Scottish Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment was a period in the 18th century often described as Scotland’s ‘Golden Age’. It was an intellectual movement that ranged across the fields of philosophy, chemistry, geology, architecture, poetry, technology, economics, sociology, medicine and history.
Sharing the humanist and rationalist outlook of the European Enlightenment of the same time period, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason. They held to an optimistic belief in the ability of humanity to effect changes for the better in society and nature, guided only by reason. This latter feature gave the Scottish Enlightenment its special flavour, distinguishing it from its continental European counterpart. In Scotland, the Enlightenment was characterised by a thoroughgoing empiricism and practicality where the chief virtues were improvement, virtue, and practical benefit for the individual and society as a whole.
The Enlightenment culture was based on close readings of new books, and intense discussions which took place at intellectual gathering places in Edinburgh as The Select Society and, later, The Poker Club as well as within Scotland’s ancient universities such as St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In these places great thinkers sought to understand the natural world and the human mind like Sam Smith and David Hume
The Scottish Enlightenment had effects far beyond Scotland, not only because of the esteem in which Scottish achievements were held outside Scotland, but also because its ideas and attitudes were carried across the Atlantic world as part of the Scottish diaspora, and by American students who studied in Scotland.
Today, many historians believe that the ideas and advances that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment helped to shape the modern world.