Not content with inventing the telephone, Scotland also discovered electromagnetism which is the basis for mobile phones and wi-fi. Knox and Buchanan believed that political power was ordained by God, but that that power was vested not in kings or in nobles or even in the clergy, but in the people.

Hutcheson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, championed political liberty and the right of popular rebellion against tyranny. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. S. Constitution; and how thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong.

Glasgow, the first hub of Scotland’s transatlantic trade, would soon be joined by Ayr, Greenock, Paisley, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh.

They are “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “not proven,” which jurors invoke when they decide the prosecution has failed to make a compelling case even when the prisoner is obviously guilty.Everyone, the artist and the artisan, the philosopher and the mechanic, the scholar and the manufacturer, was engaged in the same project: creating a polite, humane, enlightened culture. All worldlie strength, yea even in things spiritual, decays, and yet shall never the work of God decay. This is the sort of view we are used to ascribing to John Locke; in fact, it belongs to a Presbyterian Scot from Stirlingshire writing more than a hundred years earlier. And no one who takes this incredible historical trek will ever view the Scots—or the modern West—in the same way again. At the time of publication, the author was the coordinator of the Western Civilization Program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the “Scottish school,” as it came to be known, brought to the modern world. And no one who takes this incredible historical trek will ever view the Scotsor the modern Westin the same way again.For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue.