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Published online 12 January 2011

THE LINE OF REASON: HUGH BLAIR, SPATIALITY AND THE PROGRESSIVE

STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE

by

MATTHEW D. EDDY*

Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the

mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment

foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the

relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writings of

grammarians and educators such as Blair have received little attention in histories of nascent

palaeoarchaeology and palaeoanthropology, I show that he addressed a number of conceptual

themes that were of central relevance to the ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ typology that

guided the construction of ‘prehistoric minds’ during the early decades of the Victorian era.

Although I address the referential power of language to a certain extent, my main point is

that the rectilinear spatiality afforded by Western forms of graphic representation created an

implicitly progressivist framework of disordered, ordered and reordered minds.

.d.e

Keywords: anthropology; linearity; morality; note-taking; prehistory;

rationality

1
[L]ife is lived not at points but along lines.
Memory is poorer for the orientation of oblique lines.2

[T]he spoken differs from the written word, where the line becomes straight in either a

sideways or downwards direction.3

INTRODUCTION

Enlightenment thinkers paid very close attention to the natural history of language. Central to

this interest was a deep commitment to the fundamental role of print culture and, by

extension, the philological models and typologies used to understand human origins.

Words and space preserved on a page not only provided an analogy for the linear nature

of human thought, but they also had the power to order and reorder the content of the

mind. In this sense, both words and the space around them were purposeful artefacts. In

this essay I examine this model by focusing on how it provided a way to compare and

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9 This journal is q 2011 The Royal Society

mailto:[email protected]


M. D. Eddy10


contrast the minds of primitive, ancient and modern cultures. I show that the framework used

to interpret minds employed categories of analysis that gave priority to the spatial nature of

words. To pursue this topic, I focus on the Rev. Dr Hugh Blair, the University of

Edinburgh’s professor of rhetoric and belles lettres (figure 1). As one of the most

influential linguistic experts of the day, he gave lectures that were attended by hundreds

of students, many of whom would become leading scientists.4 Additionally, at the end of

his career, Blair turned his course into a bestselling book entitled Lectures on rhetoric

and belles lettres.5 This text addresses numerous points on the natural history of language

that would later be refined in the nineteenth-century anthropological literature, especially

in the books of leading authors such as James Cowles Prichard, Mary Sommerville and

Robert Chambers.6 As one the most widely read language texts in the West from the

1780s to the 1840s, Blair’s Rhetoric provides insight into how the relationship between

anthropology and linguistics was being portrayed to literate audiences in the British

Empire, the American Republic and Europe.7 Yet, although aspects of Blair’s views of

language were indeed innovative, I should perhaps emphasize that I am not treating him

as a unique language theorist. Instead, I am interested in his role as a popular professor

and author who promoted common thinking tools that have remained hitherto

unrecognized by historians of prehistory and print culture in general.

Key to Blair’s thoughts on composition and style was the belief that language was

intimately linked to the structure of the human mind, and this led him to present a

detailed account of the origins and meaning of language in his lectures. His interest in

this subject was part of a larger fascination among Scottish professors and professionals

with the ‘Science of Man’, that is, the study of the cognitive and cultural factors that

differentiated one civilization from another and formed the core of human nature.8 In this

sense they were humanists as well as anthropologists, and their work laid the foundation

for the nineteenth-century societies and professorships that would be devoted to the study

of archaeology and anthropology.9 The importance of this Scottish context was once

summed up by E. E. Evans-Pritchard when he wrote, ‘Our [anthropological] forbearers

were the Scottish moral philosophers, whose writings were typical of the eighteenth

century.’10 Focusing on Blair’s lectures, I show that that he used the words and spaces of

print to create an informal cultural typology of disordered, ordered and reordered minds. I

do this by presenting a composite model that gives a clearer picture of how his view of

the mind directly affected the chronology that he used to account for the origins of

language and literacy. I begin by explaining how his interpretation originated from a

particularly Scottish view of the human mind and then go on to delineate the various

stages of language that he believed led up to the clarity and precision that he attributed

to English.

VISIBLE FORMS FOR INVISIBLE MINDS

The relationship between thought and language was a common topic of enquiry during the

early modern period, especially among those who were influenced by John Locke’s

epistemology.11 In Scotland this relationship was linked to several philosophical, moral

and medical concepts and was influenced by different political, religious and social

commitments.12 There were, however, several features that most of these theories shared.

First and foremost, the ‘idea’ was taken as the basic building block of ‘thought’. Second,


Figure 1. Hugh Blair, depicted in the third row of the third column, was an influential thinker during the late ScottishEnlightenment. The posthumous success of his published lectures also preserved his legacy throughout Britain, itscolonies and in Europe up through the middle of the nineteenth century. (Source: J. W. Cook, Writers:Twenty Portraits (Baldwin, Craddock & Joy, London, 1825). Wellcome Library, London; reproduced withpermission.)

