According to his elogist, Dugald Stewart, the Enlightened historian William Robertson “was not eminent for metaphysical acuteness, nor did he easily enter into speculations involving mathematical or mechanical ideas”; for “the bent of his genius did not incline him to mathematical or physical pursuits.”Footnote 1 Subsequent commentators repeated these claims, often verbatim, in the nineteenth century, and have tacitly accepted them in the twentieth and twenty-first: natural philosophy, it is said, played little part in Robertson's education or intellectual makeup.Footnote 2 Yet there is reason to question this received portrait, not least because it derives largely from the historiographical legacy of Stewart. “Reticent about the place of natural knowledge in the intellectual economy of eighteenth-century Scotland,” Stewart made little effort to identify its interconnections with the moral disciplines.Footnote 3 If his dismissals of Adam Smith's and Thomas Reid's interests in natural philosophy have already been discredited, his similar statements about Robertson should no longer go unquestioned.Footnote 4 In fact, when we examine Robertson's early contacts with that province and its central place in the controversy surrounding David Hume and Henry Home, Lord Kames in the 1750s, a new portrait begins to emerge—a portrait colored by the scientific theism of such thinkers as Joseph Butler, Edmund Law, and Colin Maclaurin.Footnote 5 This source tradition assisted two key objects of Robertson's foundational sermon, The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance (1755): first, to counter the autonomous figurations of the universe associated with Hume and Kames; and, second, to develop a historical framework integrating human progress and divine providence. Attending to Robertson's debts to scientific theism enables critical revisions in our understanding of his intellectual formation, his reception of stadial theory, his aims in the Situation of the World, and the significance of this work for the rest of his corpus. Moreover, because Robertson was one of the eighteenth century's preeminent historians, and—as principal of the University of Edinburgh and leader of the Moderates in the Church of Scotland—one of its central institutional figures, this revised portrait offers larger insight into the dynamics of religion and (what is now called) science in that era.
ROBERTSON'S EDUCATION IN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
By 1734, when Robertson began undergraduate studies at Edinburgh, Bacon, Locke, and Newton pervaded the university's curriculum, and the metaphysical disquisitions of Berkeley, Butler, Locke, and Samuel Clarke were favored reading and debate material among the student societies and literati.Footnote 6 Robertson would have encountered most of these thinkers in John Pringle's course in moral philosophy and John Stevenson's in logic and metaphysics. Pringle, later president of the Royal Society of London, was primarily a man of science, and his course treated the related concerns of “pneumatics,” including natural theology.Footnote 7 According to Pringle's biographer, “Bacon was his favorite author” and was “recommended much to his pupils”; Alexander Carlyle recalled that his “lectures were chiefly a compilation from Lord Bacon's works.”Footnote 8 Having subscribed to Henry Pemberton's introductory View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728), Pringle may also have devoted time to explicating and defending the Newtonian system of the universe, as he later did in a published discourse.Footnote 9 Stevenson, meanwhile, taught extensively from the abridgment of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1696, 4th edn 1731); and extant class essays indicate that his students were exposed to the philosophies of Berkeley and the Scottish Newtonian Andrew Baxter.Footnote 10 In short, the methods and concerns of the new science were intertwined with those of theology and moral philosophy in Robertson's program of study.Footnote 11
Furthermore, courses in mathematics and natural philosophy were both part of the standard four-year curriculum, and there is evidence to suggest that Robertson took at least the former, taught by the renowned Colin Maclaurin. Robertson's great-nephew Henry Brougham wrote that he “deeply studied some branches of the severer sciences,” such that he could discuss “mathematical subjects” with authority.Footnote 12 And much as Dugald Stewart dismissed Robertson's interest in “mathematical or physical pursuits,” he acknowledged “the strong recommendations they derived from the popular talents of Mr. Maclaurin,” noting that Robertson “could not fail to receive advantage from the eloquence with which that illustrious man knew how to adorn the most abstracted subjects, as well as from that correctness and purity in his compositions.”Footnote 13 In addition to algebra, fluxions, and Euclidean geometry, Maclaurin covered astronomy and optics, and lectured to his advanced students on Newton's Principia (1687, 3rd edn 1726).Footnote 14 This was a syllabus that anticipated much of Robert Stewart's subsequent course in natural philosophy, which Robertson would have taken in 1737–8. A description of the course from 1741, listing Newton's paper on colors (1672) and Principia, along with texts by David Gregory and John Keill, points to the generally Newtonian approach that Stewart shared with Maclaurin, Pringle, and the majority of their scientific contemporaries throughout Britain.Footnote 15
Robertson's divinity studies in the early 1740s afforded him further exposure to natural philosophy as well as its contemporary religious implications. Like other students, he supplemented the stodgy lectures of his professor, John Gowdie, with extracurricular readings in liberal theology, and was said to have developed an “early and high esteem” for the works of Arminian divines, including Jean Le Clerc and Philip van Limborch.Footnote 16 These were Continental thinkers very much occupied with scientific knowledge and the uses and abuses of Cartesianism.Footnote 17 Le Clerc, for one, became a prominent advocate and disseminator of the rival Newtonian system, and his Physica (1696) served as the standard introduction to natural philosophy at Edinburgh until it was replaced by Keill's text sometime after 1708.Footnote 18 In the course of his studies, Robertson would also have encountered Butler's Analogy of Religion (1736), the foremost anti-deist tract of the eighteenth century and a major influence on English and