Nowhere has Puritanism, with its keen intelligence and its
iron tenacity of purpose, played a greater part than it has played in
the history of Scotland. And one need not fear contradiction in saying
that no other people in modern times, in proportion to their numbers,
have achieved so much in all departments of human activity as the people
of Scotland have achieved. It would be superfluous to mention the
preeminence of Scotland in the industrial arts since the days of James
Watt, or to recount the glorious names in philosophy, in history, in
poetry and romance, and in every department of science, which since the
middle of the eighteenth century have made the country of Burns and
Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith, of Black and Hunter and Hutton and
Lyell, illustrious for all future time. Now this period of magnificent
intellectual fruition in Scotland was preceded by a period of
Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of New England. The
ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the seventeenth century cherished a
theocratic ideal of society not unlike that which the colonists of New
England aimed at realizing. There was the same austerity, the same
intolerance, the same narrowness of interests, in Scotland that there
was in New England. Mr. Buckle, in the book which thirty years ago
seemed so great and stimulating, gave us a graphic picture of this state
of society, and the only thing which he could find to say about it, as
the result of his elaborate survey, was that the spirit of the Scotch
Kirk was as thoroughly hostile to human progress as the spirit of the
Spanish Inquisition! If this were really so, it would be difficult
indeed to account for the period of brilliant mental activity which
immediately followed.
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