by Michael P. Brown
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Stewart, Dugald (1753-1828), philosopher, was born in Edinburgh on 22 November 1753, the son of Matthew Stewart (1717-1785), one-time minister at Rosneath and professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, and Marjory (d. 1771), only child of Archibald Stewart of Catrine, Edinburgh, writer to the signet. Between 1761 and 1765 Stewart was educated at the Edinburgh high school, where he was taught for a few months by Alexander Adam, from whom he gained a love of classical poetry. He proceeded to take his BA degree at Edinburgh, following the traditional curriculum for an arts student--Greek, logic, and moral philosophy--though he also enrolled for a course in natural philosophy, and attended Hugh Blair's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres for two years. Adam Ferguson, author of the Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), was his moral philosophy tutor. It was Ferguson who suggested that Stewart, a talented student, attend the lectures of the celebrated Glasgow philosopher Thomas Reid, which he did during the academic session for 1771-2. He may also have held out hopes of becoming a Snell exhibitioner, but in this he was disappointed. While in Glasgow, Stewart shared lodgings with Archibald Alison, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship; he was the dedicatee of Alison's best-known work, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790). At this time Stewart was also active in a literary society to which he delivered a paper on dreaming, later published in the first volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792; Stewart, 2.289-305).
University teacher
On his return to Edinburgh in autumn 1772 Stewart replaced his ailing father in the mathematics classroom, where he showed sufficient aptitude to receive the chair three years later. In the academic session of 1778-9 he was also engaged in the teaching of moral philosophy at Adam Ferguson's departure for America as part of a delegation following the British defeat at Saratoga in the previous October. Stewart was transferred to the moral philosophy chair with Ferguson's formal resignation in 1785. He proved a successful and highly respected teacher, and his classes grew steadily during his tenure: this was due largely to his eloquence and innovation, but also to events in France during the early 1790s, and to the subsequent French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which restricted opportunities for continental education. Noteworthy students during his thirty-five-year classroom career include Henry, Lord Brougham, Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, third marquess of Lansdowne, and the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who, in the 1790-91 session, wrote for Stewart a paper, 'On the manners and customs of the northern nations'.
The content of Stewart's teaching was summarized in his Outlines of a Course in Moral Philosophy (1793), in which he introduced students to the foundations of duty towards themselves, God, and society at large. He followed in an established tradition of Scottish moral education by also including lectures on epistemology which underpinned his moral scheme and supplemented the instruction offered to students in the previous year's logic class. He used the Outlines as a framework on which his lectures built by illustrating his argument with recourse to the wide academic literature. Student lecture notes show that Stewart used philosophical texts, fiction, and travel literature to illustrate and defend his assessments, and that he spoke on a series of current academic debates ranging between the rights of women, racial difference, and the moral qualities of imaginative literature. During the academic session of 1800-01 Stewart took the radical step of separating his teaching on political economy from the moral philosophy course. His political economy lectures, given as a private series, proved immensely popular and influential, attracting an average enrolment of forty-two, among them the founders of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Francis Horner, Sidney Smyth, and Macvey Napier, and the utilitarian philosopher James Mill.
Stewart was an active participant in the life of his university. In 1805 he engaged in a dispute surrounding the appointment of John Leslie to the mathematics chair. Leslie's An Experimental Enquiry into the Nature and Propagation of Heat (1804) had been publicly attacked by the 'moderate' party of the Church of Scotland for its support of the causation theories of David Hume, and Leslie deemed an unsuitable appointment. The debate was complicated by divisions over whether academic postings should preclude ministerial duties in the church. It was Stewart's view that they should. This placed him at odds with his 'moderate' friends who held that Leslie's opponent, Thomas Macknight, be allowed to keep his parish living while taking up the post at the university. For Stewart, notwithstanding his personal objections to Humean scepticism, the debate was a matter of professional duty and intellectual freedom for which he argued in A Short Statement of some Important Facts (1805). Stewart subsequently appeared at the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in his role as an elder, and spoke in favour of Leslie, who had been accused of atheism, a charge the assembly rejected by ninety-six to eighty-four votes. It may have been for his stand that in 1806 Stewart received from the whig party the office of writer to the Edinburgh Gazette, which brought with it a lifelong sinecure of £300.
