From John Locke to Dugald Stewart

Abstract

"We see that throughout Europe, for nearly a half-century now," wrote an anonymous reviewer of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, "the taste for philosophy has become more dominant and more widely cultivated, but nowhere has there been more progress than in [Britain]. Metaphysics especially is greatly improved there. In emulation, many of the learned English have been stimulated to turn their studies in this direction." 1 The editors of The Dictionaryof Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, having noticed this same phenomenon, have undertaken to give us brief accounts of the lives and ideas of those who contributed to the philosophical Britain of the eighteenth century. In doing so, they have cast their net broadly. It is the "long eighteenth century," the period from the first publication of John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) to, more or less, the death of Dugald Stewart (1828), with which they are concerned. Moreover, "philosophy" is here understood to include not only those who "made a contribution to the history of ideas, or represented to a non-specialist reader notions about the way human beings perceived and responded to the sensible (or immaterial) world" (viii), but also a fair number of individuals whose achievements were entirely in natural philosophy or mathematics, and of a reasonably technical nature. Some may wonder if all the clergymen included did in fact address themselves to philosophical issues, but the editors rightly set out to be inclusive, while the reviewer cited above also said [End Page 359] that "among some English theologians it is now fashionable to sprinkle even their sermons with the most subtle metaphysics. At the least, unless we have Locke at our fingertips, we cannot begin to understand them."