The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century: Edinburgh Classic Editions 9780748684793

Citation preview

t he demo cratic i n tellect

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The Edinburgh Classic Editions series publishes influential works from the archive in context for a contemporary audience. These works shifted boundaries on first publication and are considered essential groundings in their disciplines. New introductions from contemporary scholars explain the cultural and intellectual heritage of these classic editions to a new generation of readers. The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century George Elder Davie with an introduction by Murdo Macdonald and Richard Gunn and a foreword by Lindsay Paterson 2013 (first published 1961) Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland G. W. S. Barrow with an introduction by Michael Brown 2013 (first published 1965)

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the

democratic intellect scotland and her universities in the nineteenth century

George Elder Davie FRSE

third edition Edited by Murdo Macdonald Edinburgh Classic Editions

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© George Elder Davie, 1961, 1964, 2013 First published in 1961 Second edition 1964 This edition 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by CRI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8478 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8479 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8480 9 (epub) The right of George Elder Davie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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contents FOREWORD by lindsay paterson INTRODUCTION by murdo macdonald and richard gunn AUTHOR’S PREFACE AND INTRODUCTORY ESSAY part 1: UNIVERSITY POLITICS 1: the presbyterian inheritance 2: the first assault of 1826 3: lorimer and the 1858 commission 4: 1889 – surrender or compromise?

vi viii xvii 3 26 41 76

part 2: THE CRISIS IN SCIENCE 5: the 1838 contest for the edinburgh mathematical chair 6: mathematics without metaphysics 7: geometry or algebra? 8: the humanistic bias of scottish science

105 127 150 169

part 3: THE CRISIS IN CLASSICS 9: the vernacular basis of scottish humanism 10: blood and culture

203 222

part 4: FERRIER AND COMMON SENSE 11: a metropolis of common sense 12: tensions in the scottish intellectual camps 13: the alienation of common sense 14: the thirty years war notes index

255 272 280 313 339 359

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foreword George Davie’s book is a lament. It is also a call to action. In the implications of one half of its title – ‘democracy’ – it inspired action that has contributed to success, insofar as the book – or at least the title as slogan – became part of Scotland’s self-image as the country moved towards self-government. But the other half – the unabashed celebration of intellect – now seems to belong to an irrecoverable past. The book came at a moment in recent Scottish history when everything was changing. It casts itself as a critique of the late nineteenth-century reforms to Scottish universities, and sides with that Scottish tradition which favoured wide-ranging intellectual enquiry against specialisation. Davie argues that generalism of mind was intimately linked to universalism of access: an intellect that was interested in all things was also open, in principle, to everyone. Yet the book is not a work of history in any reliable sense. It is not based on systematic scholarship in the archives, or re-analysis of statistical data, and it offers no evidence for its claims that access to Scottish universities narrowed during the period with which it deals. It is even less convincing that these changes were due to Anglicisation in any straightforward way. As history, it has long been superseded, notably by the elegant and rigorous work of R. D. Anderson. But, in a sense, that does not matter, because Davie’s polemical intent is in fact for the period when he was writing, the 1960s and later. His remarkable achievement was to demonstrate the abiding relevance of a Scottish intellectual tradition. More incisively and subtly than the common run of writing in the 1960s about the alleged dangers of specialisation, Davie shows how Scottish traditions of thought raise the fundamental questions that have faced democracy since Plato first doubted its feasibility. How are we to educate those who are chosen to rule, and do we still hold to the ancient ideal that the civic virtues are best formed through the scope of a broad intellect? Davie’s question is whether liberal education of an old kind – what the great English liberal Matthew

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Arnold in 1869 called education in ‘the best which has been thought and said’ – really is still our best guide to socially responsible action. Rhetorically, Davie’s title almost immediately became an inspiration for a generation of political reformers, and has entered the minds of Scotland’s new and gradually democratising political class. They have presided over a massive expansion of universities, often explicitly invoking the apparently easy conclusion that the tradition he invoked would support ever wider participation. Ignored in all this, however, is what interests him more – the cultural grounds on which the very possibility of an engaged intellect might rest. Faced with glib public talk of relevance, economic usefulness and education as a tool of social engineering, we might wish that Davie had reversed the order of the words that he borrowed from Walter Elliot. This book is in fact, in its deepest sense, about the possibility of an intellectual democracy. It is not about changing the social basis of intellect, but about the importance of perennial intellectual qualities for the polity. Lindsay Paterson University of Edinburgh February 2013

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introduction George Davie: Life and Significance George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century was first published in 1961. It pioneered the process of linking the intellectual traditions of the Scottish Enlightenment to those of today. Here and in its sequel, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect: The Problem of Generalism and Specialisation in Twentieth-Century Scotland, George Davie demonstrated with skill, humour and historical grasp the need to reassess and to properly evaluate the generalist tradition of education in Scotland, a tradition in which philosophy played a central role. The value of Davie’s understanding of the philosophical underpinning of interdisciplinary education has been recognised both as a guide to the development of educational provision and as a significant commentary on the relationship between expert and community. Davie’s publications have become reference points for the discussion of cultural thought. However, often those who use the term ‘democratic intellect’ have only a vague notion of what Davie actually wrote, and it is to be hoped that they will actually read this new edition. The Democratic Intellect has a claim to be the most significant single volume written by a Scottish academic in the last fifty years. It sets out to defend not only the intellectual culture of Scotland but the whole notion of what an intellectual culture can be, by showing that all its parts should benefit from all its other parts. As human beings we require both poetry and mathematics. They are not in competition. George Davie was born in Dundee in 1912. He was educated at the High School of Dundee and then at the University of Edinburgh. Dundee could not at that time provide him with an education in his chosen fields of classics and philosophy, but it should be noted that during his childhood both Patrick Geddes and D’Arcy Thompson were professors at University College Dundee. Geddes’ thinking in particular is characterised by both an intellectual generalism and a regard for the visual, and it is these