The line of reason 11



M. D. Eddy12


ideas were generated from direct sensory experience or from various combinations of other

ideas. Third, ideas were collected by the operations of the mind into the storehouse of

memory. Fourth, ideas flowed past the mind’s eye in a manner similar to a chain of

beads, one after another. This process was often called the ‘train of thought’, the ‘train of

ideas’ or the ‘chain of reasoning’.13 Although aspects of this model have sometimes been

treated as metaphors by historians, many eighteenth-century authors saw it as the de facto

reality of the mind’s content. Thus, although the model clearly followed the picture of the

mind painted by Locke, later versions were actually revised interpretations of Lockean

idealism (sometimes nominalist in tone) that emphasized the volitional association of

ideas.14 Crucially, this model of the mind treated words as signs that represented ideas.15

In short, printed words were visible representations that spatialized the building blocks of

human thought on paper.

The volitional collection, retention and management of ideas and words was the domain

of rationality, which was intimately linked to language and, by extension, the spatial domain

of the printed and written page. Because most Europeans believed that speech was the key

characteristic that made humans different from animals, the relationship between rationality

and language was central to Scottish philosophies of the human mind. This meant that the

history of language was also the history of rationality and morality; that is, two things that

many Enlightened thinkers held to be the most important characteristics of human nature.

It is for this reason that Scotland’s intellectuals took great care to familiarize themselves

not only with the history of Western literacy, but also with texts that addressed the

languages of the indigenous inhabitants of other parts of the world. This led them to view

words as spatialized mental artefacts that had developed accumulatively through different

cultures throughout history and not as a universal or essentialist system of signs that had

existed in a pure form in the past or that could be created in the future. The idea that

words on the page were analogous to ideas in the mind was not novel per se to Scotland,

nor even to the wider late Enlightenment context. Indeed, it was a core principle of the

model of the mind employed in classical rhetoric, particularly in the works of Cicero,

Quintilian and the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium. Scots learnt about this

model by reading these works in primary and secondary educational settings.16 Blair, for

example, repeatedly cited the foregoing authors when he discussed the malleability and

representative value of language. This was because he held that such views offered a way

to construct a progressive ‘mental’ chronology that could be used to understand the

history of humankind.

The notion that words were spatialized signs placed language in a very special cultural

position. As Blair put it in his Lectures on Rhetoric:

[T]he general construction of Language . . . is, however, of great importance, and very

nearly connected with the philosophy of the human mind. For, if Speech be the

vehicle, or interpreter of the conceptions of our minds, an examination of its Structure

and Progress cannot but unfold many things concerning the nature and progress of our

conceptions themselves, and the operations of our faculties.17

The foregoing view had been taught to Blair by his own professors, especially Adam Smith

and James Ferguson, and continued to have a central role in the thought of his students who

became professors, particularly Dugald Stewart and James Gregory. In this setting, the subtle

logic of language treated words as visible forms of invisible minds. Once ‘materialized’ into

words, ideas were then subjected to systematization, the ultimate prize of human rationality.




Within this mindset, Blair assumed three hierarchical stages of language, each being

associated with a specific era of thought as well as with specific kinds of representational

forms. Although these stages were commonly used throughout Europe, the nuances of

their genesis and meaning varied from author to author. Blair’s views on this subject

therefore give a snapshot of the general progressivist framework that late Enlightenment

thinkers used to interpret human origins at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

PRIMITIVE HISTORY AND DISORDERED MINDS

Most late eighteenth-century accounts on the origin of language drew examples from the

indigenous cultures that Europeans encountered in colonial settings around the world.

They often included the story of a hypothetical ‘savage’ who uttered the first ‘word’ as a

response to a desire for an object such as a piece of fruit hanging on a tree.18 This

account of linguistic origins was a notable difference from anthropological writings

published during the previous century, when a common point for discussion on this

matter was the recovery of the lost language of Adam.19 Yet, as ubiquitous as the ‘savage

and the tree’ story was for Blair and his contemporaries, it was often used within

arguments that framed the origin of language in fundamentally different ways (figure 2).

Blair’s view on the origin of language was most noticeably influenced by Etienne Bonnot

de Condillac’s Essai sur L’origine des Connoissances Humaines (1746) and Adam

Smith’s Treatise on the Origin and Progress of Language (1767).20 Drawing from these

texts, Blair used the word ‘primitive’ to refer to early humans who lacked the spatialized

form of representation provided by written language. His comments on this time in

history were guided by his desire to explain the invention of words and their subsequent

arrangement into disordered, oral sentences. More specifically, he used four loosely

conceived stages to frame the emergence of linear space.