Scottish thinkers alike.Footnote 19 Butler's famous parallel between the moral and natural worlds proceeded from an attempt to set theology on a scientific footing: indeed, perhaps “no writer of the period more fully represents the true influence of Newton on later thinkers than does Butler.”Footnote 20 What recommended Newtonian natural philosophy to Butler, Le Clerc, and many of their theist contemporaries was an idea with which it became closely identified in the eighteenth century: that a divine providence ordered and directed the system of nature. But this idea had antecedents in the Stoic philosophy—another of Robertson's youthful interests—and abounded in works like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which he translated much of in 1742.Footnote 21 If liberal theology may be credited with directing Robertson towards natural philosophy, another likely, if contrasting, influence was that of Adam Smith, whose 1748–51 Edinburgh lectures included a “history of philosophy” treating astronomy and the philosophy of science from a skeptical Newtonian perspective. Robertson seems to have been both aware of and interested in this work, judging by his later comment to Smith that “I still wish you would think on the History of Philosophy.”Footnote 22
Whether or not Robertson also read the popular treatments of Newton by Pemberton or Voltaire (1738), he had evidently become sufficiently interested in their subject by the later 1740s that he subscribed to Maclaurin's Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748).Footnote 23 The cost of the book—some eighteen shillings—would have been a considerable outlay for Robertson, whose parents had both died in 1745, leaving him to support seven younger siblings on a meager seventy-five-pound ministerial stipend.Footnote 24 But the contents of the Account justified its expense, offering both the definitive epitome of Newton and an elegant and scientifically learned theology of nature. A former divinity student and the son, brother, and nephew of clergymen, Maclaurin regarded natural philosophy as “the firmest bulwark against Atheism” and “a sure foundation for natural religion and moral philosophy.”Footnote 25 He believed, moreover, that the system of the universe testified to the active superintendence of a Christian God, and sought to refute “false schemes of natural philosophy,” which “may lead to atheism, or suggest opinions, concerning the Deity and the universe, of most dangerous consequences to mankind.”Footnote 26 Maclaurin criticized Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza by name, but an additional implicit target was Hume: indeed, the “Account constituted a reply to Hume's Treatise,” and “anyone at midcentury seeking a modern authority to reject Hume had one in Maclaurin.”Footnote 27 To understand why Robertson in particular should have had recourse to Maclaurin's brand of scientific theism will require a closer look at the intellectual projects of Hume and Kames, their reception, and their connection to Robertson leading up to 1755.
THE HUME–KAMES CONTROVERSY
Much has been written about natural philosophy in the thought of Hume and Kames, but its centrality to the controversy in which they were embroiled in the 1750s has been neglected.Footnote 28 The title of Hume's first publication, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739–40), suggested that he intended to apply the principles of natural philosophy to a “science of man” along the lines proposed by Newton.Footnote 29 Hume's contemporaries were quick to recognize, however, that his project entailed a skeptical assault on the theological trappings of Newtonianism and, particularly, the rationalist apologetics of its foremost advocate, Clarke. Reviewers thus characterized the Treatise as the work of a “freethinker” in the mold of English deists like Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, and John Toland, who had earlier engaged the Newtonians in intellectual battle.Footnote 30 Similar suspicions regarding the Treatise were raised in 1745 in an anonymous paper, perhaps by Baxter, which sought to derail Hume's application to the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh.Footnote 31 Cosmology loomed large in the paper's charges, which included denying “that the Deity first created Matter, and gave it its original Impulse, and likewise supports its Existence.”Footnote 32 Hume publicly disputed these charges, distinguishing between a positive atheism and his own negative skepticism, which he claimed (perhaps disingenuously) accorded with natural religion; but his application was nonetheless defeated by a vote of twelve to three in the town council.Footnote 33
Emboldened, perhaps, by this outcome, Hume abandoned his former caution, publishing the unmistakably irreligious essays “Of Miracles” and “Of the Practical Consequences of Natural Religion” among his Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748). “Of Miracles,” especially, drew sharp criticism for its apparent rejection of divine intervention. The Oxonian William Adams conceded Hume's point that “experience proves a course of nature,” but found that “whether this is ever interrupted, is still a question”—and one answered in the affirmative by no less an authority than Newton.Footnote 34 With Hume's reputation for impiety cemented by the Philosophical Essays, contemporaries began to see arguments against providence and design in practically all of his works. The Edinburgh philosopher James Balfour, for instance, claimed that Hume's system of virtue in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) was compromised by an Epicurean denial of “the order of the universe”:
If we shall suppose this universe, and all that it contains, to be the random effect of a fortuitous concourse of atoms, there can, in this case, be no uniting principle, or governing cause . . . A world thus fluctuating at random, without an intelligent ruler, without a common and bountiful parent, presents but an uncomfortable prospect . . . [L]ife itself . . . without God and providence, is not worth the possessing . . . It is therefore not to be wondered at, if those, who can allow themselves to enter into this way of thinking, are a loss to discover, or perhaps think it little worth their while to inquire after virtue.Footnote 35
From 1739 forward, Hume was increasingly read as denying God an active role in the universe; but this was a charge which extended also to Kames following the publication of his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751).