In 1809 Stewart was greatly distressed by the death of his son, George, the child of his second marriage. His first wife had been Helen, daughter of Neil Bannatyne of Glasgow, whom he had married in 1783, and with whom he had one son, Matthew, later an army colonel, before her death in 1787; his second wife was Helen D'Arcy (1765-1838) [see Stewart, Helen D'Arcy], third daughter of George Cranstoun and Maria, daughter of Thomas Brisbane, whom he had married on 29 July 1790. In the wake of his bereavement, and himself in failing health, Stewart retired from lecturing in 1810. He campaigned for his student Thomas Brown to succeed as co-holder of the moral philosophy chair, though he was disappointed with his replacement's abilities on taking up the appointment. Outside of the classroom Stewart was also active in public education. An energetic participant in a number of Edinburgh's literary societies, between 1772 and 1775 he read a series of papers to the Speculative Society on such subjects as taste, cause and effect, and scepticism. In February 1812 he offered the Royal Society of Edinburgh a paper--later published in its Transactions--on a boy, James Mitchell, who, 'born deaf and blind', had gained the sight in one eye after surgery (Collected Works, 4.300). Stewart also wrote a sequence of biographical accounts which he presented to the society in 1793, 1796, and 1802. These studies--of the moral philosopher Adam Smith, the historian and Edinburgh University principal William Robertson, and Stewart's old mentor the common-sense philosopher Thomas Reid--helped to configure the Scottish school of metaphysical philosophy, and articulate Stewart's perception of his intellectual heritage as a critic of Humean scepticism in favour of common-sense philosophy.
Philosopher and writer
In addition to being a lecturer of European reputation, Stewart was an active writer during and after his formal university career. His principal work, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, appeared in three parts (1792, 1814, and 1827), and was supplemented by Philosophical Essays (1810) and the Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828). His lecture notes on his famous political economy series of 1800 and after were published posthumously in 1856. For Stewart the role of the philosopher was to elucidate the laws by which human understanding occurred. He gave as examples of such laws the belief in personal existence, the continuation of the personality, and the independent existence of the material world. As a consequence of his concept of the philosopher's responsibility, Stewart conceived of epistemology as an overarching discipline under which could be comprehended all other forms of more specifically directed thinking on individual pragmatic topics. His favoured empirical and inductive theory of knowledge had as its corollary a form of natural science in the tradition of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, whose works he admired. Bacon was especially influential, and Stewart saw himself extending the remit of Baconian science into the study of human activity. He argued that contrary to traditional readings of Baconian methodology, induction did not preclude any role for hypothesis. Instead of merely gathering unadorned facts, the philosopher's purpose was to place disparate experiences into a conjectural system so as to produce a testable prescriptive scheme:
Without theory, or in other words, without general principles, inferred from a sagacious comparison of a variety of phenomena, experience is a blind and useless guide; while on the other hand a legitimate theory--or hypothetical theories supported by numerous analogies--necessarily presupposes a knowledge of connected and well-ascertained facts, more comprehensive by far than any mere empiric is likely to possess. (Collected Works, 3.329)
The theories of Newton were his choice of model for this methodology, which he employed across a wide range of fields within the discipline of philosophy, though it is as an epistemologist that he is now principally regarded.
In his epistemology Stewart was the most creative and able disciple of his former teacher Thomas Reid. Like Reid, Stewart advocated a 'common-sense' philosophy; he noted that this term 'seems nearly equivalent to what we in Scotland call motherwit, that degree of sagacity derived partly from natural constitution, but chiefly from personal experience, by which one is able to conduct one's self with propriety in the affairs of common life' (Bridges, 70). Stewart saw his thought as an antidote to the mitigated scepticism of David Hume. Although appreciative of Hume's intellectual calibre, and his positive contributions in the fields of political economy and history, Stewart worried about the consequences of Hume's epistemological scepticism and particularly his separation of fact and value, an understandable view given Stewart's employment as a professor of moral philosophy. However, rather than reject Hume's insight outright, Stewart followed Reid in overcoming the problem by concentrating on the intuition of everyday individuals.
'Common sense', or the ordinary responses of humans to social circumstances, provided people with the knowledge they needed to live successfully and virtuously. These responses also gave philosophers the empirical evidence required to reveal the workings of the mind, thereby revealing the 'science of man'. Stewart argued that through a process of intensive introspection, the philosopher was able to determine the essential truths necessary for men's minds to operate successfully. Philosophy failed in its duty only when the philosophical urge to understand exceeded the boundaries imposed by empirical observation. Crucially, Stewart saw the world as being made up of more than the sum of individual experiences, leaving mysterious aspects of the workings of the universe which could be taken only on faith. In a stance superficially similar to that of Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy Stewart misread and disliked, the work of the philosopher was redefined as the study of the knowable, and the knowable defined as the realm of experience.