Blair had little to say about the first stage, but it included humans who possessed no

communicative skills whatsoever. The second stage applied to humans who had

developed bodily and oral forms of communication. These two forms, which he called

‘gesticulation’ and ‘pronunciation’, seem to have emerged in tandem. Blair saw vestiges

of these forms of communication in the sign language of Native Americans, in the robust

hand movement of Mediterranean cultures and in modern practices of rhetoric.21 He

summarized the process in the following manner:

If we should suppose a period before any words were invented or known, it is clear that

men could have no other method of communicating to others what they felt, than by the

cries of passion, accompanied with such motions and gestures as were farther expressive

of passion.22

Both gesticulation and pronunciation reduced thought down to a specific kind of

representation in space immediately inhabited by a speaker and a listener. The visual

forms of this kind of language were motions of the hand, expressions of the face, or

contortions of the voice. To illustrate the invention of words Blair expanded on his

account of the ‘Savage and the tree’:

The individual objects which surround us, are infinite and innumerable. A savage,

wherever he looked, beheld forests and trees. To give separate names to every one of

these trees, would have been an endless and impracticable undertaking. His first object


Figure 2. The ‘savage and the tree’ metaphor used to discuss the origins of speech most probably arose fromChristian depictions of Adam, Eve and the Tree of Life. From the seventeenth century onwards, Adam and Evewere replaced with indigenes encountered in European colonies. Yet, as clearly evinced in the work of EtienneCondillac, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart and Hugh Blair, the volitional origins of speech still carried strongmoral undertones at the end of the eighteenth century. (Source: ‘Natural inhabitants, male and female, of theAntilles of America standing under a pawpaw tree’, in Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire generale des Antilleshabitees par les Francais, vol. 2 (T. Iolly, Paris, 1667), opposite page 356. Wellcome Library, London, libraryreference no. EPB/B 21319/B; reproduced with permission.)

M. D. Eddy14


was, to give a name to that particular tree, whose fruit relieved his hunger, whose shade

protected him from the sun.23

Because verbalization in this setting was guided by motives linked to survival or genuine

outbursts of passionate emotion, the first words formed by humans were natural signs that

emanated directly from raw experience and were, consequently, a form of truthful

representation. In other words, ‘As far as this system is founded in truth, language

appears to be not altogether arbitrary in its origin.’24 Because early words were formed

from relational acts such as imitation (onomatopoeia), resemblance and analogy, Blair

likened the rise of verbal inflection to a more colourful manner of painting by means of

sound. Key to this expansion of signification was the use of the imagination and the

aforementioned interplay between sound and gesture. Throughout his lectures, Blair

illustrated the relics of this stage by referencing the hand pictures of Native American




sign language, the tonal modulation of Chinese words, and the gesticulation that

accompanied the speech of northern Mediterranean cultures.25

The sounds and motions characteristic of Blair’s second stage of language development

were made at random intervals and they contributed to the instantiation of a third stage in

which utterances and gesticulations solidified into fixed verbal figures of speech. Again,

these words were not arranged in any particular sequential order and they were initially

used to describe objects and then actions. He called this stage ‘stylization’. It required a

communal association between a word in the mind and an object in the world. The

formation of words was therefore contingent upon objects noted for their value or danger

and required shared spaces of experience. The fixing of thought into specific words laid

the foundation for the final stage of Blair’s primitive history in which the sentence as a

recognizable unit of words emerged as a compounded form of mental representation. It

was this move to oral order that laid the scaffolding for the rectilinearity of sentences that

he associated with print culture. In this final primitive episode, words were strung

together in an order that was determined by the emotional state of mind of the speaker.

This emergence of linguistic organization was closely linked to his view on the origins of

morality (a point to which I shall return later). Overall, his stages of early language

structure depended on two things. First, he assumed that there was a direct

correspondence between ideas in the mind and words externalized by the mouth or hands.

Second, his use of language as a primary form of primitive evidence was predicated upon

an essential reduction of thought to both words and space. More specifically, words were

both sounds in space and they were pictures in the air and, consequently, uttering or

gesticulating more than one word at a time created a spatial structure and laid the

foundation for ordered sentences and, ultimately, grammar. This means that one of the

main attributes that Blair associated with primitive history was the way in which space

and words overcame different kinds of non-linguistic disorder in the world of early

humans. Thus, discussing the origin of words in this manner implicitly created a mode of

anthropological comparison in which the history of print culture served as the implicit

cognitive framework against which the history of all world cultures was compared.

ANCIENT HISTORY AND ORDERED MINDS

The spatial element of words developed by primitive cultures led to written language. More

specifically, it led to linear forms of representation that were fixed into different kinds of

print. This kind of visual fixity was one of the main characteristics shared by the

languages that Blair associated with ancient history; that is, the second chronological

stage in his natural history of language. In particular, he mentions Chinese and

Egyptian pictograms as well as Hebrew, Greek and Latin phonograms.26 Throughout his

lectures he did not present an explicit list of the visuospatial traits that he assumed were

present during the period that occurred between the dawn of simple syntactical

arrangements and the emergence of the grammatical categories of the Ancients. Instead,

he treated the topic implicitly in his many comments about the indigenous languages

spoken in European colonies, thereby participating in a larger Enlightenment climate in

which colonial observations were used to provide examples for theories that sought to

create a more detailed picture of the language structures used by preliterate societies. To a

certain extent this method mirrored classical authors such as Herodotus and Pliny, who


M. D. Eddy16


used the seemingly irrational sounds and syntax of African and Central Asian languages to

highlight the merits and accomplishments of Greek and Latin culture.27 For English-

speaking Lowland Scots such as Blair and many of his students, a similar pattern of

philological reconstruction began very close to home with the observations that were

made of the Gaelic-speaking populations that inhabited the Hebrides and Highlands.28

