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Notes
1 G. Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment (London: The Historical Association, 1981), 30.
2 See A. L. Drummond and J. Bulloch, The Scottish Church, 1688–1843 (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1973).
3 See M. Ross, M. Rankin, and L. Richmond, Who, Where and When: The History and Constitution of the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2001), 43.
4 R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), 8. For the intellectual context, see The Scottish Enlightenment Essays in Reinterpretation, edited by P. Wood (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2000).
5 C. Beveridge and R. Turnbull, Scotland after Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997), 10.
6 D. Macmillan, The Life of Robert Flint (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), 363.
7 The majority of Flint’s surviving notebooks and papers are at Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections H57 631–89. Further papers are at New College Library, Edinburgh University, MSS FLI 1–5.
8 Sher, Church and University, 13–14.
9 The thesis of decline is attributed to G. Davie, The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961) by C. Craig, ‘Nineteenth‐century Scottish Thought’, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918), edited by S. Manning, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), vol. 2, 267–76 (267).
10 See C. G. Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 104–6.
11 Macmillan, Life, 72, 75.
12 I am grateful to M. Dundas, Secretary at East Church Aberdeen, for providing this information.
13 Macmillan, Life, 116.
14 R. Flint, Christ’s Kingdom Upon Earth (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1865).
15 Flint, Christ’s Kingdom, 77.
16 Flint, Christ’s Kingdom, 55.
17 Macmillan, Life, 129.
18 Macmillan, Life, 178.
19 R. Flint, The Duties of the People of Scotland to the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons, 1882).
20 Macmillan, Life, 313.
21 L. C. Sanders, Celebrities of the Century (London, Paris and Melbourne: Cassell, 1887).
22 Also the subject of a biography by Macmillan: see D. Macmillan, The Life of Professor Hastie (Paisley: A. Gardner, 1926).
23 Macmillan, Life, 395–408.
24 Macmillan, Life, 426.
25 For American notices of R. Flint, Agnosticism (London and Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), see P. E. Winter, The American Journal of Psychology, 14 (1903), 254–5; J. Broeke, The American Journal of Theology, 8 (1904), 372–82; Anonymous, The Biblical World, 21 (1903), 398–9; A. Gillett, The Philosophical Review, 12 (1903), 666–9; and for an English notice, S. Mellone, Mind, n.s., 13 (1904), 106–10.
26 J. Dickie, Fifty Years of British Theology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1937), 65.
27 K. Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation, translated by J. L. M. Haire and I. Henderson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1949).
28 J. K. Mozley, Some Tendencies In British Theology (London: SPCK, 1951), 114.
29 Flint goes unmentioned, not only by C. Craig, ‘Nineteenth‐century Scottish Thought’, but in the second volume of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature as a whole.
30 See A. Sell, ‘Robert Flint’, Dictionary of Nineteenth‐century British Philosophers, 2 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002), vol. 1, 390–4; and ‘Robert Flint’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. G. C. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 20, 150–1.
31 A. Sell, Defending and Declaring the Faith Some Scottish Examples, 1860–1920 (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1987), 39–63.
32 J. Haldane, ‘The Philosophy of Thomas Reid’, Philosophical Quarterly, 52 (2002), 433–5, a special issue devoted to Reid, singles out S. A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), and K. Lehrer, Thomas Reid (London: Routledge, 1989), as milestones in the modern intellectual history of Scottish common‐sense thought. For some recent philosophical works, see S. Boulter, The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); M. Ledwig, Common Sense, Its History, Method, and Applicability (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); and N. Rescher, Common‐Sense: A New Look at an Old Philosophical Tradition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005).
33 See J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1968), 30.
34 See J. S. Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings, third edition (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889), esp. chs 4 and 26.
35 T. Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ch. 5, §7, ‘Of the Existence of a Material World’ (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990), 132; quoted in N. Wolsterstorff, ‘God and Darkness in Reid’, in Thomas Reid, Context Influence and Significance, edited by J. Houston (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2004), 77–101 (96).
36 Wolsterstorff, ‘God and Darkness in Reid’, 96.
37 Flint, Agnosticism, 55.
38 Flint, Scientia, 33; Agnosticism, 2, 30.
39 J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, eighth edition, 2 vols (London: Longman’s, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1872), vol. 2, 531.
40 J. Burrow, Evolution and Society A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 204.
41 Quoted in Macmillan, Life of Flint, 300.
42 See Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading, edited by V. Shea and W. Whitla (Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 7.
43 Macmillan, Life of Flint, 104.
44 See W. McFarlan, ‘Authority’ and ‘The Things which cannot Be Shaken’, in Scotch Sermons (London: MacMillan, 1880), 195–218, 219–43.
45 Macmillan, Life of Flint, 373–9.
46 Mozley, British Theology, 117; Sell, Defending the Faith, 52.
47 Flint, Philosophy of History, 496 ff.
48 Flint, Philosophy of History, 498.
49 Flint, Philosophy of History, 505.
50 Flint, Philosophy of History, 503.
51 Sell, Defending the Faith, 49, 57.
52 J. Butler, The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: Macmillan & Co., 1900), 4.
53 R. Flint, Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum and a History of the Classifications of the Sciences (London and Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1904), n5.
