Conjectural history vs. the Bible: eighteenth-century Scottish historians and the idea of history in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (*)

1. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as is well known, embodied a reaction to the French Revolution, seeing, as the Supplement did in 1801, the French Encyclopédie as the philosophical precursor of the massacres of the Terror. The critique of the French famous predecessor had already been clearly stated since 1771, when William Smellie in the "Preface" to the first edition criticized it for "the folly of attempting to communicate science under the various technical terms arranged in an alphabetical order" (1). Such an attempt was, to his mind, "repugnant to the very idea of science"(2). George Gleig, the editor of the third edition, claimed that the Encyclopaedia Britannica adopted a different method, which explained its success. It was, according to him, "a dictionary, in which the several arts and sciences are digested into distinct treatises or systems, whilst the various detached parts of knowledge are explained in the order of the alphabet" (3). The text compared classical knowledge with the lively contemporaneous debate and created an animated discussion in its pages, where "arguments and objections have been displayed in their full force" (4). The marginalia, introduced from the second edition onwards, were aids to following the arguments and were the means by which a hierarchical organization was imposed on the discussion. It was in the new, enlarged and ideologically coherent framework of the third edition, that history and early anthropological speculation emerged as a major interest of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What I would suggest, with a brief survey of the entries devoted to those themes, is that the Britannica systematically challenged not only the French philosophy, but also the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment. The editors considered this historiographical tradition as a part of the same dangerous spirit of the century, which developed the "materialism" of ancient philosophy in the new "materialism" of the theoryof the natural progress of society.
The main Scottish historians, from David Hume to John Millar, had definitely contributed, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to the development of modern historiography and human sciences. On the one hand, David Hume and William Robertson tried to find a way to balance the account of major developments in history with the need for positive evidence and reliable sources. On the other hand, alongside Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar, they applied to history the sociological speculations of Montesquieu, producing as a result a conceptual framework to explain those major developments. Given the "uniformity of human nature", argued by Hume, they assumed that men react in similar ways to similar circumstances. So, in their history, peoples uniformly passed through different stages of society, responding to the environmental challenges: the savage state where men are hunters and live within simple tribes, the barbarism of the shepherds in which property originated, the agricultural state in which government became more regular and society began to evolve into the complexity of the eighteenth-century commercial state. In few roughly devised words, this scheme is what Dugald Stewart called "conjectural history" (5), and Ronald Meek, seeking Marx’s sources, saw as a "four stages theory" (6). This was the framework of the major works of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 1770s: Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), Smith’s An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and a number of other historical enquiries by the Scottish historians. Among these, it was also the framework of the Sketches of the History of Man (1774), by the patron of almost all the Scottish literati, Henry Home, Lord Kames, a work which was widely read and discussed in the late Eighteenth century. Kames, however, gave an important and controversial glossto the four stages theory: as not all peoples had emerged from savage and barbarian states, not all peoples, he asserted in 1774, have the same "human nature". He, therefore, discussed the idea that different progenitors gave birth to different races of men, and inserted polygenesis as a necessary premise to the theory of progress through successive stages (7). Kames actually argued this thesis in opposition to universalistic assumptions, which he saw in Ferguson’s account of the development of civil society, criticizing in particular his parallel between the American tribes and the old Germans. Historians now rightly criticize Meek’s account of the four stages theory as mere "materialistic theory", as he, thirty years ago, had criticized Dugald Stewart’s definitions of it as mere "conjectural history" (8). However, to my mind, whatever name or aspect we would choose to emphasise in re-describing "four stages theory" - the jurisprudential paradigm, environmentalism, or the sentimental attitude (9)- there is a feature common to all the major Scottish historians of the 1770s, which contemporaries recognized as a new one: their narrative ran autonomously, and notwithstanding formal claims of orthodoxy, without any help from God. To the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica these were histories of a world whose capital was the "Castle of Scepticism" - James Beattie’s nightmare - where the atheist David Hume reigned (10).

