Growing morality
He said of one of its causes: “In the year 1745 four or five thousand naked Highlanders took possession of the improved parts of this country without any opposition from the unwarlike inhabitants. Had they not been opposed by a standing army they would have seized the throne with little difficulty.” (Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1766.)
It was not the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment that changed moral attitudes, so much as the slowly evolving changes in the economy towards commercial markets. Adam Smith understood that relationship. He was less impressed about the much slower power of ideas to cause social changes. Many countries experienced these moral changes without anything akin to the Scottish Enlightenment.
(PROF EMERITUS) Gavin Kennedy
Suffolk Road
Edinburgh