Kames had intended the Essays as a rejoinder to Humean skepticism and the basis of a religiously compatible science of man. His necessitarianism, however, raised the ire of the Popular party (“Evangelicals” or “Highflyers”) in the Church of Scotland—perhaps even more than any aspect of Hume's philosophy. In An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion (1753), the Reverend George Anderson took some swipes at Hume, but his main target was the author of the Essays (not yet identified as Kames). Anderson accused this author of “the most specious objection against human liberty, viz. its inconsistency with the pre-adjusted plan of God's government of the universe.”Footnote 36 Kames's alleged error consisted not only in neglecting to distinguish between moral and physical necessity, but also, like Hume's, in diminishing God's sovereign authority.Footnote 37 As another pamphleteer remarked, “it is not conceivable how the Deity can hold the reins of government, and give a proper direction to all the affairs of the universe, when we consider all his actions as fast bound in a fatal and necessary chain.”Footnote 38
Such objections were raised again in 1754, in a controversy over natural philosophy that resonated well beyond its origins in the papers of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society (of which Hume was co-secretary). In an essay, “Of the Laws of Motion,” Kames contested the prevailing belief that matter was passive and claimed that Newton himself had imputed activity to matter. This was an argument Kames had made in correspondence with Clarke and Baxter, and Hume had made in the Treatise and Philosophical Essays.Footnote 39 There was some disagreement even among Newtonians on whether all matter was passive: indeed, Maclaurin claimed in the Account that God had left a place “for second causes to act in subordination to him.”Footnote 40 But for Hume and Kames, the activity of matter underpinned a larger anti-Newtonian argument for a self-sufficient system of the universe.Footnote 41 As Kames stated in his paper, “considering this universe a great machine, the workmanship of an intelligent cause; I cannot avoid thinking it the more compleat, the less mending or interposition it requires.”Footnote 42 This view was not shared by Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy John Stewart, whose paper in response expressed the familiar position that the universe “must stand in need of a first mover, not only to begin the motion, but to preserve it.” “He who allows, that the system of the universe may proceed at present without any guidance or direction,” Stewart added, “will find it difficult to assign to himself any good reason, why it might not always, or from eternity, have done the same.”Footnote 43 Given such statements, it was no wonder that Hume complained of “insinuations of Irreligion” in Stewart's critique.Footnote 44 If Stewart did not coordinate his attack with the Highflyers, it nonetheless played perfectly into their strategy. In a 1755 pamphlet addressed to the General Assembly of the Kirk, John Bonar praised Stewart for his “very masterly reply to the Essay on motion,” and cited the active-matter theory of Hume and Kames as evidence of their larger “scheme” of irreligion.Footnote 45 Like Anderson before him, Bonar implored the Church to take action against these promoters of impiety.Footnote 46
The Highflyers sought to damage not only Hume and Kames but, more importantly, their Moderate protectors. A judgment for censure or excommunication by the Assembly “would have thrown its penumbra over” the Moderates and “compromised” their leader “Robertson as much almost as” its ostensible targets.Footnote 47 This design was clear in John Witherspoon's popular satire, The Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753), wherein he accused the Moderates of having “great charity for Atheists and Deists” (meaning Hume and Kames respectively). Witherspoon suggested, moreover, that they secretly adhered to much the same irreligious worldview, premised on “Leibnitz's scheme” of a clockwork universe—described in the second edition (1754) as “a huge machine, wound up from everlasting by necessity,” with “Fate, her only parent and guardian.”Footnote 48 Witherspoon's case could only have benefited from the reportedly widespread criticism of the first volume of Hume's History of Great Britain (1754).Footnote 49 Here, Hume used the conceptual resources of skepticism and science to highlight the corrupting role of the Church and the earthly virtues of commercial society; Bonar probably spoke for many in characterizing the work as part of a renewed “attack” on religion.Footnote 50 It is indicative of this reception, and of the ecclesiastical politics of the time, that Hume's History—perhaps the most significant Scottish publication to date—went unnoticed by the Edinburgh Review, a journal organized by Robertson and a handful