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ABSTRACT
The erudite James Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799), member of the Select Society and judge of the Court of Session in Edinburgh, wrote many pages about the existence of ‘men with tails’ and orang-utans’ humanity. For this reason, he has been labelled as ‘credulous’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘eccentric’ both by his contemporaries and by modern scholars. In this paper, I shall try to take his argument seriously and to show that throughout his work Monboddo searched for evidence. If his belief in mermaids, giants, blemmyes, daemons and oracles was far from reflecting the general attitude of the age of Enlightenment and empiricism, Monboddo contributed to place the ‘science of man’ at the centre of the map of knowledge, where Nicholas Phillipson had also located it. He did this by emphasising the variety and historicity of humankind and stressing how mind and body changed over time and space. This article is also an attempt to connect Monboddo’s erudite production with his position as a lawyer and a judge. I shall argue that Monboddo founded his ‘science of man’ on an epistemology of legal evidence, employing the same inquisitive approach that he practiced at the bar and in the court.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a chapter of the book I am writing on the boundaries of humanity in Enlightenment debates. I presented it in Princeton, Edinburgh and Oxford, as well as in my research seminars at the EHESS. I would like to thank the many colleagues and students who have provided advice, expressed doubts and raised questions in these different occasions. I’m especially grateful to Pietro Corsi, Antoine Lilti, Dario Mantovani and John Robertson, who read and commented on an earlier version of this article. A final thanks is to Nick Phillipson, for his generous advices and amusing conversations since I was a PhD student and for an unforgettable ride by vespa on the hills of Florence.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 James Boswell, Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785), ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 230 (Thursday 26th August 1773).
2 Please note that throughout this paper I retain eighteenth-century gender-specific language: ‘man’, ‘science of man’, ‘species man’, ‘history of mankind’, for speaking about all human beings.
3 Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Allen Lane, 2010). For a fine overview of Phillipson’s work, see Colin Kidd, ‘The Phillipsonian Enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014): 175–90.
4 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Language, Sociability, and History: Some Reflections on the Foundations of Adam Smith’s Science of Man’, in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70–84.
5 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics, or the Science of Universals (6 vols., Edinburgh: J. Balfour; London: T. Cadell, 1779–1799), vol. I (1779), 301. Hereafter AM.
6 See Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Monboddo and Rousseau’, Modern Philology 30 (1932–33): 275–96. I’ve explored the concepts of perfectibilité and civilisation, and the alternative models they prompted within Scottish Enlightenment historiography in ‘Civilisation and Perfectibility: Conflicting Views of the History of Humankind?’, in Political Thought, Time, and History, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., forthcoming).
7 ‘Orang-utan’ (spelled in a number of ways) is a term of Malayan origin meaning ‘man of the wood’ (‘oran’ means ‘man’ and ‘utan’ means ‘wood’/’forest’), which, until the end of the eighteenth century, was employed in Europe as a generic noun for labelling all kinds of great apes than known, both Asiatic and African.
8 James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (6 vols., Edinburgh: J. Balfour; London: T. Cadell, 1773–1792), I (II ed. 1774), 152n. Hereafter OPL. Id., ‘Preface’ to An Account of a Savage Girl, Caught Wild in the Woods of Champagne. Translated from the French of Madam H-T. With a Preface, Containing Several Particulars Omitted in the Original Account (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1768), xix.
9 Scholars have stressed the tensions between Hume and Monboddo concerning the acquisition of books for the Advocates’ Library. See William K. Dickson, ‘David Hume and the Advocates’ Library’, Juridical Review XLIV (1932): 2–14; Michael H. Harris, ‘David Hume: Scholar as Librarian’, The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 36, no. 2 (1966): 88–98.
10 ‘Book of Rules and Minutes of the Select Society’, National Library of Scotland (NLS), Adv 23.1.1,2. Elected to the board of presidents for three years in a row, Monboddoacted as preses more than a dozen times (while Hume, for instance, only did so twice). See Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 20–2, 276 (note 21).
11 Papers of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, NLS, MSS.24501-24629, 129 vols. See Iain Maxwell Hammett, ‘Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language: Its Sources, Genesis and Background, with Special Attention to the Advocates’ Library’ (Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1985).
