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

sentence, notwithstanding his numerous publications, without a direct and a manifest intention to benefit his fellow creatures.”²⁰ At one level the Sketches is meant to benefit its reader simply in virtue of the huge amount of information it contains about the history of humankind; at another and deeper level it seeks to add to the stock of reasons to believe that, despite appearances, whatever is, is right. Some among Kames’s readers, however, disagreed with his understanding of providence. According to David Doig, a master at the grammar school in Stirling, the hypothesis that human beings were all originally savage, as well as being incredible as history, is inconsistent with divine beneficence. Kames would have it that “the Father of the universe unnaturally abandoned his new-found infants, turning them into an uncultivated world, naked, untutored, unsheltered orphans.”²¹ Samuel Stanhope Smith, professor of moral philosophy at Princeton, also rejected the basic elements of Kames’s history of the human race and mounted an influential defense of the view that all men and women are descended from a single pair. Human diversity could be explained, he argued, in terms of the influence of climate and “the state of society.” The goodness of the Creator reveals itself precisely in our native adaptability. Stanhope Smith exposes Kames’s lack of firsthand experience of the places and peoples so confidently discussed and assessed in the Sketches. “Like many other philosophers,” he complains, “Kames judges and reasons only from what he has seen in a state of society highly improved; and is led to form many wrong conclusions from his own habits and prepossessions.”²²

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

      The text of this edition of Sketches of the History of Man is based on the posthumous third edition of 1788. The third edition was published in four volumes. Sketches, however, comprises three “Books”: Progress of Men Independent of Society, Progress of Men in Society, and Progress of Sciences. The three-volume format of the present edition is meant to reflect the work’s fundamental principle of structuring. Page breaks in the third edition are indicated in the body of the text by the use of angle brackets. (For example, page 112 begins after <112>.) Substantive differences between the first, second, and third editions are noted in order to give the reader a sense of how energetically Kames continued to work on the book right up until the end of his life. In places where the first edition differs significantly from subsequent editions, the relevant passage from the first edition, with its volume and page number, is supplied in a note. A fully annotated text of Sketches would be the work of many years. Kames was a conspicuous consumer of references and allusions, even by the standards of his day, and Sketches is a particular showpiece in this regard. Accordingly, an exhaustive annotation would seriously clutter the text, and I have settled for much less.

      Supplementary notes to Kames’s own footnotes are enclosed in double square brackets. For fuller information, a bibliography is provided, indicating the complete title, author, place of publication, and date of as many of the works cited by Kames (or Thomas Reid) as it has been possible to identify. The reader should bear in mind that in cases where it is unclear which of an author’s works is being cited, the bibliography is necessarily somewhat speculative. Very familiar and easily identified works (such as those by Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare) have not been included. Where a modern translation has been quoted in a supplementary footnote, the translation used is indicated in parentheses after the entry in the bibliography. Where an original text was in a modern language other than English or French, a contemporary translation is given as well. Obvious typographical errors in the text have been corrected without comment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      For various kinds of help with the preparation of this edition, I should like to thank Rebecca Armstrong, Alexander Broadie, Aaron Garrett, Ian Simpson Ross, Åsa Söderman, Agnieszka Steczowicz, and Astrid Wind. I am especially grateful to Knud Haakonssen for inviting me to edit Kames’s Sketches for this Liberty Fund series and for being remarkably patient while being bombarded with what must have seemed an endless series of questions and appeals for advice. The work on this edition was completed while I was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the British Academy.

      James A. Harris

      BOOK I

      PROGRESS OF MEN INDEPENDENT OF SOCIETY

      SKETCHES

      OF THE

      HISTORY OF MAN.

      CONSIDERABLY ENLARGED

      BY THE LAST ADDITIONS

      AND CORRECTIONS

      OF THE AUTHOR.

      IN FOUR VOLUMES.

      VOLUME I.

      EDINBURGH:

      PRINTED FOR A. STRAHAN AND T. CADELL, LONDON;

      AND FOR WILLIAM CREECH, EDINBURGH.

      M, DCC, LXXXVIII.

      PREFACE

      The following Work is the substance of various speculations, which occasionally occupied the author, and enlivened his leisure hours. It is not intended for the learned; they are above it: nor for the vulgar; they are below it. It is intended for those who, free from the corruption of opulence and depression of bodily labour, are fond of useful knowledge; who, even in the delirium of youth, feel the dawn of patriotism, and who, in riper years, enjoy its meridian warmth. To such men this Work is dedicated; and that they may profit by it, is the author’s ardent wish; and probably will be while he retains life sufficient to form a wish.<vi>

      May not he hope, that this Work, child of his gray hairs, will survive, and bear testimony for him to good men, that even a laborious calling, which left him not many leisure hours, never banished from his mind, that he would little deserve to be of the human species, were he indifferent about his fellow-creatures:

      Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.¹

      Most of the subjects handled in the following sheets, admit but of probable reasoning; and, with respect to such reasonings, it is often difficult to say, what degree of conviction they ought to produce. It is easy to form plausible arguments; but to form such as can stand the test of time, is not always easy. I could amuse the reader with numerous examples of conjectural arguments, which, fair at a distant view, vanish like a cloud on a near approach. Several examples, not to go farther, are mentioned in the preliminary <vii> discourse. The hazard of being misled by such arguments, gave the author much anxiety; and, after his utmost attention, he can but faintly hope, that he has not often wandered far from truth.²<viii>

      TO THE READER

      As one great object of the Editor is to make this a popular Work, he has, chiefly with a view to the female sex, subjoined an English translation of the quotations from other languages.<ix>

      CONTENTS¹

      VOL. I.

      Preliminary Discourse concerning