Sketches of the History of Man. Lord Kames (Henry Home)

A Treatise of Human Nature in the late 1730s, and fifty years later he had a prolonged exchange with Thomas Reid on the metaphysics of causation. He was instrumental in the commissioning of Adam Smith to give a famous series of lectures in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751, John Millar tutored his son in the late 1750s, and James Boswell entertained the idea of writing his life. Kames wrote a great deal, principally on subjects related to his profession, but also on philosophy, criticism, and education. In addition he did much to encourage the modernization and improvement of Scottish agriculture and industry. In 1755 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees for the Encouragement of Fisheries, Arts, and Manufactures of Scotland. He published a pamphlet on flax husbandry in 1766 and, at the age of eighty,¹ produced The Gentleman Farmer, the result of years of research into soils and their improvement.

      Sketches of the History of Man was published in two folio volumes in 1774. Kames says he had been at work on the book for “above thirty years” (Book I, p. 11).² The Sketches can be regarded as its author’s magnum opus, as well as the culmination of his literary career and the definitive statement of his views concerning the history of human manners, morals, and institutions. As the bibliography constructed for the present edition suggests, the Sketches was the fruit of a lifetime’s reading in an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, from ancient history to modern economics, from a Scandinavian epic to the tales of the explorers of the South Seas. Kames had high hopes for the book and negotiated with his publishers, William Creech in Edinburgh and Thomas Cadell and William Strahan in London, a payment of one thousand pounds sterling. Several of the reviews were positive, flattering even, but privately skepticism was expressed by those whose opinion probably mattered most to Kames. “Lord Kames has published two very dear Volumes of Sketches of the History of Man,” Boswell wrote to Bennet Langton: “At least I think them very dear, from what I have read of them. He has a prodigious quantity of Quotation, and there seems to be little of what he gives as his own that is just, or that has not been better said by others.”³ “A man who reads thirty years, with a view to collect facts in support of two or three whimsical theories,” remarked James Beattie, “may no doubt collect a great number of facts, and make a very large book.”⁴ Beattie regretted that in the Sketches (as in several other places in his writings) Kames denies the existence of a principle of universal benevolence. Samuel Johnson, by contrast, complained to Boswell that Kames “maintained that virtue is natural to man . . . a thing which all mankind know not to be true.”⁵ “Lord Kaims’s Sketches have here been published some weeks,” Hume wrote to Strahan, “and by the Reception it has met with, is not likely to be very popular, according to the prodigiously sanguine Expectations of the Author.”⁶ Despite Hume’s prediction, a second edition of the Sketches was called for and appeared in 1778, this time in four volumes of octavo; a third edition “considerably enlarged by the last additions and corrections of the author” came out ten years later. The Sketches was translated into German in 1787 and was also published in Philadelphia and Basel. Several further editions appeared in the 1790s and in the first decades of the nineteenth century.⁷

      “The Human Species is in every view an interesting subject, and has been in every age the chief inquiry of philosophers. The faculties of the mind have been explored, and the affections of the heart; but there is still wanting a history of the species, in its progress from the savage state to its highest civilization and improvement” (Book I, p. 11): so Kames begins his Sketches. His subject, then, is the history of humankind as a whole, rather than the history of a particular nation or city. The wealth of new information about primitive or “savage” peoples made available by the literature of travel and exploration had opened up the possibility of such a history. If it was acceptable to conjecture that the story of every people began with a state of savagery and moved through the same stages of development toward civilization, then accounts given of Siberia, Japan, China, Guinea, and the Americas could be combined with the Bible, Homer, and other more familiar sources to yield hints toward a “history of the species.” To the modern reader this might appear a rather large “if,” but the project of the Sketches is of a piece with a widespread commitment on the part of eighteenth-century Scots to what Dugald Stewart called “Theoretical or Conjectural History.” “In examining the history of mankind, as well as in examining the phenomena of the natural world,” Stewart wrote in his life of Adam Smith, “when we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of importance to be able to show how it may have been produced by natural causes.”⁸ Kames had been one of the earliest among the Scots to deploy this method of reasoning, most particularly in the history of criminal law presented in the Historical Law-Tracts of 1758. In prefaces to the first and second editions of the Sketches, Kames describes his project as “a natural history of man.” The kind of natural history he means is not that of taxonomists such as Ray and Linnaeus. Rather, it can be defined as an attempt to understand human nature in what we now call “evolutionary” terms, an attempt to explain the present condition of humankind in terms of a long process of interaction between humans and their physical environment.⁹

      Progress and Pessimism

      In 1769 Kames wrote to his friend Elizabeth Montagu, “My present work is a general history of the human race in its gradual progress toward maturity; distributed into many articles, Religion, morality, manners, arts, commerce with many others.”¹⁰ While the Sketches is a multifarious and miscellaneous work, the notion of “progress” provides a means of lending it a degree of coherence and order. Each of its three books, and many of the individual sketches, have “progress” in their title. Here “progress” means not just movement from one place or stage to another (as in the progress of a monarch around his kingdom) but also improvement, transition from savagery to civilization, from rudeness to refinement. This was to reverse the perspective of many earlier historians who, up to and including the great French naturalist Buffon, had conceived of human history as a narrative of declension and degeneration. The Scottish practitioners of “conjectural” history shared an understanding of the key moments or stages of the human race’s journey from infancy toward maturity: in the beginning men and women subsisted by hunting and fishing; then came the shepherd state; then the cultivation of land; and, finally, there arrived the world of mercantilism and commerce. Among thinkers such as Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson, Kames, and Millar there was, in the main, little of Rousseau’s pessimism about the capacity of human nature to adapt to the move away from the savage state. They all regarded men as having been social beings from the first and as being naturally fitted to a life of coexistence and cooperation with others. Progress was a realization of capacities and proclivities deeply rooted in the human constitution. That said, none of the Scots had an unequivocally positive and optimistic understanding of the transition from savagery to civilization. With the development of commerce, especially, came a variety of risks and costs. The particular ambivalences and hesitancies about progress that Kames reveals in the Sketches provide a means of locating the book a little more precisely in its contemporary context.¹¹

      As we have seen, Kames conceives of the Sketches as a contribution to a history of the human species. One of the things that distinguishes the human species is, precisely, its natural tendency toward development, change, and refinement. No other species of animal shows signs of such a propensity. It quickly appears, though, that in Kames’s view there is not one single, ubiquitous race of human beings. In the “Preliminary Discourse Concerning the Origin of Men and Languages,” he argues, principally against Buffon, that the empirical evidence—meaning the physical and moral differences between the various peoples of the earth—speaks in favor of there being a number of different races. Kames rejects the claim, made by writers from Vitruvius to Montesquieu, that differences of climate are sufficient to explain differences in appearance and national character. Two peoples—for example, the Laplanders and the Finns—can share the same climate but be very different in stature and beauty. The same climate does not even always produce similarity of complexion. Moreover, in the Americas the native peoples live in very different climates and yet share the same complexion. Some parts of the world have proved quite impossible for Europeans to adapt to. Again, inhabitants of neighboring islands have sometimes been observed to have very different moral dispositions. Kames concludes that “were all men of one species, there never could have existed, without a miracle, different kinds, such as exist at present” (Book I, p. 46). The existence of a