Dugald Stewart the noted Scottish mathematician and philosopher was born on November 22nd 1753 in Edinburgh.
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment.
The Scottish Enlightenment began in the mid 18th century and continued for the best part of a century. It marked a major shift from religion into reason. Religion had been influential in every part of Scottish life. A little over a hundred years before it resulted in a war between the Royalists and covenanters causing countless deaths in period known as the killing time, indeed during the Enlightenment the strict Calvinists Government meant some people were punished for crimes such as blasphemy.
Dugald’s father was a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, his mother Marjorie Stewart was the only daughter of Archibald Stewart, writer to the signet, so he had a good pedigree, he was schooled at Edinburgh high school from then entered the University of Edinburgh where he took an arts degree although he also attended courses in natural philosophy. On the advice of Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart spent one year in Glasgow where he attended the lectures of Thomas Reid. On his return to Edinburgh University he spent 13 years teaching mathematics.
In 1775 he was appointed joint professor of mathematics with his father. However, when Ferguson resigned as professor of moral philosophy in 1785 he was succeeded by Dugald Stewart who held the post for 25 years.
His writing included: Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, published over 35 years in three volumes, Outlines of Moral Philosophy and Philosophical Essays.
Stewart left Scotland on a number of occasions to visit France. In 1806 for example he accompanied the Earl of Lauderdale in an attempt to negotiate peace with Napoleon. On a previous visit to the country, he had witnessed the outbreak of the French Revolution.
He spent much of his retirement at Kinneil House, Boness, a stately home owned by the Dukes of Hamilton since the 17th century.
My favourite wee story about Dugald Stewart involves other big hitters of the era like Dr Joseph Black, Professor Adam Ferguson, John Home and two other poets, Robert Burns, our national bard, and Walter Scott, famous for may poetic works as well as the Waverley series and Ivanhoe. I’m not sure about how Walter Scott had come to be at the meeting on Edinburgh Southside in Sciennes Hill House as he was only 15 at the time, but he must have been a bit star struck, these guys were the creme de la creme.
We know what happened, because Scott left several accounts of the meeting. Burns, it should be said, did not do so, but by then Burns was well on his way to fame and no doubt met many of Edinburgh’s literati in the Oyster Clubs and other clubs such as the Crochallan Fencibles Club, one of many he became a member of.
Scott recalled in 1827: “I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him; but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most frequented.
“Mr Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father’s. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to dinner, but had no opportunity to keep his word, otherwise I might have seen more of this distinguished man.
“As it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Fergusson’s, where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Mr Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sate silent, looked and listened.
“The only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns’ manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury’s, representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on the one side, on the other his widow with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath, – ‘Cold on Canadian hills, or Mindens’ plain, Perhaps that parent wept her soldiers slain: Bent o’er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops, mingling with the milk he drew, Gave the sad presage of his future years, The child of misery baptized in tears.’ “Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears.
He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne’s, called by the uncompromising title of The Justice Of The Piece.
“I whispered my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I then received and still ecollect, with very great pleasure.”
