Montesquieu—its author 'the first economical philosopher, and perhaps the most eloquent theoretical moralist, of modern times.' Smith’s predecessor was Francis Hutcheson, author of that Inquiry into our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue which gave rise to Reid's New Machar essay on 'Quantity' in 1748, the reputed father of modern philosophy in Scotland;—and in the second quarter of last century the most potent agent and pioneer of the liberal culture and literary taste which made the intellectual moderation of the eighteenth century in Scotland so remarkable a contrast to the less tolerant spiritual fervour of the seventeenth. This influence was continued by his friend and biographer, William Leechman, the Principal of Glasgow College in 1764, still remembered as one of the philosophical theologians of the Church of Scotland. ‘It was owing to Hutcheson and Leechman,’ says Carlyle, ‘that a new school was formed in the western provinces of Scotland, where the clergy till that period were narrow and bigoted, and had never ventured to range their minds beyond the bounds of strict orthodoxy. For though neither of these professors taught any heresy, yet they opened and enlarged the minds of the students, which soon gave them a turn for inquiry; the result of which was candour and liberality of sentiment. From experience this freedom of thought was not found so dangerous as might at first be apprehended; for though the more daring youth at first made excursions into the unbounded regions of metaphysical perplexity, yet all the more judicious soon returned to the lower sphere of long-established truths, which they found not only more subservient to the good order of society, but necessary to fix their own minds in some degree of stability.' Gershom Carmichael, too, is not to be forgotten.
