie into the limelight yet again, a
fact that may have been influential in his decision not to publish at the time.
If, as he stated in 1793, his concern for the accuracy of his sources
prevented publication, it is apparent that the gathering of additional sources
was not a high priority as the essay was not touched or mentioned again for
the next ten years. In an inventory of Beattie’s books, written mostly in his
Abbé Raynal.
Ibid., 6
18
The quote about stabbing with a poniard is from Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and
Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies.
Translated from the French by J. Justamond, M.A., Vol. 3 (London,, 1776), 166. As Beattie
uses the word ‘poniard’ instead of ‘dagger’ as in this edition, it is possible that he read
it in the original French or he received the quote in some other way.
16
17
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
91
own hand, no mention is made of any antislavery titles.19 However, contained
within the notebook listing the books in his personal library, is a small scrap of
paper with the superscript, ‘A list of books and pamphlets relative to the Slave
Trade’. This list, written in another hand (possibly after Beattie’s death) is a list
of items belonging to the Aberdeen professor to be sold to a bookseller. This
separate document lists Wesley’s pamphlet along with several others, including
a book written by his friend and antislavery activist James Ramsay. It is unclear
why these books were not included in the main library list, but their presence
nonetheless adds to a picture of man conflicted between his feelings toward
injustice and his desire to avoid controversy, even in his own private world.
If Beattie wanted a life of peace and friendship with all the world, his desire
would be sorely tested a decade later as the mainstream antislavery movement
gathered adherents from many of the elite social circles in Britain. By January
1788 the attention of the antislavery activists was turned toward Aberdeen
and to James Beattie. If the nascent Slave Trade Abolition Bill promoted by
Wilberforce was to be effective it would require the best and brightest minds to
be recruited to the cause, and in this the London committee and its adherents
felt they had a ready ally in the Aberdeen literatus. In a letter to Beattie dated
21 January 1788, Thomas Percival, chairman of the Manchester Abolition
Society outlined the antislavery movement’s desire to recruit the cooperation
of the British Universities:
The committee established in Manchester for the relief of the
oppressed Africans are extremely anxious to avail themselves of the
aid and cooperation of the Universities in England and Scotland. Your
authority and influence at Aberdeen, might be of singular advantage in
promoting their humane and laudable views.20
In reply Beattie evidently mentioned his yet unpublished essay, prompting
Percival to encourage the pamphlet’s publication as soon as possible:
Your very friendly and most welcome letter arrived yesterday and I feel it
as a debt to justice and humanity, and consequently as a duty incumbent
upon me to urge the publication of the interesting and valuable work
you have in view. The petitions which are now preparing in various
Aberdeen University Library MS 30/2/47.
Thomas Percival, ‘Letter to James Beattie, 21st January, 1788’, Aberdeen University
Library MS 30/2/560.
19
20
92
Glen Doris
Counties, Cities and Burroughs, will doubtless be presented during the
present session of Parliament. But this ought to be no objection to the
prosecution of your important undertaking. And I hope it will rather
serve to forward the execution of it.21
In what must have been a rapid correspondence in which Beattie appears to
have hesitated to commit his essay to publication, Percival pleaded again a
week later on 8 February, ‘Permit me again to urge the speedy publication of
your tract on the Lawfulness of Slavery.’22
Abolitionism had also attracted the attention of the Blue Stockings Society
for Beattie’s friend and London patron Mrs Montagu also wrote to address
his apparent reluctance to commit his work to print. Writing in March of the
same year, she pressed him to use his literary talents to help in the cause:
As I am very zealous, in the cause of slavery, I regretted that you did
not publish what you had written on the subject. Few like you have the
power of convincing, & the art of persuading. You think logically and
you write eloquently. I know you will be glad to hear that the zeal of
those who engage in the scheme for the abolition of slavery is temper’d
by prudence, so that there is reason to hope the measures will be as
beneficial, & as permanent as the perverse conditions of human things,
& the weakness of human wisdom will allow.23
A little further on her letter Mrs Montagu addressed what she felt to be a cause
of his reluctance: ‘I cannot think so ill of the age as to believe that profit and
honour would not attend any thing you should publish. Will you be partial
enough to me to think I am worthy of one copy of your work?’ Beattie’s
own reasons for refusing to publish are given in a letter to Montagu in June
of the same year. Addressing the issue of Sir William Dolben’s successful bill
regulating the middle passage and other Jamaican reports of reform of slave
ownership, Beattie wrote of his disregard for his own work:
Thomas Percival, ‘Letter to James Beattie, 4th February, 1788’, Aberdeen University
Library MS 30/2/562. This letter was written on the fly leaf of a printed circular
letter from Granville Sharp, Chairman of the London Abolition Committee, dated
15th January, 1788.
22
Thomas Percival, ‘Letter to James Beattie, 8th February, 1788’ Aberdeen University
Library MS 30/2/564.
23
Mrs Montagu, ‘Letter to James Beattie, March 22nd, 1788’, Aberdeen University Library
MS 30/2/566.
21
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
93
My papers on the Slave Trade would now appear too late. The
legislation seems to have engaged in an investigation of that business
with a generous alacrity which does them infinite honour, and will
undoubtedly bring on such regulations as would make my zeal and my
arguments both unnecessary and unreasonable.24
Beattie’s essay did not address the abuses that Dolben’s bill sought to regulate
and it is hard to believe that whatever reforms he may have heard about would
mitigate his central thesis; that slavery was unlawful and inexpedient. This
excuse was appropriately swept aside by Mrs Montagu:
The Slave Trade has undergone some slight corrections, by which the
zeal of humanity, before much warm’d in favour of the unhappy, would
be in such a degree cooled if not quenched, thus it is much to be wished
it should be rekindled, for the publication of your work on the subject
I am therefore very desirous. You may expunge such parts as have
already been redressed.25
Yet, however much Mrs Montagu might have wished that Beattie’s reluctance
to publish was a temporary moment of indecision, it is clear from other
correspondents that such was not the case. Writing to Beattie in April, William
Forbes laments, ‘I am sorry you abandoned your idea of publishing something
on that horrid and disgraceful commerce, the African Slave Trade and perhaps
you still may resume it. It may do much good.’26
Other antislavery activists also wrote to encourage Beattie to publish,
including Bielby Porteous, now bishop of London and hence a member
of the House of Lords. Porteous sought a response to a pro-slavery tract
written by former Jesuit Raymond Harris and turned to Beattie as one who
was most able to respond to the arguments that the Bible authorized slavery.
Again Beattie refused. So averse to having his views on slavery aired publically,
Beattie even begged his friend and correspondent the duchess of Gordon not
to show anyone the copy of the essay he had given to her, lest it ‘be seen by
James Beattie, ‘Letter to Mrs Montagu, 23rd June, 1788’, National Library of Scotland
Acc.4796. Box 92. F2.
25
Mrs Montagu, ‘Letter to James Beattie, August 20th, 1788’, Aberdeen University
Library MS 30/2/569.
26
William Forbes, ‘Letter to James Beattie, 26th April, 1788’, National Library of Scotland
Acc. 4796 Box 98/2. Transcript by Iain Whyte.
24
94
Glen Doris
any eyes that are not very partial to the writer’.27 He wrote to her that he felt
his words and descriptions of abuses were not true any longer, as regulations
in the colonies had ‘mitigated the sufferings of the Negroes’. Beattie was
regularly in contact with key activists in the abolition movement who regularly
updated him with the facts of both the Slave Trade and the ploys of the proslavery lobbyists. To believe that he credulously accepted the propaganda of
the planters in their statements regarding the pleasant lot of African slaves,
seems to stretch the imagination. It is particularly hard to accept considering
the fact that Beattie had his own inside source of information on the true state
of colonial slavery.
However Beattie may have wished for anonymity when it came to abolitionist
activism, his reputation as a partisan for the cause extended beyond his circle
of friends. In January 1788 a letter arrived that challenged the Marischal
professor to take action in the cause. Written by the modern equivalent of a
whistle blower on the plantation establishment, the writer who styled himself
‘Africanus’ gave Beattie an honest account of the horrors perpetrated against
slaves in the West Indies. Africanus was himself a member of the planter
establishment, having to hide his true identity for fear of persecution at the
hands of his fellow colonists. The long letter detailed the lies that had been
told about the slaves’ conditions in response to the parliamentary inquiry and
should have certainly given an intelligent man like Beattie adequate reason
to doubt the optimistic reports from the Caribbean newspapers. Africanus’
purpose in writing was to ask Beattie, and others of his reputation, to take up
the pen in the cause of abolition.
I therefore submit it to you, Sir, and to some other eminent men in
your Church and Universities, to whom I am writing on this occasion,
whether Petitions, from your very respectable and learned Bodies could
not be promoted and expedited, so as to be presented to Parliament,
along with the rest … At the same time … writing a kind of circular
letter to the most distinguished literati, in the kingdom … suggesting to
them the idea of either writing expressly on the subject of slavery, or of
mentioning it in their publications and discourses with the detestation
becoming indignant Britons.28
James Beattie, ‘Letter to the Duchess of Gordon, 20th November, 1788’, National
Library of Scotland, Acc.4796. Box 92. Transcript by Iain Whyte.
28
Africanus, ‘Letter to James Beattie, 26th January, 1788’, Aberdeen University Library
MS 30/2/561.
27
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
95
Whether Africanus did indeed write to other literati in Scotland is not known
as no other letters from the anonymous whistle blower have been uncovered,
but Beattie was apparently moved by the letter enough to encourage Marischal
College to draft an antislavery petition to Parliament within a few months
of receiving it. However if Africanus had hoped that his request would
rouse the literati to put their skill to work tackling slavery, he must have been
disappointed. Despite some of the Universities sending petitions, none of
the Scottish Enlightenment writers published a single word in support of
the Slave Trade bill. Beattie’s own desperate attempts to avoid having his
name publically linked to abolition went as far as professing to believe the
propaganda of the plantation owners that slavery was no longer the problem
he seemed, once, passionately to believe it was.
For Beattie, the protection of his reputation and desire for a quiet life
superseded all other concerns and he resisted all requests for his words to
be put to the service of abolishing the Slave Trade. While it is certainly evident that those on various Scottish and English abolition committees used
his ideas, the evidence of the various letters about the publication of his
essay demonstrates that Beattie, while heartily supporting the cause in his
private letters, used every manner of excuse to avoid publishing something
specifically on slavery. In a letter to Mrs Montagu (at this time a member of
the London Antislavery Committee), congratulating her on the presentation
of the Slave Trade bill in 1789, he also sought to remind her of his own antislavery credentials:
The truth is, I have been collecting materials on that subject for upwards
of twenty-five years; and as far as my poor voice could be heard, have
laboured, not altogether unsuccessfully, in pleading the cause of the
poor Africans. This, at least, I can say with truth, that many of my pupils
have gone to the West Indies; and, I trust, have carried my principles
along with them, and exemplified those principles in their conduct to
their unfortunate brethren.29
It is not without reason that C. Duncan Rice, in his book The Scots Abolitionists
dismissed this optimism as ‘whistling in the dark’.30
Sir William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie LL.D, Vol. 2 (New
York and Philadelphia, 1806), 441 – 2.
30
C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists 1833 – 1861 (Baton Rouge and London, 1981),
19.
29
96
Glen Doris
The significance of the delay in finally putting a detailed critique of slavery
into print was not lost on Beattie in the end. The explanatory footnote in
volume 2 of Elements of Moral Science previously mentioned, continued further
as the author struggled to justify the delay in publishing.
It may be said that these remarks of mine come too late now (1792)
when the commons of Great Britain have passed a vote for the
abolition of the slave-trade. But, as slavery is not yet, nor likely to be
soon, abolished; and as I think myself responsible, first to my own
conscience, and secondly to the publick, for what I teach, I wish to be
known what for these thirty years and upwards I have been publickly
teaching on the subject of slavery.31
It was only when he was sure that public opinion was clearly in favour of
Abolition that he allowed his thoughts to be published; all the while assuring
his readers that he had always been a supporter of the cause. At the time of
writing, Beattie was then not to know that the 1792 Slave Trade bill was first
amended so as to include the key term ‘gradual abolition’ and then finally
stopped entirely in the House of Lords, so that, effectively, it was defeated.
