The Scottish Enlightenment

1. Scope and evidence: a European movement in Scotland

The Jacobite Risings & Culloden and the Scottish Enlightenment are parallel threads of the same century, not successive stages in which conflict suddenly gave way to reason. This History card surveys the movement’s institutions, social conditions and legacy. Individual arguments belong to the Ideas series; the Highland Clearances and Industrial Scotland have their own cards.

The core facts of this card are Established: the dates, works, institutions and biographies rest on abundant primary sources and a mature scholarly literature (Alexander Broadie, Richard B. Sher, Christopher J. Berry, T. M. Devine and others). Certain traditional popular framings require caution — notably the claim that 18th-century Scotland was "the most literate nation in Europe," which historian R. A. Houston has substantially qualified. A few influence claims (e.g., the precise degree of Scottish Enlightenment influence on the American Declaration of Independence) remain disputed and require case-by-case evidence. Consistent with this site's principle of "accuracy over patriotism," celebratory narratives are tested against the evidence throughout, and the movement's entanglement with the slave economy is stated plainly rather than omitted.

Scotland’s contribution was exceptional in concentration, not isolated or solely Scottish in origin. Scottish scholars drew on English, Irish, Dutch, French and other European traditions. Francis Hutcheson was born in Ireland; Leiden supplied a model for Edinburgh’s medical teaching; Hutton built on earlier geological inquiry: Robert Hooke had discussed geological change, and the French naturalist Buffon advanced an ancient Earth before Hutton’s publications. Their approaches differed, but the history is not one of a lone Scot inventing deep time. The achievement is strongest when these shared foundations are acknowledged rather than erased.

2. Roots: Scottish learning before 1700

The philosopher Alexander Broadie argues that the Enlightenment did not appear from nowhere, and was not simply imported from England after the Union. In his chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), he shows that Scotland had been producing first-rate scholars for two centuries before it. The point is not that there was a seventeenth-century Scottish Enlightenment: Scotland, like the rest of Europe, was then "grievously intolerant". It is that the eighteenth-century flowering grew from strong native roots.

Before the Reformation, John Mair (c.1467–1550), a farmer's son from near Haddington, became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris. Among the students there in his time were Ignatius Loyola, John Calvin, George Buchanan and François Rabelais, and Broadie thinks it probable that all of them heard him lecture. Mair went on to be Principal of Glasgow University and Provost of St Salvator's College, St Andrews.

In the century after the Reformation, Scottish mathematicians and astronomers worked at the front rank of European science. Duncan Liddel of Aberdeen taught Copernicus's theories to German astronomers at Rostock and endowed the first chair of mathematics at Marischal College in 1613. Thomas Seget knew both Galileo and Kepler; it was Seget who gave Kepler a copy of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius. John Wedderburn of Dundee defended Galileo in print. John Napier of Merchiston published his logarithms in 1614. James Gregory gave the first full mathematical account of the reflecting telescope, and his brother David Gregory taught Newton's mechanics at Edinburgh before it was taught at Newton's own university, Cambridge. By 1707 chairs of mathematics had been founded or refounded at every Scottish university, with observatories at St Andrews and both Aberdeen colleges.

Medicine and law had deep roots too. Robert Sibbald became Edinburgh's first Professor of Medicine in 1685. He co-founded the Physic Garden, which later became the Royal Botanic Garden, and in 1681 the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, together with Archibald Pitcairne, who had taught medicine at Leiden. The same year saw James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, publish his Institutions of the Law of Scotland. In political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644) has been called "the most influential Scottish work on political theory".

Broadie therefore treats the Union of 1707 as, at most, a minor cause. The Enlightenment began a decade or so after the Union, but he warns against "confusing temporal sequence with causal". On his reading, Scotland already had the institutions and the intellectual habits; what it gained in the eighteenth century was enough tolerance for independent minds to publish safely, and the good fortune of a generation of geniuses.

3. Educational and institutional preconditions

One important structural fact is that Scotland, with a population of roughly 1.26 million (Webster’s 1755 enumeration), supported five university institutions — the Universities of St Andrews (founded 1410–13), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (King's College, 1495) and Edinburgh (1583), plus Aberdeen's separate Marischal College (1593). By contrast, far larger and richer England had only two, Oxford and Cambridge. This gave Scotland a strikingly high density of higher education per head of population.

