But in order to appreciate fully the philosophic tastes and capacities of Scotchmen, we must follow them into France.From a very old date, certainly from the thirteenth century, there had been a close connection between that country and Scotland, arising from the jealousy entertained by both nations of the power and ambition of England.The Scottish youth who had a love of adventure, or a thirst for military glory, had a splendid opening provided for them in the Scottish Guard, which protected the person of the king of France, while those who had a taste for letters found means of instruction and employment in the numerous French colleges. The Scotch scholars who returned to their own land brought back the French learning with them.Bishop Elphinston, who was the founder, and Hector Boece, who was the first principal of King's College, Aberdeen, had both taught in the University of Paris; and they set up the Scottish University on the model of the French one.John Major or Mair, who taught scholastic theology in Glasgow and St.Andrews, and who was the preceptor of Knox and Buchanan, had been for some time in the University of Paris.During the sixteenth, and the early part of the seventeenth century, there was a perpetual stream of Scottish scholars flowing into France.Some of these were Catholics, {25} to whom toleration was denied at home, and who betook themselves to a country where they had scope for the free exercise of their gifts.But quite as many were Protestants, who finding (as Scotchmen in later ages have done) their own land too narrow, or thirsting for farther knowledge or learned employment, connected themselves with one or other of the reformed colleges of Saumur, Montauban, Sedan, Montpellier, and Nismes, where some of them remained all their lives, while others returned to their own country.
Some of these emigrants were lawyers or physicians; but by far the greater number of them were devoted to literature, philosophy, or theology.George Buchanan, Thomas Ricalton, three Blackwoods, Thomas Dempster, two Barclays, Andrew Melville, John Cameron, Walter Donaldson, and William Chalmers are only a few of the Scotchmen who occupied important offices in France.Two deserve to be specially named, as they wrote able logical works, -- the one, Robert Balfour, a Catholic, and Principal of Guienne College, Bourdeaux, and an erudite commentator on Aristotle; and the other, Mark Duncan, a Protestant, and Principal of the University of Saumur, and author of Institutes of Logic.
There must have been some reality as the ground of the extravagant statement of Sir Thomas Urquhart in his "Discovery of a Most Exquisite jewel," that "the most of the Scottish nation, never having restricted themselves so much to the propriety of words as to the knowledge of things, where there was one preceptor of languages among them, there was above forty professors of philosophy." "The French conceived the Scots to have above all nations in matter of their subtlety in philosophical disputations, that there have not been till of late for these several years together any lord, gentleman, or other in all that country, who, being desirous to have his son instructed in the principles of philosophy, would entrust him to the discipline of any other than a Scottish master." He adds, that "if a Frenchman entered into competition, a Scotchman would be preferred."By such teaching at home, and by such foreign intercourse, a considerable amount of narrow but intense intellectual life was produced and fostered in Scotland.But youths were beginning to feel that the air was too close, too confined, and too monastic for them, and were longing for greater freedom and {26} expansion.While Aristotle and the scholastic method still hold their place in the cloisters of the colleges, there is a more bracing atmosphere in the regions without and beyond; and this is now to rush into Scotland.From the time of the revival of letters in the sixteenth century, almost every great and original thinker had thought it necessary to protest against the authority of Aristotle and the schoolmen.Bacon left Cambridge with a thorough contempt for the scholastic studies pursued there; and the grand end aimed at in his "Novum Organum," was to carry away men's regards from words and notions, to which they had paid too exclusive attention, and to fix them on things.In respect of a disposition to rebel against Aristotle and the schoolmen, Descartes was of the same spirit as Bacon; and Gassendi and Hobbes agreed with Descartes, with whom they differed in almost every thing else.It would be easy to produce a succession of strong testimonies against the Stagyrite and the Mediaevals, spread over the whole of the seventeenth century.The rising sentiment is graphically expressed by Glanvil in his "Scepsis Scientifica," published in 1665.He declares that the " ingenious world is grown quite weary of qualities and forms-," he declaims against "dry spinosities, lean notions, endless altercations about things of nothing; " and he recommends a " knowledge of nature, without which our hypotheses are but dreams and romances, and our science mere conjecture and opinion; for, while we have schemes of things without consulting the phenomena, we do but build in the air, and describe an imaginary world of our own making, that is but little akin to the real one that God made."The realistic reaction took two different but not totally divergent directions in the seventeenth century, and both the streams reached Scotland in the following century.
