| 中文摘要 |
It was a commonplace of Enlightenment thinking that history should be studied in order to instruct as well as to entertain, and that the history of great events should be set in contexts that would throw light on the manners, morals and beliefs of the actors engaged in them. No group of intellectuals in the eighteenth century was to be more sensitive to this agenda that the historians of the Scottish Enlightenment. David Hume, William Robertson John Millar and their followers developed a philosophical history that was 'philosophical' in the sense of being rooted in the principles of human nature and 'historical' in its sensitivity to the civilisational origins of national institutions and cultures. It was this that led David Hume to exclaim in 1770 that 'this is the historical age and this the historical nation.'1 It was a historiography that made the Scots particularly sensitive to the European origins and contexts of their own history—Hume's treatment of the history of England and Robertson's treatment of the history of Scotland are particularly noteworthy in this respect, and it ensured that their attitudes to Europe would always retain a distinctively Scottish character. |
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