Crucially, the Scottish universities were not merely more numerous but more modern and more open. Over the 18th century they moved away from the old "regenting" system and a curriculum aimed at training clergy toward a lecture-based, specialised curriculum embracing economics, science, medicine and moral philosophy — "in keeping with contemporary needs for improvement and progress." Access was comparatively wide: attendance was less expensive than at Oxford and Cambridge, and the student body was more socially representative.

A decisive contrast lay in religious tests. At Oxford, subscription to the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles was required at matriculation (entry) — barring Protestant Dissenters, Catholics, Jews and others from even enrolling. At Cambridge no test was required to matriculate, but subscription was required to take a degree, so Dissenters could study but not graduate. (Reforms in 1854 and 1856 relaxed some restrictions, but remaining tests for many degrees and offices were not removed until the Universities Tests Act 1871; theological qualifications remained exceptions.) This was comparative openness, not universal access: women remained excluded from university degrees and poverty still restricted attendance. Scottish universities, by contrast, had comparatively fewer barriers to student entry — though they retained their own religious requirements for professors under the post-1690 Church of Scotland settlement. This comparative openness is a genuine and frequently cited factor in the Enlightenment's development: it widened the pool of talent and connected Scotland to a broader European scholarly world.

4. The Kirk's role and the Moderate literati

The educational groundwork was laid long before the Enlightenment by the Presbyterian Kirk. Reaching back to the Reformation and the ideals of the First Book of Discipline (covered in Card #13), the Kirk championed the principle of a school in every parish. A series of statutes — in 1616, 1633, 1646 and the Act for Settling of Schools of 1696 — attempted to fund and enforce this network, so that by the late 17th century there was a largely complete system of parish schools across the Lowlands (though provision remained patchy in the Highlands). Whatever the true literacy figures (see Caveats), this dense schooling culture created an unusually large reading public.

The Kirk's role went beyond schools. The "Moderate" party that came to dominate the Church of Scotland's General Assembly from 1752 fostered an intellectual climate broadly tolerant of Enlightenment inquiry. As Richard B. Sher demonstrated in his classic study Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (1985), a tight coterie of Moderate clergymen — Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, John Home and, above all, William Robertson — sat simultaneously at the head of the university, the Kirk and the clubs. They promoted "polite Presbyterianism," Christian Stoicism, civic humanism and the cosmopolitan values of the international Enlightenment. William Robertson (1721–1793), a celebrated historian, served as Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1762 until 1793 and as Moderator of the General Assembly; under his leadership the university became an internationally admired centre of learning. It is important not to caricature the Moderates' opponents: leaders of both the Moderate and the stricter Evangelical/Popular factions generally considered themselves orthodox Christians, and relations were often mutually respectful.

5. From natural law to the "science of man"

Broadie traces a clear line of teachers and pupils. Gershom Carmichael, the first holder of Glasgow's chair of moral philosophy (from 1727), brought the European tradition of natural law into Scottish universities. By the 1702–03 session he was lecturing on Pufendorf's On the Duty of Man and Citizen. Natural law starts from human nature and asks what rules humans must follow in order to live well.

Francis Hutcheson, from an Ulster Scots family of Presbyterian ministers, studied at Glasgow while Carmichael was teaching there. He added the idea of a "moral sense" that lets us tell virtue from vice, put more weight on benevolence, and took a softer line than Carmichael on God's place in morality. His pupil Adam Smith later called him "the never to be forgotten Hutcheson". Hume and Smith both built on him, even though neither thought moral philosophy needed to assume God's existence.

The literati agreed that human nature should be studied like the natural world, by observation and experiment: Hume's "science of man". This led in several directions. Thomas Reid answered Hume's scepticism with "principles of common sense" that cannot be proved but must be assumed in order to prove anything. Dugald Stewart named a new kind of history, "conjectural" history, which reasoned from a scientific account of human nature about periods with little or no evidence. Examples are Smith on the origin of language and Hume on the origin of religion. Smith's four stages of society (hunting, herding, farming and commerce) came from the same method. Adam Ferguson used it to reject both Hobbes's and Rousseau's "state of nature": the evidence, he said, showed people always living in society, so the state of nature is social.

