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The line of reason: Hugh Blair, spatiality and the progressive structure of language
Matthew D. Eddy Notes Rec. R. Soc. 2011 65, doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2010.0098 first published online January 12, 2011

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2011) 65, 924 doi:10.1098/rsnr.2010.0098 Published online 12 January 2011

THE LINE OF REASON: HUGH BLAIR, SPATIALITY AND THE PROGRESSIVE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE

by MATTHEW D. EDDY*
Department of Philosophy, Durham University, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writings of grammarians and educators such as Blair have received little attention in histories of nascent palaeoarchaeology and palaeoanthropology, I show that he addressed a number of conceptual themes that were of central relevance to the primitive, ancient and modern typology that guided the construction of prehistoric minds during the early decades of the Victorian era. Although I address the referential power of language to a certain extent, my main point is that the rectilinear spatiality afforded by Western forms of graphic representation created an implicitly progressivist framework of disordered, ordered and reordered minds. Keywords: anthropology; linearity; morality; note-taking; prehistory; rationality

[L]ife is lived not at points but along lines.1 Memory is poorer for the orientation of oblique lines.2 [T]he spoken differs from the written word, where the line becomes straight in either a sideways or downwards direction.3

INTRODUCTION
Enlightenment thinkers paid very close attention to the natural history of language. Central to this interest was a deep commitment to the fundamental role of print culture and, by extension, the philological models and typologies used to understand human origins. Words and space preserved on a page not only provided an analogy for the linear nature of human thought, but they also had the power to order and reorder the content of the mind. In this sense, both words and the space around them were purposeful artefacts. In this essay I examine this model by focusing on how it provided a way to compare and
*m.d.eddy@durham.ac.uk

This journal is q 2011 The Royal Society

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contrast the minds of primitive, ancient and modern cultures. I show that the framework used to interpret minds employed categories of analysis that gave priority to the spatial nature of words. To pursue this topic, I focus on the Rev. Dr Hugh Blair, the University of Edinburghs professor of rhetoric and belles lettres (gure 1). As one of the most inuential linguistic experts of the day, he gave lectures that were attended by hundreds of students, many of whom would become leading scientists.4 Additionally, at the end of his career, Blair turned his course into a bestselling book entitled Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres.5 This text addresses numerous points on the natural history of language that would later be rened in the nineteenth-century anthropological literature, especially in the books of leading authors such as James Cowles Prichard, Mary Sommerville and Robert Chambers.6 As one the most widely read language texts in the West from the 1780s to the 1840s, Blairs Rhetoric provides insight into how the relationship between anthropology and linguistics was being portrayed to literate audiences in the British Empire, the American Republic and Europe.7 Yet, although aspects of Blairs views of language were indeed innovative, I should perhaps emphasize that I am not treating him as a unique language theorist. Instead, I am interested in his role as a popular professor and author who promoted common thinking tools that have remained hitherto unrecognized by historians of prehistory and print culture in general. Key to Blairs thoughts on composition and style was the belief that language was intimately linked to the structure of the human mind, and this led him to present a detailed account of the origins and meaning of language in his lectures. His interest in this subject was part of a larger fascination among Scottish professors and professionals with the Science of Man, that is, the study of the cognitive and cultural factors that differentiated one civilization from another and formed the core of human nature.8 In this sense they were humanists as well as anthropologists, and their work laid the foundation for the nineteenth-century societies and professorships that would be devoted to the study of archaeology and anthropology.9 The importance of this Scottish context was once summed up by E. E. Evans-Pritchard when he wrote, Our [anthropological] forbearers were the Scottish moral philosophers, whose writings were typical of the eighteenth century.10 Focusing on Blairs lectures, I show that that he used the words and spaces of print to create an informal cultural typology of disordered, ordered and reordered minds. I do this by presenting a composite model that gives a clearer picture of how his view of the mind directly affected the chronology that he used to account for the origins of language and literacy. I begin by explaining how his interpretation originated from a particularly Scottish view of the human mind and then go on to delineate the various stages of language that he believed led up to the clarity and precision that he attributed to English.

