the line of reason: hugh blair, spatiality and the progressive structure of language. matthew d....
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online January 12, 2011 first published, doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2010.009865 2011 Notes Rec. R. Soc.
Matthew D. Eddy progressive structure of languageThe line of reason: Hugh Blair, spatiality and the
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Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2011) 65, 9–24
doi:10.1098/rsnr.2010.0098
*m
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
9 This journal is q 2011 The Royal Society
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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.)
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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.
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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.)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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).
29 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 138.
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.
32 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 124.
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
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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.
36 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 198.
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).
39 Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 217.
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.