In moral philosophy Stewart also continued the tradition bestowed upon him by Reid. He maintained that the mind held what he termed 'active powers' able to impose patterns upon the chaos of empirical data. This prioritized the power of the agent's understanding and his will over the influence of the social environment. In arguing this case, Stewart made a distinctive contribution to the theory of free will, proposing that humans were self-aware and intellectually creative, and therefore were not subject to causes in the same sense as the material, non-thinking world. The implication was that agents could choose between contending motives, thereby installing a theory of free will, and placing Stewart among the theological liberals within the Church of Scotland. As a consequence he contended that humans were capable of intellectual improvement, brought about by education and training, by which a whig politics of optimism was translated into a moral vocabulary: people, he suggested, could strive for, and attain, moral progress. Unlike the material, unthinking world of nature, it was the purpose of the conscious world to endeavour to comprehend the deity's purpose in creating the universe, and to co-operate with the intended ends of that power. It was this conception of the moral capacity of the individual that gave to Stewart's scheme a distinctly prescriptive element. In this he was anti-utilitarian; virtue was definable as the performance of social duties, and while Stewart was influential in developing the thought of his student James Mill, he did not follow Mill's reduction of virtue into utility.
Significant, given Stewart's position as a university teacher, was the central role he perceived for education in the shaping of human morals. In Philosophical Essays he proposed a scheme for aesthetic education aimed at inculcating and directing good taste. Moreover, education, rather than political revolution, was forwarded in his political economy lectures as a viable means of overcoming the moral deficit that he perceived within modern commercial societies.
Radicalism, political economy, and the history of philosophy
Stewart left Scotland four times, in 1783 and in the summers of 1788, 1789, and 1806, on all occasions travelling to France. In 1806 he was accompanying the earl of Lauderdale, who was on a political mission to negotiate peace with Napoleon. On these visits he informed himself of French thinking concerning political economy. He also witnessed the outbreak of the French Revolution, and wrote to Archibald Alison of his disquiet over the tactics of the estates-general, despite his support of certain reforms of government. He fully rejected the revolution with the regicide of January 1793, denouncing the 'shocking barbarities at Paris', but he was equally perturbed by the British desire to engage the French in battle, telling Alison of how 'all freedom ... is for a time suspended' (Collected Works, 10.cxxxvi). Stewart was also a friend of the poet Robert Burns, his acquaintance with whom he described in a long letter to the physician James Currie, author of The Life of Robert Burns (1800). Therein, he claimed Burns to have been a Jacobite rather than a Jacobin, though Stewart professed he did not think Burns had 'thought much on such subjects, nor very consistently' (ibid., 10.cxliii). These associations led to Stewart's being linked in the public mind with the French Revolution, a cause for which his initial sympathy was fundamentally limited by his abhorrence of violence. Although he unadvisedly noted with admiration the work of the French deputy and sensationalist philosopher Condorcet in volume 1 of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Stewart was anxious to distance himself publicly from political radicalism (ibid., 2.473), and he consciously lectured in his moral philosophy course on the nature of political authority, a task he deemed 'the circumstances of the times seem to render more necessary' (Bridges, 381). Privately, his sympathies remained vexed, as his correspondence with the United Irish leader William Drennan makes plain.
The political radicalism that tinged Stewart's thought may have extended into his reading of Adam Smith. Smith provided for Stewart a means of continuing radicalism in the wake of the French Revolution, allowing him to argue for economic and social reform while skirting the issue of political upheaval. His lectures on political economy proposed a theory of historical progress based upon the diffusion of knowledge through the printing press, and argued for the extension of education to the lower orders of society. Stewart further suggested that wealth creation could be compatible with the pursuit of moral means--the merchant did his social duty by making profits--thereby rendering void the Scottish moral paradox between the desire for wealth and the demands of virtue. Stewart had used aspects of Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) in his classes as early as the academic session of 1778-9 (Walker, 2.391), and his understanding of Smith was amended and extended through his reading of the French physiocratic political economists, notably Quesnay and Turgot. He was particularly approving of their use of empirical data in the search for an overarching science of human economic behaviour, rather than the treatment of political economy simply as a product of tradition or as a deductive science grounded on a priori principles of behaviour. The physiocratic contribution was, he believed, 'a reformation in politics similar to what Kepler and Newton accomplished in astronomy' (Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind quoted in Fontana, 100).
Stewart's study of political economy was further influenced by Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Although he was sympathetic towards Malthus in his critique of the philosophical utopianism found in William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Stewart rejected the moral pessimism of the Essay. Rather his vision of human history as progressive enabled him to overcome the tension between the 'science of man' and the need to prescribe a moral vision for which to strive. Progress allowed man to realize the potential implicit in society, thereby assisting the scheme of the deity. In the desire to argue an optimistic case, Stewart's theory of wealth creation all but occluded Smith's concerns over luxury and alienation, in favour of a whiggish optimism that infused his students.
