1 C99.

2 Cf. C107: “Mrs T[ait] asked me if I would object to dine with them on Sunday. This of course I declined but it was kind in them [sic] to ask me”.

3 Cf. Smith’s letter from Bonn (29.4.69) quoted in B&C p.86: “A little before seven a German student called and asked me to walk with him. I walked down to the Scottish Church here with him, and had some talk about our way of keeping the Sabbath, which he admitted had advantages. I am not sure what I should do in such cases. In this instance my course was clear, as I had to go to church at any rate; but ought I in other cases to refuse to walk on Sabbath afternoons, or rather to walk and try to use such conversation as is suitable for Sabbath? I incline to the latter view, but would rather have your opinion. When I first called on Dr G. on Saturday, a week ago, he invited me to come to his house on Sabbath evening and of course I declined, but I am not sure that a quiet walk with a fellow-student is quite the same thing. I would also prefer that you should not send letters so as to reach me on Sabbath as the last did”.

4 The subsequent letter (C90) establishes conclusively that the essay was for Prof. A.B. Davidson. According to B&C (p.97): “Dr Davidson’s view of the paper fully realised the hopes of the young author. He praised ‘the reverent spirit’ in which the inquiry had been conducted … and went so far as to say that the psychological part of the essay was the most fundamental examination of the subject he had ever seen. The argument was progressively conducted and ‘always took a firm position on the facts of human nature, not going off into the clouds in treating what was supernatural as if the supernatural were unnatural.’ The appreciation ended with the prediction that Smith would on the human side of the science do good service to Theology.”

5 C89. (The final page of this letter appears to have been lost.)

6 This is described in detail by Smith in his letter of 25.1.68 (C90) – e.g. “… people … were blown in every direction except that in which their hats went, cabs were being quite blown on their sides …”. He was in some alarm over his sister Ellen, who had been out visiting.

7 C90.

8 Writing to his mother from Göttingen (C157a) in July 1869, for example, he remarks: “… [J.S.] Black has suggested that my train of thought needs rather too close attention. I must try to be simpler”. And, on 11th November, 1870 (D408), Lindsay wrote thanking Smith for the copy of his inaugural address at Aberdeen Free Church College (“What History teaches us to seek in the Bible”) and noting, “Tait said he did not understand it at all”.

9 It is published in L&E as “a fragment” under the title, “Prophecy and Personality” although referred to in the polite rejection note from (Archdeacon) E H Plumtre, joint editor of the Contemporary Review (D565: 20.4.68) as “your paper on Prophecy and History”. Black and Chrystal’s choice of title is the better one.

10 EB9 (1875) vol.iii, p.640.

11 Cf. Bain (1873) p.129: “By inapplicable phraseology many a question has been darkened and mystified to the point of despair.”

12 See the contemporary article, “Association, Laws of” in EB9 (vol.ii, 1875, pp.730-734) by James Croom Robertson, Professor of Logic at University College London, for a decidedly less up-to-date view of associationism than Alexander Bain was by then setting out in Mind and Body (1873) and, five years later, in Education as a Science (1878).

13 These ideas are fully presented in Bain’s Mind and Body: the Theories of their Relation but had been foreshadowed in his earlier works, especially in The Senses and the Intellect (1855 and later edns.). In Mind and Body, Bain emphasised, for example, “the relation between outward agents and the human feelings” (p.39) and this idea underlies Smith’s argument on the inter-relationship between the prophet and external influences, both natural and supernatural. The term “parallelism” is somewhat misleading since the geometric analogy suggests association without interaction – the reverse of Bain’s intention, which was to demonstrate that observable neural processes have similarly observable mental correlates.

14 By “history”, Smith means the events of history.

15 Cf. Bain’s rather awkward description of the mind/body correlation (Mind and Body, p.132): “The line of mental sequence is thus, not mind causing body, and body causing mind, but mind-body giving birth to body-mind; a much more intelligible position. For this double, or conjoint causation, we can produce evidence; for the single-handed causation we have no evidence”. Smith is attempting to express the same notion of reciprocity with regard to mind and external stimuli, both natural and supernatural.

16 L&E , p.98.

17 Ib., p.97f.

18 Ib., p.99.

19 Ib., p.98.

20 Ib., p.100.

21 Ib., p.101f.

22 Ib.

23 Ib., p.103.

24 One wonders, in this context, about “false prophets” but WRS slides over this difficulty.

25 L&E, p103.

26 Ib., p.104.

27 The virtually untranslatable term, Vorstellungen, comes from Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) the founder of “scientific pedagogy”: it implies formed ideas or, more simply, concepts.