of associates in 1755. The Highflyers’ accusations had forced the Moderates into the difficult position of having to distance themselves from Hume and Kames even as they attempted to defend them. Hume's notoriety was such by this point that Robertson and his coeditors declined not only to review their friend's work but also to involve him in the publication or, reportedly, even inform him of it.Footnote 51 Meanwhile, in an unfavorable appraisal of a recent Hutchinsonian tract, they aligned the Review with Newtonian natural philosophy and against the autonomous picture of the universe associated with Hume and Kames. While Hutchinson (and by extension Hume and Kames) were criticized for giving “us a system which represents the world as pure mechanism; and removes the divine agency much further from view,” Newton was commended as being “eminently distinguished in all his writings for his regard both to natural religion, and to the cause of revelation.”Footnote 52 This position was reinforced by the inclusion of a letter from Adam Smith remarking on the ascendancy of the Newtonian over the “fallacious” Cartesian philosophy.Footnote 53 The editors of the Review found it impossible, however, to shake suspicions of collaboration or ideological affiliation with their infamous friends, and this probably informed their decision to discontinue the publication after only two issues.Footnote 54
As we have seen, midcentury critics identified the concept of an autonomous universe at the heart of the philosophies of Hume and Kames. The frequent conflation of these philosophies may strike us as odd: for Hume, after all, the system of the universe was only superficially intelligible and defied attribution to a final cause, while for Kames it implicated a supreme being who predetermined events in the moral and physical worlds alike.Footnote 55 One model elided divine agency; the other, human. But though their positions were quite different, Hume and Kames were both seen to be taking up the deistic or atheistic battle lines of earlier Epicureans, Cartesians, Leibnizians, and freethinkers, insofar as they too played down the ongoing role of God in the universe. Robertson, an ambitious ecclesiastical politician and historian—whose forthcoming History of Scotland (1759) would draw inevitable comparison with the History of England—had every reason to want to distance himself from Hume and Kames in 1755. The necessary tools were to be found in the scientific theism of Butler and Maclaurin.
THE SITUATION OF THE WORLD
On 6 January 1755, in the midst of the Hume–Kames controversy, Robertson delivered the Situation of the World before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. As a nineteenth-century historian of the University of Edinburgh explained, the SSPCK
has, since its foundation, been always in the practice of having an annual sermon preached in Edinburgh, immediately upon the rising of the General Assembly. The persons fixed upon to perform that duty, are usually selected from the most eminent clergymen in the church of Scotland; and it is always esteemed as reflecting honour upon him who is appointed to the office. Dr. Robertson was at this time only a young man, but he had already distinguished himself both in the church courts, and as an eloquent preacher; and in the discharge of this task imposed upon him, he acquitted himself to the satisfaction of all, and added new laurels to his fame.Footnote 56
Robertson's principal claim in the Situation of the World was that Christ had appeared “at a time when the world stood most in need of such a revelation, and was best prepared for receiving it.” Both of these conditions, he argued, were facilitated by the political unification of the Roman Empire—which on the one hand enabled rapid transmission of the gospel, and on the other spread superstition, tyranny, and vice, such that humankind desperately needed and would readily accept it. These were terrestrial developments, attributable to the actions of men rather than God, but were undergirded by celestial design: what owed “in appearance to the sagacity of men, was ordained in reality by the wisdom of God.”Footnote 57 Divine providence, in other words, cooperated with human progress in the scheme of society.
In light of its humanist stance, the Situation of the World has typically been read as “another shot fired” at the rigidly Calvinist Highflyers in the Church of Scotland.Footnote 58 But the Reverend John Jardine, writing in the first issue of the Edinburgh Review, identified a different target:
We cannot conclude without observing, that, considering how much this age has abounded with writings in favours of infidelity, discourses of this kind must needs be very seasonable; and that this discourse particularly, in which the reverend author has done so much justice to his argument in behalf of Christianity, deserves the serious consideration of our modern freethinkers.