After the tremendous public support for abolition attained in 1792, the war
with France subsumed all hopes for abolishing the Slave Trade, as any form of
protest against the government, whether by petition or campaign, was seen as
sedition. The window of opportunity closed for a further fifteen years before
peace finally allowed discussion of abolition to resurface. Beattie never lived
to see the final success of Wilberforce’s Bill as he died in 1803 after a long
battle with illness.
James Beattie has been labelled an abolitionist due to his writings, largely
contained in Elements of Moral Science, however their publication in 1793,
after the crucial defeat of the Slave Trade bill in 1792 meant that his public
support came too late to be of any use to the activists. While his letters to
friends and abolitionist contacts outlined his unpublished essay, Beattie
demurred in the face of their earnest requests to add his name to the nascent
corpus of published antislavery material. The essay copy that exists contains
philosophical insights that his friends considered invaluable to their cause, but
despite their numerous and repeated requests, he declined to publish, all the
while never letting them forget that he had the essay in his possession. While
Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 218.
31
Beattie and the Scottish Enlightenment’s lost chance to influence the Slave Trade debate
97
it can never be known for sure why he refused to publish when it would do
the most good, his many letters describing the essay give the impression of
wanting to be seen in private as an abolitionist, but not wanting to tell the
world until he could be sure his words could not hurt his public reputation.
Beattie’s letters repeatedly describe his fear of being judged by enemies for
what he wrote, as anything that hinted at possible controversy was either
suppressed or published anonymously. In seeking a life of peace and calm he
refused the mantle of the hero and denied even the opportunity for his work
to be put to good use.
Finally in 1793 Beattie nailed his colours to the mast and declared himself
an abolitionist, albeit in the midst of his general philosophical textbook.
However his courage came too late, and even then he worried that he had
said too much. In a letter to Mrs Montagu discussing the second volume of
Elements he wrote: ‘And on the slave-trade I have expiated much more than
some would think I ought to have done in a book of Elements’.32 Even after
the publication Beattie’s anxieties regarding his reputation clouded his vision
of doing right.
University of Aberdeen
James Beattie, ‘Letter to Mrs Montague, 10th January, 1793’, Aberdeen University
Library MS 30/1/335.
32
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
Alexander Broadie
I James Dundas, First Lord Arniston
James Dundas (c.1620 – 1679), the first Lord Arniston,1 was a Scottish landowner, lawyer, politician and, we should now add, philosopher – though this
last aspect of his life could not have been known to the author of the entry
on Dundas in the recent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.2 In his final
year Lord Arniston wrote a book on moral philosophy, entitled Idea philosophiae
moralis. It has never been published and the manuscript has remained in the
library of his home, Arniston House on the Arniston estate some miles south
of Edinburgh.3 The book merits close study. In this paper I shall introduce
James Dundas, shall then describe his book in broad outline, and finally shall
offer an account of his concept of moral philosophy. Reason will be given
for judging Dundas’s voice to be a significant element in the rich but underresearched field of seventeenth-century Scottish philosophy.
In broad outline his life followed the pattern of his father’s, for Sir James
Dundas père (1570 – 1628) was the owner of the Arniston estate, had been
a member of the College of Justice, and had twice been elected member
of parliament for Edinburghshire.4 He died when his son was about eight
years old. Mary, the wife of Sir James Dundas père, was deeply committed
to the presbyterian cause and, as we shall see, her son closely resembled her
in this.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Althea Dundas-Bekker of Arniston for her generosity
both in allowing me to study James Dundas’s manuscript Idea philosophiae moralis, and
also in granting me permission to quote from the book ad libitum. I am no less grateful for the hospitality that she has extended to me during my many visits to Arniston
House.
2
My main source of biographical information about James Dundas is George W.
T. Omond, The Arniston Memoirs: Three Centuries of a Scottish House 1571 – 1838,
(Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887; hereinafter ‘Omond’) especially chs 3 and 4.
3
With the support of the Leverhulme Trust, I am preparing an edition for publication.
4
Omond, Ch. 2.
1
100
Alexander Broadie
In 1635 James Dundas fils went up to St Leonard’s College in the University
of St Andrews (the college which his father had entered half a century earlier),
and it was almost certainly the regent James Guthrie who took young Dundas’s
cohort of students through the full cycle of arts subjects. James Guthrie is an
interesting person in his own right, a fully-committed presbyterian who, at
an early stage of his career and perhaps throughout his career, was probably
much influenced by Samuel Rutherford, author of the work of political philosophy Lex Rex. Guthrie’s politico-religious stance was directly responsible
for his execution in 1661, and indeed Rutherford himself would probably have
met the same fate had he too not died in 1661, a year after investigations were
initiated into his alleged high-treason. These remarks are of relevance to the
task of identifying the influences that shaped James Dundas as a philosopher.
I know of no extant record of Dundas’s activities at St Leonard’s College.
It is recorded in the account books of Arniston that in 1636 a Greek grammar
and Mercator’s Geography were purchased and that James Dundas’s name
was inscribed in them, and it might be supposed that these works were for
his use at St Andrews.5 But in the absence of any record of his activities at St
Andrews we cannot even say whether he remained there for the full cycle of
studies. As regards the grammar book he might reasonably be thought to have
studied it, since at the end of his days he displays a considerable knowledge of
Greek texts, and quotes from them in a rapid and practised hand.
On 12 December 1639, at the presbytery of Dalkeith, whose jurisdiction
included Arniston, Dundas signed the National Covenant, a document composed a year earlier in response to the attempt by Charles I to establish an
episcopalian form of ecclesiastical government in Scotland. The Covenant’s
signatories declared a commitment to presbyterianism and therefore rejected
episcopalianism (even if this rejection is not explicit in the document). Within
seven months of signing, Dundas had himself become a presbyter, an elder
of the Kirk, and there is ample evidence of his activities in the Kirk’s government, at least in his local presbytery.
In 1641 he married Marion Boyd, daughter of Robert, 7th Lord Boyd of
Kilmarnock (1595 – 1628); and James Dundas thus became related through
Marion to two distinguished Scottish men of letters of the early years of
Atlas, or a geographicke description of the regions, countries and kingdomes of the world, by
Gerhard Mercator (printed by Henry Hondius and Jon Johnson, Amsterdam) was
published in 1636, the year in which Mary Dundas bought a copy of Mercator’s
Geographia for her son. Whether the 1636 edition was the one Mary bought is not
yet known.
5
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
101
the seventeenth century. For Robert Boyd, Dundas’s father-in-law, who had
studied at the Protestant college of Saumur in France, was a cousin of Robert
Boyd of Trochrig (1578 – 1627), a distinguished Scottish theologian who
taught at the Protestant colleges at Montauban (1599 – 1604) and Saumur
(1604 – 15) before becoming principal of Glasgow University;6 indeed Robert
Boyd, Dundas’s father-in-law, had been a student of Robert Boyd of Trochrig
at Saumur. And Dundas’s father-in-law was also a cousin of Zachary Boyd,
who was a regent professor at Saumur (1611 – 15), before becoming rector
and then vice-chancellor of Glasgow University. Robert Boyd of Trochrig
and Zachary Boyd both dedicated their lives to the Presbyterian cause, and
Dundas’s own commitment to that same cause was unswerving. As well as
signing the National Covenant he also signed the Solemn League and Covenant,
a document that aimed to further strengthen the place of presbyterianism in
Scotland and in England too. Dundas also had several public roles. He twice
served on the Committee for War, he became a Member of Parliament for
Edinburghshire in 1648, and he was a colonel of foot.7
The strength of Dundas’s commitment to the Covenants can be measured
by the manner in which his legal career, barely started, came to an untimely
end. He had never received formal legal training, but nevertheless succeeded
in persuading the Scottish legal authorities of his legal competence, and in
May 1662 he was nominated an ordinary Lord of Session and in the following month became a member of the College of Justice, with the title Lord
Arniston. He was now a judge. But his new status did not last long. In August
1663 an Act of Parliament affirmed that those who had signed the Covenant
could not ‘exercise any public trust or office within the kingdom’ unless they
subscribed to a declaration of renunciation of the Covenant. Dundas refused
to make any such declaration unless he were permitted at the same time to
qualify his renunciation of the Covenant with the words: ‘in so far as it [the
At Saumur he taught philosophy, theology, Hebrew and Syriac, and at Montauban philosophy and Greek. For information on Robert Boyd, see Marie-Claude Tucker, ‘Les
professeurs écossais dans les académies protestantes françaises aux XVIe et XVIIe
siècles’, in Les outils de la connaissance, enseignement et formation intellectuelle en Europe entre
1453 et 1715, eds J.-C. Colbus and B. Hébert (Roanne: Université St. Etienne, 2006).
7
His regiment of foot was probably raised with money that he himself provided, and
recruitment may have been based in the area where he possessed estates. His service
was probably fairly notional, if not wholly honorific. His career does not suggest
martial accomplishment, though he may have anticipated seeing active service, in
which connection we should recall that the Battle of Dunbar took place in 1650.
I am grateful to Dr Lionel Glassey for this clarification regarding Dundas’s role as
colonel of foot.
6
102
Alexander Broadie
Covenant] led to deeds of actual rebellion’.8 Charles II offered Dundas a private audience at which he could affirm his reservation. But Dundas refused,
saying: ‘If my subscription is to be public, I cannot be satisfied that the salvo
should be latent’. In January 1664 his place in the College of Justice was
declared vacant. He had been a judge for barely a year and a half.
After vacating his place in the College of Justice in 1664, he played little
part in public life. Many years later a local minister, who was probably reliable
as a repository of knowledge of the history of the Dundas family, reports
that, after Dundas’s removal from the College of Justice: ‘He retired to the
family estate of Arniston where he spent the remainder of his days in domestic bliss – and in cultivating a taste for polite learning’.9 That he cultivated such
a taste cannot be in doubt in view of what appears to be the most significant
product of his retirement, to which I now turn.
The product was his book Idea philosophiae moralis. It is definitely his, for
on it he wrote his signature more than twenty times, as well as writing, and
repeating, ‘Jacobus Dundas est huius libri legitimus possessor’ (‘James Dundas
is the rightful owner of this book’). Although the title page declares the book
to have been begun on 7 April 1679, it may be supposed that that was the date
when Dundas began to write what he intended to be the definitive version. He
died in October of the same year and the book, written in neo-Latin, is 313
pages long, about 67,000 words. Almost all of it is in a rather neat hand and
the probability, merely conjectural at this stage, is that Dundas was writing on
the basis of an earlier draft. The book is in fact in two hands. Some 98 per cent
of it is in one style of handwriting, and two per cent is in another (certainly the
first is Dundas’s hand and almost certainly the second is also). One can only
conjecture about the reason for the two styles.
In the last couple of pages the hand deteriorates markedly; it is probable
that Dundas was by then a dying man. Indeed the ending, written in a severely
distorted hand, could hardly be more abrupt. Dundas makes a brief comment
about the moral relation between parent and child and adds ‘James Dundas
&c &c &c &c’; at which point the narrative closes. There are thereafter some
thirty blank pages. On the inside back cover Dundas twice inscribed a line
by Virgil: ‘O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos’ (‘If only Jupiter would
See ‘James Dundas’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. On the other hand, from
Sir Alexander Hume (in a letter to Dundas) we learn that Dundas’s intention was
to ‘disclaim all ordinances that may lead to the disturbances of the public peace’ – a
rather broader qualification. See Omond, 28 – 9.
9
‘Parish of Borthwick’, by The Rev. Thomas Wright, in New Statistical Account of Scotland,
1845, Vol. 1, 170. The entry is dated 1839.
8
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
103
return to me my past years’).10 We have no means of knowing at what stage in
the composition of the book he penned the verse. Though no evidence has
yet come to light concerning the motive for writing the book, it might well
have been that he wanted to get clear on some important matters in light of
a Virgilian sense he had that he was running out of years in which to achieve
this.
Dundas and his book ended together. He died after writing fifteen pages
about death, in particular on suicide, war and duelling, though the last few
lines of the book, on the relation between parent and child, were implicitly on
the idea of life, of continuity through one’s family. To complete my biographical narrative it should therefore be added that James Dundas’s son Robert
(d. 1726), second Lord Arniston, was a distinguished Scottish judge; James
Dundas’s grandson Robert (1685 – 1753) was Lord President of the Court
of Session, Solicitor-General for Scotland and Lord Advocate; and James
Dundas’s great-grandson Henry Dundas (1742 – 1811), Viscount Melville,
was Solicitor-General and Lord Advocate, and for three decades (1775 – 1805)
Scotland’s political manager. James Dundas’s ambitions in the Scottish legal
world, unfulfilled in his own lifetime, were more than fulfilled through the
lives of his direct descendants during the following century.
