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ABSTRACT
This paper affirms the central role of religion in Adam Ferguson's practical thought by offering a new reading of his view on the interrelations between true religion, science, moral progress, and immortality. Fergusonian true religion, it is shown, originates in the understanding of wise, benevolent Providence which the physical and moral sciences offer when they become comprehensive. This understanding, in turn, grounds a neo-Stoic religious ethic. Having true religion then means: knowing the providential order, and virtuously acting upon a proper understanding of one's place, potential, and limits in this order. For Ferguson, it is argued, it is each individual's own responsibility to morally progress on the basis of true religion. The paper thus opposes interpretations of Ferguson's view of moral progress as the irreversible result of the species’ ever-increasing insight in the details of nature as a providential order. Human societies can only offer a fertile backdrop that enables individuals to live rationally and virtuously. The highest possible degree of human moral-religious progress is to be realized in the afterlife – if the individual has lived sufficiently virtuously on earth so as to merit entrance to the afterlife's progressive scene. Nevertheless, Ferguson's focus remains firmly on religion's value for this life.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 EHCS 5.1, 195–6. Henceforth ‘EHCS’, referring to Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); ‘M’ to Adam Ferguson, The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, eds. Vincenzo Merolle e.a. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006); ‘PMPS’ to Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science (Edinburgh: Strahan, Caddel and Creech, 1792), two volumes.
2 EHCS 6.6, 264.
3 Both terms are suitable in relation to Ferguson's religious views. Given the important role God plays in Ferguson's moral outlook and the (limited, cf. infra) common ground he shares with Christianity, ‘theism’ is appropriate. Ferguson himself uses ‘Theist’ in opposition to ‘Atheist’, identifying with the former (PMPS I, 2.16, 172). The Newtonian scientific worldview to which Ferguson's true religion is wedded, and the strong emphasis on natural over revealed religion in his published writings, make ‘deism’ appropriate, too (cf. James E. Force ‘The Newtonians and Deism’, in Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology, eds. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 56). Staunch deists like Tindal wholly rejected revealed religion (ibid.). Newton's own heterodox Arianism is probably better termed ‘theistic’, given the fundamental importance it still attributes to revelation and prophecy besides natural religion (cf. ibid. 62; Richard H. Popkin, ‘Polytheism, Deism, and Newton’, in Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology, eds. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 32).
4 Craig Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 132.
5 David Kettler, Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 131.
6 Ferguson uses this term only in EHCS, but it is likewise a fitting term for the rational religion he construes in later writings.
7 Cf. Lisa Hill, The Passionate Society: The Social, Political and Moral Thought of Adam Ferguson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 118; Jeng-Guo S. Chen, ‘Providence and Progress: The Religious Dimension of Ferguson's Discussion of Civil Society’, in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, eds. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 184.
8 That is, if one seeks to uphold the centrality of civic humanism in Ferguson's thought, as Hill does.
9 PMPS I, 3.13, 304.
10 This is related to the emphasis on martial spirit in the civic humanist tradition. Cf. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 201, 269, 536.
11 Approximately between 1799 and 1808, as the watermarks on the paper on which the essays are written indicate. See the editorial footnotes to the essays cited below.
12 The early Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) also contain some passages that are congruent with my reading of Ferguson's true religion, including brief chapters on immortality and the future state that prefigure those in PMPS. Still, the book does not contain much that is of added value for my reading, so I have not included it in my discussion. The proper development of Ferguson's argument on the interrelation between true religion, science, moral progress, and immortality is limited to his later writings.
13 In Rudmer Bijlsma, ‘Of Savages and Stoics: Converging Moral and Political Ideals in the Conjectural Histories of Rousseau and Ferguson,’ Philosophy & Social Criticism 48, no. 2 (2022): 209–44, I analyze the nature and aims of Ferguson's conjectural history (in comparison with Rousseau's).
14 I.e. Kettler, Adam Ferguson; Hill, Passionate Society; Smith, Adam Ferguson.
15 Cf. Smith, Adam Ferguson, 3.
16 Also relevant, of course, is that EHCS is an essay – a work with literary qualities on a more circumscribed topic that does not aspire to the philosophical breadth and systematicity of PMPS.
17 Bijlsma, ‘Savages and Stoics’, 209–44.
18 Cf. Duncan Forbes, ‘Introduction’, in Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), xiii-xli; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 499–505; Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘Ferguson's Politics of Action’, in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, eds. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 147–56.
19 Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 207; Smith, Adam Ferguson.
20 PMPS I, 3.1, 199.
21 Ibid. 3.2, 205.
22 Ibid. 206.
23 Ibid. 205–6.
24 Ibid. 206.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid. 207.
28 Ibid. 1.3, 32.
29 Cf. ibid. 1.5, 61.
30 Ibid. 3.10, 269–70.
31 My reading here opposes Smith, Adam Ferguson, 169.
32 PMPS I, 3.9, 253. Cf. Hill, Passionate Society, 93.
33 Cf. EHCS 2.2, 81.
34 Ibid. 4.3, 179; 4.4, 190.
35 E.g. as in the case of the refined fiction writer who no longer participates in the active, public life that could have truly animated their work (cf. ibid. 3.8, 166; 5.3, 206).
36 Cf. ibid. 3.1, 115.
37 Cf. Forbes, who even uses the Rousseauian description ‘denaturing of man’ in this regard (‘Introduction’, xl). This is a (conscious) overstatement, but nonetheless an insightful one.
38 Ferguson writes that, ‘if courage be the gift of society to man, we have reason to consider his union with his species as the noblest part of his fortune. From this source are derived, not only the force, but the very existence of his happiest emotions; not only the better part, but almost the whole of his rational character’ (EHCS 1.3, 23). Thus, the firmer our union with other members of our species, the firmer the foundation for the flourishing of our rational nature.
39 Cf. Forbes, ‘Introduction’; Hill, Passionate Society, ch. 10; Kettler, Adam Ferguson, ch. 7; Oz-Salzberger, ‘Politics of Action.’
40 On Ferguson's account of the division of labour, cf. John D. Brewer, ‘Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour’, in The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, eds. David McCrone e.a. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 13–27; Ronald Hamowy, ‘Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and the Division of Labour’, Economica XXXV (1968): 249–59.
41 Cf. EHCS 4.1, 174.
42 Cf. ibid. 5.3, 5.4; PMPS II, 6.10, 492–3.
43 Modern commercial society is an advanced stage of the civilized stage.
44 Craig Smith asserts that, for Ferguson, ‘it is not the advent of commerce, but the absence of politics that is the root issue. There is no reason in principle why a commercial society need not also be a politically engaged society’ ('Self-interest in the Thought of Adam Ferguson’, in A Genealogy of Self-Interest in Economics, eds. Susumu Egashira e.a. (Springer: Singapore, 2021), 41–2). In my view, Smith is mistaken in reducing the root issue to politics. It is true that a commercial society can in principle be a politically engaged society for Ferguson. However, a crucial reason for it being less likely that a commercial society is sufficiently politically engaged is that the division of labour leads to the active, rational nature of many (not necessarily all) citizens becoming engaged in a more narrowly circumscribed way than in simpler societies. Hence, the average citizen will have to be pressed harder than before to make them able and willing to engage in politics in an adequate manner.
45 Cf. Alexander Broadie, ‘Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, sect. 11. In a similar vein, Jack Hill points to ‘the elasticity between the savage, barbarian and polite manifestations of Ferguson's progressive understanding of the self’ (‘Marx's Reading of Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Progress’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2013), 177). In comparison to these authors, my own focus on Ferguson's systematic differentiation between higher- and lower-level kinds of progress is new.
46 EHCS 2.3, 103–4. Cf. PMPS I, 3.9, 251.
47 EHCS 2.2, 89–90.
48 Ibid. 2.3, 103.
49 Cf. ibid. 3.1, 113–4; PMPS II, 5.1, 320.
50 Ibid. 4.4, 192.
51 PMPS I, 3.13, 304–5.
52 Ibid. 304.
53 Ibid. 305.
54 Ibid. 313. Cf. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. Robin Hard and ed. Christopher Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.27.
55 Cf. PMPS I, 2.15, 166. Nature's laws are fixed and may operate ‘to particular inconvenience or hurt’ (ibid. 2.16, 180). This does not disprove providence; the regularity allows the wise to learn to ‘avoid the inconvenience that would result from inattention or ignorance’ (ibid.).
56 PMPS I 3.13, 313 Cf. PMPS II, 1.3, 29. For this dimension of Ferguson's true religion, see also Eugene Heath, ‘In the Garden of God: Religion and Vigour in the Frame of Ferguson's Thought’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 13, no.1 (2015): 55–74.
57 PMPS I, 2.16, 179.
58 Ibid. 3.13, 312.
59 Cf. PMPS II, 2.2, 112–3: ‘There is one point of view in which the sciences, whether physical or moral, unite their effects. That point to which they severally tend, when physical science becomes comprehensive of the order of nature, or lays open the view to infinite goodness and wisdom; and moral science, abstracting from local forms and observances, becomes in the mind a principle of extensive benevolence, by which the individual states himself as a part in the order of nature, and entirely devoted to the will of its Author.’