Aside from a shared desire to commit words to inscribable surfaces, ancient cultures had

developed two forms of proximate differentiation for written words. These spatial modes

were based on how close one word was to another. The first spatial mode was the space

delineated by the surface on which the writing was fixed. The second was the linear space

that existed within a vertically or horizontally written sentence. Surfaces and sentences

were therefore forms into which words were placed. The shape of space offered by one

surface was different from that offered by another. Writing, or refraining from writing,

certain kinds of words on rock, vellum or paper was essentially an act of order in which

the medium’s surface facilitated selective grouping. Additionally, within paginal

parameters, the sentence functioned as another form of order. It grouped related words

into a linear unit, the formation of which, again, was an act of selective order. Thus, the

manipulation of material surfaces and the inscription techniques associated with writing

sentences were fundamentally spatial acts that allowed Blair to differentiate disordered

primitive languages from ordered ancient languages. Crucially, this spatial mode of

analysis worked in conversation with his belief that ‘When we attend to the order in

which words are arranged in a sentence, or significant proposition, we find a very

remarkable difference between the antient and modern Tongues.’29

The foregoing perception of linguistic space allowed Blair to create an intellectual

hierarchy for cultures that existed before, or even alongside, modernity because the

invention of syntactical space facilitated reflection on the order of words within the

sentence itself. Most of his comments on this topic are made in relation to Greek and

Latin, thereby signalling his view that these languages were more advanced than others of

the time:

Accordingly, no Tongue is so full of them [particles] as the Greek, in consequence of the

acute and subtle genius of that refined people. In every Language, much of the beauty and

strength of it depends on the proper use of conjunctions, prepositions, and those relative

pronouns, which also serve the same purpose of connecting the different parts of

discourse. It is the right, or wrong management of these, which chiefly makes

discourse appear firm or compacted, or disjointed or loose, which causes it to march

with smooth and even pace, or with gouty and hobbling steps.30

The close proximity of words in Greek and Latin sentences led authors to realize that

different words had unique roles and this engendered early taxonomies for parts of

speech. The recognition that such parts had different roles then facilitated the formation

of rules that could be applied to the sequential use of words. Such verbal categories and

rules effectively created a grammatical mindset.

As inferred above, Blair’s views on the linear space of sentences were intimately linked

to, and perhaps motivated by, a desire to explain the origins of morality. This point is very

important, as the space of words was also a moral corollary to the order that he attributed to

‘civilized’ societies. Blair illustrated this transformation by extending the ‘Savage and the

tree’ example. He fast-forwarded the hypothetical story and picked up at a point where

the savage’s culture had reached a place where simple names (such as ‘fruit’), verbs (such




as ‘give’) and personal particles (such as ‘me’) had been developed but had not yet been

strung together in any order. Thus, staring at the tree in hunger, an early human created

the framework for ordered thought by passionately crying, ‘Fruit give me.’ Blair held that

this primeval formulation was a momentous occurrence because it was an intentional act

of ordered thought that transported, or materialized, an idea into the oral spaces of

communication. Notably, ‘fruit’, the object of desire, was placed at the front of the

phrase, and the other less passionate words followed. This stringing of words together

laid the foundations for further intentional acts of collocation, especially inversion and

transposition, in which moral or social concerns led the speaker to place the object of

passion at a later stage in the phrase. The ability to change the formulation from ‘Fruit

give me’ to ‘Give me fruit’ was not only the foundation for more effective forms of

communication, but also strengthened the will, thereby establishing a volitional precedent

for future moral acts. This meant that the order of language developed by ancient cultures

was strongly linked to the ethical implications of verbal communication.31

The key contribution of the Ancients in the foregoing process was the recognition, collection

and codification of grammatical patterns that had emerged over time through linguistic practices.

In short, the ordered sentences of the Ancients further subjugated language to the will and, by

extension, to the moral obligations of individuals living in increasingly literate societies. In this

view, it was the linear relationship of the words to each other that proved to be just as important

as what the words were taken to represent—especially because the direct correspondence

between primitive words and objects deteriorated over time. This point was summarized by

Blair in the following manner: ‘Words, as we now employ them, taken in general, may be

considered as symbols, not as imitations; as arbitrary, or instituted, not natural signs of

ideas.’32 Yet although the Greeks and Romans developed grammatical frameworks that were

inherently spatial in nature, the internal structure of their sentences was not governed by

specific rules of word order; rather, the relationships of words were determined more

by inflected endings. This lack of ordinal space within the line of the sentence was criticized by

Blair because he believed that it generated conceptual ambiguity. The overarching view of

language that emerges from this criticism is that the spatial form of order provided by the

linear sentences of the Greeks and Romans was disordered internally. Thus, whereas the

‘prehistoric’ mind of primitives had no written form, and hence no linearity, the linguistic

order provided by the ‘historic’ ancients was one of form and not strictly content.