2. As early as the entry "Abridgement" of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s first edition, William Smellie had sided with George Campbell against David Hume in favour of the miracles, and in the entry "America" of the second edition, James Tytler attacked Kames’s polygenetic approach in the name of the truth of the Bible (11). It is, however, the third edition that raised its colours to the Scriptures in opposition to the "histories" of the Enlightenment. Under the guidance of the Episcopalian George Gleig (12), in fact, the celebrated philosophical unity of the Britannica on the subject of human history was formed around the reassertion of the Mosaic account. More than 300 articles were theological, Gleig proudly affirmed. To the entries on natural history inserted in the second edition, such as "Colour of human species" and "Comparative anatomy" (13), the third edition added the new article "Savage", whose approach to the problem of the progress of man was mirrored in the extended and greatly revised articles "Society" and "Moral philosophy". The system in defence of the Scriptures was closed by a network of cross-references to entries such as "Babel", "Bible", "Chronology", "Creation", "Miracle", "Religion", which were also linked to the historical-philological articles, written by a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, David Doig (14). This system had two main polemical targets: polygenism and the theory of the universal and original savage state. The introductory observations of the article "Society", written for the greatest part by Robert Heron (15), sometime assistant of Dr Blair, explained that these two ideas were intrinsically connected. Heron vigorously attacked "those philosophers who have made society, in its various stages between rudeness and refinement, the subject of their speculations" and who thought of mankind "as proceeding uniformly through certain regular gradations from one extreme to the other" (16). His conclusions were extremely clear: "They appear to consider the inhabitants of every different region of the globe as aborigines springing at first from the ground, or dropped on the spot which they inhabit", in opposition to the orthodox reading of Genesis (17). Polygenism appeared to him immediately linked to the four stages theory, and a direct consequence of its philosophical premises.
Thus, the Encyclopaedia Britannica adopted the same critical approach expounded by David Doig in his "Two Letters on the Savage State", previously addressed to and discussed with Kames in 1775-76. These Letters were published with an "Advertisement" by George Gleig himself, in parallel with the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1792, when the "atheist" French philosophy produced its fruits along with the Jacobin dictatorship. The Two Letters, anyway, were born as an immediate reaction to the histories produced by the Enlightenment, of which Kames was considered a typical and celebrated Scottish representative: they were published now, wrote Gleig in the "Advertisement", because it was more than ever necessary to defend the "cause of Revelation" (18). Through the critique of Kames’s Sketches, Doig intended to undermine the logical, philosophical and moral bases of the whole conjectural history, by denying its starting point: the existence of a primordial and universal savage state. To the mind of the erudite philologer, the stage theory emancipated man from God and thought that he could progress by his own natural talents, propensities and qualities, without any other guide than his "moral sense". The doctrine which presupposed men to be in a savage state at the beginning of the world, Doig wrote and the third edition of the Britannica echoed, directly descended from the ancient materialistic philosophers, Epicurus and Democritus: the ‘imaginary’ idea that men could be borne from the earth, which Kames alone had the courage to support openly with his polygenetic speculations, should be recognised, however, as an implicit premise to every conjectural history. Thus, Doig linked the stage theory to Condillac’s sensism, to the eccentric ideas of Lord Monboddo, who put Horace’s definition of the first men as "mutum turpe pecus" in the epigraph of his Origin and Progress of Language, and along this path to Rousseau. In practice, Kames, Hume and Smith’s The Origin of the Languages, in which he reconstructed the gradual formation of language, overlooking de facto God’s teaching to Adam, were accused of sharing the assumptions of the French Enlightenment (19).

3. The article "Society" therefore attested, following the Bible, that "the first societies of men lived under the patriarchal form of government", where the husband-father had absolute power over his family, and where men employed themselves in the cultivation of the ground and in the management of the flocks and herds. This demonstrates clearly that "though many of the rudest tribes are found in the state of hunters or fishers; yet the hunting and fishing state cannot have been invariably the primary form of society"(20). Gleig, in the new introduction to the article "Moral Philosophy", concerning the "History of the Science of Morals", coherently contrasted himself with both those philosophers who considered society as a consequence of a benevolent human nature and those who, on the contrary, saw its origin in the instinct of self-preservation(21). The entries "Savage", "Moral Philosophy" and "Religion" dismissed as "a wild reverie" the idea that the first men were "savages of the lowest rank"(22). Adam was not a savage; it was impossible that God, as "some modern philosophers" had "fancied", left his "noblest creatures" entirely to themselves, from the very moment of the creation, wandering about for ages, without the use of speech and only gradually civilizing themselves(23). It was also an idea "inconsistent with the phenomena of human nature", since man is not provided with the instincts which unconsciously guide the other animals to their own preservation(24). Logic, reasoning and science, therefore, confirmed the truth of the Old Testament, without which, the article "History" stated, it would be "impossible at this day to write a general history of the world"(25), because it is the only authentic and reliable source for ancient times. The Bible account and the new histories based on the stage theory were at odds:

