Born in 1739, John Robison was professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1774 until his death in 1805. By any measure Robison was a prominent figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Although Robison is not mentioned in the title of the book under review here, his portrait graces the book's jacket. That is an appropriate choice of illustration, for Robison is at the center of David B. Wilson's story and with good reason for, as Wilson puts it in his preface, Robison “taught the premier science of the day at the premier science university of the time” (xi). But this volume is not a narrow intellectual biography of one man and his scientific thought. Far from it. Wilson (professor of history and philosophy at Iowa State University) appreciates that to understand Robison's ideas and their impact necessitates that we see him and his thought in historical context. At times that requires a wide-angled approach that takes in broad trends in the history of ideas stretching from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, or, more precisely, from 1687 and the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia to Robison's influence on British natural philosophy at Cambridge University in the 1890s. At other times the context is narrowed to the details of debate in Scotland about phlogiston, heat, or electricity among Robison's circle of colleagues, students, and critics, especially in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. The result is a richly layered account of the nuanced attempt by Robison and others of the Scottish Enlightenment to seek nature's logic.

Wilson begins his story not in Scotland and not in the eighteenth century but with a chapter on the writings of “the Frenchman Rene Descartes, the Englishman Isaac Newton, and the German Gottfied Wilhelm Leibnitz” (1). While the seventeenth century achieved parts of the intellectual stability it had been in search of, “Cartesian Copernicanism and Newtonian Copernicanism represented quite different worldviews, and they differed sharply on issues such as God's creative process, God's continuing relation to his created world, the existence of void space in that world, and the validity of gravitational theory” (31–32). Chapter 2 argues that these are the sorts of concerns that were taken up by Scots in the first half of the eighteenth century. Wilson traces some of what he descriptively calls “this clamor of ideas” (65) in the writings of David Gregory, John Keill, Colin Maclaurin, and especially David Hume, whose impact is long felt in Scottish debates on science.

Building on the work of Nicholas Capaldi and Michael Barfoot among others, Wilson reads Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) as a Newtonian approach to the study of human nature. As Hume had put it in his Treatise: “And tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, 'tis still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical” (60). But Hume also had his skeptical side with which Robison battled long after George Campbell, Thomas Reid, and others had “answered” Hume. While Hume's writings influenced Robison directly, Hume also found his way to Robison as mediated by intermediate thinkers, as Wilson demonstrates in chapters on Reid (chap. 3), Joseph Black (chap. 4), and John Anderson (chap. 5).

Much of Wilson's evidence comes from manuscript sources, including Robison's lecture notes, which Wilson often put to good use. For instance, summarizing Hume's skeptical philosophy for his students, Robison directed them: “The answer given to all this by Buffier, Reid, Beattie, Campbell is that we are led by the constitution of our Nature to trust the Evidence of our Senses, and our belief in that Evidence is universal and irresistable” (240). Many of the manuscript sources cited have not been discussed in print before now and scholars will be grateful to Wilson for his painstaking work in the archives.

While this book is primarily concerned with learned books and their writers, it is not blind to the wider dissemination of those ideas. Wilson gives attention to how ideas circulated in lectures and also in various printed formats aimed at a wider reading public, such as through Robison's significant contributions to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797). Wilson's bibliography is impressive, listing all of his manuscript sources, and his list of secondary sources will provide many points of departure for those interested to pursue the historiographical debates referenced in this book's extensive footnotes. Scattered throughout the volume are ten illustrations, including a portrait of Robison from the frontispiece of the Philosophical Magazine (the same as the image on the jacket) and also beautifully insightful portraits of Robison and Reid, both painted by Henry Raeburn near the close of the eighteenth century.

When this volume is read alongside other recent studies—such as Roger L. Emerson's Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews Universities (Edinburgh, 2008)—we have a Scottish Enlightenment with a larger cast of characters than scholars have noted before, and we can better appreciate how that Enlightenment was rooted in its particular time and place while at the same time being connected to debates in England and continental Europe. Seeking Nature's Logic: Natural Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment will be required reading for those who study natural philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, but hopefully it will attract a wide readership, for it has things to offer many others whose scholarly interests intercept Wilson's at one place or another.