6. Economic context — including the uncomfortable slave-trade-linked prosperity

The 1707 Union (Card #16) gave Scots legal access to English colonial trade on equal terms, rather than creating all Scottish commerce with England or the colonies from nothing. The economic effect was not instantaneous, but over the following decades — combined with the Agricultural Revolution and the growth of banking — it helped generate the prosperity and stability within which the Enlightenment could flourish. Historians such as T. C. Smout have argued the Union amounted to a reinvention rather than the death of the nation, with Edinburgh and Glasgow becoming hubs of trade and thought. The connection between Union-era prosperity and the Enlightenment is a mainstream historiographical view, though scholars caution against reducing a cultural movement to simple economic cause.

Accuracy requires stating plainly that a substantial part of this prosperity was bound up with the Atlantic slave economy. Glasgow became the pre-eminent tobacco port in Britain. As the historian T. M. Devine writes in "The Tobacco Lords of Glasgow" (History Today, Vol. 40 No. 5, May 1990), "In some years in the 1760s, Glasgow, Greenock and Port Glasgow imported more tobacco than all the English towns combined while in the same decade more than half of all Scottish exports by value consisted of this single commodity" — leaf grown by enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland and re-exported to Europe. The "Tobacco Lords" who dominated Glasgow built the townhouses, churches and civic institutions of the city, and their wealth helped underwrite Glasgow's cultural and academic life. Some also owned enslaved people directly. In Devine's summary, tobacco "made" Glasgow in the era of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This uncomfortable context should be handled with care about individuals. Some Enlightenment figures were critics of slavery on both moral and economic grounds — Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations (1776, Book I ch. 8) that "it appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves," an argument abolitionists later drew on. The point is not to indict individual thinkers wholesale, but to acknowledge honestly that the material foundations of the movement were entangled with an economy of coerced labour.

7. Key figures and their fields (survey level)

This is a History-series overview: individual figures are subjects for the Ideas series (their intellectual contributions) and biographical coverage elsewhere in the collection. At survey level, the leading figures include:

David Hume (1711–1776) — philosophy. His empiricism and scepticism, developed in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and later Enquiries, made him a major figure in the history of philosophy. His religious scepticism made him a controversial public figure (see below).

Adam Smith (1723–1790) — a foundational figure in modern economics and a moral philosopher. Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) — a founder of sociology and the study of civil society; his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) analysed commercial modernity and coined the idea that institutions are "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

James Hutton (1726–1797) — the "founder of modern geology." His "Theory of the Earth" (presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785 and published 1788) developed a powerful account of geological deep time, building on earlier inquiry, concluding famously that in the rock record he found "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."

Joseph Black (1728–1799) — chemistry. He discovered latent heat and specific heat, and identified carbon dioxide ("fixed air"), providing foundations for both thermodynamics and modern chemistry; he also financially supported James Watt's steam-engine work.

William Cullen (1710–1790) — medicine. A hugely influential teacher of medicine and chemistry at Glasgow and Edinburgh, a leading figure of the Edinburgh Medical School and a prime mover of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Other figures of the wider Enlightenment-era flourishing — such as the engineer James Watt and the architect Robert Adam — are noted here only briefly, since they are treated more fully elsewhere in the collection (particularly the Inventions series). Also central were the philosopher Francis Hutcheson (Smith's teacher at Glasgow, often called the "father" of the Scottish Enlightenment), the common-sense philosopher Thomas Reid, and jurists and historians such as Lord Kames and John Millar.

8. The clubs and societies culture

The real engine room of the Scottish Enlightenment was its sociability — the daily exchange of ideas in clubs, societies, taverns and drawing rooms. The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh (established 1737, with roots in a 1731 medical society) fostered scientific inquiry and later became the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Select Society, founded on 22 May 1754 by the painter Allan Ramsay together with Hume and Smith, initially had fifteen members and grew to eighty-three by the end of its first year, serving as a debating forum for the city's intellectual elite; its aim, as stated in The Scots Magazine in 1755, was "by practice to improve themselves in reasoning and eloquence, and by the freedom of debate, to discover the most effectual methods of promoting the good of the country." Out of it grew the Poker Club (1762), a more convivial body originally formed to promote the establishment of a Scottish militia (the name evoking "stirring up" debate). Membership of these bodies overlapped heavily with the universities and the Moderate clergy — the same few dozen men met, argued and published together.