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precise areas that were to emerge for Davie as the key aspects of the Scottish intellectual tradition which he went on to defend. In The Democratic Intellect Davie identifies Geddes as one of the last representatives of a Scottish philosophical approach to science teaching. It is interesting to note what Davie’s friend Hugh MacDiarmid said about Geddes: ‘He knew that watertight compartments are useful only to a sinking ship, and traversed all the boundaries of separate subjects.’1 In the same book he devotes a chapter to The Democratic Intellect. The point is not to speculate about any direct influence of Geddes on Davie but rather to indicate that Davie grew up in the last years of a powerfully articulated intellectual tradition that had generalist thinking at its core. Davie’s significance for the history of ideas in Scotland is that he noticed that threatened aspect of his own culture and reflected on it when he became an academic. Nearby in St Andrews was the classicist and advocate of early Greek philosophy, John Burnet. Burnet was another inspirational generalist thinker and Davie paraphrases him to give one of the clearest statements of his own vision: ‘the most important side of any department of knowledge is the side on which it comes into contact with every other department.’2 That notion that any aspect of knowledge, culture or society benefits from the illumination of all other aspects is key to Davie’s thinking; for him the task of education was to facilitate that process. The social approach to knowledge that took for granted the role of the wider community in the process of establishing and maintaining bodies of knowledge also implied for Davie that within universities different disciplines should be juxtaposed for mutual illumination, and that a key role for the discipline of philosophy was to enable such juxtaposition to be understood. While studying at the University of Edinburgh, Davie was one of a group of students that included Sorley MacLean and J. B. Caird. Slightly younger was Stuart Hood. It was Caird and Davie who introduced Sorley MacLean to the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, and it was Davie who introduced MacLean to MacDiarmid in the flesh in Rutherford’s Bar in 1934. Davie would have considered it only proper that these two poets were introduced to one another by a student of classics and philosophy. He was to be among the first readers of MacLean’s The Cuillin in typescript, describing it in 1 2

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H. MacDiarmid, The Company I’ve Kept (Hutchinson, 1966), p. 83. G. E. Davie, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Polygon, 1986), p. 15.

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a letter to the author as ‘a classic of our time’ – an assessment that it is now so easy to echo.1 On graduating in 1938, he was appointed assistant at Edinburgh to the outstanding Kant scholar and translator Norman Kemp Smith, who was a lifelong influence. In 1944 he married Elspeth Dryer who, as Elspeth Davie, was to became a highly respected writer, winning the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1978. Elspeth was as acute a questioner of the nature of reality in her medium as was George in his. She had studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art before focusing on her writing and that again echoed George’s enduring interest in the visual. That interest emerges in a profound way in The Democratic Intellect through Davie’s consideration of the Scottish advocacy of the philosophical benefits of the study of geometry as against algebra. This was to a degree a defence of the high value placed on a visual approach to science and mathematics by Isaac Newton, at a time when the merits of such an approach were being overlooked south of the Border. A crucial example, for Davie, was Robert Simson’s edition of Euclid, published (complete with Simson’s philosophically informed notes) by Foulis of Glasgow in 1756. The implications of this ‘visual thinking’ aspect of The Democratic Intellect have still not been fully explored, but from a Scottish cultural point of view it finds its echoes everywhere from the engineering of Thomas Telford or James Watt to the photography of Hill and Adamson and the architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The Democratic Intellect is a book that practises what it preaches. It advocates an intellectual generalism and at the same time demonstrates just that on every page. Another example, again as yet not fully explored, is Davie’s exploration of the influence of Robert Burns as a philosophically informed thinker at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment. After the Second World War, George Davie was appointed to head the Department of Moral Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast. It was there that he conceived and wrote much of what was to become The Democratic Intellect. In 1953 his D.Litt. was awarded by Edinburgh University. His thesis, ‘A Scotch Metaphysics – The Theory of Knowledge in the Scottish Universities 1730–1860’, was accepted by Routledge but not published at the time due to the publisher requesting that Davie write a historical introduction to the book. This ‘introduction’ became The Democratic Intellect. In 1960 1 Quoted by Christopher Whyte’s in his introduction to S. MacLean, An Cuilithionn 1939 and Unpublished Poems (Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 2011), pp. 19–20.

