Henry Home, Lord Kames, and: Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 547 views, whether the central elements of Leibniz' logic are recognizable from the texts publicly available to the eighteenth century, whether the relevant doctrines were simply common currency in the intellectual circles of the time and not peculiar to Leibniz, whether some other figure (one possibility suggested is J. H. lambert) served as interme ,diary instead of Wolff, or whether Kant just came to his conclusions on his own without reference to Leibniz or the so-called Leibnizian logic. These last questions necessarily remain for other students of Kant and eighteenthcentury German philosophy. Lenders' service is to have tested some aspects of Martin's views in a full-length study and to have opened the way for further research. At the same time, Lenders has clearly shown the inadequacy and even falsity of the commonlyaccepted view of the relationship between Leibniz and Wolff as one of slavish and almost incestuous dependence of the latter man upon his great predecessor. Wolff deserves to be recognized as an honest thinker in his own right who drew on many sources and even made his own contributions, without denying that he is indebted to Leibniz in many ways. And Leibniz' thought needs to be reconstructed both in its own mature, systematic form and in the way it was known to or presented by other philosophers in the half-century or century following his death. We cannot expect to obtain a full and proper understanding of the views of Leibniz and Kant or of the important formative period in German philosophy from the second to the eighth decades of the eighteenth century until we have untangled some of these historical and doctrinal questions . Winfried Lenders' book illustrates the careful scholarship which will be required for this task and suggests some of the central directions which it will take. CHARLES A. Com~ Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Henry Home, Lord Kames. By Arthur E. McGuinness. (New York: Twayne Publishers , Inc., 1970. Pp. 160. $4.95) Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment. By William C. Lehman. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: International Archives of the History of Ideas, No. 41, 1971. Pp. xxvi + 358. Glds. 60.15) Before the appearance of these works, no book-length study of Kames had appeared for 30 years, and no general study of his life and works since Alexander Fraser Tytler's Memoirs o/ the Li]e and Writings o] Henry Home o/ Kames was published at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus, though one must grant that Kames' intellectual abilities fall short of several of his North British contemporaries--Hume, Adam Smith, perhaps Hutcheson and Reid as well--further discussion of his views and historical importance has been long overdue, for he was a central figure in the development of both the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. The book by Professor McGuinness is apparently intended to serve as an introduction , for, of Kames' dozen or so works, McGuinness has limited himself to three: Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Elements of Criticism, and Sketches o] the History of Man. That the work will be an effective introduction is unlikely, however. It is far too inaccurate to win the confidence of scholars seeking information about Kames; and less sophisticated readers will simply be misled. In Chapter 2 ("Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion"), for example, we hear that according to Descartes, a proposition is true "if we cannot contradict it without involving ourselves in a logical absurdity"; the old historical tune of Locke-Berkeley-Hume, skepticism to its logical conclusion--though Hume did not, 548 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of course, suppose his philosophy could be lived; that Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler, whose enlightening intellectual influence was demonstrably vast and far-reaching , were guilty of "dogmatic anti-intellectualism"; that for the moral sense and common sense philosophers, experiments may always be completed introspectively (But why then did these philosophers appeal to common language and ordinary behaviour?); that Hobbes and Hume held the same view of man in the state of nature (and Mandeville 's view that all morality is artificial and indoctrinated is also ascribed to Hume). There is...