60 Rude people do not engage in science (cf. EHCS 2.2, 88).
61 PMPS I 3.13, 313. Cf. ibid. 2.16, 187.
62 Ibid. 3.13, 312.
63 Ibid. 2.16, 180.
64 Ibid. 2.2, 72.
65 Ibid. 75.
66 Hobbes (or Descartes and Locke, whom Ferguson also mentions) is also a ‘moral scientist’, of course. Physical and moral science in Ferguson's sense can presumably be part of one integrated endeavour. The Stoics and Epicureans, whom he lists as moral scientists, also developed elaborate (meta)physical theories.
67 PMPS I 3.13, 307.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid. 309.
70 Ibid.
71 Cf. Voula Tsouna, ‘Epicureanism and Hedonism’, in The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, eds. Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 66–8.
72 PMPS I, 3.13, 310.
73 Cf. Brad Inwood, ‘Stoicism’, in The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, eds. Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 77–9.
74 EHCS 1.8, 53–4.
75 In Bijlsma, ‘Savages and Stoics’ (216–22), I analyse the Stoic roots of Ferguson's moral psychology. For a brief critique of Katherine Nicolai's argument (‘Adam Ferguson's Pedagogy and his Engagement with Stoicism’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2014): 199–212) that Ferguson's moral philosophy is not properly (neo-)Stoic, see Rudmer Bijlsma, ‘Alienation in Commercial Society: The Republican Critique of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson,’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy 57, no. 3 (2019): 358 (fn. 46).
76 Cf. Inwood, ‘Stoicism’, 83.
77 PMPS I, 3.13, 309.
78 Ibid. 310.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid. 311.
82 Cf. supra, section II; and EHCS 3.8: ‘even science itself, the supposed offspring of leisure, pined in the shade of monastic retirement’ (171).
83 Cf. PMPS II, 1.4, 45–6: ‘the wise, the courageous, the temperate, and the benevolent, are of all others most likely to stand well-affected to their fellow-creatures, to the universe, and to the Creator of the world; (…) none are so likely to recognize the providence and moral government of God, or to settle religion itself on its best foundations of integrity and goodness.’
84 PMPS I, 3.13, 306. Ferguson's opposition of reason and true religion to enthusiasm and superstition is reminiscent of David Hume's (cf. ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in Essays Moral, Political, Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 73). See also PMPS I, 2.14, 170. The sceptical, non-Christian Hume was a friend of the Moderate literati. While this group was (highly) critical of Hume's ideas, they were taken seriously and there was mutual influence – cf. Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 191; Hill, Passionate Society, 2, 22, 27, 38, 47. See also section VI for Ferguson's relation to the Moderate party and Hume.
85 In Ferguson's non-egalitarian, meritocratic republicanism, the elite has a crucial role in preserving virtue and liberty (cf. Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe's Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 100, 131, 155).
86 Such politicians may well cultivate the superstition in themselves, too (PMPS I, 2.12, 147).
87 I discuss the role of moral examples in more detail in section V.
88 EHCS 4.4, 192. Cf. supra, section III.
89 Ferguson does not explicitly say this, but I think the overlap between his philosophical, true religion and Christianity (see also sections V and VI) make this a plausible reading. It is also suggested by this passage on the shaping role of wise individuals on popular belief: ‘in every age, the few may be found who are fit to receive and communicate to others the apprehension of design in the works of God’ (PMPS I, 2.15, 166). Popular religion, it seems, can become less irrational and damaging – i.e. less wildly superstitious or enthusiastic – if such individuals have influence on ordinary believers.
90 Cf. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 79–80, 217, 486.
91 Cf. Inwood, ‘Stoicism’, 83–4; Hill, Passionate Society, 37–8.
92 Though loyalty to the local appears more important for Ferguson than for the (Roman) Stoics. Cf. ibid. 38.
93 Given the Stoic ideal of freedom from the passions, consolation will only be relevant for those still on the path to wisdom. Ferguson does not share the Stoic ideal of apatheia (cf. PMPS I, 2.10, 128–9).
94 EHCS 2.1, 78.
95 Cf. Hill, Passionate Society, 38–9; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 499–500; Bijlsma, ‘Savages and Stoics’; Bijlsma, ‘Alienation in Commercial Society’. This is not to say that there was no religious inspiration in these philosophers, but that their influence on Ferguson was predominantly through their secular political thought (although, as we have seen with Ferguson, secular and religious ideas cannot always be strictly separated).