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he returned to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he stayed for the rest of his career. The following year The Democratic Intellect was published. It attracted wide praise, not least from a figure concerned with the failure of interdisciplinary understanding in English education, C. P. Snow, and its influence on the deliberations of the Robbins committee has been recognised. Nevertheless it appeared at a time of relentless specialisation in higher education, and its generalist message was by no means universally welcomed, even in his own university. Davie was only too well aware of the challenge offered to then current thinking by his historical analysis. Today it is as relevant as ever, as we struggle with fragmented efforts at interdisciplinarity instead of adopting a philosophically informed approach such as Davie advocated. In 1983 George Davie was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, one of the first philosophers to be so honoured in recent times. Davie’s continuing contribution at this time is evident from Derrida’s invitation to him to contribute to the conference, ‘Victor Cousin, les ideologues et les écossaise’, which resulted in another notable paper, ‘Victor Cousin and the Scottish Philosophers’, first published in French in 1985 and published in English the next year in Edinburgh Review.1 In 1986, prompted by continuing enthusiasm for his work among his students, he published The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect: The Problem of Generalism and Specialisation in Twentieth-Century Scotland. As with The Democratic Intellect, that book drew together philosophy, poetry, education and wider cultural issues. The Glasgow Herald’s reviewer commented, ‘Davie may yet transform our ideas of twentieth-century Scotland.’ The Times Higher Education Supplement suggested that ‘the chapter on MacDiarmid is the best account of the poet yet written’, while The New Statesman remarked that ‘if Davie had done nothing else in this fascinating book, his elucidation of the philosophical bearings of one of the greatest twentieth-century poets would have been sufficiently momentous’. The London Review of Books called it ‘a substantial achievement in the chronically underdeveloped area of post-Enlightenment Scottish studies’. The Times Literary Supplement struck an appropriately interdisciplinary note: ‘Davie displays on page after page the virtues of an education that encourages a free interplay between special knowledge and general understanding.’ 1 G. E. Davie, ‘Victor Cousin and the Scottish Philosophers’ (Edinburgh Review, 1986, pp. 108–25).

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Having made his mark again at an age of well over seventy, Davie continued to produce and to influence. In 1990, along with Noam Chomsky, he made a notable contribution to the Free University of Glasgow’s ‘Self Determination and Power’ conference, which the writer James Kelman had helped to organise at the Pearce Institute in Govan. Introducing Davie’s essay collection, published later that year, Kelman wrote: ‘as well as offering an introduction to the intellectual struggles in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries, these essays by Davie offer an insight into some of the more crucial issues in modern times.’1 In 2001, with the help of his friend and colleague at the University of Edinburgh, the philosopher John Llewelyn, a version of his 1953 thesis, now entitled The Scotch Metaphysics, finally took its place on Routledge’s list, half a century after its original proposed publication date. Despite increasing physical frailty, in 2003 Davie published an extended essay, in association with Edinburgh Review, on the philosopher James Frederick Ferrier, a consideration of whose work lies at the heart of The Democratic Intellect.2 The word that Ferrier coined for theory of knowledge, ‘epistemology’, has become common currency. The fact that he considered a theory of ignorance to be just as important has been itself ignored. But its importance was not lost on George Davie, for at the heart of Davie’s thinking are those blind spots that lie outwith the methodological possibilities of one discipline but may nevertheless be approached from the perspective of another. The continuing appreciation of his cultural contribution was noted in 2007, when he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), the very body that had first published Hugh MacDiarmid’s Contemporary Scottish Studies. That advocacy of the poet’s views by the EIS had been a point of departure for Davie in his writing of The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect. Lindsay Paterson, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh, whose words preface this present edition of The Democratic Intellect, wrote in The Herald after Davie’s death in 2007: ‘George Davie was one of that very small group of Scottish intellectuals who have shaped the way the nation thinks of itself.’3 That 1

G. E. Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment and other Essays (Polygon, 1990). G. E. Davie, Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh Review, 2003). 3 Lindsay Paterson, ‘George Davie: An Appreciation’ The Herald, 28 March 2007. 2

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comment sums up Davie’s cultural significance. The opportunity here is to reflect further on its philosophical underpinnings. Common Sense and the Democratic Intellect An important chapter in The Democratic Intellect is headed ‘A Metropolis of Common Sense’. In it, Davie remarks that the ‘social-cultural life of the Scots’ remained ‘fairly intact’ for more than a century after the 1707 Union. He continues: ‘Edinburgh still remained a sort of debatable land where rival spheres of influence, English and French, British and Continental, might conflict with one another.’1 The passage sheds light on Davie’s own concerns. First, there is the metaphor which it employs: clubs and salons of the Scottish Enlightenment are likened to Scotland’s borders where, historically, diverse and conflicting claims held sway. Debate, and the interaction which debate involves, is essential to Davie’s notion of intellectual history. The Democratic Intellect is above all a dialogic work, where a range of voices obtain.2 Second, the passage underlies the international – Continental as well as Anglophone – perspective in which debates in Enlightened Scotland are to be seen. And, third, the passage and the chapter in which it is situated make clear the central role of philosophy in Scottish ideas. What sort of philosophy? The one-word (or one-phrase) answer given by The Democratic Intellect is: the philosophy of common sense. But more than a single word or phrase is needed because, as will become apparent in the paragraphs which follow, the term ‘common sense’ can be understood in various ways. A brief exploration of the term and its meanings supplies background to The Democratic Intellect’s discussions and, moreover, points forward to Davie’s subsequent work. In the opening paragraphs of the chapter already quoted, Davie draws upon the post-French Revolutionary theorist Theodore Jouffroy to indicate how common sense may be seen. In Davie’s words, summarising Jouffroy: the appeal of la philosophie écossaise lay in ‘its idea of common sense as a primitive version of the whole, obscurely implicit in all human beings, presupposed as a point of 1

