Conjectural history vs. the Bible: eighteenth-century Scottish historians and the idea of history in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (*)
Silvia Sebastiani
S. Sebastiani, «Conjectural history vs. the Bible: eighteenth-century Scottish historians and the idea of history in the Encyclopaedia Britannica»,
Cromohs, 6 (2001): 1-6,<URL: http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/6_2001/sebastiani.html>
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).
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)
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).
* 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.
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