Henry Home, Lord Kames (born 1696, Kames, Berwickshire, Scot.—died Dec. 27, 1782, Edinburgh) was a lawyer, agriculturalist, and philosopher.
Kames was called to the bar in 1724 and was appointed a judge in the Court of Session in 1752. He became a lord of justiciary in 1763. He is best known for his Elements of Criticism, 3 vol. (1762), a work remarkable in the history of aesthetics for its attempt to equate beauty with what is pleasant to the natural senses of sight and hearing.
His other works include Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751), An Introduction to the Art of Thinking (1761), Sketches of the History of Man, 2 vol. (1774), and The Gentleman Farmer (1776).
Scottish Enlightenment, the conjunction of minds, ideas, and publications in Scotland during the whole of the second half of the 18th century and extending over several decades on either side of that period. Contemporaries referred to Edinburgh as a “hotbed of genius.” Voltaire in 1762 wrote in characteristically provocative fashion that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening,” and Benjamin Franklin caught the mood of the place in his Autobiography (1794): “Persons of good Sense…seldom fall into [disputation], except Lawyers, University Men, and Men of all Sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.”
The personalities were fundamental: most prominent in retrospect are the philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, matched at the time by Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. However, the Scottish Enlightenment was neither a single school of philosophical thought nor a single intellectual movement. But movement it was: a movement of ideas and the disputation of those ideas. The men who developed and disputed those ideas as they met in the societies and ate and drank in the taverns of the Old Town in Edinburgh created momentum on many fronts. It was a movement of taste in architecture—Robert Adam and his brother James, followed in due course by William Playfair; a movement of taste in literature and belles lettres—Hugh Blair, the holder of the first chair of rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh, and the poets James Thomson, Allan Ramsay, and the incomparable Robert Burns, as well as the playwright John Home; a movement in the arts, especially in portraiture—the portrait artists Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn and the miniature wax and paste portraitists James Tassie, his nephew William Tassie, and John Henning. Equally central were those who made lasting and formative impacts on the development of the sciences of mathematics (Colin Maclaurin), medicine (William Cullen), chemistry (Joseph Black), engineering (James Watt and Thomas Telford), and geology (James Hutton).
Underlying and stimulating the activity in all these fields were developments in philosophy, which, although they do not define a single school, set a context for the intellectual endeavours that were integral to the Scottish Enlightenment. These developments had four key characteristics. The first was a skepticism about various forms of rationalism and about the attempts by such thinkers as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to find a single method or set of rules of rationality from which all truths might be deduced. The second was the central place given to what was connoted by the terms sentiment and sense (as in the technical expression “moral sense,” which was at the core of the moral sense school founded by the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, and as in the name given to the philosophy of common sense, which emerged in Scotland in the 18th century). The third was the drive toward empirical methods of inquiry, and the fourth, which draws on all of these, was given a prominent position in the title of the first and ultimately most important of Hume’s writings: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). Hume’s dream, shared by others, was to replace the appeal to forms of rationalism as a means of distinguishing true from false beliefs with the development of a science of human nature.