28 Ib., p.106f.

29 Quoted in B&C, p.77, from Davidson’s uncompleted Commentary Critical and Exegetical on the Book of Job (1862). It is this working principle, encouraged by if not wholly originating with A.B. Davidson, which underpins the methodology and spirit of Smith’s article, “Bible”, in EB9. Two years earlier, Benjamin Jowett (Essays and Reviews, 1860, p.337) had written: “… the same rules apply to the Old and New Testaments as to other books”.

30 L&E p.99.

31 The debt is unacknowledged apart from one footnote, referring to Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect (1855), the third edition of which had been published in 1868.

32 Cf. (L&E, p.100f): “But the capacity of the nerves themselves to conduct certain definite excitations only will limit the range of the feelings thus miraculously excited [by revelation], to which may be added the further limitation that only a feeling previously experienced can form part of a visionary image that owes its formation to the laws of association.

33 The enunciation of this principle in a fully developed form is owed to Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), educated at Tübingen and Heidelberg, and for a time a junior colleague of Helmholtz before going his own way in establishing the discipline of experimental psychology for the first time. It is tempting to speculate that Smith attended part of Wundt’s course in physiological psychology during his visit to Heidelberg in 1867 but his letters do not confirm this. See Boring (1950, ch.16 passim) for a full account of Wundt’s life and work..

34 Cf. especially ch. iv of The Senses and the Intellect, where Bain deals with “ … the operations known by such names as Imagination, Creation, Constructiveness, Origination: through which we are supposed to put together new forms, or to construct images, conceptions, pictures and modes of working, such as we have never before had any experience of. Yet the genius of the Painter, the Poet, the Musician, and the Inventor in the arts and the sciences, evidently implies a process of this nature”. Smith’s one acknowledgement to Bain (see above, n.31) is to this chapter of The Senses and the Intellect.

35 Helmholtz (influenced strongly by the British school of empirical philosophy) had already introduced the idea of “unconscious inferences” into his work on perception (see Thomson, 1968, p.65) but Smith’s essay pre-dates his encounters with Helmholtz. J.S. Mill’s chapter, Of the Laws of the Mind (A System of Logic, bk. vi, ch. iv) is likely, however, to have been familiar to Smith. It offers a particularly clear exposition of the mind/body problem: cf. §2 (“Is there a science of Psychology?”) where Mill argues, against Comte, that the “Laws of Mind … can be ascertained by observation and experiment”, even if the phenomena observed are ultimately derivatives of physiological states.

36 L&E, p.99. By 1873, in Mind and Body, Bain was arguing (p.49) that, even in sleep, “there are always currents of nerve-force, but that consciousness disappears according as these are unvaried in their degree”. We now know he was right in the first inference but wrong in the second.

37 L&E p.106.

38 Smith is here alluding to – and challenging – Butler’s argument in The Analogy of Religion (II, vii, p.264): “However, suppose a writing, partly in cypher, and partly in plain words at length; and that in the part one understood, there appeared mention of several known facts; it would never come into any man’s thoughts to imagine, that if he understood the whole, perhaps he might find, that those facts were not in reality known by the writer”.

39 Ib., p.106.

40 C150 (to his mother): “I have got the Hamilton – to my own surprise with an average of 183 marks (full value 200)”. He continues; “The Professors were afraid I had undertaken too much work and promised to do anything they could for me in the way of arranging about attendance [at classes]”.

41 C108 (to his father): “Lindsay … is first with 93 per cent … my percentage ranged fr. 65 to 68 … I am quite well and not depressed”.

42 L&E, pp.109-136.

43 Cf. Jowett (Essays and Reviews) p.351: “It is one evil of conditions or previous suppositions in the study of Scripture that the assumption of them has led to an apologetic temper in the interpreters of Scripture. The tone of apology is always a tone of weakness and does injury to a good cause. It is the reverse of ‘ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free’ “.

44 L&E, p.111.

45 Ib., p.113.

46 Ib., p.115.

47 “It is absurd” is one of WRS’s favourite expressions, both here and in his other early essays: by inviting ridicule for any contrary proposition, it always marks the use of what Lewis Carroll would have called “a knock-down argument”.

48 Ib., p.117.

49 Ib., p.120f. Smith claims that this is a “neglected fact”.

50 Ib., p.121.

51 Ib., p.124.

52 Ib., p.127.

53 Ib., p.134.

54 C152 (to his mother, 13.2.69). According to B&C (p.103), the row flared up on February 5, when “a very ignorant man” (whom B&C do not name) brought a motion “really levelled against Lindsay, Black and myself, whom he accused of habitual contempt of scripture”.