The surviving minutes of the Select Society (1754–64) show what its 162 members argued about. According to Fredrik Albritton Jonsson's count, of the 166 meetings recorded, luxury and the dangers of commerce were debated at least fourteen times, the militia and martial spirit eleven times, and agricultural improvement at least twenty-four times. Together these made up almost 30 per cent of all topics. Not everyone shared Hume's confidence in commerce. Lord Monboddo, who presided far more often than Hume, proposed debates such as "Whether the modern method of improvement by making large farms be not ruinous to the Country?" Some of the society's members carried these worries into the government's Board for the Annexed Estates.

9. The New Town and the "Athens of the North"

Enlightenment civic ambition took physical form in Edinburgh's New Town. Faced with a squalid, overcrowded medieval Old Town, the Town Council under Lord Provost George Drummond held a design competition in 1766; the winning plan, adopted in 1767, came from the young architect James Craig (aged in his mid-twenties). Craig's elegant gridiron of broad streets and formal squares — George Street along the ridge, flanked by Princes Street and Queen Street — expressed Enlightenment ideals of order, rationality and light. Built in stages between 1767 and around 1850 and extended by architects including Robert Adam and William Playfair, the New Town (with the Old Town) was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995.

Edinburgh's nickname, the "Athens of the North," celebrates this classical civic identity and the city's intellectual pre-eminence. The label became firmly current in the early 19th century — associated in particular with the painter Hugh William "Grecian" Williams, who around 1822 exhibited views of Athens alongside views of Edinburgh — and was reinforced by the Greek-revival monuments on Calton Hill, Edinburgh's own "Acropolis," including the deliberately Parthenon-like (and never-completed) National Monument begun in 1826. The nickname is thus a slightly later coinage that looked back on the Enlightenment achievement.

10. Medical education

The Edinburgh Medical School was the jewel in the university's crown and the most influential medical faculty in the English-speaking world in this period. Founded in 1726 on the model of Leiden (itself descended from Padua), and boosted by the opening of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (William Adam’s purpose-built hospital, begun in 1738 and opened in 1741), it made bedside clinical teaching central to its programme, drawing on Leiden and earlier practice. By the 1750s the university had around 300 medical students — roughly half the entire student body. Its decisive advantage over Oxford and Cambridge was practical: an Oxbridge medical degree was open only to communicant Anglicans, could take many years, and included no hospital clinical teaching, whereas Edinburgh combined systematic lectures with clinical instruction on live patients and conferred degrees by examination. It attracted large numbers of international students. (Honesty also requires noting that the medical school and infirmary grew wealthy partly on fees from colonial students, and trained practitioners who served the slave economy and empire.)

The historian Helen Dingwall stresses how far the famous names reached beyond anatomy. Alexander Monro secundus described the connection between the brain's ventricles still called the foramen of Monro and argued with William Hunter over the lymphatic system. Robert Whytt studied reflexes and nervous disease. William Cullen tried to classify all diseases, and his former protégé John Brown offered a rival system based on the body's "excitability". Benjamin Bell became the model of the scientific surgeon. Yet Dingwall also notes the limits: by 1800 the Monros had become reactionaries, students flocked to the practical extra-mural anatomy of John and Charles Bell, and patients on the wards still received bleeding, purging and diets much as before.

New specialisms appeared on the fringes. In the 1770s James Rae, a Fellow of the Edinburgh surgeons, advertised lectures on diseases of the teeth, the start of dentistry as a separate branch. Care of the insane moved into institutions: Edinburgh's Charity Workhouse held nineteen lunatics by 1749, Montrose opened Scotland's first purpose-built asylum in the early 1780s, and in 1792 Andrew Duncan proposed the public asylum that was chartered in 1807 and opened at Morningside in 1813, reportedly moved by the poet Robert Fergusson's death in the Edinburgh bedlam.