In the next section I shall describe the book in general terms and shall then
offer a more detailed account of its opening few pages. I aim to convey a sense
of the philosophical character of the work rather than to offer a sustained
analysis of his wider moral philosophical vision. As regards that character I
shall provide evidence that it can fairly be described as scholastic, a continuation in the New Order of a kind of philosophising characteristic of the Old.
I shall also point to evidence that there is an autobiographical dimension to
the book.
II Idea philosophiae moralis: A general description
The book is based on a wide knowledge of the philosophical literature, especially that of Greece and Rome; a few medieval philosophers are also referred
to; and so also are many from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As
regards ancient sources Dundas makes explicit reference to over fifty figures,
including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Cicero, Democritus, Epictetus,
10 Aeneid, VIII, 560.
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Epicurus, Lucretius, Seneca, Sextus Empiricus, Tertullian and Lactantius. The
medieval thinkers invoked include Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas,
Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus. And about forty post-medieval thinkers are quoted or referred to, including Ramus, Amyraut, Bacon, Bellarmino,
Beza, Bramhall, Buchanan, Burgersdijck, Cajetan, Fonseca, Molina, Scaliger,
Descartes, Gassendi, Grevinhovius, Grotius, Heerebord, Hobbes, Hornebeck,
Keckermann, Lipsius, Maccovy, Culverwell, Henry More and Samuel
Rutherford. This formidable list provides strong evidence for the claim, made
in the Statistical Account for Scotland, that during his retirement Dundas ‘cultivated a taste for polite learning’.
The book is composed of approximately fifty-six sections. These can be
seen as falling into several groups which are sequenced in an orderly way. In
the first half-a-dozen sections Dundas gives a general account of what moral
philosophy is. He begins by establishing the existence of moral philosophy
and then works towards a definition of it per genus et differentiam. This discussion is conducted within a largely Aristotelian framework. Secondly, a long
sequence of sections deals with the nature of good and evil and especially
with what may be thought to be the highest good, happiness. Thirdly, about
eight sections focus on free will, on what it is and what the scope of its power
is; here Dundas demonstrates a good knowledge of Jesuit writings in the field,
and especially in the area of Molina’s exploration of the idea of scientia media,
God’s knowledge, not of what does occur, but of what would occur if something else were to. Fourthly there are about fourteen sections on moral virtue
and vice, considered in general and then considered at the level of particular
virtues such as prudence, sincerity and fortitude. Then there are four sections
on moral issues relating to people killing people – here the topics are suicide,
war and duelling. And the last section, which was unfinished, is on justice, a
topic which is closely connected to the immediately preceding sections on
killing, since in each of these latter Dundas is attentive to issues of legality.
III Idea philosophiae moralis on what moral philosophy is
Dundas begins his exploration of moral philosophy not by asking what moral
philosophy is, but by arguing that there is such a thing as moral philosophy;
and only after establishing that it exists does he raise the scientific question of
what its nature or essence is. First he shows ‘quod est’ – that it is – and then he
asks ‘Quid est?’ – ‘What is it?’
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
105
We are in a position to know that moral philosophy exists because we
know enough to recognise it when we see it, whatever it may be in its essence.
In particular we know that there are doctrines about how we should live,
doctrines that direct us towards goodness according to the dictates of practical right reason. Not only are there in fact such doctrines, but, as Dundas
indicates, this is not at all surprising, because moral philosophy is so useful;
for when we get into certain kinds of practical difficulty that arise in the light
of our felt need to gain happiness and to live well, it is important to have a
doctrine that will help us to resolve those difficulties. The concept of the
practical intellect is central to this account for, as Dundas puts the point,
moral philosophy, by its precepts, directs the practical intellect regarding the
way in which it should judge what is to be done, so that it should tame and
rectify the passions and moderate them. He sums up the practicality of moral
philosophy: ‘The moral philosopher, having this admirable skill, teaches us
the sounder ways by which the quicksands of [the corrupt affections] can be
avoided and teaches us also the means by which the brute passions can be
tamed’.11
Since it is the practical intellect that is doing the work of moral philosophical thinking, it is to be classed as the ‘subject’ of moral philosophy – not the
‘subject matter’, but the subject qua agent of the moral thinking. As regards
moral philosophy’s immediate object this is dual – there is both a material
object and a formal one. The material object (obiectum materiale) is human
action, and the formal object, which informs a human action, is what Dundas
terms the ‘producible honesty (honestas)’ of a human act, or the act’s rightness with respect to its honesty. The complex that is formed from these two
objects, the material and the formal, is a human act informed by honesty and,
we are told, all things in the field of morality are ordered in relation to such
acts.
On the basis of these thoughts, all of them familiar from classical and
medieval sources, Dundas approaches the definition of moral philosophy
where, by ‘definition’, he means ‘definition per genus et differentiam’. First, what is
the genus, the general category to which moral philosophy belongs, and then
what differentiates moral philosophy from other species that fall under that
same genus? His method is to set up five candidates for the title of ‘genus’,
and eliminate each in turn, leaving the field to a sixth. The five are intuitive reason (intelligentia), philosophical wisdom (sapientia), scientific knowledge
‘Moralis philosophus tanquam peritus palmaris docet quibus sanioribus effugiendae
sint istius modi syrtes quibus etiam mediis domandae sint bruti passiones’ (Idea, 3).
11
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Alexander Broadie
(scientia), art (ars) and practical wisdom (prudentia), all of these being technical
concepts that play a prominent role in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.12
First, the genus of moral philosophy is not intuitive reason, for intuitive
reason is a disposition by which we have cognitions of first principles of the
intellect. Even if we deploy such cognitions on behalf of practical ends, intuitive reason cannot be the genus of moral philosophy, for intuitive reason
cognises objects, whereas moral philosophy is about making objects, that is,
producing in the real world what had only existed in the mind as an object of
thought.
Secondly, moral philosophy is not philosophical wisdom, and this for the
same reason as the one just invoked. Aristotle describes philosophical wisdom
as a conjunction of intuitive reason and scientific knowledge,13 and since the
latter two consist in a kind of cognition of their object and not in a making
of their object, whereas moral philosophy is a disposition to produce things
in the real world, moral philosophy cannot fall under philosophical wisdom.
Thirdly, moral philosophy does not fall under the genus ‘scientific knowledge’, since the objects of scientific knowledge are necessary, that is, are
necessary principles, and are therefore not in our power, whereas moral philosophy is aimed at human actions and therefore at what is in our power.
Fourthly, moral philosophy is not an art. Dundas’s explanation is that someone
is not described as skillful through having moral philosophy but is described
only as morally good through having it.14 The underlying issue here concerns
teachability. Arts are teachable, and those who have learned how to practice
an art are skillful at it; if therefore moral philosophy is not a matter of being
skillful at being moral, and it surely isn’t, then moral philosophy is not a kind
of art.
Fifthly, moral philosophy does not fall under the genus of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is defined as: ‘an active disposition with right reason
concerning the things that are good or evil for man’. This account of practical
wisdom seems in the right territory for moral philosophy; but it is, if anything,
too close, since practical wisdom is generally acknowledged to be one of the
cardinal virtues of morality. However, the crucial point for Dundas is that
a person can be practically wise yet fall short of being a moral philosopher,
and here he has in mind the different sorts of behaviour of the two agents:
See especially Nicomachean Ethics, III, 6.
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 3.
14 ‘Non est habitus effectivus, eius obiectum non est ποιητον ’ακριβως; nec hinc denominatur quis peritus, ut ab arte, sed duntaxat moraliter bonus.’ (Idea, 5).
12
13
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
107
‘though there are practically wise people with a natural experiential practical
wisdom, they are not so certain and prompt without moral philosophy, especially with respect to elicited acts, but if not, then with respect to commanded
acts’.15
The distinction here deployed between elicited acts (actus eliciti) and commanded acts (actus imperati), a common distinction in medieval philosophy of
action, is based on the doctrine that when, by an act of will, we do something
in the natural world, then there are in fact two acts, first the act of will, conceived of as a command to the relevant bit of the body over which the will
has power, and secondly the act that is the bodily movement that occurs in
obedience to the will’s command. The first act is the will’s, the actus elicitus, and
the second is the body’s, the actus imperatus. So Dundas is here allowing that
someone who is more practically wise than he is moral philosophical might
be less prompt with his actus elicitus than the moral philosopher would be, and
that even if he is as prompt with the actus elicitus he might then be less so with
the actus imperatus.
It should be added that Dundas immediately opens up this picture for
scrutiny by noting that being well versed in moral doctrines is in fact compatible with being less practically wise with respect to actions; to which end
he quotes a famous line by Medea where she declares: ‘I see the better and
approve of it, and I follow the worse’. Dundas suggests that Medea here has
two judgments in mind, an absolute moral judgment and also a judgment
concerning the here-and-now, where the judgment is based on what seems
agreeable or useful, without the motive of honesty being considered with sufficient seriousness.16 To this Dundas adds that: ‘seemingly Descartes should be
understood in this sense when he says in the Meditations that the cause of every
error and iniquity is that the will extends beyond the practical intellect, with an
absolute judgment being made that does not weigh everything with sufficient
seriousness, especially in relation to intellectual and practical principals and
rules of morality’.17 Dundas appears to be saying that even if Medea has seen
‘Licet dentur prudentes prudentia naturali experimentali, non tamen tam certi et
prompti sine philosophia morali praesertim quoad actus elicitos, si non autem quoad
imperatos’ (Idea, 6).
16 ‘Video meliora proboque, sc. judicio absoluto et in thesi, sed deteriora sequor, sc. judicio comparato pro hic et nunc in hypothesi, ex motivo apparentis jucunditatis vel
utilitatis, non considerato saltem satis serio, motivo honestatis’ (Idea, 6, and Ovid,
Metamorphosis, VII, 20)..
17
‘Quo sensu intelligendus videtur Cartesius ubi in Meditationibus ait, causam omnis
erroris et iniquitatis esse quod voluntas ulterius extendatur quam intellectus sc.
15
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Alexander Broadie
the better and approved of it, she has not looked at the better long enough
or hard enough. She may have seen something that could serve as a basis
for a sound moral judgment but she has not, in Descartes’s terms, ‘weighed
everything with sufficient seriousness’. And as regards Descartes’s account
of the will going further than the intellect has gone on matters of theory and
of practice, Dundas draws this conclusion: ‘Though such people are versed
in theory they will not merit being called moral philosophers unless they are
moral philosophers in practice; for a cognition, especially a practical cognition,
is in vain if it does not lead to action’.18 Thus the term ‘moral philosopher’
does not apply to anyone merely on account of their being well versed in the
writings of moral philosophers; a moral philosopher must also be a philosopher who is moral. Dundas’s commitment to moral philosophy as a way of life
could hardly be clearer.
So having rejected five candidates for the title ‘proximate genus of moral
philosophy’ Dundas accepts a sixth: ‘It is a practical disposition or (if you
wish) practical knowledge tending towards a proximate object in the practical
mode of object as regards its production, a practical mode directed by honesty and moral goodness, in conformity with moral rules … ’19 The proximate
object should be thought of as something that the agent proposes to do or
make. It is not just the thought of an action but instead is the thought of an
action that I intend to make my own in a special way by performing it. And the
action will have moral value. Dundas uses the phrase ‘directivo secundum honestatem et bonitatem moralem’ to describe the practical mode of the object.
By this Latin phrase he can be indicating either that the agent is being directed
by the values of honesty and moral goodness or is being directed to them,
that is, is being directed to the performance of an act that embodies those
values. Earlier we noted Dundas’s deployment of the distinction between the
material object and the formal object of moral philosophy, the material object
being the action itself that is to be performed and the formal object being a
moral quality, the honesty or rightness of the act. There is a certain ordering
practicus, judicio absoluto omnia non perpendente satis serio, praesertim quoad principia intellectiva et practica vel regulas morum’ (Idea, 6). For Descartes on error in its
relation to will and intellect, see Meditation IV.
18
‘Licet tales versati sint in theoria morales stabunt philosophi non merentur denominari nisi tales sint in praxi; nam frustra est illa cognitio praesertim practica, quae non
reducitur in praxin’ (Idea, 6).