12 See Nicholas Phillipson’s Doctoral Thesis (University of Cambridge, 1967), published unrevised as The Scottish Whigs and the Reform of the Court of Session 1785–1830 (Edinburgh: Stair Society, 1990). See also Id. ‘Lawyers, landowners and the civic leadership of post-Union Scotland’, Juridical Review 21 (1976): 97–120, esp. 112; Id., ‘The Social Structure of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland, 1661-1840’, in Law-Making and Law-Makers in British History, ed. A. Harding (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 145–56; Id., ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 19–40, esp. 32, 38; Id., ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The University in Society, ed. L. Stone (2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), II: 407–48, esp. 441. On the Select Society, see Roger L. Emerson, ‘The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754–1764’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973): 291–329.
13 AM, I (1779), iii–iv,188.
14 See Lia Formigari, ‘Language and Society in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 2 (1974): 275–92; Antonio Verri, Lord Monboddo. Dalla metafisica all’antropologia (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1975).
15 See for instance, Catherine Hobbs, Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).
16 AM, III (1784), 251.
17 For a similar statement, especially stressing the question of Enlightenment self-reflexivity and its ambivalent relationship with modernity, see Antoine Lilti, L’héritage des Lumières. Ambivalences de la modernité (Paris: EHESS/Seuil/Gallimard, 2019), esp. ‘Introduction. Tout nous regarde’.
18 Robert Wokler, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 145–68.
19 Sergio Moravia, ‘Moral-Phisique: Genesis and Evolution of a Rapport’, in Enlightenment Studies in Honour of Lester G. Crocker, ed. Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 163–74; Robert Wokler, ‘From l’Homme Physique to l’Homme Moral and Back: Towards a History of Enlightenment Anthropology’, History of the Human Science 6 (1993): 121–38. See also Sebastiani, ‘Civilisation and Perfectibility’.
20 See Harold Cook, ‘“Not Unlike Mermaids”: A Report about the Human and Natural History of Southeast Africa from 1690’, Kronos 41 (2015): 61–84, esp. p. 75; Theodore W. Pietsch, ‘Samuel Fallours and his “Sirenne” from the province of Ambon’, in Archives of Natural History 18, no. 1 (1991): 1–25. See also Siegfried Huigen, ‘Repackaging East Indies Natural History in François Valentyn’s Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën’, Early Modern Low Countries 3, no. 2 (2019): 234–64.
21 AM, III (1784), 248 ff. Monboddo reported that Valentyn’s account of the mermaids (pp. 254–60) had been translated by one of his correspondents, who had lived for several years in Batavia and who could confirm the reliability of the author. For Monboddo’s correspondence on Valentyn, see NLS, MSS.24537.
22 Benoît de Maillet, Telliamed ou entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec un missionnaire françois, sur la diminution de la Mer, la formation de la Terre, l’origine de l’Homme (Amsterdam: L’Honoré, 1748). Monboddo used the following English edition, from which I’ll quote: Telliamed: Or, Discourses Between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary, on the Diminution of the Sea, the Formation of the Earth, the Origin of Men and Animals, and Other Curious Subjects Relating to Natural History and Philosophy (London: T. Osborne, 1750).
23 AM, III (1784), 260–1.
24 Maillet used both the verb ‘to metamorphose’ and the noun ‘metamorphosis’ several times in his work. See Pascal Charbonnat, ‘Usages et réceptions du Telliamed chez les naturalistes durant la seconde moitié du 18e siècle’, Corpus: revue de la philosophie 59 (2010): 125–52.
25 See Claudine Cohen, Science, libertinage et clandestinité à l’aube des Lumières. Le transformisme de Telliamed (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011).
26 Telliamed, 200–6; OPL, I (II ed. 1774), 262, 301–2; AM, III (1784), 142, 251.
27 AM, III (1784), 142, emphasis added. Lord Kames was one of those who ‘suspected’ Maillet’s reliability and ridiculed Monboddo for having ‘no more pride than to swallow a French-man’s spittle’. See John Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, from the MSS of John Ramsay, Esq. of Ochtertyre, ed. A. Allardyce, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood and sons, 1888), I, 357n.
28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), ed. J. Starobinski, in Œuvres complètes, III (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), note X, 208–12, quotation p. 212.
