Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. Lord Kames (Henry Home)

      Lord Kames’s Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion is at once a typical example of and an original contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment’s distinctive attempt to construct a moral science based on the principles of natural law. From Gershom Carmichael in the 1690s to Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson in the 1780s, the teaching and writing of moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Scotland drew upon a tradition of natural jurisprudence derived from Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke.¹ If its contractarian account of the bases of government provided a suitably whiggish explanation for the emergence of civil society, natural law also offered insights into what Hutcheson called “mankind as a system,” which was governed by the fundamental “law of sociality”² that entailed various rights and duties to God, to self, and to others. To this natural law framework of rights and duties ordained by providence but knowable through reason, the Scottish thinkers typically applied a new moral psychology which emphasized the role of the passions and sentiments. The attempt to synthesize an objectively grounded law with a subjectivist account of moral and social exchange had an enormous influence on the Enlightenment’s science of man and society.

      While his Elements of Criticism (1762) is a classic in the history of aesthetics and his Sketches of the History of Man (1774) part of the canon of Enlightenment historical sociology, Kames’s Essays has received comparatively little attention.³ Yet it deserves to be read alongside Kames’s better-known works as an important contribution to the Enlightenment’s science of human nature. First published anonymously in 1751 and significantly revised in 1758 and 1779, the Essays represents an important contribution to eighteenth-century debate over the foundations of justice and morality and the challenges posed by the skepticism of David Hume. More broadly, in its concern to vindicate the veracity of our common moral intuitions and sense perceptions that are rooted in our very nature, the Essays helped found the Scottish Common Sense school. The Essays is Kames’s most important philosophical work and sheds valuable light on his life long preoccupations. At the same time, the book raises issues of continuing importance—the foundations of morality, free will versus determinism, the nature of self and identity.

      Kames’s Life and Writings

      Born at Eccles in the eastern borders borough of Berwick shire in 1696, Henry Home was the son of minor landed gentry with dual political(Whig and Jacobite) and religious (Presbyterian and Episcopalian) loyalties on both the maternal and paternal sides of the family. Because of the family’s relative poverty, he was educated at home, where he studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, and physics under the tutelage of two nonjuring (and possibly Jacobite) Episcopalian clergymen.⁴ In 1712 Kames apprenticed himself to a “writer” (the Scottish term for solicitor) in Edinburgh, but within a few years changed course to prepare for a career as a barrister. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1723. At some point during the 1730s, Kames abandoned his Jacobite sympathies to embrace the Whig principles that would help secure him the patronage first of the powerful third Duke of Argyll and then of the duke’s nephew John Stuart, Earl of Bute. In 1741 he inherited the Kames estate and married Agatha Drummond, who would inherit her family’s estate at Blair Drummond in Stirlingshire in 1766. He became “Lord Kames” when he was appointed to the Court of Sessions (Scotland’s highest civil court) in 1752; in 1763 he joined the High Court of the Justiciary (Scotland’s highest criminal court), a position he held until days before his death in December 1782.

      Kames’s judicial career and writings on Scottish law have earned him a place in the annals of eighteenth-century legal history;⁵ the rest of his work has secured his position as the quintessential Enlightenment figure in Scotland, a practical man of affairs with significant achievements as a man of letters. In addition to a busy legal career, Kames sat on the boards of two governmental agencies, belonged to a number of the important clubs and societies, and served as patron to the generation of literati who are the high point of the Enlightenment in Scotland. Among those who benefited from his patronage were Adam Smith, whose public lectures at Edinburgh in 1748–1751 were sponsored by Kames,⁶ and Smith’s student John Millar, who lived at the Kames household for two years while qualifying as an advocate and who owed his chair in civil law at the University of Glasgow to Kames and Smith. An avid reader with broad tastes, Kames relied on his Edinburgh publishers to keep him supplied with new material: “Can Lord Kames find no books either of Instruction or amusement to entertain him in the country?” he wrote to the bookseller William Creech in a typical appeal for more books; “Must he recurr to a Second reading of his ownbooks?”⁷ This would certainly have kept him occupied, for he had already published widely in law, philosophy, history, aesthetics, and agriculture.

      While Kames addressed a remarkably wide variety of topics, from flax-husbandry to education (including female education),⁸ his publications are characterized by several recurrent themes. Not surprisingly, many are juridical in nature and are concerned with systematizing the principles and tracing the origins and development of law. In a series of legal digests beginning with Remarkable Decisions of the Court of Session from 1716 to 1728 (1728),⁹ Kames devised a system of classification according to the application of specific rules of law, while Historical Law-Tracts (1758)was organized around the basic principle of philosophical history: taking law as part of the history of man, Kames accounted for its progress “from its first rudiments among savages, . . . to its highest improvements in civilized society.”¹⁰ “Improvement” was both a practical goal for law, education, agriculture, and other institutions, and a theoretical principle explaining the progress