19
‘est habitus practicus vel (si vis) scientia practica, tendens in objectum proximum
modo practico obiecti quoad productionem directivo secundum honestatem et bonitatem moralem, nempe conformitatem cum regulis morum … ’ (Idea, 6).
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
109
here. The action is for the sake of its moral quality, not vice versa, and can be
thought of as having instrumental value in so far as the action is a delivery
vehicle for the moral worth of what is done. The moral philosopher seeks to
deliver moral value to the real world.
Now that Dundas has identified the proximate genus of moral philosophy
he has only to add the specific difference, that which differentiates moral philosophy from other species under that same genus, and he will have arrived
at his definition. The definition he gives of moral philosophy is this: ‘It is a
practical disposition to perform human actions with respect to honesty and is
directed by the laws of nature’.20 To which he adds: ‘It comes to the same thing
as the common definition, that it is an effective disposition with right reason,
concerning things which are good or bad for a human being, that is, concerning human actions which would be in conformity with rules of morals’. Here
the proximate genus appears to be: ‘a practical disposition to perform human
actions’ and the specific difference seems to be: ‘having regard to honesty
and being directed by the laws of nature’. However, the proximate genus, the
sixth one, that Dundas had earlier identified, flowered so richly while he was
expounding it, that it is hard to see the difference between it and the definition
that eventually emerges. No doubt had Dundas lived to revise the text, this
problem would have been resolved.
I turn now to a last point, that concerning the utility of moral philosophy.
It is already clear that Dundas thinks the world would be a better place if
everyone were a moral philosopher, since being one implies living a morally
good life. For we learn from it how to be a judge of what is honest and what
is base, what is useful, what is not; we learn also what the specific means are
by which our unbridled desires and passions can be tamed and calmed; and
we learn how tranquillity of mind and true happiness are to be acquired.21
Nevertheless as well as thinking that everyone would be better for being a
moral philosopher, he also identifies three classes of people whose status or
role picks them out as in need of moral philosophy. The classes are theologians (and Christians more generally), lawyers and orators.
Moral philosophy is useful to Christian theologians, and indeed to
Christians whether theologians or not, because it teaches us the laws that
‘Est habitus practicus actionum humanarum quoad honestatem directivus legibus
naturae’ (Idea, 7).
21
‘ … docens honesti et turpis discrimen, quod rectum, quod utile, quod non, et quibus
speciatim mediis, domandae et sedandae sint effrenes libidines et passiones, et sic
acquirenda animae tranquillitas et vera felicitas … ’ (Idea, 8).
20
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Alexander Broadie
are engraved in the hearts of all human beings and thereby teaches us the
things that are honest in the sight of all people. Secondly, moral philosophy
is useful to those who study law, because moral philosophy teaches us the
first practical principles, the moral principles that we know by the light of
nature and whose violation or neglect is inexcusable. These principles are the
foundation of all other good laws. And finally, moral philosophy is useful to
students of eloquence or oratory, because without moral philosophy what
the faculty of speech delivers up is not eloquence but stupid chatter – non est
eloquentia sed inanis loquentia (Idea, 8). He adds a further point about the relation between moral philosophy and oratory: ‘From the “commonplaces” of
moral philosophy, namely the equal, the good, the honest, the agreeable, the
useful, the glorious and their contraries the dishonest, the useless, the shameful, etc., there is a very rich foundation of reasons and arguments, whether
you are praising, blaming, persuading, dissuading, accusing, condemning, or
defending’.22 All these speech acts are characteristic of politicians and lawyers
and the nine commonplaces are concepts introduced by Aristotle in the course
of his analyses of oratory in his Ars rhetorica.
However, Dundas does not at this stage articulate in detail the relation
between moral philosophy and the disciplines of theology, law and eloquence,
for which moral philosophy is said to be useful. But he does say that where
the moral philosopher stops, the theolog ian and the lawyer start. To which
he could equally have added that the rhetorician also then starts. It may be
supposed that Dundas means by this, not that at the point where the theologian, lawyer and rhetorician start, the moral philosopher vanishes, but instead
that the theologian, lawyer and rhetorician each take up moral philosophy
into their own discipline. Each of the specific disciplines brings something to
moral philosophy, whether what it brings be divine revelation, or positive law,
or commonplaces and forms of argument useful for someone arguing a case
before a jury or a political assembly.
Dundas was a deeply religious man, widely read in Christian theology; he
was also a politician and a judge, and therefore had a lively interest in oratory
of both the political variety and the forensic. The opening part of his Idea
philosophiae moralis, which I have been considering here, provides reason therefore to expect that there will be an autobiographical dimension to the book
‘…ex huius topicis aequo bono honesto jucundo utili glorioso et contrariis inhonesto
inutili turpi etc, uberrima motivorum et argumentorum seges sive laudes sive vituperes suadeas dissuadeas accuses damnes vel defendes’ (Idea, 8). These nine ‘topics’
or ‘commonplaces’ (in Greek, τοποι) are invoked in Aristotle’s On Rhetoric.
22
James Dundas and his Concept of Moral Philosophy
111
and, in fact, as the book progresses religious and legal materials become quite
abundant.
More important in terms of our understanding of the history of Scottish
thought in the seventeenth century is Dundas’s scholasticism. The author is a
presbyterian scholar who manifestly operates within a linguistic and conceptual
framework familiar to the medieval world. Thus Dundas’s book illustrates a
feature of seventeenth-century Scotland that merits closer study than it has yet
received – namely the fact that with the arrival of the Protestant Reformation
in Scotland, a significant element of the Old Order, and, in particular, its scholasticism, was taken up into the New Order,23 where it continued to flourish.24
University of Glasgow
Some material is to be found in Richard Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of
a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003); and David Bagchi and David Steinmetz (eds),
The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (Cambridge, 2004).
24
This paper was written as part of the Leverhulme International Network Project
‘Scottish philosophers in seventeenth-century Scotland and France’, which will be
active from 2010 to 2013 and of which I am the Principal Investigator. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for facilitating my work on James Dundas, first Lord
Arniston. Giovanni Gellera, Laurent Jaffro, Roger Mason, Christian Maurer, Steven
Reid and Marie-Claude Tucker attended a Leverhulme-funded workshop at Glasgow
University in November 2010 at which a version of this paper was delivered. I thank
them for their comments. I am grateful to Patricia S. Martin for her invaluable help
with the James Dundas manuscript.
23
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
Matthew Wickman
In assessing Isaac Newton’s impact on modernity from the perspective of the
late twentieth century, John D. Purrington and Frank Durham arrive at the
paradox that the past century ‘is at once the most Newtonian [ … ] and the
least Newtonian’ of the centuries that have followed the 1687 publication of
Newton’s monumental Principia (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).
On the one hand, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century innovations
involving ‘blackbody radiation, atomic and molecular spectra, specific
heats [ … ] radioactivity’, relativity and quantum mechanics have vaulted us
well beyond the sphere of classical physics. But on the other hand, ‘in the
accelerated technological remaking of nature’ and in our ‘fundamental view
that the universe is a rationally intelligible system, explicable in terms of [ … ]
a small set of basic laws’, we remain deeply implicated in Newtonian ideals.1
As they see it, Newtonian thinking (as a mode of organising experience) is
the engine which transports us beyond Newtonian thought (as the set of
doctrines we associate with classical physics). To this extent, we think in (or
through) the past even as we dwell in the present. Or perhaps it is the other
way around: perhaps ‘we moderns’ inhabit a world of classical certitudes – of
gravity and progress – even as our theories of that world hinge on such
‘enigmas and guesses’ as stochastic (or chaotic) probabilities and subatomic
strings of energy.
We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses is the title of a 1918 book by Edwin Muir
which addresses in its own way the type of Newtonian paradox to which
Purrington and Durham refer. Muir contends that modern time is out of
joint, that the future is behind us: in order to ‘emancipate’ ourselves from
present dogmas, we must ‘go back – or, rather, forward – to Goethe, Ibsen and
Nietzsche’, and particularly to the latter’s radical reformulation of the past.2
John D. Purrington and Frank Durham (eds),‘Newton’s Legacy’, Some Truer Method:
Reflections on the Heritage of Newton (New York, 1990), 4 – 5.
2
Edwin Muir, We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses (New York, 1920), 104. Margery
McCulloch reads Muir’s interest in Nietzsche as autobiographical, inasmuch as
Nietzsche enabled Muir to grapple with his own past. See Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and
Novelist (Edinburgh, 1993), 73.
1
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Matthew Wickman
Muir’s contemporary, Oswald Spengler, made an even stronger (or at least a
more voluminous) case for the backwards quality of the modern era, or for
the ‘decline of the West’. But Spengler wrote not only of Nietzsche and Ibsen
but also of Newton, who articulated cultural habitudes in the guise of natural
laws. ‘Motion’ and ‘mechanics’ were for Spengler less the manifestations of
an objective science than indices of human activity and world-making. For
Spengler, in other words, Newton was not only a philosopher of nature but
also a poet laureate of modern alienation.3 Muir shared Spengler’s vision of
alienation, but he projected that vision not onto Enlightenment science but
instead onto Scottish national identity, which he imagined as a prototypical
case of modern(ist) dissociated sensibilities. Muir’s notoriously withering (if
overheated) argument in his later book Scott and Scotland (1936) was that the
Reformation and subsequent history had bifurcated thought and feeling in
Scottish literature, dividing experience from its formal expression. Reprising
popular conceptions of Scottish cultural schizophrenia (from Jekyll and Hyde
to G. Gregory Smith’s ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’), this problem nevertheless
(and provocatively) bore an implicitly Newtonian flavour for Muir. For ‘a
man who writes in one language and thinks in another’, or whose Scotslanguage reflexes mediate themselves through English, he asserted, ‘the action
of his intelligence is not contemporaneous with his feeling: it is action at a
distance’.4 ‘Action at a distance’ became a well-worn phrase for gravity during
the Enlightenment, lending Scottish and Newtonian modernity a neat if tacit
coincidence in Muir’s formulation. Within the constellation of Muir’s thought,
Scotland thus exemplifies a modern disjointedness which itself appears
symptomatic of Newton’s more encompassing legacy. Scotland is the most
‘modern’ of nations because it is in some ways the most deeply (if not always
the most self-consciously) Newtonian.
This equation of Newton with Scottish thought (meaning thought by Scots
as well as thought about Scotland) is the subject of this essay. I appeal to Muir at
its outset because Muir summarised Scotland’s modern/Newtonian condition
brilliantly if in negative – meaning, he perceptively identified it even though
Newton’s, Spengler says, was an ‘artist-nature’. What is more, he elaborates, ‘the born
mathematician takes his place by the side of the great masters of the fugue, the chisel
and the brush; he and they alike strive … to actualize the grand order of all things by
clothing it in symbol … [T]he domain of number, like the domains of tone, line and
colour, becomes an image of the world-form’. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the
West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York 1926), 1:61.
4
Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (New York, 1938),
37.
3
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
115
in one important respect he got it dead wrong. For while Scotland may have
bourn the brunt of Newtonian ‘progress’ and correlative social regression in
the industrial slums of Glasgow which so harrowed Muir as a young man, the
nation’s most conscientiously Newtonian moment found it perhaps the least
in thrall to the Newtonian paradox of the early twentieth century.5 That is, it
was when Scottish intellectuals most conspicuously assimilated and earnestly
defended Newtonian thought that their world view was (in Muir’s and
Spengler’s terms) least truncated, least dissociated – the least, and therefore
the most, modern.
I am referring here to a period in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries when Newton became a subject in Scottish universities decades in
advance of Newton’s of its doing so in own Cambridge, and when Scottish
literati became Newton’s most forceful advocates in Europe.6 A full account
of this history exceeds the limits of this essay, but we can perhaps begin to
appreciate its scope in a crucial passage from the landmark long poem The
Seasons (1730) by James Thomson:
… [R]efracted from yon eastern Cloud,
Bestriding Earth, the grand ethereal Bow
Shoots up immense; and every Hue unfolds,
In fair Proportion, running from the Red,
To where the Violet fades into the Sky.