When God had formed Adam and Eve, Moses does not say that he left them to acquire by slow degrees the use of their senses and reasoning powers, and to distinguish as they could fruits that were salutary from those that were poisonous. No: he placed them in a garden where every tree but one bore fruit for food; (...) he brought before them the various animals which roamed through the garden; he arranged these animals into their proper genera and species; and by teaching Adam to give them names, he communicated to the first pair the elements of language. (26)

The problem of the savage state was so important, as Gleig put it, because it affected the conception of man, his qualities, the powers of his mind, the criterion of virtue and "the principle or motive by which men are induced to pursue it" (27). In short, it was the central problem of human history and civil society. The new histories produced by the Enlightenment converged in debasing man to the animal conditionjust to raise him to a divine state, by attributing to human nature a natural propensity to improvement. The article "Savage", which faithfully recorded Doig’s critique to Kames, confirmed this opposition to the idea of progress: "man cannot, or, which is the same thing, has not risen from barbarism to civilization and science by his own efforts and natural talents" (28). Otherwise, if we follow the principle asserted by Hume that "natural causes operating in the same direction and with the same force, must in every age produce the same effects", savage peoples would no longer exist. The principle itself of similar reactions to similar contexts, which was the foundation of the stage theory, was used to prove that human nature had no propensity to progress, but it inclines to be static or to degenerate. The Christian outlook of the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica thus showed, in the clearest way, the radically universalistic principle behind the idea of ‘natural progress’ in the stage theory. The Britannica accepted, in a sense, Kames’s reasoning on the varieties of development in men, to criticize the whole modern progressive framework of Scottish and European Enlightenment (29). 

4. The existence of savage societies, of course, constituted historical and social evidence to Gleig and Doig (30). However, these societies were, from their  Christian-centred point of view, the consequence of the Fall; in fact, after Adam’s being driven out of the Garden, some of his offspring "degenerated" into savages. Both the physical causes - such as differences in climate or region - and the moral ones - human indolence, for instance - can easily explain how men, dispersed over the earth, might have degenerated, "though descending all from the same original pair, and though enlightened with much traditionary knowledge relative to the art of life, the order of society, moral distinctions, and religious obligations" (31). The article "Society", therefore, although it seemed to echo the account of the stadial progress, offered, instead, a complete confutation and an entirely alternative model. There are five stages between rudeness and civilization, Heron explained. The first is a savage state, where men live in a state of indifference, by hunting and fishing, having great physical force but weak sentiments and minds. In the second, defined still as a savage state, men are united by a kind of government and have more morality, social virtues, and religious sentiments. Differences among the ranks of society appear only in the third stage, alongside the birth of property; duties multiply here, men become servants, masters, husbands and fathers, while the inequalities between the sexes increase. In the fourth stage agriculture flourishes, progress advances quickly, thanks to the division of the several arts and the birth of commerce. With the fifth step, finally, arts, literature and sciences are cultivated; government establishes itself firmly, the ferocity of barbarism disappears, the subordination of women becomes milder, social duties are strengthened, religion is now kind, humane and gentle (32). The appearance of luxury in this stage is a decisive agent of the civilization of society, encouraging commerce and social intercourse. This is, in fact, the period when human virtue and human abilities shine with the greatest splendour. Nonetheless, beneficial luxury, the best friend of society at the beginning, becomes its worst enemy and the main cause of its degeneration from this golden age. Human history records recurrent periods of decadence: to the names of the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, are to be added those of the modern Portuguese, Venetians, Spanish, and now even that of revolutionary France.
This scheme does not differ from that of the historians of the Scottish Enlightenmentjust by its emphasis on the inevitable catastrophic destiny of societies. For our purposes, it is also secondary that there is no distinction between the savage’s and shepherd’s stages in it. What is critical is that the conceptual basis of this analysis is completely different. Consistent with what has already been said, this progressive path follows the fall into the savage state, and only some peoples became savages, while others preserved their original knowledge and proceeded from here. Thus the article "Society" followed the Bible, even when it admitted the existence of a certain stadial progress: Adam and Eve fed on fruits, Cain and Abel were shepherds and farmers, then towns were formed and arts had been diversified; after the Flood, the patriarchal families descended from Noah became tribes who repopulated the earth, developing again the arts and commerce with their consequent luxury and corruption (33). But the distance of this account from the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment is plainly explained by Heron himself: "It is indeed impossible" - he declared - "to exhibit under one general view an account of arts, manners, and religious sentiments, which may apply to some certain period in the history of every nation. The characters and circumstances of nations are scarce less various and anomalous than those of individuals" (34). Thus, the stages which the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote about did not form a typology, like that used by the main Scottish historians, on which a reliable account of progress can be founded.

