The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (review)

350 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Anand C. Chitnis. The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976. Pp. 279. $17.50. For reasons perhaps more eccentric than eighteenth-century inquirers would allow, literary and historical structures do have much in common. One wants somehow to argue, and "declinists" such as Gibbon and Adam Ferguson are surely poised to agree, that an era's ending, or the sense of it, defines not so much the beginning, the general instigating causes, as the middle, the point of action that is still seeking its resolution as well as its self-clarification. The fact that writers of fiction and history alike share this fascination with the middle of things --for them truly the heart of the matter--ensures (or ought to) that the reader or critic is attentive throughout to the stresses that play on and give shape to that middle. These stresses are a kind of agitation, more appropriately an inquidtude, which makes of history something rather like Thomas Reid's depiction of the mind, namely, a constant "ebullition" of personal and institutional forms. If this suggests an unsettled--to the essayist even unsettling-picture of sporadic growth, which would even deny to a period or a character the perfection of its fullest flowering, it is at the same time a cautionary note against the rounded view with its highly polished surfaces. In one of his early Renaissance studies, Walter Pater judiciously remarks that "the perfection of culture is not rebellion but peace; only when it has realized a deep moral stillness has it really reached its end." Nevertheless, he adds, on the way there is frequently room "for a noble antinomianism." Locating the middle from the end involves a search for tensions and a gnawing sense of their irresolution. In this volume by Anand Chitnis, the first (so it is claimed) "of any length to account for, and examine the social history of, the Enlightenment in Scotland" (p. 246), there is a frustrating absence of middle, coupled with an inadequate grasp of the end and an overattachment to the question of beginnings. The last stems in part from the social historian's desire to provide an explanation, in causal terms, of that peculiar coalescence of "aristocracies," the one "of rank," the other "of letters" (as Francis Jeffrey put it in 1819), that marked the social as well as solitary attitude of mind that became self-consciously Scotland's "Enlightenment." Practical improvements in agriculture and education, spurred both by necessity and by the Word of God, in addition to felt imperatives of a more socio-cultural order that resulted, for example , in Edinburgh's New Town, are aspects of a developing Scottish setting into which fits that "smaller but no less remarkable" phenomenon of the Enlightenment (pp. 6, 9). Yet immediately , because Chitnis has chosen to define his subject from the peripheries, which is the outside , the plot thickens to confusion. "Improvement," including the refurbishing of traditional institutions such as the Church and universities, is alleged to be a precondition of "enlightenment ," from which, however, it is scarcely distinguishable (pp. 8.13, 195-96, 201,204, 246). Given the very circular nature of the progression; allowing for the sense of responsibility (as much Stoical as Protestant and national) that insists on "cultivation" everywhere, that is, within the bounds of capability, and a perpetual war on excess or extravagance; and finally, capturing the Baconian spirit whose ubiquitous presence binds the enterprises of natural and moral philosophy into a single perspective of advancement, and which itself "sanctifies" (not the converse, as Chitnis twice maintains without justification; pp. 129, 196) the Enlightenment 's adoption of Newtonian principle--given all that, couM it be otherwise? At the close, Chitnis announces the theme of "evolution" (p. 253); at the outset, he climbs down from a purportedly "strict definition" (p. 10) of the Scottish Enlightenmentto take up a wait-and-see "process" stance. Approaching the end from the beginning, but never the middle with its beginning from a strong sense of the ending, he fails to take the citadel. If one has not yet seized the measure of an age's decline, can one be said...