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The Scottish judge and 'eccentric' philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo's (1714–1799) significance within Enlightenment thought is usually seen as stemming from his Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., 1773–1792). The OPL was a major contribution to the Enlightenment's debate over the philosophy of language, and established Monboddo's reputation as an innovative and influential, yet controversial and credulous proto-anthropologist. In the following I explore Monboddo's Egyptomania and the role it plays in his account of the origins and development of religion within his larger 'History of Man'. Monboddo's idiosyncratic and untimely fusion of conjectural history, Buffon-inspired natural history, Christian theology, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and credulous interest in Egyptology, especially in Antient Metaphysics (6 vols., 1779–1799), make him extremely difficult to place within the Scottish Enlightenment. I want to bring Monboddo back into our conversation about the Scottish Enlightenment, shed light in the process on his highly idiosyncratic combination of enlightened and unenlightened thought and, using Monboddo's example, emphasize some interesting if unexpected aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment's application of the 'science of human nature' to the study of religion. For Monboddo, human civilization and religious knowledge owes their existence to Egyptian daemon-kings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recovers the discussion of the relationship between religion, human nature and happiness in the Scottish Enlightenment physician John Gregory's (1724–1773) A Comparative View of Human Nature (1765). Through examining Gregory's best-selling but understudied text, this article explores how the Aberdeen Enlightenment's own branch of the wider Scottish 'science of human nature', centred at the famous Aberdeen Philosophical Society, was as deeply concerned with the study of religion as it was the philosophy of mind. Gregory examined how the purported cultural spread of dogmatic scepticism, associated by the Aberdonians with David Hume, threatened individual happiness and social tranquillity by removing the crutch of religious belief upon which the multitude (though not the philosopher) depended. In doing so, it suggests that the contribution made by physicians to the Scottish Enlightenment's engagement with religion has been unjustly ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, James Beattie (1735–1803) was one of the most prominent literary figures of late eighteenth-century Britain. His major works, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) and the two-canto poem The Minstrel (1771–1774), were two of the best-sellers of the Scottish Enlightenment and were key to Beattie's role in the emergence of both the 'Scottish School' of Common Sense Philosophy and British Romanticism. Intellectual history scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has tended to discuss Beattie in terms of his relationship to his fellow Aberdonian Thomas Read. While clearly important, his link with Reid does not exhaust our potential interest in Beattie. This article explores his extensive engagement with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In the process, it is argued that the Genevan's works – especially the Confession of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile (1762) – played an important though little noticed role in both Beattie's rhetoric and anti-scepticism in both the Essay and Minstrel. Moreover, Beattie's initially praising stance on Rousseau as a potential friend to true religion indicates the complexity of the reception of the Genevan's works in late eighteenth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744-1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Archibald Campbell'sNecessity of Revelation(1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal'sChristianity as Old as the Creation(1730), but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]