Democratic Intellect, p. 261. On ‘dialogic’, see M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 1981) and V. Brown, Adam Smith’s Discourse (Routledge, 1994). 2

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agreement between philosophical and political differences [and] capable of being appealed to as a check on extremism’.1 The examples that Davie adduces of ‘extremism’ are the doctrines that virtue has nothing to do with pleasure and that a ‘material’ or external world does not exist. Perhaps the best way of stating the point that Davie wishes to draw from Jouffroy is to say that common sense sets its face against not ‘extremism’ but doctrines which philosophical scepticism affirms. What understanding of common sense is implied in the passage summarising Jouffroy? Setting aside questions concerning ‘extremism’ and scepticism, one meaning in particular occupies pride of place. If the term ‘common sense’ refers to a world-view ‘implicit in all humans’, it signifies (in part at least) a sense or meaning or pattern of ideas shared by a number of individuals – say, individuals who comprise a group or community. But – it may be asked – does a reference to ideas shared by a number of individuals tell the full story, where the notion of ‘common sense’ is concerned? In order to see that this is not the case, and to bring Davie’s thought into focus, we broaden our discussion. In the history of philosophy, the term ‘common sense’ has two meanings. Sometimes it does indeed signify a sense or meaning or set of ideas shared by a number of individuals. When, for example, Hutcheson translates the Latin expression sensus communis as ‘Publick Sense’,2 he has this conception of common sense (or a version of it) in mind. At other times, however, the expression ‘common sense’ refers not to a sense shared by individuals but by the senses (sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell). So to say, common sense is viewed as a ‘sixth sense’ which totalises, or draws together into a coherent picture, data supplied by the other, more familiar, five. Thomas Reid, as quoted by Davie in his Crisis of the Democratic Intellect, underlines the importance of ‘common sense’ in this meaning of the term.3 The question of how and why distinct senses should have an interconnected meaning – why a cube which looks sharp-cornered should also feel sharp-cornered whereas a sphere which looks smooth also feels smooth – was thrown into relief by 1

Democratic Intellect, p. 255. F. Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Liberty Fund, 2002), p. 17. 3 T. Reid, ‘Curia Prima on Common Sense’ (Appendix to L. Marcil-Lacoste Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid ) (McGill-Queen’s University Press), p. 189; see G. Davie, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Polygon, 1986), p. 187. 2

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Bishop Berkeley in 17101 and formed a focus of philosophical interest in the work of eighteenth-century Scots.2 Both meanings of common sense play a part in Davie’s writings. The phrase ‘democratic intellect’, which Davie sets at the head of his work,3 invokes first the social and then the epistemological significance of the term. In The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (The Democratic Intellect’s sequel), the relation between the meanings is an explicit theme.4 Ferrier and the Blackout of the Scottish Enlightenment – Davie’s last book – tells the story of how a resurgence of Calvinism in Scottish society diverted Ferrier’s philosophical attention at a time when, perhaps, a clear conception of the five senses’ interrelation was in his reach.5 What overall significance should we attribute to the complex conceptual continent – that of common sense in its two-fold meaning – which Davie’s writings bring into view? Our suggestion is that the significance is difficult to exaggerate. Although Davie’s focus is on the history of ideas during a specific period, the ideas he draws to a reader’s attention resonate internationally and from the eighteenth century to today. This is especially so if we ask how the two senses of common sense are related, and go on to propose a fashion in which this is the case. Perhaps either meaning of the term ‘common sense’ comes into its own only when the other is present? Perhaps a socially shared sense is possible only amongst a group 1

G. Berkeley, A New Theory of Vision CXXXII. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 25; A. Smith ‘Of the External Senses’ in his Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Liberty Fund, 1980), p. 148. See G. Davie, ‘Berkeley, Hume and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy’ in his A Passion for Ideas (Polygon, 1994), pp. 40–69. 3 See Democratic Intellect, p. 75. 4 A striking instance comes in Crisis of the Democratic Intellect, p. 259, where Davie refers to Adam Smith on intersubjectivity to show how knowledge of ‘causality’ (or at any rate ‘causality as it occurs in the social fact of people’s influence on one another’) is to be seen. 5 The passage in Ferrier which Davie, in conversation, presented as especially worthy of attention – a passage which, when almost blind, he asked to have read aloud – runs as follows: ‘And here we may hazard an observation, which, simple as it is, appears to be new, and not unimportant in aiding us to unravel the mysteries of sensation; which observation is, that, in no case whatever, does any sense inform us of the existence of its appropriate organ, or of the relation which subsists between that organ and its objects, but that the interposition of some other sense is invariably required to give us this information.’ And again: ‘while it is the touch which establishes an interval between the organ and the objects of sight, it is the sight which establishes no interval between the organ and the objects of touch. Sight thus pays back every fraction of the debt that it has incurred to its brother sense’ (J. Ferrier, Lectures and Philosophical Remains, Blackwood, 1864, Vol. II, p. 366.). 2

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or community of totalised individuals? And perhaps, conversely, a group or community of totalised – coherent, well-integrated, humane – individuals is conceivable only where shared sense in its social meaning obtains? Read in this way, Scottish common sense philosophy opens on to a host of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century positions: these include the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy, the later Wittgenstein’s conception of social or public meaning, Hegelian and neo-Hegelian views of mutual recognition as a precondition for ‘scientific’ thinking, the early Habermas’s advocacy of a ‘consensus’ theory of truth and – to return to a Scottish example1 – object-relations psychoanalysis where actual people as well as inner fantasies play a part in individual development. Here, we do not insist on any one of these examples. Our aim is to illustrate the immense richness and fertility of the intellectual world which, in The Democratic Intellect, is introduced. Murdo Macdonald University of Dundee Richard Gunn University of Edinburgh February 2013

1

W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (Tavistock, 1952).