VISIBLE

FORMS FOR INVISIBLE MINDS

The relationship between thought and language was a common topic of enquiry during the early modern period, especially among those who were inuenced by John Lockes epistemology.11 In Scotland this relationship was linked to several philosophical, moral and medical concepts and was inuenced by different political, religious and social commitments.12 There were, however, several features that most of these theories shared. First and foremost, the idea was taken as the basic building block of thought. Second,

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Figure 1. Hugh Blair, depicted in the third row of the third column, was an inuential thinker during the late Scottish Enlightenment. The posthumous success of his published lectures also preserved his legacy throughout Britain, its colonies and in Europe up through the middle of the nineteenth century. (Source: J. W. Cook, Writers: Twenty Portraits (Baldwin, Craddock & Joy, London, 1825). Wellcome Library, London; reproduced with permission.)

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ideas were generated from direct sensory experience or from various combinations of other ideas. Third, ideas were collected by the operations of the mind into the storehouse of memory. Fourth, ideas owed past the minds eye in a manner similar to a chain of beads, one after another. This process was often called the train of thought, the train of ideas or the chain of reasoning.13 Although aspects of this model have sometimes been treated as metaphors by historians, many eighteenth-century authors saw it as the de facto reality of the minds content. Thus, although the model clearly followed the picture of the mind painted by Locke, later versions were actually revised interpretations of Lockean idealism (sometimes nominalist in tone) that emphasized the volitional association of ideas.14 Crucially, this model of the mind treated words as signs that represented ideas.15 In short, printed words were visible representations that spatialized the building blocks of human thought on paper. The volitional collection, retention and management of ideas and words was the domain of rationality, which was intimately linked to language and, by extension, the spatial domain of the printed and written page. Because most Europeans believed that speech was the key characteristic that made humans different from animals, the relationship between rationality and language was central to Scottish philosophies of the human mind. This meant that the history of language was also the history of rationality and morality; that is, two things that many Enlightened thinkers held to be the most important characteristics of human nature. It is for this reason that Scotlands intellectuals took great care to familiarize themselves not only with the history of Western literacy, but also with texts that addressed the languages of the indigenous inhabitants of other parts of the world. This led them to view words as spatialized mental artefacts that had developed accumulatively through different cultures throughout history and not as a universal or essentialist system of signs that had existed in a pure form in the past or that could be created in the future. The idea that words on the page were analogous to ideas in the mind was not novel per se to Scotland, nor even to the wider late Enlightenment context. Indeed, it was a core principle of the model of the mind employed in classical rhetoric, particularly in the works of Cicero, Quintilian and the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium. Scots learnt about this model by reading these works in primary and secondary educational settings.16 Blair, for example, repeatedly cited the foregoing authors when he discussed the malleability and representative value of language. This was because he held that such views offered a way to construct a progressive mental chronology that could be used to understand the history of humankind. The notion that words were spatialized signs placed language in a very special cultural position. As Blair put it in his Lectures on Rhetoric:
[T]he general construction of Language . . . is, however, of great importance, and very nearly connected with the philosophy of the human mind. For, if Speech be the vehicle, or interpreter of the conceptions of our minds, an examination of its Structure and Progress cannot but unfold many things concerning the nature and progress of our conceptions themselves, and the operations of our faculties.17

The foregoing view had been taught to Blair by his own professors, especially Adam Smith and James Ferguson, and continued to have a central role in the thought of his students who became professors, particularly Dugald Stewart and James Gregory. In this setting, the subtle logic of language treated words as visible forms of invisible minds. Once materialized into words, ideas were then subjected to systematization, the ultimate prize of human rationality.

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Within this mindset, Blair assumed three hierarchical stages of language, each being associated with a specic era of thought as well as with specic kinds of representational forms. Although these stages were commonly used throughout Europe, the nuances of their genesis and meaning varied from author to author. Blairs views on this subject therefore give a snapshot of the general progressivist framework that late Enlightenment thinkers used to interpret human origins at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