29 See, for instance OPL, I (1774), 144–6; 152n.
30 AM, III (1784), 142. See also OPL, I (II ed. 1774), 304, 262n, 265n, 269n. Monboddo referred here to Description de l’Égypte, contenant plusieurs remarques curieuses sur la géographie ancienne et moderne de ce païs … composée sur les Mémoires de M. de Maillet, … par M. l'abbé Le Mascrier (Paris, 1735). On Monboddo’s ‘Egyptomania’ and the role it played in his ‘History of Man’, see Robin J. W. Mills, ‘Egyptomania and Religion in James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s ‘History of Man’, History of European Ideas 47, no. 1 (2020): 119–39.
31 See Pietro Corsi, ‘Systèmes de la nature and Theories of Life: Bridging the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Republics of Letters 6, no. 1 (2018), https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/syst%C3%A8mes-de-la-nature-and-theories-life-bridging-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries.
32 Telliamed, ‘Of Sea Man’, 238.
33 See Joel Fineman, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in The New Historicism, ed. Harold Aram Veeser (London, New York: Routledge, 1989), 49–76, quotation p. 61.
34 Monboddo’s annotations of the first 5 volumes of AM are held by the NLS, MSS.25253–25257. The sixth volume appeared in the year of Monboddo’s death, so he was probably unable to amend it.
35 ‘Curious Account of a Marman, or Marmaid’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 25 (1755): 504, emphasis added. Monboddo inserted this article in AM, III, 261 (NLS, MSS.25255).
36 See Vaughn Scribner, ‘“Such Monsters Do Exist in Nature”: Mermaids, Tritons, and the Science of Wonder in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Itinerario 41, no. 3 (2017): 507–38; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 134. The mermaid-mania went on all through the nineteenth century: Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1997).
37 See, for instance, The Critical Review 58 (1784): 250–8; The New London Magazine (1786): 414–8; The Lady's Magazine: Or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, XXV (1794, Supplement): 695–9; The Scots Magazine 57 (1795): 152–6.
38 This was the subject of AM, III (1784), book II, ch. XII, 248 ff.
39 Ibid., 248, 261–2.
40 OPL, I (II ed. 1774), 236–69.
41 Ibid., 257–9. The source was Nils Mattsson Kiöping, Beskrifning om en resa, genom Asia, Africa och många andra hedna länder … [1667] (3rd ed. Stockholm: Lars Salvius, 1743).
42 See Henric Gahn to Linnaeus, Edinburgh, 28th February 1773, in Bref och skrifvelser af och till Carl von Linné (Stockholm: Aktiebolaget Ljus, 1907–1922), VI (1912), 197–200, where Gahn also revealed to have translated one of Kiöping’s chapters for Monboddo. I am grateful to Jens Amborg for his translation of Gahn’s letter from the Swedish. See also Margaret McKay, ‘Peacock, Monboddo, and the Swedish Connection’, Notes and Queries 235, no. 4 (1990): 422–4.
43 OPL, I (1774), 259–61n. See Christianus Emmanuel Hoppius, ‘Anthropomorpha’ (dated Uppsala 6th September 1760), in Carolus Linnaeus, Amoenitates academicae (Holmiae: Laurentius Salvius, 1763), VI: 63–76.
44 Monboddo, who adopted for himself a vegetarian regimen, was convinced that modern diet caused the diminution of both population’s number and human stature. Again, John Kay captured this ‘extravagance’ in his caricatures, depicting Monboddo behind three giants, as in . In 1759, the Select Society debated the question: ‘Whether hath mankind decreased in stature strength and virtue during three thousand years?’. ‘Book of the rules and Minutes of the Select Society’, 80. See Jonsson, Enlightenment Frontier, 21–2.
45 Paul B. Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science 27 (1989): 89–123.
46 See Monboddo to Linnaeus, undated but presumably April 1772, and Linnaeus’ answer, also undated but presumably June 1772, in Linnaean Correspondence (Uppsala University Library, L4945 – alvin-record:233516 – and L4943 – alvin-record: 233526). An English translation of Monboddo’s Latin letter can be found in A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists, from the Original Manuscripts, ed. James Edward Smith (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), II, 554–7, from which I quote (p. 556) with very slight variations.
47 OPL, I (1774), 259–61n.
48 Ibid. This chapter IV was added in the second edition in 1774 (OPL, I, book II, 270-312) and resumed Monboddo’s paper ‘Of the Orang Outang, & whether he be of the Human Species’, NLS, MSS.24537, ff. 1–47.