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author’s preface and introductory essay This book originated almost accidentally, and, as it were, in the margin of regular academic ‘researches’. I was preparing for the press a doctoral thesis on ‘the Scottish school of common sense philosophy’, and had been asked by interested publishers to add a chapter on the intellectual and social background of the Scottish philosophers. Suddenly, in gathering this introductory and general material, the whole topic deepened; unsuspected dramas were revealed; and finally I became so absorbed in ‘the story behind the story’ that, putting aside my thesis manuscript on the rise and fall of the Scottish philosophy, I launched out into a quite different book, of less specialised scope, but of not less serious temper, on the rise and fall of the Scottish Universities, or, to be precise, of that central sector of them, known as the Arts Faculty. This study attempts to break new ground on a subject of interest from the general educational point of view, as well as from the point of view of Scotland’s cultural contribution to the world. As befits a pioneer work, what matters is the question (or series of questions) started. As for the answers, explicit or implicit, which are here suggested, these are merely provisional, and other people – outside the universities, I hope, are well as inside – may want to develop different sorts of answers, either more accurate in a factual view or more adequate in a practical view. A book like this inevitably owes much to others. It is, however, impossible to do justice here to the indirect sources of stimulus (in the present case very important), and I shall confine myself to a few direct acknowledgments. First, there was the invaluable sabbatical year granted me by Queen’s University, Belfast. I must also mention the various scholars – all of them fellow-philosophers – who favoured me with comments on portions of the manuscript, the late Professor Kemp Smith, Professor C. A. Campbell, Professor W. B. Gallie, Professor Alexander Macbeath, C.B.E. and Professor A. D. Ritchie. As regards the Edinburgh University Press, I have to acknowledge a very illuminating conversation with Professor W. L. Renwick of the Press Committee at a stage when the present book was a mere project, and, later on, the work of putting the variegated materials into some sort of unitary shape owed a very great deal to stimulating criticisms, destructive as well as constructive, from Press staff and above all from the Secretary himself. Finally, if here and there the narrative

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begins to move forward with a speed and lively humanity worthy of its theme, general credit is due to my wife. G. E. Davie Great Stuart Street, Edinburgh, 1961

* * * F. W. Maitland seems to have understood fairly well the central paradox of Scottish History from 1560 onwards. The outstanding fact, he implies, is that the Reformation broke down the barriers between England and Scotland in one way only to re-establish them in another. Between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth, ‘two kingdoms are drifting towards a “personal” and then a “real” union. But two churches are drifting into discord and antagonism’. Hence while it might appear as if, with the ending of the Franco-Scottish alliance, ‘a new nation, a British nation, is being born’, in the sequel, religious considerations prevented a complete fusion. But while it was right to bring into prominence this Heraclitean rhythm of a simultaneous drawing towards, and away from, England, it is probably misleading to identify the differentiating factor with religion, and to imply, as Maitland seems to do, the absence of a serious secular division between North and South. On the contrary, the Great Britain of the 1707 Union is surely best regarded not as an arrangement of two state-churches in one state but rather as a unity in politics combined with a diversity in what may be called social ethics. The principle of centralisation was confined to the Parliamentary and fiscal spheres, and local autonomy remained intact not only in the church but also in the judicature, and, what is equally important, in certain fundamental institutions in which legal and clerical interests met, such as, above all, the educational system. Hence from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, the distinctive code regulating the Scottish way of life was based not simply on a religious separation but on a distinctive blend of the secular and of the sacred. It may be argued, moreover, that, under post-Union conditions, it was the secular component rather than the sacred which was chiefly responsible for the continuing foreignness of the Scottish ethos. After all, the egalitarianism of the Presbyterians always made a certain appeal over the border, although to be sure it was

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un-English in an official sense. On the other hand, the ratiocinative approach of Parliament House, looking as it did to Roman and Continental law, was out of line with the inherited English practice; and still more alien and uncongenial was an educational system which, combining the democracy of the Kirk-elders with the intellectualism of the advocates, made expertise in metaphysics the condition of the open door of social advancement. Thus, the barrier between North and South was proverbially located in the contrast between rationality and rule of thumb, between principle and precedent, and the English with their tolerant good-humour could refer to the complex sister-nation as ‘metaphysical Scotland’. It was, then, this intellectual-secular element in Union Scotland which Maitland apparently underestimated. However, in his case, the oversight was neutralised by the illuminating presentiment that the distinctiveness of the Scots was due to their carrying over into the modern world some of those mediaeval values which had lapsed in the South. The great continuities, he pointed out, were not wholly on one side of the border, and the relevance of this reference to the pre-Reformation legacy comes home to us when, in studying the nineteenth century, we are brought up against those balanced tensions of Church and State, of faith and reason, on which depended the precarious stability of Scottish society. This common exaggeration of the religious monopoly in Scotland, though restrained within limits in the case of earlier scholars like Maitland, or again Buckle, seems unfortunately to be carried to a new extreme by historians of the modern school. The long episode of ‘Metaphysical Scotland’, considered in abstraction from its laical side and as a merely clerical manifestation, has become the dark age of modern British History, and its unEnglish code of social ethics, no longer seen as a carry-over from Continental rationalism or from mediaeval ideals, is turned into an aberration of provincial non-conformity. According to Dr. Gordon Donaldson’s recent influential book,1 the distinctive Northern system was an exotic growth kept alive less by internal principle than by eternal circumstances. ‘It is hard to see’, he says, ‘how any development originating in Scotland itself could have interrupted, far less reversed, the trend towards conformity with England.’ Apparently, the great continuities of which Maitland spoke existed only on one side of the border! 1

The Scottish Reformation (C.U.P., 1960).