Here, awful NEWTON, the dissolving Clouds
Form, fronting on the Sun, thy showery Prism;
And to the sage-instructed Eye unfold
The various Twine of Light, by thee disclos’d
From the white mingling Maze. Not so the Swain,
He wondering views the bright Enchantment bend,
Delightful, o’er the radiant Fields, and runs
To catch the falling Glory; but amaz’d
Beholds th’amusive Arch before him fly,
Then vanish quite away.7
See especially Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (Edinburgh, 1993), 81 – 121.
On Newton’s Scottish origin as an academic subject, see See John Friesen, “Archibald
Pitcairne, David Gregory and the Scottish Origins of English Tory Newtonianism,
1688 – 1715,” History of Science, 41:2 (2003), 163 – 91; cf. Anita Guerrini, “The Tory
Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and Their Circle,” The Journal of British Studies, 25:3
(1986), 288 – 311.
7
James Sambrook (ed.), Spring, in The Seasons (Oxford, 1981), ll. 203 – 17; Thomson’s
5
6
116
Matthew Wickman
This passage, in Spring, holds an iconic place in literary history: it represents
the dissemination of Newtonian thought into eighteenth-century poetry
and, more generally, into the culture of ‘Enlightenment’.8 And yet, by that
same token, the passage also came to mark a symbolic Rubicon for Romantic
poets. William Blake dismissed Newton as a soul-chilling agent of mechanical
reason, and John Keats, following the lead of William Wordsworth, pledged
‘[c]onfusion to the memory of Newton’ for having ‘destroyed the poetry of
the rainbow by reducing it to a prism’.9 The rejection here was not only of
an unimaginative science, but also of an eighteenth-century literary aesthetic
which Thomson had helped articulate, and which bore the hallmark of Scottish
Newtonian thought. ‘Two cultures’ divided here – literature from science, and
English Romanticism from its more complex (more apparently conflicted)
Scottish counterpart.10
But this is where Thomson’s Newtonian picture, and the Newtonian
picture of Thomson, grow more complicated. For the passage immediately
following this paean to Newton modifies the science it purports to celebrate
(in ways I will explain below):
Then spring the living Herbs, profusely wild,
O’er all the deep-green Earth, beyond the Power
Of Botanist to number up their Tribes:
Whether he steals along the lonely Dale,
In silent Search; or thro’ the Forest, rank
With what the dull Incurious Weeds account,
Bursts his blind Way; or climbs the Mountain-Rock,
Fir’d by the nodding Verdure of its Brow.
emphasis. Subsequent references will be cited in the text.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson observes that, ‘[m]ore than any of the other poets, Thomson
developed the “symbolism of the [colour] spectrum”’. Newton Demands the Muse:
Newton’s Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (Hamden CT, 1963), 46.
9
Benjamin Haydon, Autobiography and Memoirs, quoted in Richard Dawkins, Unweaving
the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (New York, 1998), 39; cf. M.
H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford,
1953), 303 – 12 and Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse, 1 – 2. On Blake’s animus
toward Newton, see Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1995), 194.
10
I allude here to C. P. Snow’s notion of the ‘two cultures’ debate. On the divergent (and
variant) paths of Scottish Romanticism, see especially Ian Duncan, with Leith Davis
and Janet Sorensen, ‘Introduction’, in ed. Duncan, Davis and Sorensen (eds), Scotland
and the Borders of Romanticism, (Cambridge, 2004), 1 – 19; cf. Murray Pittock, Scottish
and Irish Romanticism (Oxford, 2008), esp. 1 – 31.
8
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
117
With such a liberal Hand has Nature flung
Their Seeds abroad, blown them about in Winds,
Innumerous mix’d them with the nursing Mold,
The moistening Current, and prolifick Rain. [222 – 33]
The poem transports us with the botanist as he traverses dales, forests and
mountains. Unlike the previous passage, where we encounter sage and swain at
ground level, we now sweep across broad expanses of nature. Such movement
typifies The Seasons, which habitually varies our perspective, taking us from, say,
distant ‘Aspiring Cities’ buried by earthquakes and ‘Mountains in the flaming
Gulph’ across Africa to ‘nearer Scene[s]’ at home [Summer, 1100 – 02]. In
this respect, Thomson poetically articulates ideas which John Keill (the Scot
who was the first person to lecture on Newton at Oxford) shared in his 1721
Introduction to the True Astronomy:
That we may have a more Distinct knowledge of the Fabrick of the World,
and that the admirable Beauty of the Universe, and the harmonious Motions
of the Bodies therein contained may be more easily understood, it will be
requisite that that Divine and immense Fabrick should not be observed from
one Point or Corner only: … to have a true and just Notion of the World, we
must suppose it to be observed, in different Situations and Distances.11
As gifted as Newton, Robert Hooke and other Enlightenment-era
astronomers were, none illustrated this astronomic injunction as vividly as
Thomson. Indeed, Keill’s treatise amounted to an aesthetic imperative – a
desideratum for ‘suppose[d]’ observation – invoking the imaginative arts as the
visual complement to Newtonian science.
And yet, for Keill, the paradigm for astronomic ‘figure’ was not poetry as
much as geometry. In the preface to his lectures, Keill declared that astronomy
‘for the certainty and evidence of its Demonstrations is not inferiour to
Geometry; its usefulness is manifold, and the Amplitude of its Subject is so large
that it comprehends nothing less than the World itself ’ (ii-iii, Keill’s emphasis).
Astronomy was earth measurement (literally, geo-metria) in an encompassing
sense, casting its eye not only to nature but also to metaphysics, enabling us to
‘obtain at last a distinct Knowledge of this Immense Palace of God Almighty’
(17, Keill’s emphasis). Thomson imagined his work in similar terms, ranging
John Keill, An Introduction to the True Astronomy (London, 1721), 16 – 17, Keill’s
emphasis. On the oscillation between macroscopic and microscopic perspectives in
The Seasons, see Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and
the Mediation of History (Cambridge, 2004), 38 – 66.
11
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Matthew Wickman
poetically across the globe for the purpose of gaining ‘The Heights of Science
and of Virtue’ (Summer, 1741), but his model was less geometry than physicotheology, the pervasive eighteenth-century discourse ‘in which the discoveries
and conjectures of scientists [we]re used to demonstrate the existence and
benevolent attributes of God on the evidence of the created universe’.12
Physico-theology was a synthetic rather than a self-contained discipline,
intersecting with other ‘sciences’ and even with the pedagogical philosophy of
Scottish universities, which emphasised a philosophical union of disciplines.
Not coincidentally, Newton constituted the point of intersection between
these discourses – astronomy and geometry, physico-theology and pedagogy.
During Thomson’s years as a student at the University of Edinburgh, for
example, one of his teachers, Robert Stewart, ‘taught astronomy according
to Newton’s system and taught it in such a way as to demonstrate religious
truths’.13
The Seasons were thus Newtonian in ways which far surpass any mere
reference to rainbows. In the poem’s universe, the poet plays astronomer,
mathematical scientist and moral philosopher, all of whom are Newtonian.
But they are Newtonian in a curious way, as Thomson’s passage on the ‘living
Herbs’ attests, and as we will see below. This passage subtly modifies the
Newtonian principles it purportedly exemplifies, and in doing so it makes up a
fragment of a larger story which, as Keill intimates, is rooted neither in poetry
nor in science, but rather in geometry. In the seventeenth century, astronomers,
political economists, and natural and moral philosophers throughout Europe
became increasingly concerned with problems of measurement in applied
mathematics, and with the limitations of geometry in providing sufficiently
detailed data. Traditionally, geometry held pride of place in such applications,
in part because in sketching and logically deducing proportionate lengths it
skirted the philosophical conundrum of irrational numbers (for example,
of irreducible fractions and infinitely repeating decimals, neither of which
amounted to anything ‘whole’, or to any ‘one’ thing: the longstanding
metaphysical definition of existence). But in the seventeenth century, these
ontological qualms began fading before the practical necessity of amassing
increasingly detailed information about the globe – its relation to other celestial
James Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700 – 1748: A Life (Oxford, 1991), 52; cf. Alan Dugald
McKillop, The Background of Thomson’s Seasons (Hamden CT, 1961), 6 – 8.
13
Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700 – 1748, 13 – 14. For a recent discussion of eighteenthcentury pedagogy, see Susan Manning, ‘“Whether Utility or Pleasure be the Principal
Aim in View”: An Edinburgh Perspective on the Value of English Studies’, Scottish
Literary Review 1 (2009): 1 – 15 (2).
12
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
119
bodies, but also its amenability to markets and overseas exploration, the
viability of artillery systems and other ventures requiring numerical precision
over proportional elegance. The axial innovator here was Descartes, who, one
historian notes, resorted to algebra as a way ‘to free geometry from the use of
diagrams’ even as he attempted ‘to give meaning to the operations of algebra
through geometric interpretation’.14 Analytic geometry, as this new Cartesian
mathematics was called, effectively translated geometric figures into algebraic
form and vice versa, thus enabling the visual display of the types of complex
equations best suited to numbers and variables.
Today, geometry and algebra are so intertwined that their practitioners tend
to forget the historical and philosophical fault-line which once differentiated
them. But eighteenth-century Scottish mathematicians underscored these
divisions, symbolically if not always in practice. Geometry signified the modern
era’s link to the ‘classical’ past as well as the mind’s ability to sketch its own
thought processes and thus more fully connect reflection with perception.
Scottish mathematicians partly followed Newton’s lead here, though they
eventually pursued this line of reasoning to greater lengths, particularly
cultural lengths, than Newton ever conceived. Newton, an expert algebraist,
was something of a convert to geometry. In his eulogy of Newton, Bernard le
Bovier de Fontanelle reminded his readers that the young Newton had found
Euclid ‘too clear, too simple, too unworthy of taking up his time’, and had
‘leapt at once to such books as Descartes’s Géometrie and Kepler’s optics’.15
But Newton later expressed regret at ‘his mistake at the beginning of his
mathematical studies, in applying himself to the work of Descartes and other
algebraic writers’.16
The source of this regret may well have been Newton’s dispute with
Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of the calculus. It is difficult
to overstate the impact of calculus. Charting rates of movement over time,
and thus measuring change in items ranging from the motion of planets to
the movements of financial markets, the wide scope of modern phenomena
into which calculus figures leads some scholars to label it the most important
mathematical innovation in modern history.17 Technically, the calculus enabled
Carl B. Boyer, rev. by Uta C. Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, 2nd edn (Hoboken
NJ, 1968), 339.
15
Fontanelle, Eloge de Neuton (sic), cited in A. Rupert Hall (ed.), Isaac Newton: EighteenthCentury Perspectives, (Oxford, 1999: 59 – 74), 59.
16
Quoted in Hall, Isaac Newton, 79.
17
The mathematical scholars James M. Henle and Eugene M. Kleinberg assert that
‘[t]he history of modern mathematics is to an astonishing degree the history of
14
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Matthew Wickman
the calculation of areas under curves, translating geometric proportions into
numerical (and, invariably, algebraic) sequences of data. Newton’s ‘fluxional’
calculus specifically measured the varying speeds (or ‘fluctuations’) and
directions of moving points – points in motion which it portrayed as the basis
of lines, thus converting algebra back into geometric form. Newton’s feat
here was to resolve irrational numbers (with their infinite and unrepeating
decimals) into relative ‘wholes’ and then convert conglomerate series of these
numbers into the form of flowing lines. Leibniz, meanwhile, enunciated a
model known as the ‘differential’ calculus; while it too charted the motion
of points along a graph, Leibniz emphasized the algebraic articulation of the
infinitesimal differences between these points, and thus made little attempt to
square ‘analysis’ with traditional geometry. The differential calculus enjoyed
wider currency on the continent, and later advancements in the field built on
Leibniz’s system. While Newton was hardly forgotten in mathematical history,
the Leibnizian model became simple shorthand for the history of calculus.
These later developments were anything but evident in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when the quarrel between Newton and Leibniz devolved
into a national conflict. Scots played a key role in its escalation. According to
Rupert Hall, ‘[n]early all the [renowned British] mathematicians of this time’,
and ‘nearly all the ardent Newtonians … were Scots: David Gregory, [John]
Craige, [Archibald] Pitcairne, [George] Cheyne, the Keill brothers [John and
James], James Stirling, Matthew Stewart, [and] Colin Maclaurin’.18 But history
has not always – nor even often – been kind to these intellectuals. Newton’s
biographer Richard S. Westfall labels Keill, for instance, ‘a crude and abusive
man who did Newton’s cause much harm before the learned world, which
quickly learned to despise him’.19 And more generally, Scottish mathematicians
are seen to have presided over an era in which ‘British mathematics fell behind
that of Continental Europe’, precisely on account of their collective adherence
to geometry.20
the calculus. The calculus was the first great achievement of mathematics since the
Greeks and it dominated mathematical exploration for centuries. The questions it
answered and the questions it raised lay at the heart of man’s understanding not only
of geometry and number, but also space and time and mathematical truth … The
methods it developed gave the physical sciences an impetus without parallel in history,
for through them natural science was born … ’ Infinitesimal Calculus (Cambridge, MA,
1979), 3.
