G. W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Table of Contents

B. SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY.

In Scotland quite another school of thought developed, and the Scotch are the foremost of Hume's opponents; in German philosophy, on the other hand, we have to recognize in Kant another opposing force to that of Hume. To the Scottish school many philosophers belong; English philosophy is now restricted to Edinburgh and Glasgow, in which places a number of professors belonging to this school succeeded one another. To the scepticism of Hume they oppose an inward independent source of truth for all that pertains to religion and morality. This coincides with Kant, who also maintains an inward source or spring as against external perception; but in the case of Kant this has quite another form than that which it possesses with the Scottish philosophers. To them this inward independent source is not thought or reason as such, for the content which comes to pass from this inwardness is concrete in its nature, and likewise demands for itself the external matter of experience. It consists of popular principles, which on the one hand are opposed to the externality of the sources of knowledge, and, on the other, to metaphysics as such, to abstract thought or reasoning on its own account. This sort of reasoning understanding applied itself to ethics and to politics - sciences which have been much developed by German, French, and above all by Scottish philosophers (supra, p. 320); they regarded morality as cultured men would, and sought to bring moral duties under a principle. Many of their works are translated into German; several of these on ethics or morality are translated by Garve, for instance, who also translated Cicero De Officiis, and they are written in a manner similar to that of Cicero when he uses the expression Insitum est a natura (Vol. I. p. 93). This moral sentiment and the ordinary human understanding hereafter formed the common principle to a whole succession of Scots, such as Thomas Reid, Beattie, Oswald, and others; in this way they frequently made sagacious observations, but with them speculative philosophy quite disappears. One special characteristic of these Scottish philosophers is that they have sought accurately to define the principle of knowledge; but on the whole they start from the same point as that which was in Germany likewise accepted as the principle. That is to say they represented the so-called healthy reason, or common-sense (sensus communis), as the ground of truth. The following are the principal members of this school, each of whom has some special feature distinguishing him from the rest.