THE SCOTTISH ANTICIPATOR OF DARWIN.* THEBE are very many interesting
things in this book; and metaphysicians of all schools will be grateful to Professor Knight for many of the letters which appear in it. But it is in more respects than one a disappointment; Professor Knight has scarcely done justice either to his subject or to himself. His subject is not simply the eccentric Scottish Judge and meta- physician who died in the last year of the eighteenth century at the age of eighty-five, who entertained Burns, Johnson, and Scott, who anticipated Darwinism by his evolution theory—of man's descent from monkeys that wore off their tails by con- stant sitting—and modern anthropology by his studies of civilisation in the light of ancient savagery, but "some of his contemporaries." Had Professor Knight given us a full picture of that remarkable society—profoundly metaphysical, enthusiastically literary, and largely rationalistic—which gave Edinburgh distinction during the sixty years that elapsed between 1737, when Monboddo was called to the Bar, and his death, he would have anticipated a work that will have 'to be done some day. Yet not only is the sketch of Monboddo himself short and scrappy, but_ the accounts of his contemporaries and correspondents which accompany it are of the kind that one would expect to find in an " encyclopdia for the million." Dr. Knight excuses himself by saying that " Hume has already been dealt with by several writers from different points of view," and "It is the same with most of the other eighteenth century 'men of the time.'" Yet he admits that Monboddo's personality, striking, many-sided, and unusually magnetic, "would have formed a centre round which to group the Scots ' men-of- letters ' who belonged to the latter half of the eighteenth centuiy." Why then did he not take occasion by the hand, and give us Hume and Robertson, Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames, Burns and Dugald Stewart, and all the members of the "select society" once more and altogether ? He has missed a great chance. We must also add that this yolume has not been revised for the press with " sufficient care. It contains too many mistakes like the too obvious "Madame Raiaander," and "Sir William Dines" for" Sir William Jones."
One's disappointment is all the greater because it is plain that had Professor Knight utilised the multifarious material ready to his hand, and not merely portions of-it, he might have produced a very readable as well as valuable book. When he "1etibiTnseff go," he is distinctly interesting. Thus • Lord 119nLoddo and Some grim Conte-mporarisa By William Knight, LL.D. asund0A: Nan Murray. [Ws j "The rent-roll of Monboddo was very small, not more than .€300 in Burnet's time; but he never raised his rents and never dismissed a poor tenant for the sake of a larger sum. offered bra newcomer willing to occupy the farm. His personal habits were frugal, if somewhat eccentric. Very fond of exercise in the open air, he rose early—six o'clock—and always took a cold .bath (summer and winter, even during frost) in a -house erected for the purpose at some distance from the mansion, near a running stream which supplied it with water. He took a light meal only during the day, supper being his chief meal. Before going to rest he had an air-bath and then anointed himself with oil,. in imitation of the ancients, his lotion being composed of 'rose-
water, olive oil, saline, aromatic spirit, and Venetian soap.'" -
Or again, in a different vein :— " As a man of learning Monboddo has bad no rival amongst the philosophers of Seothind -except Sir William Hamilton ; but in his early days, when an advocate, he was noted quite as much for his love of hunting, of the theatre, and of dancing, 'as, for his poor opinion of contemporary authors and his excessive admiration for the writers of antiquity. He thought that the human race had sadly degenerated. He was taunted with being a master of ceremonies to the playhouse,' and that may have lost him some legal practice ; but he was really diverted from his profession by his love of learning and his passion for writing books. His bias against the Moderns has been noticed, but he did not quarrel with his contemporaries. He differed widely from them and expressed his differences with characteristic force. He had some friction with David Hume and Lord Kames as well as with Dr. Johnson. He detested the philosophy of Ifume, while neither Bacon nor Locke nor Berkeley satisfied him, but he was not a bitter opponent. In his excessive eulogy of the ancients, he once said to ,the Duchess of Gordon at Gordon Castle that few of the moderns who had won distinction could write with elegance. It was suggested to him that Lord Karnes (who was present) did so. He replied that he did not think his brother on the Bench any exception to the rule,—a remark which not unnaturally offended the latter. Their hostess, not relishing the prospect of a literary duel in her drawing-room, proposed that the two authors should dance a reel with her, which they did."
Here we have the man undoubtedly, at his liest and his worst. He was kindly and- generous, as was shown by Scotts descrip- tions of his mita and by his treatment of Burns, who beth in prose and verse extolled the beauty of the daughter—the "fair Burnet" of familiar lines—whom the Judge lost whilst she was in the flower of her youth. He was egotistic, no doubt, after a superb fashion of his own, as when he wrote to Sir George Baker of a projected work that it would be" the • • greatest work of History, Philosophy, and, Learning that has been .published in this country," and when later in life he said, "I have forgot a great deal more than most other men knew." But his vanity was essentially, harmless, although it no doubt ,helped to isolate him from his fellows, even his fellow-Judges. As a Judge, he did not sit on the same bench with the other senators of the College of Justice. One reason forthis conduct was his deafness; but it has also been pointed out that he had had a quarrel with the head of the Court, Lord President Dundas.