18
A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War: The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge,
1980), 161, 134.
19
Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980), 721.
20
Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 414.
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
121
And yet, this latter truism bears closer inspection. Helena M. Pycior
observes that there were two basic schools of thought in eighteenth-century
Scotland regarding algebraic innovation. The first, personified by Robert
Simson, longtime professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow (from
1711 – 61), was generally inimical, while the other, headed by Colin Maclaurin,
professor of mathematics at Marischal College and then at the University
of Edinburgh (and the author of the important Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s
Philosophical Discoveries [1748] and the rigorous Treatise of Fluxions [1742]),
embraced geometry but also engaged readily with algebra.21 In the former case,
the resistance to algebra was motivated in large part by the conviction that
‘many Propositions, which appear conspicuous in [Euclid, are] knotty [ … ] and
scarcely intelligible to Learners by [the] Algebraical Way of Demonstration’.
This was because geometry shows ‘Evidence by the Contemplations of
Figures’, as opposed to the ‘Symbols, Notes, or obscure Principles’ one finds
in algebra.22 Maclaurin, meanwhile, aimed to defend Newton’s own ambivalent
(i.e. geometric and algebraic) mathematical enterprise against such detractors
as George Berkeley (who wrote a scathing treatise, The Analyst [1734],
denouncing the fluxions) and the disciples of Leibniz on the Continent. In
neither instance, crucially, was the debate over geometry really about geometry.
For Simson, the anxiety over symbols amounted to a philosophical (or, today,
what we would call a phenomenological) argument about experience, or about
the relationship between reflection and perception.23 For Maclaurin, geometry
touched on a national ontology, specifically concerning the ‘being’ of Scottish
identity – ‘British’ in declaring solidarity with Newton and ‘Scottish’ in retaining
a connection with a classical (that is, a pre-modern, pre-Unionized) past and
its intellectual traditions.24 Geometry in eighteenth-century Scotland, in other
Helena M. Pycior, Symbols, Impossible Numbers, and Geometric Entanglements: British Algebra
through the Commentaries on Newton’s Universal Arithmetick (Cambridge, 1997), 242 – 43.
22
Keill, ‘A Preface, shewing the Usefulness and Excellency of this work’, in Euclid’s Elements
of Geometry, from the Latin Translation of Commandine (London, 1746), no pagination.
23
The early nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher William Hamilton stated this
principle most clearly: ‘the mathematical process in the symbolical [i.e. the algebraic]
method is like running a railroad through a tunnelled mountain; that in the ostensive
[i.e. the geometric] like crossing the mountain on foot. The former carries us, by a
short and easy transit, to our destined point, but in miasma, darkness and torpidity;
whereas the latter allows us to reach it only after time and trouble, but feasting us
at each turn with glances of the earth and the heavens, while we inhale the pleasant
breeze, and gather new strength at every effort we put forth’. William Hamilton’s
1838 Letter to the Provost, quoted in George Elder Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland
and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1981; 1961), 127.
24
On the ‘classical’ tradition in Scottish education, see Davie, The Democratic Intellect,
21
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Matthew Wickman
words, was a cultural rather than simply a mathematical battleground, and the
mistake in perceiving it as retrograde is a function of seeing it too narrowly.
I do not have the space in this essay to elaborate on this culture war other
than to remark that the phenomenological and nationalist dimensions of
geometry pervade Scottish Enlightenment discourse, from moral and natural
philosophy to aesthetics and historiography. Lord Kames’s 1762 Elements of
Criticism, for example, took its name from Euclid; Adam Smith explained
sympathy through geometric metaphors of pitch and proportion; and
geometry informed the elementary notion of common sense as a philosophy
of relations, and thus achieved a prominent place not only in Thomas Reid’s
Inquiry into the Human Mind (and its forward-looking ‘geometry of visibles’, a
thought experiment involving the curvature of space), but also, as I suggested
above, in the pedagogical philosophy which permeated Scottish universities
well into the nineteenth century.25 Geometric thinking informed or even helped
shape literature and the ways we imagine it. Critics speak of (non-) linear
narratives and the emergent (i.e., the eighteenth-century) ‘space’ of literature
at the margins of factual discourses.26 Poems like The Seasons were even more
literal, effectively translating spatial perspective into literary form through their
presentation of elaborate scenes of nature accentuated by simple rhetorical
pointing devices (‘Now see … ’ ‘Here … ’ ‘There … ’). Moreover, Thomson
appeared expressly to embrace a fluxional poetics, as in his elegiac Poem Sacred
to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, published shortly after Newton’s death in
1727. There, Thomson extolled Newton as the physicist of gravity and the
guru of fluxions, slighting the Cartesian theory of vortices by declaring ‘[t]he
heavens [ … ] all [Newton’s] own, from the wide rule / Of whirling vortices
and circling spheres / To their first great simplicity restor’d’.27
169 – 200 and Craig Beveridge and Ronnie Turnbull, Scotland After Enlightenment: Image
and Tradition in Modern Scottish Culture (Edinburgh, 1997), 135 – 52.
25
See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie
(Indianapolis, 1982), 18 – 23 and Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles
of Common Sense, in The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. William Hamilton, 2 vols. (Boston,
2005), 1, 147 – 52.
26
On the spatial relegation of literary romance to the Scottish Highlands in the
eighteenth century, see my The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s “Romantick” Highlands and
the Birth of the Modern Witness (Philadelphia, 2007), esp. chs. 1 and 2.
27
A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton in Poems (London, 1730), ll. 82 – 4.
Thomson’s friend and University of Edinburgh classmate David Mallet expressly
contemplates Newton’s theory of gravity and, tacitly, fluxions in his poem The
Excursion: ‘with transport I survey / The firmament, and these her rolling worlds, /
Their magnitudes, and motions … ’ The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper,
21 vols., ed. Alexander Chalmers (orig. pub. 1810; New York, 1969), 14, 22.
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
123
That does not mean, however, that Thomson’s poetry is straightforwardly
Newtonian. In the passage concerning the ‘living Herbs’, for example, our
supposedly fluxional sweep of vision is actually less fluid than saccadic,
or sporadic, with each location momentarily holding the gaze through
its corresponding description – the ‘silent Search’ along the dale, ‘the dull
Incurious Weeds’ that encumber our progress through the forest, and so on.
While it is true, as John Sitter argues, that ‘the scene unfolds sequentially’, the
poetic observer does not flow across a sinuous landscape as much as subtly
mark a series of points differentiating them.28 In this respect, motion here
is more rectilinear than curvilinear, which in eighteenth-century fluxional
treatises was a hallmark of algebraic analysis. Hence, in appearing more
‘differential’ than ‘fluxional’, Thomson’s passage also seems more Leibnizian
than Newtonian. The connection here to the calculus is analogical, though
it hardly seems incidental. Consider the presence in Thomson’s passage of
numerical complexity: the botanist attempts to ‘rank’ and ‘account’ for the
various floral species, but nature’s sheer profusion, its ‘liberal Hand’, makes this
an impossible exercise, flinging the ‘Innumerous’ seeds into the ‘Winds’ where
they ‘mix[]’ with soil, currents and rain, and eventually recede from view into
an unbounded expanse. In this way, the scene foreshadows what Kant would
later call the ‘mathematical sublime’, as that which initially seems countable
ascends into virtual infinity, where it escapes our (geometric) purview. Ralph
Cohen argues that such sublime passages reflect Thomson’s theology, which
holds that a ‘sensuous, creative nature beyond the ability of man even to
catalog is the consequence of the fall of man’ – that mortality, limiting us to
place and time, hampers our ability to comprehend the full extent of God’s
creative design.29 But Cohen’s lapsarian point is also an implicitly mathematical
one, for conceptual tools like infinite series and differentials reinscribe our
fallen condition even as they compensate for it: they enable us to formulate
simulacra of what we cannot see, but as Simson would remark, they also curtail
the authority of our experience. Thomson’s ‘nature’ thus eludes us precisely,
he implies, when we begin cultivating it, measuring it – mastering it through
our ‘industry’ and for our use.30
In this respect, this passage in The Seasons following the paean to
Newton – literally, the poetic moment ‘after’ ‘NEWTON’ – probes the limits
John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 178.
Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of The Seasons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970), 30.
30
Jonathan Bate overlooks this point in his brief mention of The Seasons in his ecocritical treatise The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 100.
28
29
124
Matthew Wickman
of the geometry it appears otherwise to expound: it reflects critically, we might
say, on what Keill would label its own powers of figuration, of imagination.
In transporting its numberless seeds to places we no longer behold, and which
we can only vaguely measure as abstractions, Thomson’s ‘nature’ surpasses
the geometrical horizons which the Scots defended in Newton. Hence, at this
moment of Newtonian celebration in The Seasons, the Newton-inspired union
of ancient and modern, shape and symbol already begins to turn against itself.
In this, Thomson’s transmutation of the Newtonian project was no
different in spirit from what the more rigorous mathematical Newtonians
were themselves doing.31 David B. Wilson describes Keill’s Newtonianism
as ‘Aristotelian’ in its defense of the ‘forms’ and infinite divisibility of
matter; Maclaurin’s, meanwhile, was ‘Cartesian’ in deploying Descartes’s own
methodological techniques to argue for rather than against the independent
existence of matter.32 Newton, in other words, became an object as well as
the agent of innovation in Scotland – a compelling development when one
considers Newton’s role in shaping the modern world. One prominent line of
argument in Newtonian studies is that the ‘Newtonian universe, organized by
Newton’s physics and celestial mechanics, permitted an entirely new approach
to nature’; it fostered innovation in the applied as well as the theoretical
sciences.33 With the gradual implementation of Newtonian curricula in
universities across Europe ‘a new “technical literacy” came into being along
with the new manufacturing technologies’, accompanying ‘the ability to make
mathematical calculations of increasing sophistication and the ability to
read and understand technical drawings and models’. Such thinking fueled
industrialisation as well as astronomy. Scotland bears a prominent if (as I
am suggesting) still inadequately understood pride of place in this line of
thought. In the eighteenth century, reputedly, the locus of this ‘constellation
of innovat[ion] … might have been in Edinburgh’ given the rigorous nature
of Newtonian instruction in the university.34 Then again, one might make
an equally compelling case for Glasgow’s centrality, given the influence of
the students who matriculated there, including the chemist Joseph Black, the
natural philosophers John Robison and John Anderson (the latter of whom,
This is an argument I develop at greater length in a forthcoming book.
See Wilson, Seeking Nature’s Logic: Natural Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment
(University Park PA, 2009), 44 – 59.
33
Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism
(Atlantic Highlands NJ, 1995), 1.
34
Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of
Industry and Empire, 1687 – 1851 (Cambridge MA, 2004), 131, 120.
31
32
Scottish Newtonianism and Modern(ist) History
125
in 1796, founded Anderson’s Institution, the world’s first technical college
which evolved into the University of Strathclyde), and James Watt, whose
application of Newtonian mechanics in developing the steam engine enabled
the Industrial Revolution.35
But my point is not that this or that place in Scotland was more at some
Newtonian vanguard than others, but rather that the Newtonian thought
which established itself throughout the West was already, in Scotland, a source
of creative adaptation. This is true even though, or perhaps especially because,
such adaptation took such ‘old’ forms as geometry. The nineteenth-century
physicist James Clerk Maxwell, for example, was an expert geometer as a boy.
And when he and his peers reformulated the foundations of the universe in
replacing Newton’s physics of force with a model based in a theory of energy,
he did so in part by adapting Newton’s Three Laws of physics to radically
new ends. As new as these principles were, they were in this respect a late
manifestation of what was already a rich tradition.36
University of Aberdeen
Wilson, Seeking Nature’s Logic, 69 – 70.
