Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/145

Rh before the court of session lasted thirty-one days, and the most eminent lawyers were engaged. It is a curious historical fact, that almost all the lawyers on both sides were afterwards raised to the bench. Mr Burnet was, in 1764, made sheriff of his native county, and on the 12th February, 1767, through the interest of the Duke of Queensberry, lord justice general, he succeeded Lord Milton as a lord of session, under the title of Lord Monboddo. It is said that he refused a justiciary gown, being unwilling that his studies should be interrupted, during the vacation, by any additional engagements.

The first work which he published was on the Origin and Progress of Language. The first volume appeared in 1771, the second in 1773, and the third in 1776. This treatise attracted a great deal of attention on account of the singularity of some of the doctrines which it advanced. In the first part, he gives a very learned, elaborate, and abstruse account of the origin of ideas, according to the metaphysics of Plato and the commentators on Aristotle, philosophers to whose writings and theories he was devotedly attached. He then treats of the origin of human society and of language, which he considers as a human invention, without paying the least regard to the scriptural accounts. He represents men as having originally been, and continued for many ages to be, no better than beasts, and indeed in many respects worse; as destitute of speech, of reason, of conscience, of social affection, and of every thing that can confer dignity upon a creature, and possessed of nothing but external sense and memory, and a capacity of improvement The system is not a new one, being borrowed from Lucretius, of whose account of it, Horace gives an exact abridgment in these lines:―"Cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris, mutum et turpe pecus," &c. which Lord Monboddo takes for his motto, and which, he said, comprehended in miniature the whole history of man. In regard to facts that make for his system he is amazingly credulous, but blind and sceptical in regard to every thing of an opposite tendency. He asserts with the utmost gravity and confidence, that the oran-outangs are of the human species that in the bay of Bengal, there exists a nation of human creatures with tails, discovered one hundred and thirty years before by a Swedish skipper―that the beavers and sea-cats are social and political animals, though man, by nature, is neither social nor political, nor even rational―reason, reflection, a sense of right and wrong, society, policy, and even thought, being, in the human species, as much the effects of art, contrivance, and long experience, as writing, ship-building, or any other manufacture. Notwithstanding that the work contains these and many other strange and whimsical opinions, yet it discovers great acuteness of remark.

His greatest work, which he called " Ancient Metaphysics," consists of three volumes 4to., the last of which was published only a few weeks before the author's death. It may be considered as an exposition and defence of the Grecian philosophy in opposition to the philosophical system of Sir Isaac Newton, and the scepticism of modern metaphysicians, particularly Mr David Hume. His opinions upon many points coincide with those of Mr Harris, the author of Hermes, who was his intimate friend, and of whom he was a great admirer. He never seems to have understood, nor to have entered into the spirit of the Newtonian philosophy; and, as to Mr Hume, he, without any disguise, accuses him of atheism, and reprobates in the most severe terms some of his opinions.

In domestic circumstances Monboddo was particularly unfortunate. His wife, a very beautiful woman, died in child-bed. His son, a promising boy, in whose education he took great delight, was likewise snatched from his affections by a premature death ; and his second daughter, in personal loveliness one of the first women of the age, was cut off by consumption, when only twenty-five years old.