According to Jardine, Robertson was aiming an apologetic argument beyond the walls of the Kirk at “our modern freethinkers,” the authors of “writings in favours of infidelity.”Footnote 59 And indeed, Robertson framed his sermon as a response to “modern infidels.”Footnote 60 But to whom, specifically, was he responding? In 1755, Hume and Kames were the “freethinkers” and “infidels” on Scottish lips, and for Robertson it was politically imperative to be seen to reject their heretical positions.Footnote 61 He directly ascribed to “infidels” only two rather dusty arguments associated with an earlier generation of deists, hoping perhaps to demonstrate his abhorrence of impious views and distance himself from those of Hume and Kames without drawing additional fire upon them.Footnote 62 His more substantive critique, however, centered on the issue of God's role in the universe. If the philosophies of Hume and Kames asserted a regular course of nature to the exclusion of an active providence, it was crucial for Robertson to reassert the compatibility of these concepts. An important task of the sermon, then, was “to illustrate and magnify the divine power” from the kind of Moderate–Newtonian scientific perspective presented later that year in the Review's takedown of Hutchinsonianism.Footnote 63 To this end, Robertson employed two key apologetic strategies, both indebted to natural philosophy.
First, Robertson argued that divine intervention was periodically required to renew a moral world that tended to decay. By the time of Christ's appearance, human affairs had become “broken” to the point of “universal corruption” and “the utmost dissolution of manners.” Political, moral, religious, and domestic structures were all “languishing and decayed” under the Roman Empire, and “what the wisdom of men could do” in such “a corrupt world, had been tried” and found “to be of very small avail.” Thus “the power of God . . . never exerted but on the most necessary occasions,” was required “to check and mitigate” civilization's “malignant distempers.” If this argument addressed the old theological problem of Christ's belated appearance, it also implied a need for subsequent divine renovations whenever the social machine again deteriorated beyond human repair. Robertson would describe the Protestant Reformation as such an event in The History of Charles V (1769); but as early as the Situation of the World, he perceived “powerful unknown causes” working to reform his own “degenerate age.”Footnote 64 This account echoed the definitive Newtonian argument for divine superintendence, expressed in the Principia and Query 31 of the Opticks (2nd edn 1718), and defended by Clarke in his famous correspondence with Leibniz (1717).Footnote 65 Commenting on an initial draft of Maclaurin's Account in 1732, Newton's loyal nephew John Conduitt recalled being particularly struck by Clarke's rejoinder to Leibniz that “if God had made the world in such a manner as never to stand in need of his interposition & providence it would have been independent of him”; and he appealed to Maclaurin to emphasize the point.Footnote 66 This Maclaurin did in the published Account to which Robertson subscribed, concurring with Newton “that the fabric of the universe, and course of nature, could not continue for ever in its present state, but would require, in process of time, to be re-established or renewed by the same hand that formed it.”Footnote 67 In 1755, this argument enjoyed wide circulation: it had, for instance, been cited by Hume's critic Adams in his response to “Of Miracles,” and alluded to by David Plenderleath in the SSPCK sermon of the previous year.Footnote 68 It had also been extended to God's operations in the moral world: Butler suggested in the Analogy that “there might be Interpositions to prevent Irregularities” or attend to “Exigencies” in society as in nature, and that human affairs might thereby “have a new Direction given them.”Footnote 69 Armed with a potent rationale for the necessity of divine intervention, Robertson had now to reconcile this with the weight of human experience.
Robertson's second apologetic strategy was thus to challenge the empirical grounds for an absentee deity by subsuming divine intervention as far as possible into the natural order. Using language reminiscent of Butler as well as several Scottish Newtonians, he held that God “conducteth all his operations by general laws” in both “the natural, and . . . the moral world.”Footnote 70 Hume and Kames, too, had attempted to comprehend moral subjects by the kind of “general laws” Newton had discovered in nature, but their approaches were exceedingly skeptical and necessitarian respectively. Hume resisted the usual equation of general laws with general providence, arguing that they defied attribution to a final cause.Footnote 71 And Kames, seeking to establish God's absolute prescience, theorized “that human actions, are, all of them, directed by general laws, which have an operation not less infallible, than those laws have, which govern mere matter.”Footnote 72 For both philosophers, the constancy and uniformity of nature discredited the notion of ongoing divine activity; and this, above all, was the view Robertson sought to counter with his own interpretation of general laws. It was “popular error,” he granted in Charles V, “to believe that the established laws of nature might be violated on the most frivolous occasions”; “that the Supreme Ruler of all ought visibly to display his power” whenever humans so desired. Properly understood, however, the divine economy consisted not in “particular and extraordinary acts of power,” but in “the regular progress and execution of a general plan.”Footnote 73 This reading of God's “government of the universe, by equal, fixed, and general laws” shaped Robertson's argument in the Situation of the World. Because “the Almighty seldom effects, by supernatural means, any thing, which could have been accomplished by such as are natural,” he dispensed revelation at that “favourable juncture” when minimal disturbance in the course of nature would be required. Even the figure of Christ God desired “not to assume any strange character, or to claim any new and unknown dignity.” By thus representing the sacred as natural, Robertson cleverly circumvented the evidentiary problem Hume had raised to such devastating effect in “Of Miracles.” For if even the ultimate miracle of revelation could be accomplished by largely ordinary means, might God not work through hidden secondary causes to bring about any change in human affairs? Robertson also countered Kames's denial of free will, by portraying the Romans as unwitting “instruments” of a deity that did not compel human actions, but instead marshaled their (often unintended) results.Footnote 74