5. According to the editors of the Britannica, the advancement of society is not a natural process, but the work of Providence. Progress is, in fact, due to "some persons endowed with superior talents, or in the language of poetry, some heroes, semi-gods, or god-like man", sent by God to civilize men. They are the mythic legislators, who having apprehended knowledge from more civilized nations "sowed the first seeds of civilization among the hordes of wandering disunited barbarians" (35). They never lost the knowledge given by God to Adam; they were raised from the Fall by a direct act of the Creator, the Revelation given only to "some chosen individuals commissioned to instruct others" (36). Without miracles, in the Britannica, history does not move, man does not progress, rather degenerates. Further, history clearly demonstrates that "man, once a savage, would never have raised himself from that hopeless state". So, "had all mankind been once in the savage state, they never could have arrived at any considerable degree of civilization" (37). For Doig, Gleig and Heron, therefore, humankind and civilization spread from the Middle East to the rest of the world, according to what has been defined an ‘eliodromic’ theory of the diffusion of mankind and culture. As the Greeks would have not have developed beyond their original barbarism without the influence of the Egyptians and the Italians without Greek knowledge, so the American Indians would have been destined to remain in their savage state without the intervention of the Europeans. As Gleig put it in his biography of the Principal, William Robertson, the Spaniards had in America the same role that the Romans had in Europe, carrying literature and science, and preparing peoples for the reception of "true religion". Here, Gleig’s argument reversed Dugald Stewart’s review of the History of America, which criticised Robertson’s inclination to veil the cruelties of the Spanish conquest, relying on De Pauw’s and Buffon’s prejudices. Instead, for the editor of the third edition of the Britannica, in future "Cortes will, like Caesar, be considered merely as an instrument employed by Providence to forward its inscrutable purposes" (38). Thus, the stages of the article "Society" did not actually describe the history of progress, but rather offered a revised account of traditional Christian euro-centric assumptions. The modern version of semi-divine legislators were the Western settlers sent by God into the uncivilized parts of the globe.
Contrary to the peculiar conception of man and of his history propounded by late eighteenth-century Enlightened culture, the editors of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica thus reaffirmed their fidelity to the Mosaic Account. The historical providential framework handed on by the Scriptures was defended and confirmed in the articles on philosophy, history, and religion, edited for the greatest part by the Episcopalian George Gleig. Physical anthropology and comparative anatomy, immediately incorporated in Britannica, permitted the reaffirmation of the idea of the superiority of men by comparison with nature’s other creatures. At the same time, they attested the uniqueness of mankind, in whatever climate, in the fields of the new natural sciences, giving more strength to Buffon’s monogenetic position (39).

6. The entries "Mysteries", "Mythology", "Philology", written by David Doig, who, like Gleig came from Stirling, made it possible to see this historical and scientific position in a context which strongly reasserted the Christian Revelation and its superiority, thanks to the comparison with the other religious traditions. The critique of the savage state and polygenesis, which gave birth to his Letters in opposition to Kames, laid the foundation of the historical ideology of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: an ideology which looked at the Enlightenment, the French as well the Scottish, as a unique danger for religion and society. In so doing, following David Doig, they did not seem to recognise the differences between Rousseau’s idea of human perfectibility, sensism, and the Scottish sociological approach. As I have emphasised, this critique was not a response to the events of the French Revolution and the British horror of it. It was, instead, written down as soon as conjectural history became the standard framework in the historical enquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment. But before the 1790s Doig remained almost unheard. The events of the French Revolution rendered his analysis an acceptable counterview to Scottish historiography and its idea of progress. Of course, the approach of Smith, Ferguson, Millar and Kames was not materialistic in itself. However, a staunchly conservative point of view believed that their analysis was materialistic in tendency, and antagonistic to the Mosaic account. In these terms, Britannica’s editors exactly identified what makes the Scottish historians part of the European Enlightenment, a diversified movement with one modern common denominator: the secularisation of society and of the history of mankind. Doig wrote in the 1770s, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica reaffirmed in the 1790s, that in the Christian world there was no room for the primordial and universal savage state. Under attack was the natural progress of men towards civilization, a history without God.2001