The great bulk of this book is composed of Monboddo's correspondence with certain of ' his contemporaries, such as Dugald Stewart, Dr. John Pringle, " Hermes " Price, Bishop Horsley, and Welbore Ellis. -These letters are very meta- physical and scholarly, and will, therefore, as we have hinted, interest a limited circle. Dr. Knight would have done better, however, had he given, not the complete letters, but extracts from them by way of elucidating the too brief, though in many ways excellent, account he .gives of Burnet's philosophy. That was a curious -jumble of evolution and de- generation. "The root principle of his teaching was the ascent and progress that is to be seen in Nature from the inorganic through the organic up to man," associated with "a subsequent descent in the modern world,—a.falling away not only from the wisdom of the ancients, but from their physical stature and development." Monboddo's own letters illustrate the excessive character of his classicism :— "I must think it very unfortunate for the English taste V poetry that Shakespeare has been set up as a standard ; as I think it unfortunate for their philosophy that Locke has been considered a model in that way, and reverenced in England as Socrates and Plato were in Greece. If Shakespeare had formed himself, as I have said- all young poets ought to do, upon the study, of Aristotle's rules, and had gained the practice of the great ancient masters from which these rules • were drawn, we sholild have seen him' at least aim at What is most perfect in tritgedy, namely a disceeery. And it is an ill sign of our taste in dramatic writing that so few discoveries are to be found in our English plays. There is, however, one in a late _play, I mean the tragedy of Douglas' (by Home), which :I think is most happily executed, and exceeds anything of -the kind:I knew; either ancient or tiodern, witheat eteepting even' the-famous' disenveryin-the
(Edipus Tyrannns' mentioned by Aristotle as a model of the kind."
Egotist though he was, Burnet could and did confess he was wrong :— " As to Scoticisms in my style, I have avoided them as much as I was able, but some have escaped me. There is particularly a very gross one which my Lord Mansfield, who has done my work the honour of a second perusal, observed to me ; 'presently,' instead of at present,' which, I wonder, has escaped both you and the English gentleman you mention ; but I have not scrupled to use words, whether used in Scotland or not, that I thought were agreeable to the genius of the language, though they were not used in England."
As for his contemporaries, one may gather from a letter written by Welbore Ellis in what "high latitudes" some of them lived:—
" I do not admit that any argument drawn from the effects we feel our material may have on the immaterial pirt of us will apply to the Divinity, however intimately He may be blended in every particle of matter. But the sum of the whole on this point is that we both agree in the fact of the omnipresence of the Deity, but in what manner He is present seems to me to be far beyond the utmost stretch of human comprehension. I am afraid that with regard to some things you attribute to Intellect, I must likewise conclude that such knowledge is too excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it.' I do not know that I have asserted where our intellect exists, but my consciousness informs me where it energizes ; for when I think, I feel that my brain is acted upon, and that gland is a body and occupies space. If I have been long thinking intensely, I feel the like sense of weariness, of sore- ness, and sometimes of pain, that I do in any limb of my body if I exercise it too long. I therefore can have no doubt but that it has been acted upon. Now if it be true that nothing can act but where it is at present, it seems to follow that my intellect has been present where my feelings make me sensible that it has been acting ; but how, or in what manner it is present I cannot explain no more than I can the manner of the presence of the Deity. What I have said seems to prove not only that our intellect cannot, while united with our body, act without the pain, in the sense you suppose me to use tbat expression—as it cannot act without the heart and the other parts necessary to animal life -but also that the brain is its immediate instrument in the act of thinking. Where those airy beings' own ideas are lodged I cannot say, nor that they occupy space, but I know that when I exercise my imagination or endeavour to recolleet any past events or expres- sions I feel some emotions in that gland my brain. These, among many other reasons, induce me to doubt your theory of the mind transporting itself from its instrument to places and times the most remote which have existed, but have long ceased to exist, and even to such as never did or could exist, and these not the creatures of our own, but of other men's minds ..... . . You admit that intellect must be somewhere, but to send it to the country of these nothings is sending it nowhere ; and so I believe that it stays at home, where in the treasuries of memory it finds material for all its compositions, whether waking or in the partial stupor in which we are when we dream."
Monboddo's metaphysical friends clearly liked and respected him, but some, it is clear, could not help laughing in the sleeve while they manifested their respect.
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