54 C. Smith, ‘Thomson, William, Baron Kelvin (1824–1907)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
55 This Thomas Thomson Jackson (1797–1898) is not to be confused with the Thomas Jacksons, father and son, mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. I am grateful to S. Lawler, of the Special Collections Department at Glasgow University, for assisting with a search for publications by Jackson that included copac.ac.uk and the British Library catalogue but produced no results.
56 Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707, 10, claims that ‘The statistical evidence of church membership and religious worship shows that religious adherence did not decline during the industrial revolution nor urbanization, but, if anything grew – certainly down to the 1880s and possibly later in Britain’.
57 R. Flint, Anti‐Theistic Theories (Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1878), 36–7.
58 R. Flint, Socialism, second edition (London and Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1903 [1894]).
59 For notices of Socialism see T. Veblen, The Journal of Political Economy, 3 (1895), 247–52; S. Ball, International Journal of Ethics, 5 (1895), 526–30; and F. Butlin, The Economic Journal, 5 (1895), 247–8.
60 K. Willis, ‘The Introduction and Critical Reception of Marxist Thought in Great Britain’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 417–59 (444–5).
61 Flint, Socialism, 9.
62 Flint, Philosophy of History, 535–6.
63 Flint, Socialism, 14.
64 Quoted in Flint, Anti‐Theistic Theories, 7.
65 R. Flint, The Philosophy of History in Europe, vol. 1: The Philosophy of History in France and Germany (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons, 1874); Vico (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons, 1884); History of the Philosophy of History: Historical Philosophy in France, French Belgium, and Switzerland (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons, 1893).
66 Macmillan, Life, 190, 196, 326. The original reviews have not been traced.
67 For notices of Flint’s History of the Philosophy of History, see Lord Acton, English Historical Review, 10 (1895), 108–13; D. Irons, The Philosophical Review, 3 (1894), 726–30; J. B. Mullinger, Mind, n.s., 3 (1894), 390–5; H. L. Osgood, Political Science Quarterly, 10 (1895), 167–9; and B. Rand, International Journal of Ethics, 5 (1895), 266–7.
68 See J. Altholz, ‘Lord Acton and the Plan of the Cambridge Modern History’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 723–36 (729).
69 A. Small, Review of O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, The American Journal of Sociology, 26 (1921), 632–7; R. Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, translated by J. W. Harvey, T. E. Jessop and H. Sturt; edited by J. H. Muirhead (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 233.
70 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, an Inquiry into its Growth and Origin (London: Macmillan, 1920), 279, 365–6.
71 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 142–3. See F. H. Bradley, ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’, Collected Essays, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), vol. 1, 1–70.
72 See K. Willis, ‘The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830–1900’, Victorian Studies, 31 (1988), 85–111 (103 n49); D. Kelley, Fortunes of History Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 52, 182. The only extended examination of Flint’s philosophy of history remains unpublished: see S. R. Obitts, ‘The Thought of Robert Flint’ (Edinburgh University Ph.D. thesis, 1962; microfilm copy at British Library shelf‐mark D83486).
73 For the neo‐Kantian approach to the philosophy of history in the nineteenth century see the following works, all translated by G. Oakes: G. Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History An Epistemological Essay (New York: The Free Press, 1977); W. Windelband, ‘Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894’, History and Theory, 19 (1980), 169–85; and H. Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
74 Osgood, Review of Historical Philosophy, 167, presumably had in mind G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik (Jena: Frommann, 1858).
76 Flint, Philosophy of History, 2.
75 Thinkers discussed in the 1874 volume include Bodin, Pascal, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Turgot, Voltaire, Condorcet, de Bonald, Saint‐Simon, Fourier, Cousin, Jouffroy, Guizot, Comte, Michelet, Quinet, De Tocqueville, Odysse‐Barrot, Leibniz, Schlozer, von Müller, Lessing, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Bunsen, Lazarus, Lotze and Hermann.
77 Butler, The Analogy of Religion, 55, 67, 130.
78 Quoted in Obitts, ‘The Thought of Robert Flint’, 186.
79 A. Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, translated by F. Ferré (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988), 57.
80 Flint, Vico, 61.
81 Flint, Vico, 117–18.
82 Flint, Scientia, 20.
83 For the idea of ‘conjectural’ history, see C. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
84 Flint, Philosophy of History, 46, 48
85 For notices of Flint’s work on Ibn KhaldÛn, see H. Becker, Review of Ibn KhaldÛn: Ausgewählte Abschnitte aus der Muqaddima, translated by A. Schimmel, The American Journal of Sociology, 58 (1953), 532, and W. Watt, Review of Ibn KhaldÛn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by F. Rosenthal, English Historical Review, 75 (1960), 298.