* Abbreviations. EB1: Encyclopaedia  Britannica, or a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, compiled upon a new Plan (...) by a Society of gentleman in Scotland,  ed. by W. Smellie, 3 vols, London, 1773; EB2: Encyclopaedia  Britannica; or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, &c. On a Plan entirely New (...). 2nd edition; greatly improved and enlarged, ed. by J. Tytler, 10 vols., Edinburgh, 1778-83; EB3: Encyclopaedia  Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature (...). The Third Edition, in Eighteen Volumes, Greatly Improved, by C. Macfarquhar (vols. 1-12) and G. Gleig (vols. 13-18), Edinburgh, 1788-97. This article is also published in:Storia della Storiografia, n. 39, 2001. I presented a first version of this at the Conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society on "Memory and Identity: Past and Present", Toronto, October 19-21, 2000. I would like to thank all the participants for their useful suggestions and comments, and in particular Richard Sher, Roger Emerson and Paul Wood. I also would like to thank John Robertson, John Brewer, Guido Abbattista, Rolando Minuti and Mario Caricchio for their precious help.

(1) W. Smellie, "Preface", EB1. On Britannica’s reaction against the alphabetical order, see: G. Abbattista, "La ‘folie de la raison par alphabet’. Le origini settecentesche dell’Encyclopaedia Britannica 1768-1801", in "L’enciclopedismo in Italia nel XVIII secolo", Studi Settecenteschi, 16, 1996, pp. 435-476.

(2) W. Smellie, "Preface", EB1. On the history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, see: P. Kruse, "The story of the Encyclopædia  Britannica, 1768-1943", Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1958; H. Kogan, The great EB; the story of the Encyclopædia  Britannica, Chicago, 1958. On the crucial role played by the proprietors Andrew Bell (1726-1809) and Colin Macfarquhar (1745 circa-1793), see: F. A. Kafker, "The Achievement of Andrew Bell and Colin Macfarquhar as the First Publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica", British Journal for the Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 1995, pp. 139-152.

(3) G. Gleig, "Preface", EB3, vol. 1, p. IX; J. Tytler, "Introduction", EB2, pp. III-IV. See also: W. E. Preece, "The Organization of knowledge and the Planning of Encyclopaedias: The Case of the Encyclopaedia Britannica", Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, 9, 1966, pp. 799-819.

(4) "Preface", EB3, p. XII.

(5) D. Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, L.L.D., of William Robertson, D. D. and of Thomas Reid, D. D. Read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Now collected into one volume, with some additional notes, in Collected Works, vol. X, Edinburgh, 1858.

(6) R. L. Meek, "Smith, Turgot, and the ‘four stages’ theory", in Smith, Marx and after, London, 1980; R. L. Meek, Social Science and Ignoble Savage, Cambridge, 1976. On conjectural history, see also: H. M. Höpfl, "From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment", Journal of British Studies, 17, 1978, pp. 19-40; J. D. Brewer, "Conjectural History, Sociology and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Adam Ferguson and the Division of Labour", in D. Mc Crone, S. Kendrick, P. Straw, eds., The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, Edinburgh, 1989, pp. 13-30; C. J. Berry, The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh, 1997. For a point of view, which invites to look "backward" rather than "forward" to set a proper context to the Scottish conjectural history, see R. L. Emerson, "Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers", Historical Papers: Communications Historiques, 1984, pp. 63-90.

(7) The first sketch, entitled "Diversity of Men and Languages" in 1774, became the "Preliminary Discourse" in the second edition. See: H. Home, Lord Kames, Sketches on the History of Man, 4 vols., Edinburgh, 1778.

(8) R. L. Meek, Social Science and Ignoble Savage, pp. 231-243. See also: A. S. Skinner, "A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?", in I. Bradley and M. Howard, eds., Classical and Marxian Political Economy, London, 1982.