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In an admiring notice1 of Dr. Gordon Donaldson’s book, Professor Trevor-Roper goes one better, insinuating that the operative ideals of the Presbyterian epoch were not just exotic but even plain absurd, representing the triumph of evangelical metaphysics over a politic empiricism. At the Reformation, ‘practical men worked for “conformity with England”. At one time, they nearly got it. Why did they fail? Why, in the next generation, did a rigid system – imported immediately from England, ultimately from the Continent, – prevail over this empirical spirit?’ In this way, the programme of Scottish research is defined by the Oxford Professor of History in abstraction from the intellectual-social background in terms of a perhaps largely artificial problem as to why victory rested with ‘clerical extremists’ like the ‘the grim and pedantic Andrew Melville and the grimmer more pedantic Covenanters’, and no account is taken either of the Humanist, educational component of Presbyterianism as mediated by the great Buchanan,2 and by Melville himself, or the interconnection of the Reformation with Scots and Continental law, as represented by the ratiocinative exadvocate, the Rev. Robert Bruce, in his classic sermons. No doubt, the historians of modern Scotland are achieving wonders in the way of pure research, but the pity is that their ‘scientific’ procedure of studying the religious sector in isolation from the legal and the educational spheres makes nonsense of the Scottish story by obscuring the sociological background to the prolonged spiritual resistance against being completely assimilated to the South. So, in the case of Dr. Gordon Donaldson, the doctrinal separation of the Scots perhaps assumes the guise of an exotic and unnatural doctrinairism, largely because an arbitrary abstraction has kept out of the picture the ‘Continental’ bias fostered by the country’s central secular institutions. Or again, the Scotland of the seventeenth century would hardly pose Professor Trevor-Roper the problem of a land deluded by metaphysical punctilio, if the Scottish point of view had been comprehended by him not in the narrow sense of exclusive fanatical sectarianism but as a complex of social 1

In the Sunday Times, 5 June 1960. To clear up the common confusion in this matter, we might refer to Buchanan’s often translated (both then and since, and into many languages) brace of tragedies – the Jephtha and the Baptist. Read in the pseudo-Shakespearian English of routine Victorian translations, these plays do indeed sound ‘pedantic and grim’, whereas in the recent lively version in Scots (Oliver & Boyd, 1960), we find the starkness of moral conflict presented with grim humour. 2

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aspirations, secular as well as religious, which, in a fashion perhaps foreign to the Anglo-American world, combined metaphysical intellectualism of an anti-empirical sort with a certain measure of democratic sympathies. Thus a one-sided approach obliterates the ancient image of Scotland as a balancing-ground in which Latin principles of civilisation encounter Saxon, until finally the high intellectual drama glimpsed by Maitland and more than glimpsed by Buckle, has become a closed book to the younger historians who in the year 1960 automatically write off the story of seventeenthcentury Scotland as ‘barren of the ideas which, stemming from ambition, alone give interest to history’. Perhaps indeed a generation which thus measures metaphysical Scotland against the ideals of the Empire-builder of yesterday or the Success-man of today will see in what we have said nothing but a reactionary attempt to refurbish the fading Presbyterian legend which Dr. Gordon Donaldson both by research and by propaganda has been busy wiping out. But no, we are certainly doing no such thing, at least in so far as concerns these dismal denominational obsessions which have done so much to discredit Scotland and its history. In this sense, we sympathise thoroughly with Dr. Gordon Donaldson’s attitude to this latterday Presbyterian legend, and our opposition to him begins only when, in place of these deposed Presbyterian prejudices, he seeks to set up the denominational prejudices of another communion. Our purpose in short is to make an end of each and all of these sectarian misinterpretations of Scottish history, putting in their place a more comprehensive point of view which gives the secular institutions of Scotland equal prominence with the sacred, and which sees the distinctive life of the country not in its religion alone but in the mutual interaction of religion, law and education. In this way, the rejection of the Presbyterian outlook in its narrow form leads us back to something rather like the Presbyterian point of view prior to 1850, in the old days of the Moderates, when the values were not sectarian but national. Having thus firmly set aside sectarianism, let us turn to the defeatism, so often accompanying it, which is unable to see anything in Scottish history but an uninterrupted, irreversible trend towards conformity with England. If we are not mistaken, this latter heresy arises from the same one-sidedness as does the former. Just as sectarianism involves exclusive concentration on one particular institution in artificial abstraction from institutions

