routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

162 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
on Glasgow and Edinburgh as centres of intellectual activity. The Scottish
Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which originated in
Glasgow in the early eighteenth century, and flourished in Edinburgh
in the second half of the century. Its thinking was based on philosophical
enquiry and its practical applications for the benefit of society
(‘improvement’ was a favoured term). The Enlightenment encompassed
literature, philosophy, science, education, and even geology. One of its
lasting results was the founding of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–
71). The effects of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially in the second
half of the century, were far-reaching in Britain and Europe.
The philosophical trends ranged from the ‘common-sense’ approach
of Thomas Reid to the immensely influential works of David Hume,
notably his Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739. Here, his
arguments on God, and the cause and effect of man’s relationship with
God, are far ahead of their time in the philosophical debate in Britain:
It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behaviour,
by my experience of past events. And if you affirm that, while a
divine providence is allowed, and a supreme distributive justice
in the universe, I ought to expect some more particular reward
of the good, and punishment of the bad, beyond the ordinary
course of events; I here find the same fallacy, which I have
before endeavoured to detect. You persist in imagining, that, if
we grant that divine existence, for which you so earnestly contend,
you may safely infer consequences from it, and add something
to the experienced order of nature, by arguing from the attributes
which you ascribe to your gods. You seem not to remember, that
all your reasonings on this subject can only be drawn from effects
to causes; and that every argument, deduced from causes to
effects, must of necessity be a gross sophism; since it is impossible
for you to know any thing of the cause, but what you have
antecedently, not inferred, but discovered to the full, in the effect.
(David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations (1776) was probably the
most important work on economics of the century, revolutionising concepts
of trade and prophesying the growing importance of America as ‘one of