11. Publishing and the Encyclopaedia Britannica

Print culture was central. Edinburgh became a major publishing centre, and the era's defining monument to the encyclopedic, knowledge-organising impulse was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, conceived by the Edinburgh bookseller-printer Colin Macfarquhar and engraver Andrew Bell and published "By a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland." Its first edition appeared in three volumes between 1768 and 1771, edited by the 28-year-old printer and naturalist William Smellie, who compiled nearly all the articles (later joking that he had made "a dictionary of arts and sciences with a pair of scissors"). What began as a Scottish Enlightenment project became a major, long-running English-language general encyclopedia.

12. Religious complexity and the Hume controversies

It is a myth that the Scottish Enlightenment was a uniformly secular or anti-religious movement in the manner sometimes associated with French philosophes like Voltaire. In fact, a great many of its key figures were clergymen or worked in productive tension with the Kirk, and the tolerant Moderate establishment was itself an enabling condition of the movement. The Scottish Enlightenment was better characterised by a broadly religious, though tolerant and "polite," intellectual culture than by militant secularism.

Yet genuine controversy and internal conflict existed, and the career of David Hume is the clearest evidence. Hume's reputation as a sceptic and "infidel" — earned by the religious implications of his philosophy — repeatedly barred him from academic posts. In 1745 his candidacy for the Chair of Moral Philosophy (strictly, of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy) at Edinburgh was defeated after clergy-led opposition condemned him as an atheist and sceptic; the post went to William Cleghorn. His prospects at Glasgow in 1751–52 also came to nothing, amid religious opposition and the politics of academic patronage. He never held a university chair, becoming instead Keeper of the Advocates' Library in 1752 — a post that gave him the resources to write his best-selling History of England. In the mid-1750s he narrowly escaped formal censure by the Kirk's General Assembly. Historians note some nuance — rivalry between competing schools of moral philosophy may also have played a part in 1745 — but the central fact stands: Hume's religious scepticism was genuinely controversial and carried real professional cost.

13. Professors and ministers: how Scotland differed from France

The early Enlightenment had to fight for room inside the Kirk. Within a short period three Glasgow professors faced church opposition. Francis Hutcheson was criticised for teaching that people are naturally benevolent and that someone can be virtuous without believing in God. William Leechman was charged with heresy, though he survived and later became principal of the university. John Simson, who taught that Christian revelation must pass the test of reason, was forbidden by a church court to teach, although he kept his chair.

Even so, Broadie stresses that Hume was the exception: "most of the literati were dedicated Calvinists". This is one of two features he identifies that made the Scottish Enlightenment different from the French. First, many leading Scots were professors: Hutcheson, Smith, Blair, Reid, Maclaurin, Cullen, Robison, Black, Robertson, Dugald Stewart and Playfair. In France, where the Catholic Church controlled the universities, no first-, second- or even third-rank figure of the Enlightenment held a chair. Second, many Scottish literati, among them Leechman, Blair, Reid, George Campbell, Robertson and Ferguson, were Kirk ministers, while most of the French philosophes were deists, sceptics or atheists.

Because the professors, lawyers and ministers who led the movement were formed by Scotland's own institutions of church, education and law, Broadie concludes that its "Scottishness ran deep", even as it produced work of universal significance.

14. Decline and legacy

There is no single agreed end-date. Because Adam Smith lived until 1790 and Hutton until 1797, an abrupt end at the French Revolution (1789) would be misleading. Many historians place the waning of the distinctively concentrated phenomenon around the turn of the 19th century, through a combination of generational change (the deaths of the great figures), a more repressive and anxious political climate in Britain after the French Revolution of 1789, and the emergence of new intellectual movements (Romanticism) and new vehicles such as the Edinburgh Review (founded 1802), staffed by the pupils of the Enlightenment generation.

The legacy is vast and well documented. The Scottish Enlightenment effectively founded or transformed modern economics (Smith), sociology and social theory (Ferguson, Millar), geology (Hutton), and made lasting contributions to chemistry (Black), medicine (Cullen and the Edinburgh school) and philosophy (Hume, Reid). Its influence on the American founding generation is real but should be stated carefully: the Rev. John Witherspoon, an Edinburgh-educated Scot, became president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1768, signed the Declaration of Independence, and taught James Madison and a generation of American leaders, transmitting Scottish "common sense" and moral-sense philosophy; Thomas Jefferson admired the University of Edinburgh. The often-repeated claim that the Declaration's "self-evident truths" derive directly from Hume or Smith is an uncertain influence claim and should be treated with caution, but the broader channel of influence — via Witherspoon, Hutcheson, Reid and Smith — is well attested. The movement also shaped University College London and influenced figures as far afield as Andrés Bello in Latin America.