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socially interlocked within it, so too what the defeatist fails to see is that a movement towards assimilation in one sector tends to be compensated for by a counter-movement, simultaneous or subsequent in another sector, which interrupts and modifies the original trend to conformity, making for a fresh differentiation. In order to discredit briefly these notions of total assimilation in favour of the rival formula of unification in politics, separation in ethics, it is sufficient to take note of certain outstanding differences in the seventeenth-century development of law and education in Scotland as compared with England. The crucial fact is that, by about 1700, the continuing Scottish efforts to reorganise law and education on rational lines had achieved a considerable measure of success, whereas the corresponding movement in England1 for a utilitarian reform of law and education had failed lamentably and was being forgotten. This superior state of Scottish institutional arrangements presumably accounted for the remarkable reservations introduced into the Treaty of Union, and throughout the eighteenth century, the Scots, at the same time as they congratulated themselves on the advantage of a common market with England, equally congratulated themselves on the advantage of their well-ordered progressive system of law and education (and of religion too) as compared with the stagnant and ill-ordered state of affairs in the South. In this way, submergence in the political-economic system of England was combined with a flourishing, distinctive life in what Marxists conveniently, if not perhaps aptly, call the social superstructure, and a Scotland, which was still national, though no longer nationalist, continued to preserve its European influence as a spiritual force, more than a century after its political identity had disappeared. Throughout the nineteenth century too, in spite of increasing assimilation of political and economic life, the Scots stuck to this policy of apartness in social ethics. However, amid the recurrent tensions of the time, industrial and democratic, the old confident grip on the situation was noticeably slackening. Instead of the steady rhythm of independent institutional life, a new pattern emerged of alternation between catastrophe and renaissance, in 1 For our impression of the state of law and of education in England, we are indebted to two recent essays by Professor Trevor-Roper himself – his Encounter article (February, 1959) on ‘Three foreigners and the philosophy of the English Revolution’, and his Inaugural as Professor, History, Professional and Lay (Oxford, 1959). When he is on his native heath, and away from Scottish associates, it is remarkable how his judgment improves.

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autho r ’s p r e face a nd i ntro duc tory es s ay xxiii which the distinctive national inheritance was more than once brought to the very brink of ruin only to be saved at the last minute by a sudden burst of reviving energy. In the early years of the century, no doubt, the situation was much more promising than in England. Church, Law, and Education in the North had emerged from the eighteenth century in good shape and with growing international prestige. However, the peculiarly precarious situation of the Scottish system of government was forcibly and unexpectedly brought home when, with the repercussions of 1832 Parliamentary Reform, a desperate crisis of stress and strain shook to its foundations the interlocked network of institutions on whose co-operation depended whatever was distinctive in Scottish society. The Church and the Law suddenly found themselves irreconcilably involved in a deadlock over fundamentals which split the whole country for over two decades, embittering relations in all walks of life and bringing into doubt the continuing viability of the semi-autonomous status enjoyed since the Union. Already, amid the shock and passion of the original schism, indispensable props of the system had been surrendered – most notably, the prerogative of independent credit issue (1845), and it looked as if the central sectors of the Northern establishment were in no position to withstand much longer the pull of assimilation. However, remarkably enough, this dangerous loss of ground seems not to have produced any feeling of ultimate defeat in the Scots, and, once the height of the crisis was over, they reacted with resilience and imagination to the chaos caused by the break-up of the balanced harmony of their institutions. The ruling idea was to re-establish the system on a new and perhaps sounder basis, by reallying the dissident factions round the educational system as that item above all others in the inheritance which divided the Scots least, and which thus might bridge the difference between Law and Church. In this way, it was hoped that the universities would assume responsibility for the nation’s spiritual leadership in the room of the divided Church, and, in that capacity, achieve the practical reaffirmation of the moral ideals of Scottish life in a form appropriate to the nineteenth century. Grudingly endorsed in the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1858 by a suspicious Parliament, this experiment in national revival through education depended on a sagacious combination of practicability and of principles which stood in silent but emphatic contrast to the corresponding usages in the South. In a reaffirmation of the

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genuinely democratic character of the universities, every effort was made to develop the traditional Scottish machinery designed to neutralise the inequalities of scholastic and family backgrounds. Junior classes, in which the Professor himself might teach the elements, enabled the intellectually gifted to ‘catch up’, and matriculation at sixteen and earlier was sometimes a counteractive to the counter-democratic influence of the sixth form. In this way, careers were opened to talents, scientific as well as philological, in accordance with the spirit of the nineteenth century, but, at the same time, lest this selection and fostering of talents would produce a flood of one-sided experts and bureaucratic specialists, general studies of a non-utilitarian kind were given pride of place in the curriculum, and, as in France, the path alike to science and to literature lay through compulsory philosophy. Statistics as well as legends bear out the relative success of this programme of democratic intellectuality. But, from the first, difficulties were created for the project by Scotland’s subordinate rôle in the United Kingdom, and in particular the Union parliament, though sanctioning the experiment, gave little financial or moral support to ideals so un-English as these. No doubt, it was up to the Scots to press for fair treatment, but, unfortunately, in a situation which called for concerted national action, Scottish initiative was paralysed by a new intensification of the nationwide sectarian strife, and in fact it was by this time depressingly clear that this imaginative scheme of rallying the country round its educational institutions and ideals was having the effect not of resolving the stresses and strains of Scottish society but merely of shifting them into the University faculties, and above all into the philosophy classrooms, as into the heart and centre of the nation’s culture. No doubt, these continuing dissensions impaired the academic routine less than was sometimes alleged, but they made a bad impression over the border, providing the Parliamentary parties unsympathetic to Scotland with the opportunity they had long been waiting for. In this way, recovery within less than twenty years turned into ruin, and just as the crisis of a generation before saw the loss to the Scots of their privileges in banking and finance, so too in this crisis of the ’seventies, they found themselves suddenly deprived of their cherished autonomy in education. Control of the system of state-schools passed into the hands of the English board and an authoritative Royal Commission decreed the reorganisation of the Universities as specialist institutions on the model of London or of Redbrick,