Stewart's principal contribution to the subject was to conceive of political economy as a distinct discipline, deserving of institutional autonomy within the academy. Perhaps driven to introduce the course for personal reasons--wartime inflation had undermined his university salary--Stewart made the decision to offer private tuition in the field separate from his remarks on the subject in his public moral philosophy class, which suggests a more general separation of personal morality from matters of political economy. None the less, within the political economy course Stewart upheld the Ciceronian notion of moral citizenship, teaching the sons of the Scottish economic élite that success in political economy depended on their moral probity, and vice versa. In this he remained securely within a Scottish tradition of moral thinking, a tradition he did much to identify, study, and promote.
On the history of philosophy Stewart provided his series of biographies of Scottish literati and a lengthy essay on the recent history of philosophy in Europe. In the memoirs he contributed to the development of a distinctly Scottish variant of Enlightenment thought. This 'metaphysical philosophy of Scotland' was informed by the scientific observation of man and society, a trait that he thought best exemplified by the work of Adam Smith (Collected Works, 1.427). This was combined with a historical awareness, personified by William Robertson, to produce an epistemology which was informed by empirical observation, but did not eschew the development of general theories of human awareness. It was, he argued, the achievement of Thomas Reid to have produced the groundwork necessary for a successful synthesis of this kind.
In his historical essay Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy, Stewart situated Scottish metaphysics in the context of European thought since Francis Bacon. As a self-conscious alternative to d'Alembert's preliminary discourse to Diderot's Encyclopédie, the Dissertation characterized the history of European philosophy as the emergence and progression of the experimental study of human nature. This progression, Stewart argued, had culminated in the Scottish school which for the first time was putting down secure foundations for an empirical science of man in the fields of epistemology, political governance, political economy, and moral philosophy. Stewart had originally intended his essay for the supplemental volumes to be added to the fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The idea for the supplement had come from Stewart, who also advised Archibald Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh Review, who had acquired the rights to the Encyclopaedia's imprint in 1812. The supplements, including Stewart's Dissertation, were finally published in 1824 in six volumes (699 articles) alongside the sixth edition.
Final years and legacy
In 1820, following Thomas Brown's death, the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair reverted to Stewart, who now refused the requests of friends to take up teaching again and formally resigned in July of that year. He was to be disappointed in his preferred choice of successor. When the candidature of Sir James Mackintosh failed to materialize, he favoured his student and friend Macvey Napier, a founder of the Edinburgh Review and editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, Napier withdrew from the competition, and Stewart transferred his support to the Oxford scholar and whig Sir William Hamilton, who subsequently edited Stewart's collected works. Contrary to his wishes the council elected the tory candidate, John Wilson (Christopher North).
Stewart spent much of his retirement at Kinneil House, Linlithgowshire, which was owned by the duke of Hamilton. Despite suffering a stroke in January 1821 he continued to publish, and saw the third and final instalment of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind to the press in 1827, and the Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man in the following year. Throughout his later writing career he was assisted by his second wife, Helen, who was his reader and the hostess of a renowned Edinburgh salon; towards the end of his life he was also helped by their daughter, Maria (d. 1846), who served as his amanuensis. Stewart died, probably of a stroke, at Edinburgh on 11 June 1828 while visiting friends, and was buried in the family vault in the city's Canongate cemetery. He was survived by Helen, who died in Edinburgh on 28 July 1838.
Stewart's contribution to Scottish thought and letters is measurable in several ways. He had long supplemented his income by taking in students as boarders, and his university classes were filled with many of the great and the good of Scottish society. His nineteenth-century biographer John Veitch named some twenty-five notables who attended his classes in political economy, while few undergraduates escaped the influence of his lectures on moral philosophy (Veitch, liv-lv). He was considered by his students to be a superlative teacher; Lord Cockburn recalled there was 'eloquence in his very spitting' (Cockburn, 23).
Stewart passed on the common-sense philosophy from Thomas Reid to a final generation of thinkers, headed by Sir William Hamilton. Although the early nineteenth century saw the Scottish school confronted by derivations from Kantian idealism and an emergent utilitarian pragmatism, Stewart's thought and the common-sense school remained an influential strand of British philosophical debate. However, external challenges by followers of Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and by the evangelical wing of the Church of Scotland headed by Thomas Chalmers, coupled with internal criticisms by radical reformers such as James Frederick Ferrier, saw Stewart's attempts to traverse a path between the extremes of rationalism and scepticism become slowly outmoded as the century progressed. Some of his students, among them the physician William Pulteney Alison, son of his friend Archibald, further critiqued Stewart's work from the stance of physiology, in which school Stewart became something of a straw man from whose work they could define their own position.