86 Flint, The Philosophy of History, 1, 6–7, 12.
87 Flint, The Philosophy of History, 191, 216, 535.
88 Flint, The Philosophy of History, 523, 529.
89 Flint, Vico, 160.
90 Flint, Vico, 87
91 Flint, Vico, 45, 57.
92 Flint, Scientia, 127.
93 For notices of Flint’s work on Vico, see D. G. Ritchie, Mind, os, 9 (1884), 579–82; B. Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, translated by R. G. Collingwood (London: Howard Latimer Ltd., 1913), 277; The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, translated by M. Fisch and T. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944), 95 n111; I. Berlin, ‘Corsi e Ricorsi’, Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978), 480–9 (480); Vico, Selected Writings, edited by L. Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), n13.
94 See H. Spencer, ‘The Classification of the Sciences’, in Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, 3 vols (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1891), vol. 2, 74–117.
95 See, for example, H. M. Stanley, ‘On the Classification of the Sciences’, Mind, os, 9 (1884), 265–74; W. Smith, Review of E. Goblot, Essai sur la classification des sciences, The Philosophical Review, 7 (1898), 639–42; G. A. Cogswell, ‘The Classification of the Sciences’, The Philosophical Review, 8 (1899), 494–512; J. W. Powell, ‘Classification of the Sciences’, American Anthropologist, n.s., 3 (1901), 601–5; T. Whittaker, ‘A Compendious Classification of the Sciences’, Mind, n.s., 12 (1903), 21–34, W. E. Hocking, Review of C. Stumpf, Zur Enteilung der Wissenschaften, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 5 (1908), 271–5.
96 E. Richardson, Classification Theoretical and Practical I. The Order of the Sciences II. The Classification of Books Together with an Appendix containing and Essay towards a Bibliographical History of Systems of Classification (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901) predates Flint’s book by several years, but acknowledges Flint’s earlier essay on the ‘Classification of the Sciences’, Presbyterian Review, 6 (1885), 401–35; 7 (1886), 483–536, as one of the best sources for the subject at 96.
97 See the notice of Flint’s Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum by P. Hughes, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 2 (1905), 354–8 (354).
98 For modern notices of Flint’s Philosophy as Scientia Scientiarum, see N. Steneck, ‘A Late Medieval Arbor Scientiarum’, Speculum, 50 (1975), 245–69 (245 n1); R. Yeo, ‘Reading Encylopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730–1850’, Isis, 82 (1991), 24–49 (27, n11), and ‘Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 57 (1996), 157–75 (171, n45); and C. McIntosh, ‘Eighteenth‐century English Dictionaries and the Enlightenment’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998), 3–18 (18, n31); Steneck finds Flint’s treatment of medieval systems of classification ‘more superficial’ than those of authors after 1945, but he is alone in passing negative comment.
99 Flint, Vico, 149.
100 Flint, Scientia, v.
101 Flint, Scientia, 10.
102 Flint, Scientia, 11–12.
103 Flint, Scientia, 12.
104 Flint, Scientia, 16.
105 Flint, Scientia, 27.
106 Flint, Scientia, 34.
107 Flint, Scientia, 37.
108 Flint, Agnosticism, 13.
109 Plato, Republic, 509d ff.
110 Flint, Scientia, 68–9.
111 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1025b.
112 Flint, Scientia, 88, 123, 214.
113 Aristotle, Topics, 105b.
114 Flint, Scientia, 84.
115 Flint, Scientia, 88.
116 Flint, Scientia, 90–6.
117 R. Descartes, ‘Letter of the Author’ in Principes de la philosophie (Paris, 1647); quoted in Flint, Scientia, 104.
118 F. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London, 1605), II.1, ‘Triple Distribution of Human Learning’. For a modern discussion, see S. Kusakawa, ‘Bacon’s Classification of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, edited by M. Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 47–74.
119 Compare J. D’Alembert, Preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, translated by R. N. Schwab with W. E. Rex (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and J. Bentham, Chrestomathia, edited by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
120 Flint, Scientia, 101.
121 As Brian Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt note, Campanella’s first surviving work, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Naples, 1591) was followed by several other major philosophical publications including: Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae (Frankfurt, 1617); De sensu rerum et magia (Frankfurt, 1620); and Metaphysica (Paris, 1638). See B. Copenhaver and C. B. Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 317 ff.
122 Campanella is mentioned only once in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, edited by D. Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), as the provider of a ‘new, comprehensive alternative to the school philosophy’: see D. Des Chene, ‘From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science’, 67–94 (75). He is absent from C. Mercer and E. O’Neill, Early Modern Philosophy Mind Matter and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
123 On J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), ch. 21, ‘Of the Division of the Sciences’, see Flint, Scientia, 123. For a modern discussion see R. Woolhouse, ‘Locke’s Theory of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Locke, edited by V. Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 146–71.
124 Flint, Scientia, 130.
125 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1983), A832/B680.
126 Flint, Scientia, 134.
127 Flint, Review of F. Brentano, Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte, Mind, os, 1 (1876), 116–22.
128 Flint, Scientia, 251.
129 Flint, Scientia, 338–9.