96 Cf. EHCS 3.2, 4.2.
97 Cf. Chen, ‘Providence and Progress’, 180–2.
98 Ferguson shared with other Moderate Presbyterians the tendency to propagate ‘a spirit of civic virtue for conservative purposes’ (Sher, Church and University, 190).
99 That is, insofar as his true religion can still be said to have a Christian dimension – see section VI.
100 Hill, Passionate Society, 120.
101 Chen's reading (‘Providence and Progress’) is very similar – cf. infra.
102 Hill, Passionate Society, 210. Hill refers to PMPS I, 3.12, 298. Making errors does indeed have the beneficial effect, according to Ferguson, of leading us to the right choices and solutions in the end. In my reading of Ferguson, however, I separate between the moral and practical evolution of human beings and societies. Our errors and solutions at the practical level, therefore, are not correlated with our moral progress in the way Hill proposes they do. There is no ‘inexorable path of perfection’ on the level of moral progress.
103 Hill, Passionate Society, 201. Cf. ibid. 199: ‘Corruption is (…) conceived as an unavoidable consequence of our perfectibility, a natural by-product of our desire to develop, grow, and effect our ultimate union with the mind of the Creator.’
104 Ibid. 209.
105 Ibid.
106 Cf. ibid. 118, 205.
107 PMPS I, 3.14, 329.
108 Ibid. 330. Cf. ‘Distinction of Value’, M, 79.
109 PMPS I, 3.14, 331.
110 ‘The very darkness of Futurity is to him an intimation that his bussiness (sic) is now before him’ (‘Perfection and Happiness’, M, 7).
111 PMPS I, 3.14, 337.
112 Cf. EHCS 1.1, 14.
113 PMPS I, 3.14, 335. Cf. ‘Perfection and Happiness’, M, 7; ‘Cause and Effect and Design’, M, 127.
114 PMPS I, 2.16, 177.
115 As Heath documents (‘Garden of God’, 59). Cf. Adam Ferguson, The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995), vol. II, letters 301, 360, 409.
116 Cf. infra.
117 Thomas Ahnert writes that ‘[s]kepticism about a reasonable belief in the afterlife was characteristic of Moderates more generally’ (The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690-1805 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 82). Orthodox Presbyterians tended to claim that we have natural knowledge of the soul's immortality (ibid.).
118 ‘Things that Are or May Be’, M, 230.
119 Ibid.
120 PMPS I, 3.14, 332.
121 ‘Things that Are or May Be’, M, 239.
122 Hill also points to the ‘quasi-divine understanding’ and exemplary role of these figures (Passionate Society, 208). Hence, there is certainly some room for differentiation as regards the level of moral progress of individuals in her reading of Ferguson. But this is to be understood within her comprehensive reading in which the focus is on moral progress as a species achievement.
123 Cf. ibid. 155. As Heath points out (‘Garden of God’, 62–3), Ferguson leaves open the possibility that malice has ‘a deeper root in human nature than mere error or mistake’, but that we simply ‘have no occasion to look for any root that is deeper (…) if error and mistake be sufficient to account, for the germ of this poisonous plant’ (PMPS I, 2.16, 181). Hence, as a Christian, Ferguson might have believed in a deeper root, even though he could not include this in his natural theology. But his positive assessment of savage life does seem to rule out a strong conception of original sin tout court. In fact, ‘the mistake of precedence’ (Heath, ‘Garden of God’, 182), which Heath presents as a ‘secular version of Biblical pride’ (ibid. 63), is a mistake peculiar to advanced societies.
124 ‘Things that Are or May Be’, M, 229.
125 Hill, Passionate Society, 195.
126 PMPS I, 3.1, 194.
127 Ibid. 199.
128 Elsewhere, Ferguson writes of religion, virtue, and happiness: ‘This no one can procure for another. It is left by the Almighty for every one only to procure it for himself. Aurelius accordingly procured it for himself, but could not for his son’ (PMPS II, 1.8, 104).
129 PMPS I, 3.1, 194–5.
130 Chen highlights the influence of Ferguson's teacher William Cleghorn (who was in turn inspired by Plato and Newton) on his account of providence and universal progress (‘Providence and Progress’, 177 ff.). An analysis of the precise nature and measure of this influence falls outside of the present paper's scope. My reconstruction of Ferguson's argumentation in PMPS and relevant essays in M suggests that Ferguson does not, in crucial respects, propose the account of providential progress that Chen argues he does, and may thus have more critically appropriated his teacher's views than Chen proposes.
131 ‘Cause and Effect and Design’, M, 125.