55 B&C, p.104: “I came down on him pretty heavily, plainly telling him that he could never have supposed that there had been anti-scriptural teaching in the Society unless he had been utterly ignorant of Theology”.

56 C152.

57 C153.

58 Smith actually shared the presidency with Kippen and Bell, as his letter home (C111) in March, 1869 indicates. He adds, “… and I have been chosen to give the Introductory Address next winter”.

59 In L&E, pp.137-162.

60 Ib., p.138.

61 61 The list is impressive, as the letter to his father (C116, 24/25.5.69) indicates: amongst other scientists, he met the aged Weber at Bonn (thanks to a letter from Sir Wm. Thomson), Kohlrausch at Göttingen, Helmholtz and Kirchhoff at Heidelberg. Of the theologians, he was most taken by Ritschl, whose temperament seems to have resonated deeply with Smith’s: “Did I tell you about Ritschl? He was a pupil of Baur’s but too acute to remain in the Tübingen School and was accordingly rescued by Baur both scientifically and personally. He now takes a very independent course freely criticising the established positions; but cherishing much greater respect for the reformers than for the present dogmatic … I have never heard anything so interesting on a theological subject as Ritschl’s lectures”.

62 Ib., p.140. Smith’s sentiments here are remarkably Whewellian.

63 Ib., p.141.

64 The Moderator for 1868 was the Rev. William Nixon of Montrose. The much-applauded Moderatorial address from which Robertson Smith quotes (FCSAP,1868, pp.2-11) is an extraordinary display of reactionary fanaticism, even by Free Church standards of the day, and should have given Smith pause – e.g.: “He is not a good Free Churchman who commits himself to our standards before he is satisfied that they are but an echo, in human language, of the infallible Word, or who does not continue to look at them in the light of Scripture, and to uphold them only under its supreme and sole authority. (Applause.) Neither has it yet been proved that they are untenable amidst the light cast on them by the discoveries of science. Flippant criticisms to that effect, indeed, are directed against them by imperfectly educated guides of public opinion, including certain rather shallow occupants of chairs in seats of learning, and even in schools of theology”.

65 Ib., p.143.

66 Ib., p.147.

67 Ib., p.152. Smith never underwent a “conversion” experience and remained deeply suspicious of those who asked if he had been “born again”. Here Smith’s views had been supported by his long discussions with Ritschl during his visit to Germany that summer. In particular, Ritschl had helped Smith clear his mind on the matter of sects: “A union with the Sects is of course according to Ritschl quite impossible. In many respects we may wish them well and recognise that in the present state of things they may do useful work but their principle of excluding from the Church all who cannot profess to have undergone an empirical conversion puts them in necessary antagonism to the Church”. (C118: letter to his father, 7.7.69).

68 Ib., p.154f.

69 On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man (1835).

70 “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750”; in Essays and Reviews, p.292f. Cf., in the same volume, Baden Powell’s essay, “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity”, which interestingly calls attention to what would nowadays be called “observer error” as a crucial weakness in the “argument from testimony” in relation to miracles.

71 Cf. Butler (1860) p.283: “Suppose, I say, these [historical] facts set over against the things before mentioned out of the Scripture, and seriously compared with them; the joint view of both together must, I think, appear of very great weight to a considerate reasonable person …”.

72 Ib., p.290: “Now if men can be convinced, that they have the like reason to believe this, as to believe that taking care of their temporal affairs will be to their advantage, such conviction cannot but be an argument to them for the practice of their religion”.

73 Malthus (1982). The Essay was first published in 1798 but his views gained real prominence only after publication of his second essay, A Summary View of the Principle of Population in 1830.

74 Chalmers terms it “lax and adventurous speculation” (vol.ii, p.103).

75 Ib., pp.103f. It was this approach that Pattison stigmatized as “so depressing to the soul” (in Essays and Reviews, p.293).

76 Ib., p.113.

77 Ib., p.126.

78 Robert M. Young, in his paper, “The Impact of Darwinism on Conventional Thought” (Symondson ed. 1970) seems to be representative of those who speak loosely of the “prevailing laissez-faire economic theory” (p.14). J.S. Mill’s position is unequivocally stated in his autobiography: “The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour … we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as … ‘merely provisional’ ” (Mill, 1963, p.196). Bain , in his J.S.. Mill (1882) p.89, spells out clearly Mill’s radical proposals for the redistribution of property, for example, while commenting that he doubted if Mill had fully thought through the implications.

79 L&E, p.149.

80 Ib., p.157.

81 Ib., p.157.

82 Ib.

83 B&C, p.116: “I dined with Tait yesterday, [October 28] with Crum Brown [Tait’s brother-in-law] and McLennan, an advocate”.