Academics From Scotland

"The Augustan constitution remains one of the major products of the human intelligence. It was a whole into which the parts fitted smoothly, but both whole and parts were elastic and capable of swift adaptation to unforeseen conditions. It was elaborate, but that was necessary, both because of its origin and its purpose."

"Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality."

"There is no merit in an empire as such. Extension in space does not necessarily mean spiritual advancement. The small community is easier to govern, and, it may well be, more pleasant to live in. If its opportunities are limited its perils are also circumscribed. But the alternatives which confronted him were empire or anarchy."

"The Athenian empire lasted for fifty years at the most, and the stupendous creation of Alexander the Great for less. What has been the fate of succeeding imperialisms? That of Spain endured on the grand scale for little more than a century; that of Napoleon for a decade; the British Empire is less than two centuries old, and in its present form is a thing of yesterday. In the brief span of recorded history empires have had a shorter life than many monarchies, theocracies, and even republics. The Augustan alone reached a venerable age. In the coming of Christianity it had to face the greatest of all historic convulsions, but such was its potency that it weathered the storm and influenced profoundly the organization of the Christian church."

"The true achievement of Augustus is that he saved the world from disintegration. Without him Rome must have lost her conquests one by one, and seen them relapse into barbarism or degenerate into petty satrapies. The wild peoples of the East and North would have ante-dated their invasions by centuries."

"It is due to him that the Roman concepts of public duty and service are still a living force among us. Historians have denied him the name of genius which they grant readily to Alexander and Julius and Napoleon; but if it be not genius to re-make and re-direct the world by a courageous realism and supreme powers of character and mind, then the word has no meaning in human speech.."

"To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education."

"He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply."

"Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown."

"There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness."

"Now that the once omnipotent Liberal party has so declined, it is hard to realise how formidable it was in 1911—especially in Scotland. Its dogmas were so completely taken for granted that their presentation partook less of argument than of a tribal incantation. Mr. Gladstone had given it an aura of earnest morality, so that its platforms were also pulpits and its harangues had the weight of sermons. Its members seemed to assume that their opponents must be lacking either in morals or mind. The Tories were the "stupid" party; Liberals alone understood and sympathised with the poor; a working man who was not a Liberal was inaccessible to reason, or morally corrupt, or intimidated by laird or employer. I remember a lady summing up the attitude thus: Tories may think they are better born, but Liberals know that they are born better."

"The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them."

"Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure."

"The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political, were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact, and therefore did not look for new foundations."

"We had our pride shattered, and without humility there can be no humanity."

"A great storm destroys much that is precious, but it may also clear the air and blow down trees which might have been obscuring the view and making our life stuffy, and reveal in our estate possibilities of development that we had not thought of."

"To-day we have fewer dogmas, but I think that we have stronger principles. By a dogma I mean a deduction from facts which is only valid under certain conditions, and which becomes untrue if those conditions change. By a principle I mean something that is an eternal and universal truth."

"Our sufferings have taught us that no nation is sufficient unto itself, and that our prosperity depends in the long run, not upon the failure of our neighbors but their successes."

"I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support."

"He who would valiant be against all disaster; Let him in constancy Follow the Master. There's no discouragement Shall make him once relent; His first avowed intent To be a pilgrim."

"Prayer opens the heart to God, and it is the means by which the soul, though empty, is filled by God."

"The best prayers have often more groans than words."

"Alongside politicians and the press, writers of fiction picked up the theme of a sinister Communist threat, a theme that drew on the intelligence wars between the Soviet Union and the West. John Buchan, a Scottish novelist who had served in intelligence during World War One before becoming an MP, saw the hidden hand of a Communist plot to take over the world. In her novel The Big Four (1927), Agatha Christie, a successful British novelist, referred to ‘the world-wide unrest, the labour troubles that beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some’. The sense of menace played an important role in imaginative fiction. It took forward the pre-war strand of spy fiction, but added a theme of social disorder. There was also frequently a racial dimension, with a tendency to depict hostile figures as Slav and Jewish, frequently in league with sinister elements in British (or French or American) society. This theme drew on a broader hostility to Jews that was given renewed energy by the association of the Russian Revolution in hostile eyes with them. Russian émigrés spread this assessment. In turn, there was similar material in the Soviet Union about Western plots to overthrow the Revolution, a theme that long continued."

"Men are to be estimated, not from what they know, but from what they are able to perform."

"We are fond of distinctions; we place ourselves in opposition, and quarrel under the denominations of faction and party, without any material subject of controversy."

"Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies."

"Love is an affection which carries the attention of the mind beyond itself, and is the sense of a relation to some fellow creature as to its object."

"The attainments of the parent do not descend in the blood of his children, nor is the progress of man to be considered as a physical mutation of the species."

"An intimate acquaintance with the languages of those nations who once possessed a high share of human greatness and felicity, is well calculated both to engender and preserve a love of freedom. Mr Ferguson, accordingly, was a zealous and enlightened friend of whatever tended to promote the advancement, and diffuse the principles of national liberty. Attached, like his father, and all the clergy of Scotland, to those maxims of ecclesiastical policy that produced the Reformation, and those ideas of political right, that, by justifying the revolution, endeared the House of Brunswick, and legalised their claims to the throne of these kingdoms, he is said even then to have prided himself on being a “constitutional Whig.”"