132 Chen, ‘Providence and Progress’, 177.
133 ‘Cause and Effect and Design’, M, 125.
134 Ibid.
135 Ibid. 125.
136 Ibid. 126.
137 Ibid. 126–7.
138 PMPS I, 3.11, 282; Chen, ‘Providence and Progress’, 179.
139 PMPS I, 3.11, 283.
140 Ferguson's remark in EHCS on the significance of the law/constitution for future generations is illustrative: ‘the influence of laws, where they have any real effect in the preservation of liberty, is not any magic power descending from shelves that are loaded with books, but is, in reality, the influence of men resolved to be free’ (6.5, 249). Laws may have been written in a spirit of liberty, but this spirit is not somehow magically preserved within them for all time. Earlier generations can communicate their spirit to us through the letter of the law, but only when we keep acting upon this communication will the law be prevented from turning into a dead letter. The species progress reading seems to involve a kind of ‘magical’ preservation of moral progress.
141 Heath, ‘Garden of God’, 58–9.
142 Cf. Ferguson, Correspondence, vol. II, letter 330, 418: ‘I have learned of late to call him The Principle of Existence.’
143 E.g. Heath (‘Garden of God’, 58) mentions Ferguson's using ‘our Saviour’ when describing a painting by Rubens (Ferguson, Correspondence, vol. I, letter 1, 5). While suggesting that Ferguson saw himself as Christian, the fact that this description is not accompanied by any ruminations on the theological significance of Christ's death makes it quite uninformative as regards the robustness of his Christianity. At any rate, Heath estimates that we ‘should not assume that Ferguson's zeal overheated (sic)’ (‘Garden of God’, endnote 12).
144 Cf. Sher, Church and University, 186.
145 Cf. A.G. Long, Death and Immortality in Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 169. Nothing in Ferguson suggests that he does not consider the soul to be immortal in the strong sense (that is, if the soul survives the body).
146 Ibid. ch. 6. Nonetheless, Ferguson's quotation from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in the section on immortality of PMPS indicates that he sees Marcus's agnosticism as inspirational for his own toned-down agnosticism. The quotation also suggests that the origin of Ferguson's belief that the wise have a better chance of immortality lies in Stoicism. Marcus commends that we should accept divine wisdom, even if it will turn out that even ‘some of the best men (…) who have (…) been admitted to a familiarity with the Divine Being, should yet, when they die, have no longer any existence’ (cited in PMPS I, 3.14, 337). Chrysippus positively believed that only the sage's soul survives death (Long, Death and Immortality, 153). Finally, Marcus believes that our personal identity would be substantially altered if the soul somehow survives physical death (ibid. 170; cf. Aurelius, Meditations, 8.5). While Ferguson nowhere claims that a strong break with our former identity will occur, his suggestion that we would pass on ‘to a new state of intelligent being, furnished with other organs of perception’ (PMPS I, 3.14, 329) shows similitude with Marcus's conditional view of the afterlife: ‘if you come to have a somewhat altered consciousness, you will merely be a living creature of another kind’ (Aurelius, Meditations, 8.58).
147 Ahnert, Moral Culture, 7. While counting him among the Moderates, Ahnert does not analyze Ferguson's position in this debate.
148 Ibid. 15.
149 Ibid. 86.
150 Ibid. 102. Ahnert also mentions William Robertson.
151 As another argument for the importance of Christianity, Heath points out that Ferguson's idea that we are an ‘image of God’ has Biblical origins (‘Garden of God’, 68). However, the idea also connects well with Stoic oikeiosis. Crucially, Ferguson focuses on Stoic thinkers as best approaching this image (cf. also ‘Things that Are or May Be’, M, 229). Hence, this dimension of his true religion, too, points to a Christian Stoicism at best.
152 Cf. note 84.
153 Cf. ibid.
154 Given Ferguson's focus on inner moral disposition and concomitant behaviour, and his commitment to only a few basic doctrines, it seems that only some purified form of Protestantism might come close to his idea of true religion. He must have found, with the other Moderates, orthodox Presbyterianism too dogmatic, while Roman Catholic ceremony and beliefs must have contained too many superstitious elements.
155 Cf. Andre C. Willis. Toward a Humean True Religion: Genuine Theism, Moderate Hope, and Practical Morality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 19, 28.
156 Heath ‘Garden of God’, 69. Heath mentions Ferguson's conviction that ‘our progressive development may continue beyond the mortal realm’ (ibid. 61), but does not analyse this in terms of what it means for the limits to our progress on earth.
157 Cf. EHCS 3.1, 113–4.