Robertson's naturalistic depiction of divine operations found some support in the traditional Protestant belief that the age of miracles had passed with the apostles. He probably took this position in a heated debate with the Evangelical John Erskine during the Cambuslang revival of 1742.Footnote 75 And his first publication, the Moderate manifesto “Reasons of Dissent” (1752), held firmly that because “miracles are now ceased,” the Church “can only subsist by those fundamental maxims, by which all society subsists.”Footnote 76 But in the Situation of the World, Robertson pushed the boundaries of the orthodox position by naturalizing to a great extent even the miraculous phenomenon of revelation. The strategy of comprehending miracles within the laws of nature can be traced to Newtonian natural philosophers, including Maclaurin, who asserted that God might reform his creation “by the intervention of instruments” rather than supernatural means.Footnote 77 It also points to Butler's contention in the Analogy that “the christian Dispensation may have been, all along, carried on by general Laws, no less than the Course of Nature”; that “revealed Dispensations of Providence, and miraculous Interpositions” might be “as much reduceable to general ones [laws] as Gravitation.”Footnote 78 This line of thinking suggested that divine actions would be manifested by unusual concatenations of events rather than supernatural phenomena. Or, as Robertson put it in the opening to his sermon, “Careful observers . . . can discover a skilful hand, directing the revolutions of human affairs, and compassing the best ends, by the most effectual and surprizing means.”Footnote 79 Robertson shared with Hume and Kames the modern scientific view that nature and society proceeded under fixed and uniform laws; but because these systems could not sustain themselves indefinitely, he argued, they required periodic reformation by the divine hand. That such reformation could not be proved by supernatural evidence was no serious objection, moreover, because the deity practically always worked through natural causes. Robertson's argument thus countered Hume's position on miracles and Kames's position on free will—as well as the larger presumption of both philosophers against ongoing divine activity. It also formed the basis of an alternate historical vision of progress.
STADIAL THEORY AND CHRISTIAN PROGRESS
The Situation of the World has been seen to articulate the stadial theory of progress, a marked intellectual feature of the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote 80 Some elements of this theory can be detected among Hume's writings, including a 1748 essay tying the characters of nations to their political, cultural, religious, and legal institutions. Others can be found in Kames's Historical Law-Tracts (1759), which advanced both a conjectural method for supplying gaps in the historical record and a materialist framework linking institutional developments to changes in the means of subsistence.Footnote 81 But it was Adam Smith, as early as the Edinburgh lectures on jurisprudence in 1750–51, who first developed these lines of inquiry into a comprehensive historical sociology of progress.Footnote 82 For Smith, the evolution of manners, and of the human mind itself, corresponded to shifts in the means of subsistence and distribution of property between four distinct stages: hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial. A stadial historian—albeit one more theologically inclined than Smith—might thus concur with Robertson that God had waited to reveal the gospel until humans were mentally prepared to receive it and institutionally prepared to disseminate it. A stadial historian might also conceivably judge this initial dispensation to have been imperfect—tailored necessarily to the limited percipience of a primitive people—and posit its gradual perfection through further dispensations synchronized with the progressive course of human faculties. Such a concept of progressive revelation was undoubtedly a key feature of Robertson's sermon, but its attribution to stadial theory demands reconsideration. For one thing, the extent in 1755 of Smith's development of this theory and Robertson's knowledge of it is far from clear.Footnote 83 Robertson has been described, moreover, as “a somewhat reluctant stadial historian,” who found that approach intractable to narrating civil history and only fully adopted it in the History of America (1777).Footnote 84 Finally, the ontogeny of civilization described in the Situation of the World does not fit Smith's model. As we have seen, Robertson's picture of society under the Roman Empire was characterized as much by the degeneration of mind and manners as by the extension of commerce, that ostensible civilizer; and the “important revolution, in the sentiments and dispositions of mankind” which set moderns apart from ancients owed not to stadial transition, but to supernal transmission.Footnote 85 If Smith's four-stage theory was an unwieldy apparatus for reconciling divine providence with human progress, Christian progressivism, on the other hand, was a powerful resource whose scientific disposition accorded with Robertson's own.
