Scottish Enlightenment

Scotland's unlikely intellectual explosion had structural preconditions. The Presbyterian Church's literacy campaigns had given Scotland what may have been the world's highest literacy rate by the mid-eighteenth century, with roughly seventy-five percent of Scots able to read compared to fifty-three percent in England. The country had five universities when England had two. After the 1707 Act of Union dissolved the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh lost its political function but retained its legal and ecclesiastical institutions, concentrating lawyers, ministers, and academics in a compact city that no longer had a legislature to occupy its ambitious minds.

The clubs and voluntary associations that formed the social infrastructure of the Enlightenment were critical. The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh was founded in 1737. The Select Society, co-founded by David Hume in 1754, became the principal forum for debating politics, economics, morals, and the arts. The Poker Club, named by Adam Ferguson for its aim to "poke up" opinion, formed in 1762. Historian Jonathan Israel has argued that by 1750, Scotland's major cities had built an intellectual infrastructure of mutually supporting institutions, including universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums, and masonic lodges.

The outputs were extraordinary. Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) became foundational to cognitive science. Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) founded modern economics. Joseph Black isolated carbon dioxide and conducted pioneering experiments on latent heat. James Hutton redefined geology. James Watt refined the steam engine. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789 that no place in the world could compete with Edinburgh as far as science was concerned.