Online Catalog Product Details

		Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An
		(Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics) By Francis Hutcheson Edited and with an Introduction by Wolfgang Leidhold Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics, Knud Haakonssen, General Editor
		Table of Contents Publication Date: April 2004 6 x 9. 275 pages. Introduction, notes, textual notes, index.

Email this page to a friend

International Customers: If you would like an order shipped outside the U.S., its territories, Canada, South America, Central America, or the Caribbean, please email sales@gazellebooks.co.uk for assistance.

Francis Hutcheson’s first book, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was published in 1725, when its author was only thirty-one, and went through four editions during his lifetime. This seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment is now available for the first time in a variorum edition based on the 1726 edition.

The Inquiry was written as a critical response to the work of Bernard Mandeville and as a defense of the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. It consists of two treatises exploring our aesthetic and our moral abilities.

Francis Hutcheson was a crucial link between the continental European natural law tradition and the emerging Scottish Enlightenment. Hence, he is a pivotal figure in the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series. A contemporary of Lord Kames and George Turnbull, an acquaintance of David Hume, and the teacher of Adam Smith, Hutcheson was arguably the leading figure in making Scotland distinctive within the general European Enlightenment.

Wolfgang Leidhold is Professor of Political Science at the University of Cologne.

Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.

Additional Testimonials

". . . students of Hutcheson can now trace the changing states of his Inquiry by consulting a single volume. This important work, available in an attractively printed and inexpensive edition, will doubtless bring new attention to the philosophy of a key figure in eighteenth-century Irish and Scottish thought."

Daniel Carey
National University of Ireland, Galway
Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Spring 2005



Why read Hutcheson? Most students know of him vaguely, mainly as a precursor of Hume. “There is little or nothing in Hume’s moral philosophy that cannot be traced to Hutcheson, but in Hume it is all more clear and pointed,” wrote Arthur Prior in 1949 (Logic and the Basis of Ethics, 31). Many important strands of Hutcheson’s thought do recur in Hume: his defence of the new theory of a moral sense and his rejection of rationalist theories of ethics, for instance, which, having quickly provoked objections from John Clarke, John Balguy and Gilbert Burnet, led to many of the revisions introduced in later editions of these two works. (The present text-critical editions make it possible for the first time to view these changes synoptically.) But Hutcheson’s work explores other topics, many of them interesting in their own right, all of them of historical interest.

His central idea is that we have, in addition to the five external senses, also a sense of beauty and a moral sense. These senses were introduced in Inquiry (the two main parts of which, published in 1725, will be referred to as T1 and T2). Over time, the number of senses grew, among them, in Essay (also in two parts [1728]: T3 and T4), the public sense and the sense of honor. Experiences conveyed by these senses determine us, he argued, to judge things good or bad, and to decide for or against a course of action, without regard to self-interest: this anti-egoism mattered most to him.

Hutcheson explores other matters too, of course, in these important volumes. Morals without faith: He disputes the thesis that every action is a sin if it is undertaken without considering God. It would have the repugnant consequence that “the best of men are infinitely evil” (T4: 6.1, 187). The problem of evil: He also argues that contemplating the natural world will lead us to belief in a benevolent God. “How can anyone…even question a perfectly good Providence?” (T3: 6.3–4). Moral matters: the “conduct of the passions and affections” (roughly: the emotions and desires) covers a wide range, some of which, like his condemnation of the character traits Hume later described as the “monkish virtues,” seems now mainly of historical interest. Others, for example those concerning honor killings and the sense of honor generally (T3: 5.8), have gained renewed relevance. Beauty: He insists, in Inquiry, on the beauty of the theorems and theories (T1: 3) offered by the deductive sciences (mathematics, physics), a kind of beauty neglected by all subsequent writers on aesthetics. (He also mentioned natural law theory like Pufendorf’s, but omitted this in the fourth edition of T1.) Hutcheson also maintained that our delight at the works of nature is at least equal to, or else greater than, that inspired by works of art (T3: 6.2, 115).

Like other Liberty Fund publications, these volumes are elegantly designed, excellently produced, and moderately priced. To handle and read them is a pleasure.

Thomas Mautner
Australian National University
Ideas, Esthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era
Volume 11