In the Situation of the World, Robertson grounded his scheme of progress, like his account of Christ's appearance, in contemporary natural philosophy and the concept of analogy between nature and society. He listed as one of God's “general laws” that “perfection of any kind”—moral, natural, or religious—could only be attained under the “gradual” and “progressive plan of Providence.”Footnote 86 The idea of a “perfectionating Progression by general Laws” pervaded the philosophical systems of Scottish Newtonians: George Cheyne's dietetics in An Essay on Regimen (1740), George Turnbull's scheme of virtue in The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy (1740), and, we might add, Maclaurin's philosophy of science in the Account.Footnote 87 Butler, likewise, figured the divine plan as “not a fixt but a progressive one,” in which God accomplished “his natural Ends, by slow successive Steps.”Footnote 88 The concept of a gradual providential unfolding of truth can be traced back to Augustine (and other Church Fathers), who held that because God had accommodated his message to the limited intellectual capacity of its initial audience, interpretation of Scripture should evolve alongside that capacity. In the hands of Calvin and other sixteenth-century thinkers, however, the principle of accommodation took on new significance, becoming “intertwined with the rise of ‘modern science.’”Footnote 89 And by the eighteenth century, accommodationist hermeneutics had become a crucial armament of theologians and natural philosophers for reconciling inconsistencies between scientific and scriptural accounts. Late in life, Robertson himself employed this strategy in revisions to the geologist James Hutton's proposed preface to the Theory of the Earth (1788).Footnote 90 “To instruct mankind in speculative science; to communicate to them a history of Nature; or to explain the true system of the Universe,” Robertson argued, fell outside the ambit of Scripture, which described “the phenomena of nature” in a way premoderns would understand: “not according to philosophic truth, but as they present themselves to our view.”Footnote 91 In “accommodating his dispensations to the frailty of his subjects,” God had provided for the advance of knowledge in tandem with human powers of understanding.Footnote 92 The logic of accommodation thus underpinned the equation of progress with providence.
For Butler, accommodation meant that humans could hope to eventually comprehend “the whole Scheme of Scripture . . . in the same way as natural Knowledge is come at: by the Continuance and Progress of Learning.”Footnote 93 Robertson, however, suggested that divine revelation played an ongoing role in this process: “the light of revelation was not poured in upon mankind all at once,” he argued, but “in proportion as the situation of the world made it necessary.”Footnote 94 This concept of progressive revelation was characteristic of a line of Anglican apologetics that found its most influential expression in Edmund Law's Considerations on the State of the World with Regard to the Theory of Religion (1745).Footnote 95 In response to deist argumentation concerning Christianity's late appearance and want of universality, Law adduced a historical theory of the development of the mind to account for progress in philosophical and religious knowledge alike. He observed that from low beginnings the former had lately risen to great heights, as “the Avenues to Learning of all kinds have been plan'd out and open'd by Ld. Bacon, the Nature and most intimate Recesses of the Human Mind unfolded and explain'd by Locke, the Frame and Constitution of the Universe by Newton.” Because God had set religion on the same arc of improvement “as all other parts of Science,” it was logical to conclude that he would reveal his Word to humans “in very different manners according to their different Circumstances and Capacities; that his several Dispensations have been gradually open'd so as regularly to rise out of and improve upon each other.” As “more full Revelations were communicated to the World,” it “thereby became better qualified to receive, keep and convey them, as they were likewise dispens'd in a way best suited to its own State.”Footnote 96 Law prefigured Robertson in arguing that Christ had arrived at a juncture determined by necessity of reformation and ability to receive it.Footnote 97 And while he did not take the more radical step of proposing future revelations—or even revelations subsequent to the events of the New Testament—by declaring himself “far from imagining that Christianity is yet come to its mature state, that it is understood in the whole extent,” he opened the door for others, like Robertson, to consider such possibilities.Footnote 98 The Word of God, for Law as for Robertson, was a historically dynamic message, accommodated to human faculties and refined through a graduated series of disclosures.
Similarities between the Situation of the World and Law's Considerations did not go unnoticed among Robertson's early biographers. As George Gleig observed,
Both writers agree that the intellectual powers of mankind have been progressive; that the race as well as every individual has had its nonage and maturity; that in the infancy of the world men were not capable of receiving the sublime though simple dispensation of the gospel; and that the Supreme Being never multiplies miracles to accomplish what can be gradually brought about by natural me[a]n[s] . . . And both shew . . . that the world had at no period from its creation been in a state so well calculated for the propagation of the gospel as when Judea had become a province of the Roman empire.
Gleig supposed such parallels to be the product of a remarkable “coincidence of thought” rather than direct influence, but gave no evidence to support this claim.Footnote 99 In fact, Robertson had ample opportunity for exposure to Law's theory: the Considerations was published a full decade before the Situation of the World and reached a second edition in 1749.Footnote 100 Even if Robertson was somehow unacquainted with that work, however, he could have encountered similar thinking in a number of other Anglican tracts. The important point is that, by embracing Christian progressivism, Robertson set his historical model on a very different foundation from that of Hume, Kames, or Smith. As editor of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1788–97), Gleig mounted a polemic against the secular, autonomous conception of progress advanced by these historians; for progress, he argued, was dependent on providence.Footnote 101 It is no wonder, then, that he should have valorized Robertson's approach: in the Situation of the World, it was not alteration of the distribution of property or other material circumstances but, rather, revelation of divine will that stimulated the human capacity for improvement. This was a historical framework that diverged significantly from stadial parameters to assert the periodic necessity of divine revelation as a mechanism of social instauration.
CONCLUSION
In 1788, presenting his son-in-law with an attractively bound set of his works, Robertson observed that “my solitary sermon, naked as it came into the world, accompanies its well-drest brothers, but though the least of my works, I would not have you esteem it the last in merit.”Footnote 102 Indeed, the aged historian had good reason to reflect favorably on that early production, the Situation of the World. According to Gleig, “this sermon did great honour to the author,” and smoothed the way for his translation to a desirable Edinburgh parish in 1758.Footnote 103 As a component of his political program in the Kirk, it may also have helped to protect Hume and Kames and consolidate Moderate power—outcomes which, along with the success of the History of Scotland, led to a rush of honors and appointments in the next few years: royal chaplain in 1761, principal of the University of Edinburgh in 1762, moderator of the General Assembly in 1763, and Historiographer Royal in 1764. The Situation of the World helped lay the foundations not only for Robertson's various careers but, moreover, for the narrative of progress he would develop in the course of his historical oeuvre. In Charles V, he tied this narrative to the most important event in the post-biblical history of Christianity: the Protestant Reformation. Whereas Hume had suggested that the Reformation was rash and premature, Robertson perceived it as timed, like Christ's appearance before it, to an optimal concurrence of circumstances.Footnote 104 Dissatisfaction with the corrupt and decadent Roman Church had reached such a pitch that men across Europe were ready to cast off its yoke. The revival of classical learning, meanwhile, had prepared their minds for Luther's message, which could now be successfully disseminated via the new medium of print. Robertson concluded that while
none of the reformers possessed . . . supernatural gifts, yet that wonderful preparation of circumstances which disposed the minds of men for receiving their doctrines, that singular combination of causes which secured their success . . . may be considered as no slight proof, that the same hand which planted the Christian religion, protected the reformed faith, and reared it, from beginnings extremely feeble, to an amazing degree of strength and maturity.
By “the natural effect of many powerful causes prepared by peculiar providence,” God had intervened once again to refine human knowledge of the Word and amend civilization.Footnote 105 A cosmopolitan historian writing in an age of global empires, however, could not fail to reflect on the prospects for still further-reaching revelation. Robertson had already signaled in the Situation of the World that European attainments in “empire or commerce” might become “instruments in the hand of God, for preparing the world to receive the gospel.”Footnote 106 If the History of America cast the Spanish conquistadors in the instrumental role formerly occupied by the Romans, An Historical Disquisition (1791) hinted that the British might now (more benignly) take up this role in India.Footnote 107 The endurance in Robertson's later works of the framework he first set out in 1755 suggests that his historical understanding of the human mind was rooted in Christian progressivism rather than in stadial theory—to which he came only belatedly. Yet this consideration in turn raises larger questions about the intellectual trajectory of the eighteenth century.
Robertson has been seen to exemplify, on the one hand, the secularization of Western intellectual life in the wake of Newton, and, on the other, the endurance of traditional providential discourse.Footnote 108 The foregoing account shows, however, that he conceived of history neither in secular terms nor in those of orthodox religion—that he sought instead to refashion the providential idiom according to Enlightened principles. If Robertson had “come to history by way of theology,” the Situation of the World showed him reflexively imposing history back on theology—that is, naturalizing the sacred within a framework of observed general laws of society.Footnote 109 And if the scientific theism that informed this arrangement had first been developed in the context of the deist controversy, Robertson's uptake reflected the new demands on midcentury apologetics. Hume and Kames posed challenges requiring a more thorough integration of providence with natural laws than even Butler or Law had envisioned. This did not, however, mean picturing God's activity as entirely prosaic or mechanical. While it has been commonly asserted that the conceptualization of natural laws as regular and uniform led to the wholesale rejection of the marvelous by high thinkers in the eighteenth century (if not earlier), Robertson's descriptions of divinely arranged events as “wonderful,” “singular,” and “surprizing” tell a different story.Footnote 110 To be sure, only the primitive or vulgar looked for supernatural manifestations of God's power; but those less “prone to credulity and superstition,” more amenable to “science and philosophy,” could delight in the “infinite ease” with which he brought about “events that to human sagacity appear impossible.”Footnote 111 This, for Robertson and his constituency, was the essence of Enlightened piety.
