INTRODUCTION “ENLIGHTENMENT EVERYWHERE”: LOCATING THE READER IN THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT Few casual students of the Scottish Enlightenment will have heard of George Ridpath, minister of the village of Stitchell, near Kelso, and author of A Border History of Scotland and England (1776). According to the editor of his diary, Ridpath was “a man of rare culture, a friend of the most celebrated Scots literati of the time, and an earnest student in many branches of science”.1 Th ough he made regular journeys to Edinburgh to attend meetings of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, for the most part the diary demonstrates that Ridpath led a quiet existence in rural Roxburghshire, with the leisure time to indulge his favourite pursuits of gardening, socialising, star-gazing and reading. As such, this document, with its remarkably complete por- trayal of the commonplace interests and values of a provincial clergy- man, has hardly featured in modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment.2 Yet what Ridpath’s diary illustrates for the student of Hume, Smith et al is the extent to which the Enlightenment pro- duced by such luminaries percolated through to readers in provincial Scotland. He read with obvious relish the works of his acquaintances David Hume and William Robertson, even though he did not always agree with them, and supported the Moderate literati on the conten- tious issues of the day – such as the militia debate and the Douglas 1 Ridpath, viii; the original is at NAS CH1/5/122–3. 2 Th e Scottish Enlightenment was fi rst conceived by W. R. Scott,Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teachings and Position in the History of Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1900); see also G. Bryson, Man and Society: the Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945) and H. Trevor-Roper, “Th e Scottish Enlightenment”, SV18C, 68 (1967). For dis- cussion of the origin of the term, see J. Robertson, “Th e Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment” and R. B. Sher, “Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment: the Lessons of Book History”, both in P. Wood (ed.), Th e Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester, 2000). Th e two have recently released two very diff erent book-length treatments: J. Robertson, Th e Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005); R. B. Sher, Th e Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland & America (Chicago, 2006). 2 introduction controversy.3 Above all, he conducted his daily aff airs along the very lines that Richard Sher suggests characterised “Enlightenment supporters everywhere…a primary commitment to science, polite learning, toleration, moderatism, reasonableness, virtue, justice, improvement, and liberty”.4 Th ough he was not the most original or insightful thinker, his example suggests that consumers of the great texts of the Scottish Enlightenment – the men and women who read them, and whose interest made them commercially viable – refl ected seriously on what they read and through doing so participated in the experience in a way that modern scholarship has so far grossly underestimated. I Peter Gay’s seminal interpretation argued that the Enlightenment, with its roots in France, was scientifi c, anti-religious and possessed with a profound belief in the glorious progress of reason. Intellectuals who demonstrated these characteristics were admitted to a familial group of philosophes whose deliberate aim was to bring about the fi nal victory in the battle between reason and irrationality.5 Th is interpretation implic- itly denies that the Enlightenment diff ered from place to place. Gay envisaged a specifi c, homogeneous movement which had its quintessence in France, and, if other countries are properly to be judged as having undergone Enlightenment, then they must be seen to have shared fully in those very characteristics which marked out the French experience.6 3 Ridpath, 118, 130–1, 262–4, 319 on Hume’s works; 240–2 on Robertson’s History of Scotland; on the controversy provoked by the clergyman John Home’s play Douglas, compare 118 and 127 with R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: the Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985), 74–93; on Enlightenment sup- port for the establishment of a Scottish militia, compare 111 with J. Robertson, Th e Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (London, 1985). 4 R. B. Sher, “Storm over the Literati”, Cencrastus, 28 (Winter 1987–1988), 43. R. B. Sher and J. R. Smitten (eds.), Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1990) present a very similar check list of “common values and beliefs that were shared by “enlightened” men of letters everywhere, including science, virtue, rea- son, toleration, cosmopolitanism, polite learning, critical methods, freedom of the press, and fundamental human rights”, 5. 5 P. Gay, Th e Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (London, 1966–1969); R. Darnton, “In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas”, Th e Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), 113–32. 6 D. J. Witherington, “What was Distinctive about the Scottish Enlightenment?”, in J. J. Carter and J. H. Pittock (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen, 1987), 9;.