MODERN HISTORY AND REORDERED MINDS

Blair held that modern European languages had improved the structure of sentences by

introducing more specific rules of word order. The absence of this new kind of sentential

order was one of the main characteristics that he used to differentiate ancient from

modern languages. Such an interest in the systematic representation of language was one

of the hallmarks of European pedagogy around 1800 and this led to a wide variety of

spatialized charts, with some good Scottish examples appearing in the first edition

of Encyclopaedia Britannica during the 1770s. Blair’s views on the spatial importance of

modern word order become most visible in his comments on grammar. He taught his

students that there were three kinds of grammatical category: substantives, attributives and

connectives. He then classified parts of speech under these categories, as shown in table 1.


Table 1. Blair’s grammatical system.

substantives attributives connectives

nouns verbs prepositionspronouns participles conjunctions

adverbs interjectionsadjectives

M. D. Eddy18


He states that he discerned this system from the works of Quintilian.33 It is also likely

that he was influenced by James Harris’s Hermes.34 When it came to the spatialization of

words, the most important category for Blair was ‘connectives’, and they had a special

role in sentential order for two reasons. First, modern languages used them more

frequently; this meant that there was more space between words in the line of the

sentence. Such a structural feature made the relationship between words more visually

accessible. Second, modern connectives had to be placed in a more standardized order

within the line of the sentence, thereby using linear proximity to establish a precise

relationship between words.

Blair believed that the language which made the most judicious use of connectives was,

unsurprisingly, English. Although its grammar did have some drawbacks,35 he reserved

particular praise for the fact that, unlike its Anglo-Saxon and Middle French progenitors,

English no longer attached gender distinctions to substantives. Its great advantage was its

multifarious use of connective particles, and it was this kind of grammatical category that

was underused or lacking in the languages spoken by primitive cultures. Thus, the

difference between disorganized primitive languages and nominally ordered ancient

languages reflected a relative scale of mental ability that continued straight up to Blair’s day:

It is abundantly evident, that all these connective particles must be of the greatest use in

Speech; seeing they point out the relations and transitions by which the mind passes from

one idea to another. They are the foundation of all reasoning, which is no other thing than

the connection of thoughts. And, therefore, though among barbarous nations, and in the

rude uncivilised ages of the world, the stock of these words might be small, it must

always have increased, as mankind advanced in the arts of reasoning and reflection.

The more any nation is improved by science, and the more perfect their Language

becomes, we may naturally expect, that it will abound the more with connective

particles; expressing relations of things, and transitions of thought, which escaped a

grosser view.36

Accordingly, because Greek was (at the time) one of the first known languages to have

included such particles, Blair placed its sentential constructions in a ‘higher’ grammatical

category than those that appeared in Latin. Similarly, because modern European

languages used particles to a lesser extent, they had reached a similar stage of sentential

specificity (especially Italian and French); so the difference was one of degree and not of

kind. Yet, even though modern grammar was inherently a spatial enterprise for Blair, the

internal, sequential and formal order of sentential units fixed on paper did not provide a

flexible mode of invention through which different kinds of thematic information could be

reordered into new conceptual arrangements. As a reader who lived during the largest

explosion of printed texts since the invention of the hand press, Blair needed a way of




transforming words, clauses and narrative blocks into units that could be respatialized in a

manner that did not violate the priority that he gave to the linear order instantiated by

grammatically organized sentences.

One form of reordering was commonplacing; that is, a kind of note-taking proposed by

the ancients but which had been hyper-spatialized by the moderns. Following spatial

models practised throughout Enlightenment Europe,37 Blair’s commonplacing consisted of

two units. First, there was a block of information extracted from a text. Second, there was

the head; that is, a one-word or two-word label that was spatially or typographically

differentiated from the text that it was meant to capsulate. He schematically arranged his

own heads in a printed syllabus entitled Heads of the Lectures of Rhetorick and Belles

Lettres. This form of vertical order, which required students to read along the line of the

margin, was known well by his pupils, because it was often used to arrange grammatical

and geographical word tables in contemporary textbooks. The vertical order of Blair’s

heads was a form of coded space that he had learned when he himself was a student.

Building on the commonplacing tradition, he developed a notational system during the

late 1730s in which he copied and then ordered abstracts of notable passages under heads.

The history of humanity, which, for Blair, followed a progressivist framework, proved

particularly conducive to this kind of reordering. According to James Finlayson, Blair’s

younger colleague:

History, in particular, he resolved to study in this manner; and, in concert with some

youthful associates, he constructed a very comprehensive scheme of chronological

tables, for receiving into its proper place every important fact that should occur. The

scheme was devised by this young student for his own private use was afterwards

improved, filled up, and given to the public by his learned friend Dr. John Blair,

Prebendary of Westminster, in his valuable work, The Chronology and History of the

World.38

The larger point to draw from this pedagogical reflection is that the spatial arrangement of

heads, either as lecture titles or dates, had a crucial role in the vertical linearization

of information in Blair’s teaching. What is notable is that, like John Blair’s expansion of

Hugh Blair’s chronology tables, most of the latter’s students used the schemata of his

lecture heads as a framework, a visual catalogue, into which they inserted the written

notes that they took in his course. While he lectured, he read out and discussed long

quotations that were relevant to the head under discussion. Crucially, these extracts could

be obtained only by attending his lectures. Thus, he was not only teaching his students

how to extract quotations from texts, he was also showing them how to regroup and

respatialize sentences in a manner that could be used in the future to suit themes or topics

of their own choosing. Such a method was explicitly more spatialized than ancient

commonplacing and was implicitly a form of linguistic spatialization unknown to

primitive cultures.