In respect of political economy, Stewart was an inspiration to the Edinburgh Review. It took from Stewart both his advocacy of free trade and his conception of political economy as a broad discipline concerned with investigating human behaviour and motivation. Paradoxically, given the Review's whiggish political attitude, Stewart also influenced a tory school of political economists at Oxford. This group of high-churchmen, which included Edward Copleston, John William Ward, and Richard Whatley, was impressed by Stewart's Philosophical Essays. In particular they drew on his arguments against philosophical materialism and the French school of idéologues. They did, however, dissent publicly from his rejection of scholastic syllogistic logic in favour of Baconian induction, prompting Stewart into a defence of his stance in the second volume of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.
In his work on the history of philosophy, Stewart proved to be both a late product, and an early theorist, of the Scottish Enlightenment. He identified two characteristics which have subsequently concerned its study: first, the issue of the Scottish character of the school. He was a strong patriot in matters of philosophical origins--along with matters of chronological duration--and gave the Irishman Francis Hutcheson a pivotal role, though he claimed Hutcheson as a fellow Scot. Second was the remit and scope of their concerns--'conjectural history', which he first defined in his essay on Smith; the 'science of man', which he centred on Robertson; and the defence against Humean scepticism, for which he celebrated Thomas Reid. He also highlighted the sociology of knowledge, giving pre-eminence to the universities and emphasizing the role of print culture in the development of the school's ideas. Moreover, his failure to consider the ramifications of mathematics and scientific exploration still finds an echo in studies of the field. Stewart also patronized a number of female novelists, notably Elizabeth Hamilton and the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, whose brothers Lowell and Henry boarded in the Stewart household while at university. Stewart appeared as the Scottish philosopher in the introduction to Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls (3rd edn, 1808).
Beyond Britain, Stewart was influential in both the United States and France. In the USA Stewart's abstract work on the mind played an important part in the development of philosophy curricula in many colleges. His Outlines sold over 7500 copies, and by 1824 was in its eighth American edition. In France his thought was first used by P.-P. Royer-Collard, professor of the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne (1811-14). Victor Cousin introduced Stewart's ideas into the educational system following Théodore Jouffroy's translation of the major works in the 1820s and 1830s. Stewart's popularity in France was due, in part, to the perceived political quietism within his definition of the professional philosopher. This was a boon to defenders of the restored monarchy wary of any form of political engagement or ideological commitment which recalled the revolution, and no small irony given Stewart's own travails over the matter of political activism in the early 1790s.
MICHAEL P. BROWN
Sources
The collected works of Dugald Stewart, ed. W. Hamilton, 11 vols. (1854-60); reprint (1994)
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DNB
M. Brown, 'Creating a canon: Dugald Stewart's construction of the Scottish Enlightenment', History of Universities, 16 (2001), 135-54
R. B. Sher, 'Professors of virtue: a social history of the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh', Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (1990), 87-126
Archives
Col. U., Butler Library, lecture notes
LUL, lecture notes
Museum of London, lecture notes
NL Scot., lecture notes
U. Aberdeen L., lecture notes
U. Edin. L., corresp., journals, papers | BL, letters to Macvey Napier, Add. MSS 34611-34612
NL Scot., letters to Archibald Constable
NL Scot., corresp. with Lord Lansdowne and others
NRA, priv. coll., Douglas-Home MSS, letters to Lady Jane Home
Yale U., Beinecke L., corresp. with James Boswell
Likenesses
A. Nasmyth, portrait, c.1786 (with wife and son), priv. coll.
J. Tassie, medallion, 1794, Scot. NPG
J. Tassie, medallion, 1797, Scot. NPG
H. Raeburn, portrait, c.1808, Scot. NPG [see illus.]
J. Henning, pencil drawing, 1811, Scot. NPG
J. Henning, pencil drawing, 1811, NPG
J. Henning, Wedgwood medallion, 1811, Scot. NPG
L. E. Fox-Strangeways, ink silhouette, 1819, Scot. NPG
D. Wilkie, chalk drawing, 1824, Scot. NPG
J. Edgar, group portrait, wash drawing, c.1854 (Robert Burns at an evening party of Lord Monboddo's, 1786), Scot. NPG
S. Joseph, bronze bust, Scot. NPG
S. Joseph, bust, U. Edin.
A. Skirving, chalk drawing, Scot. NPG
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