"When Adam Ferguson summed up such teaching by defining the savage as a man who did not yet know property (1767/73:136), and when Adam Smith remarked that `nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures or natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that is yours' (1776/1976:26), they expressed what, in spite of recurrent revolts by rapacious or hungry bands, had for practically two millennia been the view of the educated. As Ferguson put it, `It must appear very evident, that property is a matter of progress' (ibid)."

"Theory consists in referring particular operations to the principles, or general laws, under which they are comprehended; or in referring particular effects to the causes from which they proceed."

"In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many."

"Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

"…if we intend to pursue the history of our species in its further attainments, we may soon enter on subjects which will confine our observation to more narrow limits. The genius of political wisdom and civil arts appears to have chosen his seats in particular tracts of the earth, and to have selected his favourites in particular races of men."

"Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate."

"The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning."

"Hutton's claim to rank high among the founders of geology rests on no wide series of writings, like those which Von Buch poured forth so copiously for more than two generations. Nor was it proclaimed by a host of devoted pupils, like those who spread abroad the fame of Werner. It is based, so far at least as geology is concerned, on one single work, and on the elucidations of two friends and disciples."

"Though his partnership in the chemical work brought him considerable wealth, it made no difference in the quiet unostentatious life of a philosopher, which he had led ever since he settled in Edinburgh."

"His character was distinguished by its transparent simplicity, its frank openness, its absence of all that was little or selfish, and its overflowing enthusiasm and vivacity."

"Dr. Hutton... was highly pleased with appearances that set in so clear a light the different formations of the parts which compose the exterior crust of the earth... On us who saw these phenomena for the first time, the impression made will not easily be forgotten. ...The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abbys of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much further reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow."

"The world... might have had still a long time to wait for the appearance of his dissertation, had it not been for the interest he took in the foundation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh... At one of the early meetings of this Society he communicated a concise account of his Theory of the Earth., which appeared in the first volume of the Transactions. This essay was afterwards expanded..."

"Hutton was... no narrow specialist, wrapped up in the pursuit of one circumscribed section of human inquiry. His mind ranged far and wide over many departments of knowledge. ...His pleasure in every outward step made by science and philosophy showed itself in the most lively demonstrations."

"Among the marks of disturbance in which the mineral kingdom abounds, those great breaches among rocks, which are filled with materials different from the rock on either side, are among the most conspicuous. These are the veins, and comprehend, not only the metallic veins, but also those of whinstone, of porphyry, and of granite, all of them substances more or less crystallized, and none of them containing the remains of organized bodies. ...The materials of all these veins Dr Hutton concludes to have been melted by subterraneous heat, and, while in fusion, injected among the fissures and openings of rocks already formed, but thus disturbed, and moved from their original place."

"The present rocks, with the exceptions of such as are not stratified, having all existed in the form of loose materials collected at the bottom of the sea, must have been consolidated and converted into stone by virtue of some very powerful and general agent. The consolidating cause which he points out is subterraneous heat, and he has removed the objections to this hypothesis by the introduction of a principle new and peculiar to himself. This principle is the compression which must have prevailed in that region where the consolidation of mineral substances was accomplished. Under the weight of a superincumbent ocean, heat, however intense, might be unable to volatilize any part of those substances which, at the surface, and under the lighter pressure of our atmosphere, it can entirely consume. The same pressure, by forcing those substances to remain united, which at the surface are easily separated, might occasion the fusion of some bodies which in our fires are only calcined. Hence the objections that are so strong and unanswerable, when opposed to the theory of volcanic fire, as usually laid down, have no force at all against Dr Hutton's theory; and hence we are to consider this theory as hardly less distinguished from the hypothesis of the Vulcanists, in the usual sense of that appellation than it is from that of the Neptunists or the disciples of Werner."

"The third general fact on which this theory is founded, is, that the stratified rocks, instead of being either horizontal, or nearly so, as they no doubt were originally, are now found possessing all degrees of elevation, and some of them even perpendicular to the horizon; to which we must add, that those strata which were once at the bottom of the sea are now raised up, many of them several thousand feet above its surface. ...This force, which has burst in pieces the solid pavement on which the ocean rests, and has raised up rocks from the bottom of the sea, into mountains... exceeds any which we see actually exerted, but seems to come nearer to the cause of the volcano or the earthquake than to any other, of which the effects are directly observed. The immense disturbance, therefore, of the strata, is in this theory ascribed to heat acting with an expansive power, and elevating those rocks which it had before consolidated."

"The first general fact which he has remarked is, that by far the greater part of the bodies which compose the exterior crust of our globe, bear the marks of being formed out of the materials of mineral or organized bodies, of more ancient date. The spoils or the wreck of an older world are every where visible in the present, and, though not found in every piece of rock, they are diffused so generally as to leave no doubt that the strata which now compose our continents are all formed out of strata more ancient than themselves."

"The object of Dr Hutton was not, like that of most other theorists, to explain the first origin of things. He was too well skilled in the rules of sound philosophy for such an attempt; and he accordingly confined his speculations to those changes which terrestrial bodies have undergone since the establishment of the present order, in as far as distinct marks of such changes are now to be discovered."

"He was one of those who are much more delighted with the contemplation of truth, than with the praise of having discovered it."

"Few men have entered with better preparation on the arduous task of investigating the true theory of the earth."

"From the date... when he was yet a very young man, and making excursions on foot through the different counties of England, till that which we are now arrived at, a period of about thirty years, he had never ceased to study the natural history of the globe, with a view of ascertaining the changes that have taken place on its surface, and of discovering the causes by which they have been produced."