Scotland was thus born as a ‘modern’ nation in the very process of modifying what
we take modernity to be. Hence, and to return to the place from whence we started,
when Muir imagines Scotland as a privileged site of the future anterior, or of the past
which the modern world has yet to become, he is merely (if unwittingly) enunciating
the latest chapter of an ‘enlightened modernism’ with a long and complex history.
35
36
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
Tom McInally
George Gordon was born at Coffurach near Fochabers in Morayshire on
15 June 1712. The Gordons of Coffurach were gentry and a cadet branch
of the ducal house of that name. Like their cousin, Alexander second Duke
of Gordon, they were Catholic and in order to receive a higher education
it was necessary for them to go abroad. George’s elder brother, Alexander,
attended the Scots College in Paris and in 1724 at the age of twelve George
was sent to the Schottenkloster in Regensburg. In the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries Scottish Catholics had founded four colleges on the
continent – Douai (in the Spanish Netherlands), Rome, Paris and Madrid – to
allow young men to be educated in the Catholic tradition when the Penal
Laws forbade such education in Scotland. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century the Scots Benedictine monastery in Regensburg was also designated
a college and seminary. The Regensburg monastery was one of three Scottish
Benedictine houses in Southern Germany – the others were in Würzburg
and Erfurt – which were known as Schottenkloster. During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries when the Penal Laws against Catholics were being applied
more than 2000 Scots were educated at the colleges and Schottenkloster.1
When George Gordon arrived in Regensburg the abbot, Bernard Baillie,
was so impressed with the young boy’s abilities that he organized a special
educational programme for him. He was sent to study at colleges in Austria,
Italy and France2 where he received a fuller education than would have been
possible at the monastic school. He returned to Regensburg in 1732 to
start his Benedictine novitiate taking as his given name Andreas, the name
In addition to the facilities abroad the Church attempted to maintain small junior
colleges in isolated parts of the highlands. Harassment by State authorities meant
that frequently they had to close or move location. The most successful one at Scalan
in upper Glenlivet was burnt to the ground in 1746 as part of the reprisals in the
aftermath of the Jacobite rising. The college was reopened in 1750 and functioned
until the opening of the legal college at Aquhorties in 1799.
2
In Paris he met up with his brother, Alexander, who was still studying at the Scots
college. In 1735 Alexander became prefect of studies at the college in Paris before
being appointed as rector in 1738 of the illegal seminary at Scalan.
1
128
Tom McInally
by which he became famous. There he studied under Gallus Lieth who had
recently resigned his professorship at the University of Erfurt. Lieth taught
the scholastic tradition of philosophy which must have been frustrating
for Gordon. The young man had already been exposed to the ideas of the
German philosopher, Christian Wolff, who had rejected Aristotelian strictures
and any other received wisdom which could not be verified by practical
experiment. Wolff ’s views had caused much controversy and led to attacks
by his co-religionists. He had been ousted from his professorship at Halle, in
Prussia, in1723 by ultra-Lutheran Pietist professors of that university and had
been forced to flee to the University of Marburg in Hesse-Kassel. Despite
being a renowned scholar Wolff needed both academic allies and political
protection to continue to teach until he was able to return to Halle in 1740. His
experience was not unique. Enlightenment movements throughout Europe had
to deal with entrenched conservative interests. Orthodox Lutheran and Jesuit
universities espoused Aristotelian Humanism and adhered to debating theory
in preference to engaging in scientific enquiry through practical experiment.
When Andreas Gordon later in 1743 rejected this strict Scholasticism he too
came under severe criticism. However while studying with Lieth in Regensburg
he conformed to the conventional thinking of his teacher.
Andreas completed his formal education by taking a degree in law at the
University of Salzburg gaining distinction and on graduation in 1737 he was
appointed at the age of 25 to a chair of philosophy at the University of Erfurt.
His appointment was possible because of the degree of control which the Scots
Benedictines had gained over that university’s senate. Over four decades prior
to Gordon’s arrival the Scots of the Erfurt Schottenkloster had worked with the
senate of the university to mutual advantage. The Scots had provided financial
assistance, significantly improved the library and allowed the university the use
of a number of the monastery buildings. In return the Scots had by right two
chairs reserved exclusively for them with membership of the senate. At the
time of Gordon’s appointment, the prior of the Schottenkloster, Hieronymus
Panton was university principal and the Scots had a firm hold on the activities
of the senate.
On arrival Gordon would have found that the monastery buildings housed
the university’s “Cabinet of Physics”.3 This appears to have stimulated Gordon’s
The “Cabinet of Physics” was a collection of scientific instruments used in
experimentation and demonstrations. Pradel Johan, ‘Studium und wissenschaftliches
Streben’, Erfurt, 1924. (A copy of this pamphlet which describes the conditions at
the Schottenkloster in Erfurt at this time and the work of the Scots is in Scottish Catholic
3
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
129
interest in investigating practical problems.4 Although there is no direct proof,
the “Cabinet of Physics” probably contained an electrostatic globe of the type
developed by Otto von Güricke in the previous century. Whatever provided
the stimulus Gordon devoted his energies to the nascent science of electricity
which he turned into his lifetime’s work making an international reputation in
the process. The science, such as it was, had scarcely progressed beyond the
work of von Güricke and Isaac Newton.5 The globe which von Güricke had
devised was made of sulphur and was capable of being electrically charged
through friction. The charge generated was only strong enough to create
electrostatic attraction for small particles. Von Güricke claimed that he had
demonstrated a force of gravity. This claim appears to have aroused Newton’s
interest and he made suggestions as to how von Güricke’s device could be
improved. The Newton/Hauksbee globe which resulted was made of glass
and had similar limitations but was capable of generating more powerful
discharges in the form of sparks. Gordon showed his practical ingenuity by
improving on these early devices. He designed and built a machine capable
of developing and sustaining enough of an electrostatic potential to produce
continuous discharges. His friction generator consisted of a glass cylinder
measuring 4 inches in diameter and 8 inches in height which was rotated
on an axle suspended on a frame and driven by a flywheel of much larger
size thus allowing the glass cylinder to be spun at very high speeds. As the
cylinder attained its maximum speed of 680 rpm brushing against a spring
Archives, KC 42 – 3)
Initially Gordon worked on the “Florentine Thermometer”. This instrument which
had been developed in Florence in the 1650s used alcohol to measure temperature
and was unreliable due to the fact that alcohol’s coefficient of expansion is not
constant, thereby giving variable readings particularly at low temperatures. Gordon
had done little more than describe the problem (his work on this was published
posthumously in 1753) before Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, a German glass-blower
and instrument maker working in Holland, had produced a reliable mercury based
thermometer. This experience helped Gordon to appreciate that practical problems
required practical approaches to achieve solutions.
5
Güricke had produced static electrical charges on a revolving sulphur globe. He
believed he was demonstrating how gravity worked when small particles were
attracted to the globe. Newton conducted no experiments although he suggested
an improvement in von Güricke’s equipment by making the globe of glass. Francis
Hauksbee improved on Newton’s ideas in 1709. Newton’s interest was aroused by
electricity being another example of a “force acting at a distance” which he had
espoused in the case of gravity but had been unable to explain. When Gordon first
became interested there had been little progress on these matters and critics claimed
that electricity was no more than a philosopher’s toy. The challenge was to develop a
deeper understanding of the nature of electricity through practical experimentation.
4
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Tom McInally
loaded leather pad it became electrically charged and produced a continuous
discharge along a copper wire. Gordon’s friction machine had the additional
advantage of being portable and therefore could be set up in lecture rooms as
well as in the laboratory.
With this equipment, which he had devised by the time of his first university
session at Erfurt in 1737 – 38, Gordon created a whole series of experiments
illustrating a number of aspects of the nature of electricity. He organized his
lectures to include demonstrations and invited his audience to participate. One
of his earliest experiments was to form a chain of people holding hands. He
then electrified the chain such that its participants could not free themselves.
This not only astounded everyone but also caused great amusement among the
onlookers. A second early experiment consisted of attaching a cable to small
animals or birds and electrocuting them. His generator was powerful enough
to kill the animal even when the cable was more that 150 metres long. These
experiments were highly popular and attracted greatly increased numbers
of students. This was financially beneficial to the university and Gordon’s
standing in the senate grew. He reinforced his success by publishing detailed
accounts of his friction machine and the experiments he was conducting using
it. In this he followed Wolff ’s strictures by publishing in Latin for scholars and
again in German for “a further readership”. His fame spread internationally
and he was invited to repeat his demonstrations at the courts of Gotha and
Weimar. Gordon’s experiments were studied and copied by many who were
not privileged to witness his demonstrations. The books in which he described
in detail his apparatus, methodology and findings were written specifically so
that others would be able to replicate his results and were widely distributed
and ran to several editions.
Philosophers interested in developing knowledge in the phenomena
of electricity engaged him in correspondence. Abbé Jean Antoine Nollet,
a member of the French Academy of Sciences, befriended Gordon and
replicated a number of the young Scot’s experiments.6 Other scientists were
copying extensively from Gordon’s published work. Public demonstrations
were financially profitable and Gordon’s experiments were repeated for
that reason alone. However at the opening conference of the Academy of
In 1746 he made his own electric machine which adapted Gordon’s design to
accommodate a range of larger glass spheres generating even stronger discharges.
Nollet repeated the human chain experiment with 200 Carthusian monks holding
hands. However his machine did not displace Gordon’s design as it was extremely
cumbersome and could not be easily transported.
6
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
131
Sciences in Berlin in 1744 Christian Friedrich Ludolff gave a demonstration
of an earlier experiment of Gordon’s in which he used a spark to ignite the
fumes from a bowl of warmed alcohol. Ludolff claimed that this proved
that electricity was a form of fire.7 In making this claim he was asserting
that electricity conformed to Aristotle’s categorisation of the four elements.
Gordon rejected this claim and set out to show that it was wrong. He refined
his original experiment by electrically charging a fine jet of water and aiming it
at the bowl of alcohol. The fumes again caught fire but in Aristotelian terms
this was a paradox since water could not be an agent of fire. Andreas Gordon
published his experimental findings in his book Oratio de philosophia nova veteri
praeferenda in 1745. In presenting them he stressed that advances in knowledge
of natural philosophy could only be gained by the application of mathematics
to experimentation.
The same year he followed this volume with another book of experiments,
Versuch einer Erklärung der Electricität, (Erfurt, 1745). In this work he renewed
his attack on Aristotelianism in a brilliantly devised experiment in which he
pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the study of electricity while
confounding Scholastic ideas. He had constructed an apparatus in which two
bells were given opposite electrical charges. Between them was suspended a
metal clapper insulated on a silken cord. On contact with the first bell the
clapper took on its charge and simultaneously was repelled by the first bell and
attracted to the oppositely charged second bell. On contact with it the clapper
took on its charge and returned to strike the first bell again. The clapper was
thereby being attracted to each bell in turn. The bells rang continuously for
as long as the current was applied. This device which came to be known as
“German Chimes” and later “Franklin’s Bells” was the first device which
could convert electrical energy into mechanical energy. Although this was a
spectacular demonstration in itself Gordon’s principal purpose was to show
an application of “a force acting at a distance” which could not be explained
away in Aristotelian terms. Aristotle’s philosophy had denied the existence
of such a force. Aristotelians claimed that all actions were explicable by the
inherent nature of matter itself and manifestations of gravity, such as a falling
apple, were caused by the object possessing the quality of gravity. (Similarly
a piece of wood floated in water because it possessed the quality of levity.)
His fellow German scientist and great rival, Professor Georg M Bose of Leipzig
University, made the same claim and stated that he had discovered this before
Ludolff through having set his laboratory on fire on a number of occasions by
accidental electrical discharges.
7
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Tom McInally
The object, therefore, had the potential to move without any external force
being placed upon it and it was unnecessary to postulate that the cause was a
force acting on it from a distance. Gordon’s experiment of the ringing bells
in which the metal clapper continuously changed position many times per
second reduced the Aristotelian explanation to nonsense.