49 Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturæ, per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species (1st ed. 1735; 10th edition, 2 vols., Stockholm: Laurentius Salvius. 1758–1759), I, 20–4. Linnaeus distinguished the species Troglodytes from the species Homo Sapiens, but he distanced the former even more from apes, which belonged to the second genus of the order of the primates. See Gunnar Broberg, ‘Homo sapiens: Linnaeus’s Classification of Man’, in Linnaeus. The Man and his Work, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 56–194.
50 Linnaeus to Johann Georg Gmelin, 14th February 1747, in Johann Georg Gmelin, Reliquias quae supersunt commercii epistolici cum Carolo Linnaeo, Alberto Hallero, Guilielmo Stellero et al. (Stuttgartiae: Typis C.F. Heringianis, 1861), 55. See also Linnaeus, Fauna svecica (I ed.1746; Stockholm: L. Salvii,1761), 3ff; Id., Menniskans Cousiner (Anthropomorpha), ed. Telemak Fredbärj (Uppsala: Ekenäs, 1955), 4ff., where he described Köping’s account in detail (pp. 8–9). See Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus. Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 87ff.; Christina Skott, ‘Linnaeus and the Troglodyte’, Indonesia and the Malay World 42, no. 123 (2014): 141–69.
51 Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Roy H. Campbell, Andrew S. Skinner and William B. Todd (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), I, 25 (Book I, ch. 2 ‘On the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour’); OPL, I (1774), 264–5.
52 OPL, I (1774), XV, 185, 409–10. See also Monboddo to James Harris, 31st December 1772, in William Knight, Lord Monboddo and Some His Contemporaries (London: John Murray, 1900), 71–4.
53 See Monboddo’s letter to Linnaeus, in Smith, A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus, II, 556.
54 OPL, I (1774), 268; AM, IV (1795), 26–34.
55 OPL, I (1774), 188.
56 AM, IV (1795), 27. I’ve focused on the centrality of anatomical studies in shaping the Enlightenment debate on the orang-utan in ‘A “Monster with Human Visage”: The Orangutan, Savagery and the Borders of Humanity in the Global Enlightenment’, History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 4 (2019): 80–99.
57 OLP, I, (1774), 186–7. On savage children in Monboddo’s narrative, see Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), ch. 2 and 3; Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment. The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2003), ch. 5.
58 Carolus Linnaeus, A Genuine and Universal System of Natural History (London: Printed for the Proprietor by Lewis and Co., 1795), II.
59 Buffon defined the species as ‘une succession constante d’individus semblables et qui se reproduisent’. See Georges-Louis L. Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (36 vols., Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749–1789), IV (1753), 385–6. According to Rousseau, only a test in cross-breeding, which he himself acknowledged to be too dangerous to be put into practice, could solve the issue of orang-utans’ humanity. See Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, note 10, 211.
60 AM, IV (1795), 26–7; AM, III (1784), 360; OPL, I (1774), 274–7. Monboddo’s source was Foucher d’Obsonville, Essais philosophiques sur les mœurs de divers animaux étrangers, avec des observations relatives aux principes et usages de plusieurs peuples, ou extraits des voyages de M*** en Asie (Paris: Couturier fils, 1783), 365–78 (‘Des sylvains, ou orank-outank’). On Monboddo’s anthropological view of the orang-utan, see Alan Barnard, ‘Orang Outang and the Definition of Man. The Legacy of Lord Monboddo’, in Fieldwork and Footnotes. Studies in the History of European Anthropology, ed. Arturo Alvarez Roldan and Han Vermeulen (London, New York: Routledge, 1995), 95–112; Id., ‘Monboddo’s Orang Outang and the Definition of Man’, in Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600, ed. Raymond Corbey and Bert Theunissen (Leiden: Leiden University, 1995), 72–85.
61 OPL, I (1774), 359–60.
62 OPL, I, (1774), 261, emphasis added.
63 OPL, I (1774), 267n.
64 AM, IV (1795), 25 and Appendix. Monboddo met the ‘savage girl’ in Paris in 1764, when he, as an advocate, was investigating on the Douglas’ cause, and published a long reflection on her story in 1768, as a Preface to An Account of a Savage Girl, translated from the French by his clerk William Robertson, who was also in Paris with him. On the case of Marie-Angélique, see Julia Douthwhaite, ‘Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the “Wild Girl of Champagne”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 2 (1994–1995): 163–92; Ead., The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 1.