15. The Enlightenment in America: textbooks, reprints and reviews

The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (1975), argues that the Scottish Enlightenment's American influence grew rather than shrank after the Revolution. His evidence is mainly bibliographical. Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was published at Philadelphia in 1784, a year after it appeared in Edinburgh, and Hook counts fifty-six American editions, complete and abridged, between 1805 and 1823 alone, many from small-town presses. Yale adopted Blair in 1785 and Harvard in 1788; Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism went through ten American editions by 1835. Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind appeared at Philadelphia in 1793, a year after the Edinburgh edition, and by 1824 the North American Review reckoned eight American editions totalling 7,500 copies. Reid's Works, Smith's Wealth of Nations (Philadelphia, 1789), Ferguson's Essay on Civil Society and the histories of Hume and Robertson were all reprinted.

Hume is the telling exception. Hook finds that his philosophy was hardly published in America before his Philosophical Essays appeared in 1817, apparently because of its reputation for irreligion, while his History of England sold well. Reid and Stewart, by contrast, became the core of college courses in mental and moral philosophy. The philosopher Herbert Schneider dated this "Scottish" takeover of American philosophy teaching to about 1820; Hook argues it was under way from the 1780s. He also suggests a cost: John Witherspoon, who in 1781 coined the word "Americanism" on the model of "Scotticism", and the many teachers who used Blair, may have encouraged a genteel, correct style that held back a native American literary idiom. That is Hook's interpretation.

Medicine was a parallel channel. A count Hook cites finds that 139 Americans took Edinburgh medical degrees between 1749 and 1812, 86 of them from the South and 65 from Virginia alone, with perhaps as many again studying without graduating. The next Edinburgh generation reached America through print. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was being reprinted entire in New York by about 1810; in 1823 its American circulation was put at 4,000 copies, equal to that of the North American Review, which had itself been modelled on it. Hook concludes that the Review confirmed for Americans the intellectual eminence Scotland had won in the previous century.

How far this amounted to a Scottish shaping of American thought is disputed. Douglas Sloan (1971) traced the Scottish model in American colleges, and Garry Wills (1978) went further by reading the Declaration of Independence through Hutcheson and Reid, a thesis that Ronald Hamowy and others rejected. Henry May (1976) placed the Scottish philosophy within a wider, more conservative American Enlightenment. Hook's figures for editions and curricula are the firmest part of the case; claims that Common Sense philosophy was simply America's philosophy are a matter of interpretation.

16. Did it ever end? A live debate

Historians do not agree on when the Scottish Enlightenment ended. A common answer runs from Hutcheson's first major works in the 1720s to Reid's death in 1796. George Elder Davie argued that it lasted until the 1840s, when James Frederick Ferrier's philosophy of consciousness broke with its naturalistic approach. Cairns Craig has proposed a "second Scottish Enlightenment" in the later nineteenth century: a national self-examination marked by the Scottish Text Society (1882), the Scottish History Society (1886) and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (1885–1900).

Broadie goes further. If an Enlightenment means people thinking for themselves in a society tolerant enough to let them publish safely, then, he argues, it never ended. Philosophy of high quality continued through Sir William Hamilton, Ferrier and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, much of it still answering Hume. Science reached new heights with James Clerk Maxwell, whose great-grandfather George Clerk Maxwell had gone on geological field trips with James Hutton, and with Lord Kelvin. The ideas also lived on abroad. Royer-Collard and Victor Cousin made Reid's common-sense philosophy part of French philosophical education for most of the nineteenth century, and in America C. S. Peirce developed his own "critical common-sensism". Broadie's conclusion is pointed: calls since 1999 for a "second Scottish Enlightenment" are premature, because "the second cannot start until the first has run its course".

This is a reasoned interpretation, not a settled fact. Most historians still use "the Scottish Enlightenment" for the period of roughly 1730–1800, and this card does the same.