Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion - (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics) 3rd Edition by Henry Home Lord Kames

Book Synopsis

The Essays is commonly considered Kames's most important philosophical work. In the first part, he sets forth the principles and foundations of morality and justice, attacking Hume's moral skepticism and addressing the controversial issue of the freedom of human will. In the second part, Kames focuses on questions of metaphysics and epistemology to offer a natural theology in which the authority of the external senses is an important basis for belief in the Deity.

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Mary Catherine Moran taught in the Department of History at Columbia University.

Review Quotes

. . . .Mary Catherine Moran's introduction to the less widely circulated but important Essays [on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion] gives a short biography followed by a well-sketched overview of Kames's project to construct a moral system "on the principles of natural law" (ix), summarizing the arguments on morality, justice, necessity, and natural theology that he gives in the separate discussions comprising the work. Moran's comparison of the more or less static concept of human nature given in Essays with the better-known savage-to-civilization progress theory of Kames's Sketches of the History of Man(1774) illuminates the significant tension in Kames's work between historicism and commitment to a notion of a providential system. Both works [Elements of Criticism and Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion] include, in addition to well-judged footnotes, new indexes and short bibliographies of recent secondary literature. These volumes will now make it significantly easier to give Kames his full due as a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment in the classroom.

Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Spring 2006