(9) On the stages theory as a "theory of natural jurisprudence", see: K. Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator, Cambridge, 1981, and Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge, 1996. Mark Salber Phillips, revisiting Momigliano’s definition of "philosophical history", stresses the sentimental approach of the Scottish historians. See, "Reconsideration on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain", Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, n. 2, 1996, pp. 297-316; "If Mrs. Mure Be Not sorry For the Poor King Charles’: History, Novel, and The Sentimental Reader", History Workshop Journal, 43, 1997, pp. 110-131; Society and Sentiment. Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820, Princeton, 2000.

(10) E. C. Mossner, ed., "Beattie’s ‘The Castle of Scepticism’: An unpublished Allegory against Hume, Voltaire and Hobbes", University of the Texas Studies in English, vol. 27, 1948, pp. 108-145.

(11) "Abridgement", EB1, vol. I, pp. 6-7; "America", EB2, vol. I, pp. pp. 288-308. "Abridgement" is considered one of William Smellie’s (1740-1795) most original entries in the EB1, because it deals with the roles and methods of making encyclopedias. See: F. A. Kafker, "Introduction" to Encyclopaedia Britannica or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Preceded by The Prospectus for the First Edition, reprint of the I ed., Routledge, 1997, and "William Smellie’s Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica", in F. A. Kafker, ed., Notable Encyclopædias of the Late Eighteenth Century: Eleven Successors of the "Encyclopédie", Studies on Voltaire, vol. 315, 1994, pp. 145-254. See also: R. Kerr, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of William Smellie, Edinburgh, 1811, pp. 361-392. The balloonist James Tytler (1747-1805), who had to escape to America, being prosecuted for sedition, immediately after the beginning of the third edition, edited and almost entirely wrote the EB2. See: R. Meek, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of James Tytler, for a considerable time a liberal contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edinburgh, 1805; J. Fergusson, Balloon Tytler, London, 1972

(12) On George Gleig (1753-1840), see: W. Walker, Life of the Right Reverend George Gleig, LL.D, F.S.S.A., Bishop of Brenchin, and primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, Edinburgh, 1878.

(13) With the second edition the study of man was included in the sphere of "natural history". On the one hand, the editor Tytler sided with Dr. John Hunter in defence of monogenism, against those who though that "the whole human race have not sprung from one original" ("America", EB2, vol. I, pp. pp. 288-308; "Colour of human species", EB2, vol. III, pp. 2083-2084); on the other, he defended the uniqueness of the human being asserting that, notwithstanding many physical similarities, the interval which separated man from orang-utan was immense ("Comparative Anatomy", vol. III, pp. 2146-2165; "Simia", vol. X, pp. 8166-72). In this way, the EB2 anticipated some of the main arguments of the EB3.

(14) On the intellectual background of David Doig (1719-1800) and his links to the neo-Hutchinsonian thought, see: P. Wood, "Introduction" to S. S. Smith & D. Doig, An Essay on the Causes of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species & Two Letters on the Savage State, addressed to the late Lord Kames, Bristol, 1995.

(15) Robert Heron (1764-1807), polygraph and member of the general assembly of Scotland, contributed to many reviews and magazines, such as the Edinburgh Magazine, the London Review, the Universal Magazine, the Anti-Jacobin Review, and wrote A New General History of Scotland, 5 vols., Perth, 1794-99. See, "Heron, Robert", in T. Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, 3 vols., London, 1874-5, vol. II, pp. 258-260.

 (16) "Society", EB3, vol. XVII, pp. 568-90; quotation p. 569. Although my interpretation is now sensibly different, the first hint of this came from an interesting article by Pierangelo Castagneto. See: P. Castagneto, "Uomo, natura e società nelle edizioni settecentesche dell’Encyclopaedia Britannica", in G. Abbattista, ed., "L’enciclopedismo in Italia nel XVIII secolo", Studi Settecenteschi, 16, 1996, pp. 435-476.

(17) "Society", EB3, vol. XVII, p. 569.

(18) G. Gleig, "Advertisement", in D. Doig, Two letters on the Savage State, addressed to the late Lord Kaims, London, 1792, p. xiii.

(19) D. Doig, Two Letters, pp. 5-8. A. Smith, "Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages" (1761), in The Works of Adam Smith, ed. by D. Stewart, vol. I, Otto Zeller, Aalen, 1811. In his Biographical Memoir, Dugald Stewart considered this text "a very beautiful specimen of theoretical history". See: D. Stewart, Collected Works, vol. X, p. 37.