A second form of reordering within the sentence was facilitated by ‘style’; that is, ‘the

peculiar manner in which a man expresses his conceptions, by means of Language.’39 It

was ‘peculiar’ because it worked creatively alongside the ordered space of grammatically

aligned words. A modern person’s style was not simply an aesthetic ideal. Rather, it was

an external representation of the inner workings of an ingenious mind that allowed a

writer to connect things that had not been seen before and to understand how such

connections fitted into larger systems of language. For style to be used effectively, Blair


M. D. Eddy20


held that sentences should be kept relatively simple. Following French literary critics, he

taught his students to strike a balance between style periodique, long sentences with

multiple clauses, and style coupe, sentences formed from ‘short independent propositions,

each complete within itself.’40 Like commonplace heads, the advantage of stylistic clauses

was that they could be rearranged, which meant that they could be moved around in a

manner that did not upset the order required of a grammatical template. Indeed, they were

truly ordinal. They were an order within an order that used tropes to add deeper meaning

to existing forms of organized representation. On this point, Blair wrote:

Style has always some reference to an author’s manner of thinking. It is a picture of the

ideas which rise in his mind, and of the manner in which they rise there; and hence, when

we are examining an author’s composition, it is, in many cases, extremely difficult to

separate Style from sentiment.41

The untangling of style from sentiment, moreover, was an act of the will and, like the early

forms of syntax and grammar, it created the volitional foundation for an Enlightened moral

mind. On the whole, the use of language in this way was part of the wider Scottish

intellectual climate in which words were viewed as oral or visual signs of ideas, and which

treated stylistic language as the most important cultural artefact that a given society, or even

the human race, could create.42 Such a view meant that the languages of the colonial

indigenes that he so often cited in his sections on primitive speech fell short of the style

exhibited in the writing of Modern authors. Strikingly, because he believed that the

progression towards style was gradual, he also held that the Romans fell short of the clarity

that could be achieved in modern languages.43 He displayed this sentiment throughout his

lectures by the way in which he used Roman writers to illustrate non-‘perspicuous’

constructions. It was only in modern times that the refinement of perspicuity had reached

the stage in which the resemblance and connections between objects could be clearly

communicated with carefully selected words that connoted precise meanings.

CONCLUSION

In this essay I have shown that Hugh Blair placed a high value on the spatial characteristics

provided by print culture. Primitive minds were disordered, either in terms of the absence of

words in space, or in terms of unstandardized sentences. Ancient minds were ordered

because they had identified the spatial importance of articles and parts of speech, leading

them to promote sentences that followed loose rules of word order. Modern minds had

not only refined this order but also developed alternative ways of spatializing thought that

operated in parallel with grammar. Notably, all the characteristics associated with these

three stages reinforced the contemporary linguistic model used to assess all cultures of the

globe. Overall, the space of words provided a classificatory tool that his students could

use to evaluate both the archaeological and anthropological evidence that they

encountered as naturalists, travellers, scientists, curators and colonial civil servants. The

progressive stages of Blair’s approach provided a temporal framework that both ordered

and explained the structure of primitive, ancient and modern minds. Moreover, the

intimate link between order and explanation was present in most linguistic models of the

day and it served as an interpretive tool for many travellers going to European colonies

and for early nineteenth-century thinkers whose writings contributed to the nascent




disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Importantly, Blair’s three stages were premised

on the concept that human artefacts could be used to create a temporal structure that

explained change in human behaviour over time. In his case, the artefacts were the signs

and spaces of print culture; however, it would be only a decade or two later when

naturalists and antiquarians turned their thoughts to tools, thereby inaugurating a shift

from one kind of artefactual line to another.

NOTES

1 Tim Ingold, Lines: a brief history (Routledge, London, 2007), p. 116.

2 Barbara Tversky, ‘Spatial schemata in depictions’, in Spatial schemas and abstract thought (ed.

Merideth Gattis), pp. 79–112 (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001), at p. 99.

3 Jack Goody, The domestication of the savage mind (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 124.

4 Blair’s ideas were disseminated through Britain and North America through bound copies of

manuscript lecture notes written or commissioned by his students. See Gary Layne Hatch,

‘Student notes of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric’, in Scottish rhetoric and its influences

(ed. Lynee Lewis Gaillet), pp. 79–94 (Erlbaum, Mahwah, 1998); J. R. Irvine and G. J.

Gravlee, ‘Hugh Blair: a select bibliography of manuscripts in Scottish archives’, Rhetoric

Soc. Q. 13, 75–77 (1983); J. R. Irvine, ‘Rhetoric and moral philosophy: a selected inventory

of lecture notes and dictates in Scottish archives’, Rhetoric Soc. Q. 13, 159–164 (1983).