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autho r ’s p r e face a nd i ntro duc tory es s ay xxv and it began to look as if the end of the century would see the effective abolition of the whole distinctive Union system, especially as this educational onslaught was contemporaneously seconded by a forceful Parliamentary campaign in the religious sector, aimed at reducing the Scottish establishment to a position comparable to southern non-conformity. These threats of imminent Scottish surrender in both education and religion might make one fancy oneself in the nineteen fifties – except for the difference that the take-over bids of the ’seventies in both cases rapidly overreached themselves through a miscalculation of the northern situation. Religion, the Law and Education, after having been embroiled internally and with one another for a generation, were no longer perhaps in a mood to push their differences to the point of a knock-out. The various Presbyterian factions, conscious of lost ground, began to adopt the policy of agreeing to differ, and of keeping within their own territory. So, too, about the same time, the advocates, perhaps in disgust, abandoned their aspirations to uphold secular values in Scottish society and constituted themselves into a rather aloof, professional corps, rather after the style of their brethren in the south. In this way, both the Law and the Church withdrew somewhat from the centre of public life, gladly leaving it to Education to resume its interrupted responsibility for the national mission, and to rebuild, as far as possible, the shattered inheritance. In the end, then, the projected assimilation of the ’seventies proved premature and, by the end of the century, a new cycle of educational development was under way, which had started in the ’eighties with the restoration of Scottish control over the stateschools. This new revival was in a way comparable to its predecessor in the matter of principle, but was markedly more modest in scope. The 1858 movement had above all put the Universities in the centre of its programme, but the succeeding one concentrated chiefly on the secondary schools. So, too, there was a certain noticeable difference in the class-character of the two educational reorganisations, and whereas, in the ’fifties, educational policy still aimed at embracing all the income-groups in one system, by the ’nineties the more substantial sort of citizen, including a growing number of lawyers, were giving their allegiance to the English-type residential school and to the older English Universities. However, in spite of the differences, Scotland up to 1930 certainly saw a sustained effort to restate well-tried principles in

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twentieth-century terms. In the schools, every attempt was made to prevent the premature specialisation of the sixth form, according to the peculiar English model, and the pattern of studies followed the all-round Continental fashion. At the same time, in affirming this allegiance to the principle of general education, the country did not forget the twin-principle of democracy, abolishing the inequalities which hampered (and still hamper) denominational schools throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. In this way, at the schools level, there was genuine effort to utilise the autonomy, while, at the same time, in the Universities, native standards still to a certain extent held their own against alien influence. Even in the midst of a growing tendency to extreme specialisation, the philosophy-classes, as taught by men like Bowman and Kemp Smith, still retained in large measure their traditional prestige, and, what was perhaps most important of all, the educational writings and example of John Burnet,1 among others, kept alive not just in the Universities but throughout the length and breadth of the land a continuing sense of the value of the national ideal of the democratic intellect, illustrating its social relevance by reference to Continental and to American as well as to English experience, and showing how the process of its adaptation to the twentieth century might involve the introduction of the foundation year such as A. D. Lindsay, partly under Scottish2 inspiration, was later to try out at Keele. The present book, however, leaves almost entirely out of account this group of twentieth-century Scottish epigoni, and confines itself solidly to the question of the Universities in the nineteenth century, treating in a series of essays, first their resistance to anglicisation, second their efforts to cope with modern specialising tendencies, mathematical, scientific and classical, and third their involvement in the central Church-State struggle. Such a piecemeal approach no doubt involves a danger of encouraging the all-too-common blinkered view which sees Scotland in the twilight of Spenglerian Untergang. As a corrective, and to display the real theme of the book, we have therefore ventured in this introduction a brief synthetic survey such as might furnish a much needed reminder that it is not too difficult to discern a central common purpose even amid the complexities and confusions of modern Scottish history, provided 1 2

Especially, Higher Education and the War (1917). See W. B. Gallie, A New University (1960), for Lindsay’s Scottish background.

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autho r ’s p r e face a nd i ntro duc tory es s ay xxvii that one keeps in view the interplay of the distinctive institutions, giving as much attention to those concerned with the sub specie temporis as to those concerned with the sub specie aeterni. Note to Second Edition Recently, the Universities of Scotland have shown welcome signs of awakening to the contemporary relevance of the historic Scottish experience. In particular, there have been three notable inaugurals – Professor J. D. Hargraves, ‘Historical Study in Scotland’ reprinted in the Aberdeen University Review (Autumn 1963), Professor H. J. Hanham’s ‘The Scottish Political Tradition’, available as University of Edinburgh Inaugural Lecture No. 19, and – most remarkable of the three – Professor Gordon Donaldson’s ‘Scottish History and Scottish Nationality’, as yet unpublished. Given further developments along these lines, it could be that Scottish studies will impart to British Scholarship a new directive and drive of a kind likely to eliminate the prevailing insularity. G. E. Davie July 1964

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