(20) "Society", EB3, vol. XVII, p. 569.

(21) "Moral Philosophy", EB3, vol. XII, pp. 272-318, "History of the Science of Morales", pp. 273-9. Gleig wrote only the introduction to this entry. The greatest part of it, which remained unchanged since the first edition, was in fact a long abridgment of David Fordyce’s Elements of Moral Philosophy (London, 1754). In a letter to the Rev. John Skinner (January 11, 1794), Gleig strongly censured the "vile paragraph about the Majesty of the People, and the Duty of Resistance", which he was unable to remove, because he was not yet the editor of the general work. See: Theological Works of the late Rev. John Skinner, Episcopal Clergyman in Longsode, Aberdeenshire, in two volumes. To which is prefixed, a Biographical Memoir of the Author, 2 vols., Aberdeen, 1809, pp. lxvi-lxvii.

(22) "Religion", EB3, vol. XVI, 60-77, quotation p. 61. See also: "Savage", EB3, vol. XVI, p. 672; "Moral Philosophy", EB3, vol. XII, p. 272.

(23) "Religion", EB3, vol. XVI, p. 61.

(24) "Religion", EB3, vol. XVI, p. 61; "Instinct", EB3, vol. IX, pp. 259-269.

(25) "History", EB3, vol. VIII, p. 561-600, quotation p. 561. "History", which presents few differences from the article appeared in the EB2 (vol. 5, pp. 3649-3688), devotes an entire section to the "Ecclesiastical History". Stating this, it is particularly interesting and a bit surprising that Adam Ferguson is the author of the "Historical Chart" enclosed at the end of this article since the second edition, which was based on the traditional Biblical chronology. A research on this aspect could be of some interest.

(26) "Religion", EB3, vol. XVI, p. 62.

(27) "Moral Philosophy", EB3, vol. XII, p. 273.

(28) "Savage", EB3, vol. XVI, p. 672.

(29) I discussed this aspect more in detail in: "Storia universale e teoria stadiale negli Sketches of the History of Man di Lord Kames", Studi Storici, a. 39, 1998, pp. 113-136, and "Razze, donne e progresso nell’Illuminismo Scozzese", Passato e Presente, n. 50, 2000, pp. 45-70.

(30) "Savage", EB3, vol. XVI, p. 671. G. Gleig, "Advertisement" to Doig’s Two Letters, pp. VIII-X, XII-XIII; D. Doig, Two Letters, pp. 4 e sgg., 38-39.

(31) "Society", EB3, vol. XVII, p. 569.

(32) This is in contrast to what happens in ruder stages, where religion is often cruel and bloody. In the entry "Polytheism", Gleig explains the way in which peoples can degenerate from the belief in the true God to that in a multitude of false divinities.  See: "Polytheism", EB3, vol. XV, pp. 336-349.

(33) Roger Emerson argued the importance of Biblical sources of the four stages theory. See: R. L. Emerson, "Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers", Historical Papers: Communications Historiques, 1984, pp. 63-90.

(34) "Society", EB3, vol. XVII, p. 572.

(35) "Savage", EB3, Vol. XVI, pp. 672-3. D. Doig, Two Letters, pp. 64-68.

(36) "Miracle", EB3, vol. XII, 169-174, quotation p. 170. Also this article was written by George Gleig.

(37) "Savage", EB3, Vol. XVI, p. 672.

(38) G. Gleig, Some account of the Life and Writings of William Robertson, D.D.F.R.S.E., Late Principal of the College of Edinburgh, and Historiographer to His Majesty for Scotland, Edinburgh, 1812, p. lvi. In contraposition to D. Stewart, Biographical Memoirs, pp. 241-242.

(39) The increasing importance of the scientific approach in the EB3 is attested by the numerous quotations of Blumenbach’s and Zimmermann’s researches; Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope Smith and Samuel Smith Barton become other important sources. See, for instance: "America", EB3, vol. 1, pp. 537-617; "Comparative Anatomy", EB3, vol. V, 249-274; "Complexion", EB3, vol. V, p. 286-90; "Negroe", EB3, vol. XII, pp. 794-798; "Slavery", EB3, vol. XVII, pp. 522-534; "Man", Supplement to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (...). In two volumes, by George Gleig, 2nd ed. with improvements, Edinburgh, Thomson Bonar, 1803, vol. 2,  pp. 164-165.