Abstract
In 1734, John Arbuthnot, Scottish physician, Royal Society member, Scriblerian wit and close friend of Alexander Pope, published Know Yourself, a 138-line philosophical poem. Strikingly different from his other satirical and scientific works — he made frequent, if often unattributable contributions to the Scriblerian output, and published a number of works on mathematical and medical topics — the poem is suffused with an alert and questioning self-consciousness, and attempts to offer a philosophical and theological answer to the injunction to ‘know yourself’ imposed by its title. Know Yourself identifies a ‘double Nature’ and ‘double Instinct’ in mankind, whom it places in an uneasy position between heaven and the beasts: ‘Angel enough’ to seek happiness, but ‘Brute enough to make the Search in vain’. The dominant sense is of mankind’s postlapsarian displacement and rootlessness, man’s ejection from the ‘Bliss’ of his ‘native Sky’ and his painful, weary inhabiting of ‘this poor Clod’, an experience of dislocation which prompts a continual, uneasy and unrealisable desire. Man is a thoughtless wanderer on the road of his life, unattentive to his eventual end, longing to raise himself on ‘Wings of Love and Praise’, yet making best progress when his ‘wary Footsteps’ are guided by ‘humble Thoughts’. This constrained and difficult position between heavenly aspiration and our fallen nature is ultimately resolved by divine revelation: the ‘sacred Text’ which uncovers the ‘Secret’ of man’s ‘high Descent’ and decodes the ‘mystick Tokens’ which are ‘Marks’ of man’s ‘Birth’. The poem thus discovers an enlightenment of sorts, though a temporary one, and one which only reinstitutes the troubling duality of man’s nature, its combination of ‘unthinking Clod’ and ‘heav’nly Fire’. By the end of the poem, this doubleness renders a final paradox: whilst the ‘Mysterious Passage’ of man’s eventual ascent to heaven is ‘hid from human Eyes’, in ‘Soaring you’ll sink, and sinking you will rise’. In a poem infused with a sense of homelessness and exile, and where man’s fallen nature is a mark of regression, man’s homecoming is paradoxically achieved through a reconciliation to his fall.1
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Notes
John Arbuthnot, Gnothi Seauton: Know Yourself (London, 1734), repr. in Literature and Science 1660–1834, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), vol. 2, ed. Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, pp. 79–88.
John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments (London, 1731), p. v.
John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health (London, 1744), repr. in Literature and Science 1660–1834, vol. 2, ed. Lawlor and Suzuki, Book 4, ll. 12–13, 16–22.
An extensive literature exists on the transformation of moral philosophy in Scottish universities at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the influence of natural philosophy on the Scottish Enlightenment more generally. See Michael Barfoot, ‘Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 151–90; Ronald G. Cant, ‘Origins of the Enlightenment in Scotland: The Universities’, in The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 42–64; Roger L. Emerson, ‘Natural Philosophy and the Problem of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 242 (1986), 243–91, and Emerson, ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Stewart, pp. 11–36; Peter Jones, ed., Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988); Christine M. Shepherd, ‘Newtonianism in Scottish Universities in the Seventeenth Century’, in Origins and Nature of Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Campbell and Skinner, pp. 65–85; Paul Wood, ‘Science and the Aberdeen Enlightenment’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Jones, pp. 39–66, and Wood, ‘Science and the Pursuit of Virtue in the Aberdeen Enlightenment’, in Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Campbell and Skinner, pp. 127–49.
David Shuttleton argues that Arbuthnot was intimate with Scottish Tory Newtonians, and may have defended the Newtonian Archibald Pitcairne in Edinburgh disputes over the new science. See his ‘“A Modest Examination”: John Arbuthnot and the Scottish Newtonians’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18:1 (1995), 47–62. See also Anita Guerrini, ‘The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and their Circle’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 288–311.
William Leechman, ‘Preface: Giving some Account of the Life, Writings, & Character of the Author’, in A System of Moral Philosophy, by Francis Hutcheson (Glasgow, 1755), pp. i–xlviii. On Hutcheson, see T. D. Campbell, ‘Francis Hutcheson: “Father” of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Campbell and Skinner, pp. 167–85.
David Fordyce, Elements of Moral Philosophy (London, 1754), pp. 19–20.
Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, in Three Books (Glasgow, 1747), p. 1; Leechman, ‘Preface’, p. xv.
David Hume, ‘Abstract’ to A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 646; Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), vol. 1, pp. 32–3.
John Sekora’s Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) remains a classic account of such anxieties.
My argument in this section has already appeared in similar form in ‘Disability and Sympathetic Sociability in Enlightenment Scotland: The Case of Thomas Blacklock’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30:3 (2007), 423–38.
Joseph Spence, ‘An Account of the Life, Character, and Poems of the Author’, in Poems by Mr. Thomas Blacklock (London, 1756), p. xlv.
Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 96–100; see also Edward Larrissy, ‘The Celtic Bard of Romanticism: Blindness and Second Sight’, Romanticism, 5:1 (1999), 43–57.
[Thomas Blacklock], entry on ‘Blind’, Encyclopœdia Britannica, vol. 2, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1778), pp. 1188–204 (p. 1189).
Thomas Blacklock, Poems on Several Occasions (Glasgow, 1746), p. 26. There are minor changes to this poem in Blacklock’s later collections of 1754 and 1793.
Blacklock, Poems on Several Occasions (Edinburgh, 1754), pp. 141–55 (pp. 144–5). This poem is not included in the 1746 collection.
For a discussion of the eighteenth-century construction of disability as difference, see Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds, Defects: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), Introduction, and Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Forms of Enlightenment: Embodied Beings in Eighteenth-Century Scotland. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_2
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