5 Throughout this essay I cite the three volumes of the 1783 edition of Blair’s lectures that was

printed in Dublin: Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters, vols 1–3 (Whiteston,

Collins, Burnet, etc., Dublin, 1783). I note that although the content was effectively the same,

the ‘official’ edition published jointly in London and Edinburgh was in only two volumes:

see Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters, vols 1 and 2 (Strahan & Cadell,

London; Creech, Edinburgh, 1783). This means that the pagination of the two editions is

different.

6 The anthropological centrality of ‘mind’ and ‘language’ during the early nineteenth century is

addressed in H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s anthropology (Rodopi, Amsterdam,

1999); see especially ch. 6.

7 It was also influential through its translations. Don Abbott summarizes Rhetoric’s dissemination

and its translation into Spanish, French and Italian translations, in ‘Blair “abroad”: the European

reception of Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters’, in Gaillet (ed.), op. cit. (note 4), pp. 67–

77. A list of first-edition translations occurs in the bibliography. See also Abbott’s ‘The influence

of Blair’s Lectures in Spain’, Rhetorica 7, 275–289 (1989). Blair’s influence is also addressed in

John Hill, An account of the life and writings of Hugh Blair (Cadell & Davies, Edinburgh, 1807).

8 Paul B. Wood addresses this context in ‘The science of man’, in Cultures of Natural History

(ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary), ch. 12 (Cambridge University Press, 1996),

and in ‘Science, philosophy, and the mind’, in The Cambridge history of science (ed. Roy

Porter), vol. 4 (Eighteenth century science), ch. 34 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). See

the footnotes in these sources for further reading. For the geographical placement of the

‘Science of Man’ during this time period, see David N. Livingstone, ‘Geographical inquiry,

rational religion and moral philosophy: Enlightenment discourse of the human condition’, in

Geography and Enlightenment (ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers),

pp. 93–120 (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

9 The broader humanist foundations of early modern anthropology are addressed in Anthony

Grafton, ‘The identities of history in early modern Europe: prelude to a study of the Artes

Historicae’, in Historia: empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe (ed. Gianna

Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi), pp. 41–74 (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005).


M. D. Eddy22


10 E. E. Evans-Prichard, ‘Social anthropology: past and present. The Marrett Lecture, 1950’, Man

50, 118–124 (1950), at p. 118.

11 Locke’s views on this relationship are addressed throughout Hannah Dawson, Locke, language

and early modern philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007); E. J. Lowe, Locke

(Routledge, London, 2005); John Yolton, John Locke and the way of ideas (Oxford

University Press, London, 1956); John Yolton, Locke and French materialism (Clarendon,

Oxford, 1991); Ian Hacking, Why does language matter to philosophy? (Cambridge

University Press, 1975).

12 See Wood’s introduction to Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation: Papers Relating to the Life

Sciences (ed. Paul Wood) (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1996). Also

Gladys Bryson, Man and society: the Scottish inquiry of the eighteenth century (Princeton

University Press, 1945).

13 The foundational role of idealism, also called ‘ideaism’ by early moderns, in Enlightenment

thought cannot be overestimated. As Hacking, op. cit. (note 11), has shown, the notion of

‘idea’ as the base unit of thought transcends the ‘Cartestian-Rational’ and ‘Lockean-

Empiricist’ typology so often used to characterize eighteenth-century philosophers. See also

Emanuele Levi Mortera, ‘Reid, Stewart and the association of ideas’, J. Scott. Phil. 3, 157–

170 (2005).

14 The ‘volitional’ aspect of ideas as words influenced many of Blair’s sources and contemporaries.

In addition to Hacking, op. cit. (note 11), and Dawson, op. cit. (note 11), the early influence of

this form of idealism is treated in David Bartine, Early English reading theory: origins of

current debates (University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1989), esp. pp. 22–33; and

throughout Murray Cohen, Sensible words: linguistic practice in England, 1640–1785 (Johns

Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1977).

15 The fine-grained role of words as signs differed from scholar to scholar. For the Scottish context,

see M. D. Eddy, ‘The medium of signs: nominalism, language and classification in the early

thought of Dugald Stewart’, Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. Biomed. Sci. 37, 373–393 (2006). For

comparison, see Sophia A. Rosenfeld, A revolution in language: the problem of signs in late

eighteenth-century France (Stanford University Press, 2004).

16 M. D. Eddy, ‘Natural history, natural philosophy and readership’, in The Edinburgh history of the

book in Scotland, vol. 2 (1707–1800) (ed. Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall) (University

of Edinburgh Press, in the press). The use of Cicero, Quintilian and other classical authors for

rhetorical courses in Britain is addressed more broadly in W. S. Howell, Rhetoric and logic in

England, 1500–1700 (Princeton University Press, 1956) and John L. Mahoney, ‘The classical

tradition in eighteenth century English rhetorical education’, Hist. Educ. J. 9, 93–97 (1958).

For the previous two centuries see Peter Mack, Elizabethan rhetoric: theory and practice

(Cambridge University Press, 2002).

17 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 199.

18 The use of conjectural history to understand the origin of language is outlined in Stephen

K. Land, ‘Lord Monboddo and the theory of syntax in the late eighteenth century’, J. Hist.

Ideas 37, 423–440 (1976), and in Nicholas Hudson, Writing and European thought, 1600–

1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), chs 3 and 4.