This rejection of Scholasticism aroused the hostility of members of the
Society of Jesus8 whose antagonism to Gordon was based as much on being
made to look foolish as on having their philosophy refuted.9 In 1747 a Jesuit
professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg, Petrus Eisentraut,
attacked Gordon’s ideas in his book Dissertationes Philosophicae Quator de
Electricitate. A public dispute developed the following year when Gordon
replied with his publication Epistola ad Amicum Wirceburgi. Gordon had made
dangerous enemies who continued to attack him but he had also received
international recognition for his work. In 1745 he was made a member of
the Academy of Perugia and in 1748 he was appointed a member of the
French Academy; Nollet having proposed him for this accolade.10 However,
the Jesuits persisted in their attacks. Another Würzburg professor, Lucas
Opfermann, went as far as accusing Gordon of heresy.11 Fortunately, Gordon
had friends who stood by him. The senate of his university both Catholic and
Lutheran fully supported him and he also had influential allies in those of his
Benedictine brethren both Scottish and German who formed the Disputation
College of academics (headquartered in St Emmeram’s college in Regensburg)
The hostility was restricted to members of the German Province of the Society.
French and Italian Jesuits took a more relaxed view of this experimentation.
9
There is little doubt that Gordon took pleasure in making fun of his critics. A story is
told of an observer at one of Gordon’s lectures who questioned the value of studying
electricity; claiming that it was no more than entertainment. Gordon responded that
one of its benefits was to greatly improve one’s sense of smell and that he could
demonstrate such to him. The critic accepted the offer and Gordon poured some
brandy into a spoon which he then held for him to smell. The spoon was electrified
while Gordon was standing on an insulating pad. When the heckler breathed in the
fumes the current discharged through his nose with chastening results. It is clear
from this example that Gordon could be merciless with his critics. J. J. Heilbron
Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, (Berkeley, 1979), 273.
10
Fischer Ernst Ludwig, The Scots in Germany (Edinburgh, 1974; 1902), 218. The French
Academy by law was prohibited from appointing more than six non-French nationals
at any one time. In light of this Gordon’s appointment was extremely prestigious.
11
In Philosophia scholasticorum defense contra oratorem academicum Erfordiensem. The accusation
was that in disputing inherent qualities of matter he was attacking the doctrine of
transubstantiation. He was being accused of the same heresy as Galileo had been a
century earlier.
8
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
133
which was a forerunner of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Gordon
had been a founding member of this organisation. His most effective defence,
however, came from the Pope. Benedict XIV was personally interested in
science and the arts and was an acknowledged liberal in Enlightenment terms.
As a young man he had been befriended by the eminent scholar, Bernard de
Montfauçon, who encouraged him in Enlightenment thought, and when the
new philosophers in Germany were attacked by the Jesuits, Benedict sided
with the philosophers. In 1747 he wrote in defence of Johann Adam von
Ickstatt, professor of philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, saying that
his teaching was irreproachable and entirely correct in faith. This defence was
extended by argument to all like minded philosophes including Gordon.
Even in the face of this opposition the German Jesuits did not give up
the fight. The matter generated a considerable amount of rancour and was
almost out of control when the archbishop of Mainz, exerted his authority
and imposed an interdict on all the parties to the dispute from issuing any
further public communications on the subject. But in 1749 Josef Pfriemb,
the Jesuit professor of Ethics and Physics at the University of Mainz, went
public with another attack on Gordon. Immediately Pfriemb was removed
from his post and transferred to the University of Bamberg. From that point
onwards Gordon was free to continue research, teaching and publication of
his findings for the remainder of his short life.
As well as researching the phenomenon of “action at a distance” Gordon
was interested in another scientific preoccupation of the time, that of
developing a “perpetual motion machine”. In the same book as he published
his experiment of “Gordon’s Bells” he captured the imagination of the
scientific community by describing an experiment involving a device known
as “the electric whirl”. This consisted of a metal wheel, like a star, with several
points around its circumference which came into contact with an electrically
charged conductor. As each point in turn touched the conductor it received
an electrical discharge which caused the wheel to rotate and brought the next
point on its circumference into contact with the conductor thus causing the
wheel to spin continuously. This apparatus is the earliest example ever of an
electric motor; specifically it was an electrostatic reduction motor. The forces
were too weak to do much more than turn the wheel itself and therefore
the device could not be put to practical use.12 A better understanding of
Paradoxically, reduction motors are now used in highly sophisticated control systems in
a number of complex electrical devices including transformers and missile guidance
systems. The inherent weakness of the low current produced is an advantage in
12
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Tom McInally
electromagnetism and particularly the invention of the induction coil were
needed before a more powerful electric motor could be built. This was
achieved by Faraday a century after Gordon’s experiment. Nevertheless, the
invention considerably enhanced Gordon’s reputation.13
Other experimenters took advantage of Gordon’s pioneering work but
many did not follow his openness in publishing full details of their work.
Professional vanity together with the financial benefit of devising new
demonstrations led them to keep significant aspects secret so that others could
not copy their experiments. Bose, Musschenbroek and von Kleist were among
those guilty of such actions. While following one of Gordon’s experiments
each of these researchers independently discovered an effect which led to
what is arguably the greatest advance in electrical science in the eighteenth
century. In 1746 Peter Musschenbroek, a Dutch physicist at the University
of Leiden, demonstrated to a friend, Andreas Cunneus, Gordon’s experiment
in which he electrified water in a jar which then was capable of generating
sparks. Afterwards, while alone, Cunneus tried to copy the experiment and
mistakenly held the jar in his hand. He received an enormous electric shock.
When he told his friend, Musschenbroek realized that the jar itself could store
electricity. Recognising the significance of this fact he published his discovery
and was given credit as the inventor. The device, named a Leyden Jar by Nollet
in honour of Musschenbroek’s university, was the first condenser/capacitor to
be developed. Ewald Georg von Kleist and Professor Bose belatedly claimed
making the same discovery earlier than Musschenbroek, again by repeating
Gordon’s experiment, but in keeping with the secrecy which prevailed they
had not disclosed it to anyone. It appears clear that Gordon’s openness with
his findings inspired a number of fellow philosophers to work on similar lines
of research.
Andreas Gordon did not spend much time following up Musschenbroek’s
work. Progress in the better comprehension of the nature of electricity was
thereby delayed. It was to take researchers many years through trial and error
before a full understanding of the working of the Leyden Jar was made and its
these circumstances. The current does not create an electromagnetic field capable
of interfering with the signals being measured. Gordon had invented a solution for
which there was no problem in his lifetime.
13
Prior to being made a member of the Academy of Perugia and the French Academy
of Sciences other honours had been proposed to Gordon. In 1742 he was offered
the position of librarian by the archbishop of Krakow and in 1743 on the death of
Abbot Baillie his brother Benedictines asked him to become abbot of Regensburg.
He declined each of these preferring to continue his researches at Erfurt.
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
135
effectiveness as a condenser achieved. A series of failures to understand the
processes that were being observed hampered developments. Even as late as
the 1770s Benjamin Franklin was still making suggestions for improvement.
Gordon’s limited work on the new discovery is not difficult to understand.
His energies were being engaged in the dispute with his Jesuit critics and
in addition, he was suffering from failing health. By 1750 he was showing
clear signs of the tuberculosis which eventually killed him and he had ceased
research into electricity altogether. He confined his efforts to writing up the
scientific investigations he had already undertaken but when he died in 1751
at the age of 39 he had not finished his final book. His fellow Benedictine
and professor at Erfurt, Bernard Grant, completed and published Elementa
Physica Experimentalis in 1753. At the same time his former pupil, Ildephonse
Kennedy, wrote that his friend’s death had been hastened by the attacks of the
Jesuits.14
Gordon’s contribution to the early development of the science of
electricity was undoubtedly substantial and groundbreaking. How then can
one account for his relative obscurity today. A number of factors played a part.
After his death Gordon’s work continued to be copied but few gave credit
to the Scotsman. Despite the fact that his experiments were all published,
few researchers acknowledged any of his contributions to the science which
they used. Only Nollet appears to have tried to give appropriate recognition
to his friend. Franklin used Gordon’s Bells as part of his experimentation
into lightning referring to them only as “German Chimes”. Subsequently they
have become known as “Franklin’s Bells” without any acknowledgement of
their true inventor. It is perhaps easy to understand why intellectual rivalries
among his contemporaries and successors contributed to Gordon’s being
ignored but lack of recognition in Scotland probably has more to do with the
fact that he was a Scottish Benedictine monk working in Germany at a time
when Catholicism was outlawed in his own country and Catholics were subject
to penal laws.15 Nevertheless acknowledgement of Gordon’s contributions
Hammermeyer Ludwig, ‘Aufklärung in Katholischen Deutschland des 18 Jahunderts’,
Jahrbuch- Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte, Vol. IV (1975), 102.
15
Joseph Priestley’s The History and Present State of Electricity, with original experiments
(London, 1767), was the standard history of electricity for over a century after its
publication. In it Priestley mentions Gordon’s role in developing the friction machine
and his earliest experiments with animals and electrification of water in jars but
makes no mention of how his experiments influenced other researchers. This was
possibly due to lack of information since he was writing twenty years after Gordon’s
great experiments when competing claims for prominence in the advancement of
14
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Tom McInally
could be expected in his adopted country of Germany but even here it has
been limited. The University of Efurt was rightly proud of its distinguished
professor but in 1803 Prussia annexed Erfurt and the surrounding Thuringian
state. The Prussians closed the three hundred year old university and it was not
re-founded until the 1990s after the fall of Communism and the re-unification
of Germany. The new institution is still engaged in re-establishing itself as
a fully functioning university. Nevertheless Erfurt has honoured Gordon.
In 1900 the city commemorated its famous Scotsman by naming its new
technical college the Andreas Gordon Schule. The college continues to prosper
today, running degree level courses in a wide range of subjects including,
appropriately, electrical and electronic engineering.
An eponymous college in the city of his triumphs is a deserved but limited
reward for Gordon’s significant contributions to the Enlightenment in general
and science in particular. His legacy includes three specific achievements which
deserve better recognition. First is the major contribution which he made to
the science of electricity. Unlike a number of his contemporaries he did not
simply seek to entertain with diverting displays of electrical effect – although
he certainly did that. He also sought to explain what he saw. In this, like
everyone else prior to James Clerk Maxwell a century and a half later, he was
unsuccessful except that he argued passionately that Aristotle’s philosophy
could not accommodate the new science. By the time he died he had won that
argument.
Secondly Gordon helped grow a tradition in which Scottish Catholics
played major roles in education in Germany. This involvement did not begin
with Gordon but he ushered in its most important period. By training and
inspiring a group of young Scotsmen his influence lasted beyond throughout
the rest of the eighteenth and even into the nineteenth century. In the 1750s
his pupils Ildephonse Kennedy and Benedict Arbuthnot helped found the
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and contributed to science with their researches
into chemistry, mathematics, anthropology and genetics.16 Kennedy was
appointed the academy’s secretary and held the post for forty years. Apart from
continuing his old mentor’s practice of public lectures and demonstrations he
also translated scientific papers written by British scientists such as Joseph
the science were being made by many. Priestley himself was also heavily engaged in
experimentation into electricity.
16
Hammermeyer Ludwig, ‘Academiae Scientiarum Boicae Secreterius Perpetuus:
Ildephons Kennedy O.S.B. (1722 – 1804)’, Kuhn Ortwin Ed., Grossbritannien und
Deutschland (Munich, 1974) 197.
George Gordon: the Scot who refuted Aristotle
137
Black and published them in order to ensure that German scientists were kept
informed of the latest developments in commercially important technologies.17
Scottish Benedictine involvement in German academic life was reduced when
religious institutions were secularized in the first decade of the nineteenth
century but it did not end immediately. Its last great flowering came with the
Scots astronomer, John Lamont, who studied at the Regensburg Schottenkloster.
Lamont went on to be appointed Bavarian Astronomer Royal in 1852 and was
created a count by the king of Bavaria, dying in his adopted country in 1879.
Scottish contributions could be said to have continued even afterwards with
Lamont’s bequest of his considerable wealth to found scholarships in science.
Andreas Gordon’s third contribution to the Enlightenment and arguably
his finest was the manner in which he conducted his research and disseminated
his findings. His complete candour and willingness to inform others is
impressive: his work was shared with the wider community of philosophers;
his observations were from practical experiment; measurements and detailed
notes were taken; all experiments were repeatable resulting in replication of the
same findings. All this was achieved at a time when most of his contemporaries
acted out of personal gain and professional hubris. This marks Gordon as a
philosopher in a new mould dedicated to the advancement of science in a
spirit of cooperation.
University of Aberdeen
Eric Forbes, ‘Ildephonse Kennedy, O.S.B. (1722 – 1804) and the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences’, Innes Review, Vol. 32, p. 93.
17