65 See Chauncey Brewster Tinker, Nature’s Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1922), 16; John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 172–6. In a letter of 7th May 1784, however, Banks comforted Monboddo by sending him an excerpt from a German traveller ‘favourable to the system of mankind having in a former period of the Existence of their species been endowed with a tail or Tail like appendage’, NLS 5378/22/7, quoted by Gascoigne.
66 OPL, I (1774), 262–3, where he referred to his capacity of finding living witnesses for proving that ‘a man in Inverness … had a tail, about half a foot long’.
67 See Iain Maxwell Hammett, ‘Roman Law and the Genesis of Lord Monboddo’s Of the Origin and Progress of Language’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies I, no. 1 (1978): 33–40, quotation p. 33. Whereas Kames’ and Millar’s historical and sociological approach eroded the strict principles of Scottish Roman Law, Monboddo defended ‘the ancient rationalist version of Natural Law embodied in the coherent, metaphysical system of Stair’s Institutions’. See Ibid., 39.
68 OPL, I (1774), p. 260.
69 AM, III (1784), 250. Monboddo repeated almost verbatim Maillet’s statement, for which see Telliamed, 238.
70 It was announced by the Gentleman’s Magazine ‘Catalogue of New Publications’ in May 1773 (vol. 43, p. 242).
71 Alexander Mackenzie to David Anderson, 5th June 1773, Anderson Papers, BL Add. MS 45430, 282v–5r, quotation 284r–v. I wish to thank Joshua Ehrlich for having raised my attention to this correspondence. On Anderson and ‘the politics of knowledge’ as a central feature of the East India Company, see Joshua Ehrlich, ‘The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge’ (Doctoral Thesis, University of Harvard, 2018).
72 Nicolas Fontana, ‘On the Nicobar Isles and the Fruit of the Mellori’, Asiatick Researches, or Transactions of the Society 3 (1799): 149–64, quotation 151–2n.
73 Tim Ingold, ‘Humanity and Animality’, in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London, New York: Taylor & Francis, Routledge, 1994), 14–32, esp. 14–7 referring to OPL, I (II ed.1774), 265.
74 AM, IV (1795), Preface. On Monboddo’s conception of perfectibility, see Silvia Sebastiani, ‘Civilisation and Perfectibility’.
75 AM, IV (1795), 178; OPL, III (1776), 450n.
76 Ibid., 220, 227.
77 John W. Cairns, ‘After Somerset: The Scottish Experience’, The Journal of Legal History 33, no. 3 (2012): 291–312; Id., Law, Lawyers, and Humanism: Selected Essays in the History of Scots Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 271–310, 364–98. See also Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires. An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 91–6.
78 Decisions of the Lords of Council and Session, from 1766 to 1791, Collected by David Dalrymple of Hailes (2 vols., Edinburgh: William Tait, 1826), II, 776–9. See, Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 9–40, esp. 18, 33.
79 ‘Negroe Cause, 15.1.1778’, MS, Advocate Library, Edinburgh, Session papers, collected by John Maclaurin, Lord Dreghorn, vol. 49, p. 12. I thank John Cairns for having provided me with this manuscript, which extensively records Monboddo’s argument (pp. 11–4). On this question, Monboddo also took issue with Hume: AM, III (1784), 145n. See Silvia Sebastiani, ‘Challenging Boundaries. Apes and Savages in Enlightenment’, in Simianization. Apes, Gender, Class, and Race, ed. Wulf D. Hund, Charles W. Mills and Silvia Sebastiani (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2015), 105–37, esp. 121–2; Aaron Garrett, ‘Human Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160–233, esp. 196.
80 AM, IV (1795), 177; III (1784), 222.
81 AM, III (1784), 237.
82 Coherently with his ethos, Monboddo financed his own publications, and the print run was only three hundred copies. See Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book. Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 210.
83 As James Boswell defined his father Lord Auchinleck, Monboddo’s colleague in the Court of Session. See Anthony La Vopa, ‘The Not-So-Prodigal Son: James Boswell and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Being Sociable: Character and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, ed. T. Ahnert and S. Manning (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), 85–103, quotation p. 98. La Vopa stresses a lurking tension between the culture of politeness and the culture of work in legal profession.
84 OPL, IV (1787), 4.
85 AM, I (1779), iv, where Monboddo opposed history and philosophy. See also AM., III (1784), iii.