James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: from Glasgow to Princeton (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 409 and German words that Vico uses. FoLlowing the concordance are two computerbased lists of word frequencies; but of greatest value is the concordance itself. It is a concordance in the true sense of the word; that is, it is an alphabetical arrangement of the principal words of the text that reprints for each word the passage in which it occurs. This work is indispensable for any scholar working on Vico's thought. What a great tool it will be when such also exists for the Scienza nuova of 173o/1744 and Vico's other works. DONALD PHILLIP VERENE Emory University J. David Hoeveler, Jr. James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: from Glasgow to Princeton. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, t981. Pp xiv + 374. $25.00 James McCosh's greatest fault lay in trying to keep too many things right: student morals; presbyterianism; the off-license habits of workers; Scottish philosophy-from Hutcheson to Hamilton; evolutionary or "developmental" science; university curricula; and finally American philosophy itself. ("I am anxious to keep philosophy right in this country." ) Lacking the intellectual incisiveness of Sir William Hamilton , yet fired with the reformist passion of a Thomas Chalmers, this severe judge of men and ideas was not, understandably, himself always "right." Indeed, the test of Professor Hoeveler's claim on behalf of McCosh's "uniqueness" (3o6) within the "Scottish philosophical school" must be this cleric, moral philosopher, and university president's ability to build on righteous indignation truly original monuments of philosophical and socio-cultural achievement. If the jury were convinced of Hoeveler 's case for McCosh's socio-cultural achievement----clearly his stronger, more natural , habitat--it would be embarrassingly hung with respect to his philosophical achievements. This need not have happened; unless, of course, McCosh himself so obscured the assessment that the case is doomed to irresolution. (Perhaps an analysis of McCosh's writings which is as philosophically informed as it is carefully expository would determine that fact.) The evidence on both sides--that of Scottish philosophy during the "Enlightenment" and of McCosh's published and unpublished materials--is by now surely ample. The respective contributions of Hutcheson and Hume, of Adam Smith and Reid, of Stewart, Brown, or Hamilton, and even of Archibald Alison and J. F. Ferrier, in giving definable, if not uniform, shape to the concerns of Scottish thought, are no longer at the mercy of potted summaries, including those, "ironically," of McCosh himself. We have long passed the deplorable stage, for example, of isolating Hume from the complex currents of Scottish philosophy--be they commonsensical, politely deterministic, or "Utopian" as George Davie has argued recently of Reid's position--so that we could be tempted to affirm that "no doubt, Hume was utterly out of place in Scotland, intellectually above all!" What is intriguing, if exasperating, about Hoeveler's approach is the 41o HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY gloriously missed opportunity to examine McCosh's reading of Scottish philosophy, and of McCosh's place within (or without) it, first from the vantage point of our sharpened, liberated, awareness of the diverse components of that "school"; then too from a newly-furnished appreciation of McCosh's origins in the evangelical terrain of southwest Scotland, of his intellectual development, unhappily under Glasgow's Mylne, more expansively at an Edinburgh dominated by Chalmers and Hamilton, of his active involvement in early evolutionary debates, of his innovative, courageous, and for the most part tolerant struggles to implant his perception of the best Scottish educational traditions in the minds of students and trustees alike. Anything less than this double prospect, difficult to sustain, is simply unacceptable. So too, one regrets to have to say, are the "howlers," of which a few illustrations must suffice. The Edinburgh "campus" was never, alas, constructed "around Charlotte Square"; its completion, moreover, was left to William Henry (1789-1857), not "Robert," Playfair (49). Reid's Inquiry was not published "one year" after his Glasgow appointment (hence in 1765), nor could George Campbell have earlier "succeeded" him at Marischal College, where Reid never taught (24-25). The dates of Stewart's Elements and Outlines are x792 and 1793 respectively, not x791 and 1792 (26). It is inconceivable...