William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) and the Study of Religion in Enlightenment England (2018)
This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Lynn Festa;
(2021)
Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB396379434/)
Book
Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton;
(2013)
Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism
(/isis/citation/CBB001420318/)
Chapter
Porter, Roy;
(2003)
The Environment and the Enlightenment: The English Experience
(/isis/citation/CBB000670928/)
Book
Anna K. Sagal;
(2021)
Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB259998433/)
Book
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette;
Blondel, Christine;
(2008)
Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB000850395/)
Book
Kelly, Jason M.;
(2009)
The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB001231389/)
Book
Nadine Weidman;
(2021)
Killer Instinct: The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB223877625/)
Book
James A. Harris;
(2019)
Hume: An Intellectual Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB460332792/)
Thesis
Noni D. Carter;
(2022)
Homo Narrans: In Pursuit of Science’s Fictions of the ‘Human’ in Eighteenth-Century Science and Contemporary Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB489688409/)
Book
Jared Farmer;
(2022)
Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees
(/isis/citation/CBB057151563/)
Article
Ned Curthoys;
(2013)
Redescribing the Enlightenment: The German-Jewish Adoption of Bildung as a Counter-normative Ideal
(/isis/citation/CBB674400558/)
Article
Silvia Sebastiani;
(2019)
A ‘Monster with Human Visage’: The Orangutan, Savagery, and the Borders of Humanity in the Global Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB296727781/)
Article
Alexander Cook;
Ned Curthoys;
(2013)
Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB948183405/)
Article
Jeffrey D. Burson;
(2019)
The Interweaving of Sacred and Secular: Metaphysics, Reform and Enlightenment in the Rivalry Between Dom Deschamps and Claude Yvon, 1769–1774
(/isis/citation/CBB451552367/)
Book
Gascoigne, John;
(2010)
Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment: British and Global Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB001033258/)
Book
Monod, Paul Kléber;
(2013)
Solomon's Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB001213599/)
Thesis
Hume, Brad D.;
(2000)
The naturalization of humanity in America, 1776--1861
(/isis/citation/CBB001560502/)
Chapter
Garrett, Aaron;
(2003)
Anthropology: The “Original” of Human Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000471405/)
Thesis
Goldman, Judith E.;
(2007)
Visible Hand: “System,” Method, and Suasion in the Human Natural Science of Adam Smith
(/isis/citation/CBB001561346/)
Book
Carhart, Michael C.;
(2007)
The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB000950729/)
Be the first to comment!