Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind

On the Natural Sociability of Mankind: Inaugural Oration

Francis Hutcheson Professor at Glasgow On the Natural Sociability of Mankind Inaugural Oration Glasgow At the University Press 1730 191 After I had devoted six years in this universitytothestudyof humaneletters and philosophy,1 private considerationsand dutiescalledmeawayfromthis very pleasant place to Ireland, where I was involved inlaboriousandtedious business and had very little leisure for good letters or the cultivation of the mind.2 It was therefore with no little joy that I learned that the university which had been my alma mater had after thirteen years proposed to restore me, its former student, to freedom;3 and that the distinguished governors and professors, who once were as revered by me as parents, had now elected me to be their colleague.4 Mindful of my former parents,5 I was able to leave without too much sorrow my beloved native land, to seek the ancient mother . . . from whom I traced my lineage.6 For my heart longed to return to Scotland, venerable mother of brave and learned men, which has not grown feeble in our time, whose fertility will never be impaired by age. I expected that I would be quite delighted (as indeed I am) to see again 1. Hutcheson registered as a student at the University of Glasgow in1711(Munimenta Alme Universitatis Glasguensis, bk. 3, p. 196) in the fourth or final year of the undergraduate curriculum (the natural philosophy year) in the class of John Loudon. He remained at the university for six more years as a student of divinity. 2. Hutcheson was the master of a dissenting academy in Dublin through the 1720s. It is indicative of the modest disposition he sought to cultivate on his return to Glasgow in 1730 (see Wodrow, Analecta, IV, p. 167) that he should have described his years in Dublin as intellectually unproductive; the works for which he was and remains best known, his two Inquiries, Essay, and Illustrations, were published in those years. 3. Metaphor from the manumission of a slave. 4. Hutcheson was elected Professor of Moral Philosophy on 19 December 1729 in a closely contested election, described by W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, pp. 54–56. He was formally admitted to the university as Professor of Moral Philosophy at a meeting of the faculty on 3 November 1730: GUA 26647 fol. 22. 5. Virgil, Aeneid, 5, 39, in Aeneid, vol. I, p. 474. 6. Ibid., 3, 96, and 5, 801, in Aeneid, vol. I, p. 378. 192 on the natural sociability of mankind the very places where, happy, cheerful, and free of care, I once passed my days, the very buildings, the gardens, the fields, and the river banks where we used to lie. But beyond all this, there rose before my mind the image of the university itself, of the learned and grave discourses delivered in this very auditorium and in the private classrooms of the professors. How I rejoice to see these places again, where I imbibed the first elements of the inquiry after truth; where I had my first taste of the immortal sublimities of Homer and Virgil, of the charm, the felicity and dexterity, the humor and wit of Xenophon and Horace, of Aristophanes and Terence; likewise the abundant grace and dignity of Cicero in every branch of philosophy and his eloquent and vigorous contention in pleading.7 Here I first sought the nature and causes of virtue, and made my first attempts to trace those eternal relationships of numbers and figures on which this stupendousfabric of the universe rests; and beyond this, the nature, the power, the wisdom , and the goodness of the eternal God himself, by whose power, intelligence , and design all things are governed.8 It was here too that all these things settled deeply in my mind and developed there, after they had been often weighed in gentle, friendly converse or in free and modest debate among friends and companions, as we walked in the gardens of the university or in the lovely countryside around the city, which the Glotta9 washes with its gentle stream. As I recalled all these things, my departure for Scotland seemed happy and cheerful and full of joy. One thing only troubled me, and still it causes me concern, that I might be found unworthy of the college of grave and learned men by whose votes I have been elected to be a professor, that I might be unequal to the task they have...