19 Adamic language is addressed in Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the religions in the

English Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the history of the

anthropological centrality of Adam and Preadamites, see David N. Livingstone, Adam’s

ancestors: race, religion and the politics of human origins (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore,

MD, 2008).

20 Blair audited Smith’s early Edinburgh lectures and borrowed his Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

notes to help him prepare his own lectures. For Smith’s view of language, see Marcelo

Dascal, ‘Adam Smith’s theory of language’, in The Cambridge companion to Adam Smith

(ed. Knud Haakonssen), pp. 79–111 (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher




J. Berry, ‘Adam Smith’s considerations on language’, J. Hist. Ideas 35, 130–138 (1974), esp.

p. 131; Stephen K. Land, ‘Adam Smith’s “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of

Languages”’, J. Hist. Ideas 38, 677–690 (1977).

21 For Native American sign language, see Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 119. His main

source on this topic was Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada

(T. Osborne, London, 1747).

22 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 119. Notably, James H. Merrell avers that the forms of

Native American gesticulation that most interested British colonists were signs that were linked

to survival and trade. ‘“Customs of our country”: Indians and colonists in early America’, in

Strangers within the realm: cultural margins of the first British empire (ed. Bernard Bailyn

and Philip D. Morgan), pp. 117–156 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC,

1991).

23 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, pp. 165–167.

24 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 123.

25 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 128.

26 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), treats the emergence of written language in vol. 1,

pp. 138–161.

27 For the larger use of classical histories in Scotland, see Roger L. Emerson, ‘Conjectural history

and Scottish philosophers’, in Hist. Pap. Can. Hist. Assoc. 19, 63–90 (1984).

28 These tools were also used close to home in the debates over the authenticity of the Scots Gaelic

in James MacPherson’s Ossian poems. See the introduction to vol. 1 of Dafydd Moore (ed.),

Ossian and Ossianism (Routledge, London, 2004).


30 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 198–199.

31 Blair’s discussion of word order and desire, as related to a piece of fruit, is addressed in Blair

(1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, pp. 138–140. Blair also linked the formation of Chinese

characters, which he held to be hieroglyphs, to both moral and intellectual development

(ibid., pp. 150–153). These views, moreover, follow in the same vein as Adam Smith’s

position on the moral importance of language and grammar. Smith’s position on this matter

is outlined in Dascal, op. cit. (note 20), pp. 100–103.


33 It should perhaps be noted that the grammatical categories used to classify parts of speech during

the eighteenth century were unstable. Indeed, no less than 56 different Latin and vernacular

systems were proposed in Britain during the course of the century. See Ian Michael, English

grammatical categories and the tradition to 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1970),

pp. 201–280. For competing classifications of pronunciation, see Joan C. Beal, English

pronunciation in the eighteenth century: Thomas Spence’s grand repository of the English

language (Oxford University Press, 1999). For more on the commonality of these three

classical categories, Blair directed his students to read Quintilian, but he does not state which

work. He was most probably referring to De institutione oratoria, bk 1, ch. 4 (Blair (1783),

op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 164). Lectures eight and nine address Blair’s grammatical divisions

of language (ibid., pp. 163–199). The philosophical desire to divide language into

grammatical categories, especially in the work of Blair’s teacher Adam Smith, is addressed in

Dascal, op. cit. (note 20), pp. 87–100.

34 James Harris, Hermes, or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (H.

Woodfall, London, for J. Nourse, and P. Vaillant, 1751). Blair’s arrangement is similar to

‘System 44’ summarized in Michael, op. cit. (note 33), p. 264, which comprised substantives,

attributives, conjunctives and definitives. Aside from Harris (1751), Michael’s ‘System 44’

occurred in an anonymous set of articles written by ‘W.R.’ in Oxford Magazine during the

late 1760s and in the article ‘Grammar’ in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica

(Edinburgh, 1797).


M. D. Eddy24


35 Blair summed up the major grammatical drawbacks of English by writing, ‘I agree, indeed, with

Dr. Lowth (preface to his Grammar), in thinking that this very simplicity and facility of our

Language proves a cause of its being frequently spoken with less accuracy’ (Blair (1783), op.

cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 212). Here Blair is referring to Lowth’s Short introduction to English

grammar, with critical notes, but no publication details are given.


37 M. D. Eddy, ‘Tools for reordering: commonplacing and the space of words in Linnaeus’s

Philosophia Botanica’, Intellect. Hist. Rev. 20, 227–252 (2010).

38 James Finlayson, Sermons, by Hugh Blair . . . with a Short Account of the Life and Character of

the Author, vol. 1 (Sharpe & Son, London, 1820), p. ix. Also John Blair, Blair’s Chronological

Tables, Revised and Enlarged (H. G. Bohn, London, 1856).


40 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 245–246.

41 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 217–218.

42 Eddy, op. cit. (note 15).

43 For instance, see Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, pp. 141–143.


the line of reason: hugh blair, spatiality and the progressive structure of language. matthew d....

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