Sketches of the History of Man. Lord Kames (Henry Home)
to maturity. As the nineteenth century was to show, racialist thought very easily becomes racist thought. It is true that Kames wonders whether the “inferiority” of Negroes “may not be occasioned by their condition,” but a comparison between the industry of “Hindows” (i.e., the peoples of India) and the “indolence” of Africans makes him hesitate: “after all, there seems to be some original difference between the Negroes and the Hindows” (Book I, pp. 41–42).12
Because of the difficulty of reconciling a plurality of races with the biblical story of the derivation of mankind from a single human couple, Kames looks for a miracle to explain human diversity and finds one in the confusion of peoples and languages that followed the building of the Tower of Babel. However, in the sketch “Origin and Progress of American Nations,” Kames is less circumspect and argues directly for the need of a “local creation” to explain the peopling of America (Book II, p. 560). The native American peoples, like the Africans, are something of a problem for Kames’s belief in the inevitable progress of humankind: on the whole, they had simply failed to move on from hunting to the shepherd state. A problem of a different kind was posed by the poems of Ossian, a supposedly ancient poet of the Scottish Highlands whose works were “discovered” and “translated” by James Macpherson in 1760. As the sketch on manners amply demonstrates, Kames, like many of his Scottish (and German) contemporaries, was an enthusiastic believer in the authenticity of Ossian. But the ancient Caledonians depicted in the poems had manners remarkably pure for men in the original state of society—their sentiments are always elevated and tender, and women are always treated with respect and delicacy. “In Homer’s time,” Kames notes, “heroes were greedy of plunder; and like robbers, were much disposed to insult a vanquished foe. According to Ossian, the ancient Caledonians had no idea of plunder: and as they fought for fame only, their humanity overflowed to the vanquished” (Book I, p. 224). Kames describes going to great lengths to prove, by finding other examples of noble savagery in Scandinavian epics, that Ossian’s Caledonians were not suspiciously unique. His faith in Ossian reveals a tendency toward nostalgic primitivism at odds with the “official” view of history as the development out of infancy and into maturity.13
A certain fondness on Kames’s part for the simplicity and austerity of earlier ages is made manifest also in the sketch on luxury. Condemnation of luxury, needless to say, is not unusual in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in his view that general obsession with superfluity and consumption for consumption’s sake was debilitating to both the state and the individual human being, Kames is at one with a long tradition of thought that stretches from Roman moralists through Machiavelli to Rousseau in France and the “Country Party” of eighteenth-century England. In this tradition commerce is set against property, and where property is associated with freedom and virtuous citizenship, commerce is associated with dependency and selfishness. What is peculiar is that one should find such extreme condemnations of luxury as are expressed in the Sketches coming from the pen of one who, at other times, appears to regard the commercial state as the culmination of the human journey toward maturity and refinement.14 It is to be admitted that even the most ardent advocates of the material, moral, and political benefits of commerce—Hume and Smith, for example—were sensitive to its shortcomings and dangers. However, Kames’s attitude toward luxury is incomparably more negative than Hume’s or Smith’s. Natural benevolence and regard for the dictates of justice are being corroded away by the free expression of love of avarice and selfishness made possible in a commercial society. He warns that “the epidemic distempers of luxury and selfishness are spreading wide in Britain” (Book II, p. 426). It is difficult to know how to reconcile this aspect of Kames’s thought with, for example, the opposition to entails expressed in the “Sketches Concerning Scotland,” contained in the appendix to the Sketches. An entail allowed a property owner to fix the inheritance of his land for several generations to come and prevented an heir from selling or mortgaging. Kames regarded entails as obstructive of commerce in so far as they prevented capital from being released and invested in new enterprises. It has been argued that much of Kames’s writing on law was intended as an attempt to help Scottish law escape its feudal origins in order to better serve the interests of commercial society. Judging by what is said about luxury in the Sketches, Kames appears not to have a settled and consistent view as to whether the corrupting effects of commerce are outweighed by the possibilities it opens up of refinement and improvement.15
A similar ambivalence is evident in Kames’s treatment of another stock topic of eighteenth-century moralizing, the advantage of a militia over the maintenance of a standing army (see especially the sketch “Military Branch of Government”). One of the reasons why luxury was condemned in the eighteenth century, as in previous ages, was that it made men weak and effeminate and therefore unsuited them for the task of defending their country’s liberty. Defense had then to be assigned to hirelings who fought for money only, and the result was a weakness of the state that complemented the weakness of individual citizens. When Kames says at the opening of Book II of the Sketches that “patriotism is the corner-stone of civil society” (Book II, p. 337), what he means is not simply a warm feeling for one’s country but a willingness to devote oneself to its defense. The problem, as Kames well knew, was that it was impossible for commerce to flourish if the adult male population was permanently liable, for extended periods, to be drafted into military or naval service. This would inevitably seriously obstruct sustained attention to the improvement of agriculture, industry, and trade. Kames fails to engage with the arguments of Hume and (especially) Smith that a country is better defended by professionals than by amateurs, that it is impossible in modern conditions for an army to maintain itself at its own expense, and that there is in any case no contradiction between political liberty and the existence of a standing army. His solution to the problem he perceives to be posed by the rise of commerce is a typically idiosyncratic compromise: he suggests that compulsory military service should be rotated among the male population so that everyone would serve for seven years.16
This suggestion is made in a spirit of optimism: such a system would serve the competing concerns of both commerce and liberty. When in this mood, Kames appears to share Adam Ferguson’s belief that, while there is much in modern society for the lover of liberty to fear, it is not inconceivable that important elements of, at least, civic virtue and liberty might yet be preserved and nurtured. In many other places in the Sketches, however, Kames manifests a rather extreme pessimism about the ability of commercial society to maintain itself in equilibrium and about the future of Britain in particular. (He remarked to Elizabeth Montagu that the disease of selfishness and luxury that Ferguson sought to cure in his Essay on the History of Civil Society “is too far advanced to be cured by any characters that can be formed with ink.”)17 Pessimism is perhaps especially obvious in Book III’s account of the progress of morality “from birth to burial” (Book III, p. 761). The development of society does not come to a halt when maturity is arrived at. On the contrary, maturity, in the form of peace, contains the seeds of decline, in the form of ever-increasing general concern for luxury at the expense of patriotism. Maturity is followed by degeneracy, in the case of societies just as surely as in the case of individual living creatures. “In all times luxury has been the ruin of every state where it prevailed,” Kames writes in the sketch on luxury. “Nations originally are poor and virtuous. They advance to industry, commerce, and perhaps to conquest and empire. But this state is never permanent: great opulence opens a wide door to indolence, sensuality, corruption, prostitution, perdition” (Book II, p. 333). Wise legislation might slow the process of decay for a short time but is powerless to prevent it altogether.18
Providence
Despite the pessimism that complicates his conception of history as progress from savagery to refinement, Kames is able to regard both the general scheme of the history of humankind and a great many of the incidental details as evidence of divine providence. As Ramsey of Ochtertyre noted, “no speculations pleased [Kames] more than the unfolding of final causes.”19 Illustrations of the wisdom and benevolence of the divine plan are everywhere in the Sketches. Even where providence cannot be perceived, Kames insists, it can be assumed to be at work. Even where a nation declines and falls under the weight of selfishness and corruption, the hand of God is visible, working to turn evil to advantage. This is surely the lesson that Kames was most concerned to communicate to his reader. According