Abstract

Traditionally, American culture has admired what could be termed the common sense virtues of intellectual and artistic self reliance, hostility to metaphysical speculation, equality in intellectual and moral perception, and pragmatism. These are also traits that tend to characterize an important part of eighteenth century British literature: the Scottish common sense philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scholars recognize the dominance of the writings of the "North Britons" in American college education from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Yet almost no scholarship has attempted to trace its effects. ;This study first examines in general terms the influence of the Scottish philosophy on such American writers as Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson. It then analyzes this Scottish legacy in some detail by examining selected writings of one of America's most important literary and cultural influences: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson's education at Harvard consisted in being thoroughly trained in the Scottish thinkers. This study concludes that Emerson's common sense dismissal of skepticism, his trust in the individual's sense perception of nature as the means to his idealism, his emphasis on self-reliance, his democratic notions of knowledge, and his conception of a moral sense can be understood as a significant legacy of the Scots