PRIMITIVE

HISTORY AND DISORDERED MINDS

Most late eighteenth-century accounts on the origin of language drew examples from the indigenous cultures that Europeans encountered in colonial settings around the world. They often included the story of a hypothetical savage who uttered the rst word as a response to a desire for an object such as a piece of fruit hanging on a tree.18 This account of linguistic origins was a notable difference from anthropological writings published during the previous century, when a common point for discussion on this matter was the recovery of the lost language of Adam.19 Yet, as ubiquitous as the savage and the tree story was for Blair and his contemporaries, it was often used within arguments that framed the origin of language in fundamentally different ways (gure 2). tienne Bonnot Blairs view on the origin of language was most noticeably inuenced by E de Condillacs Essai sur Lorigine des Connoissances Humaines (1746) and Adam Smiths Treatise on the Origin and Progress of Language (1767).20 Drawing from these texts, Blair used the word primitive to refer to early humans who lacked the spatialized form of representation provided by written language. His comments on this time in history were guided by his desire to explain the invention of words and their subsequent arrangement into disordered, oral sentences. More specically, he used four loosely conceived stages to frame the emergence of linear space. Blair had little to say about the rst stage, but it included humans who possessed no communicative skills whatsoever. The second stage applied to humans who had developed bodily and oral forms of communication. These two forms, which he called gesticulation and pronunciation, seem to have emerged in tandem. Blair saw vestiges of these forms of communication in the sign language of Native Americans, in the robust hand movement of Mediterranean cultures and in modern practices of rhetoric.21 He summarized the process in the following manner:
If we should suppose a period before any words were invented or known, it is clear that men could have no other method of communicating to others what they felt, than by the cries of passion, accompanied with such motions and gestures as were farther expressive of passion.22

Both gesticulation and pronunciation reduced thought down to a specic kind of representation in space immediately inhabited by a speaker and a listener. The visual forms of this kind of language were motions of the hand, expressions of the face, or contortions of the voice. To illustrate the invention of words Blair expanded on his account of the Savage and the tree:
The individual objects which surround us, are innite and innumerable. A savage, wherever he looked, beheld forests and trees. To give separate names to every one of these trees, would have been an endless and impracticable undertaking. His rst object

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Figure 2. The savage and the tree metaphor used to discuss the origins of speech most probably arose from Christian depictions of Adam, Eve and the Tree of Life. From the seventeenth century onwards, Adam and Eve tienne were replaced with indigenes encountered in European colonies. Yet, as clearly evinced in the work of E Condillac, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart and Hugh Blair, the volitional origins of speech still carried strong moral undertones at the end of the eighteenth century. (Source: Natural inhabitants, male and female, of the ne rale des Antilles Antilles of America standing under a pawpaw tree, in Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire ge es par les Franc habite ais, vol. 2 (T. Iolly, Paris, 1667), opposite page 356. Wellcome Library, London, library reference no. EPB/B 21319/B; reproduced with permission.)

was, to give a name to that particular tree, whose fruit relieved his hunger, whose shade protected him from the sun.23

Because verbalization in this setting was guided by motives linked to survival or genuine outbursts of passionate emotion, the rst words formed by humans were natural signs that emanated directly from raw experience and were, consequently, a form of truthful representation. In other words, As far as this system is founded in truth, language appears to be not altogether arbitrary in its origin.24 Because early words were formed from relational acts such as imitation (onomatopoeia), resemblance and analogy, Blair likened the rise of verbal inection to a more colourful manner of painting by means of sound. Key to this expansion of signication was the use of the imagination and the aforementioned interplay between sound and gesture. Throughout his lectures, Blair illustrated the relics of this stage by referencing the hand pictures of Native American

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sign language, the tonal modulation of Chinese words, and the gesticulation that accompanied the speech of northern Mediterranean cultures.25 The sounds and motions characteristic of Blairs second stage of language development were made at random intervals and they contributed to the instantiation of a third stage in which utterances and gesticulations solidied into xed verbal gures of speech. Again, these words were not arranged in any particular sequential order and they were initially used to describe objects and then actions. He called this stage stylization. It required a communal association between a word in the mind and an object in the world. The formation of words was therefore contingent upon objects noted for their value or danger and required shared spaces of experience. The xing of thought into specic words laid the foundation for the nal stage of Blairs primitive history in which the sentence as a recognizable unit of words emerged as a compounded form of mental representation. It was this move to oral order that laid the scaffolding for the rectilinearity of sentences that he associated with print culture. In this nal primitive episode, words were strung together in an order that was determined by the emotional state of mind of the speaker. This emergence of linguistic organization was closely linked to his view on the origins of morality (a point to which I shall return later). Overall, his stages of early language structure depended on two things. First, he assumed that there was a direct correspondence between ideas in the mind and words externalized by the mouth or hands. Second, his use of language as a primary form of primitive evidence was predicated upon an essential reduction of thought to both words and space. More specically, words were both sounds in space and they were pictures in the air and, consequently, uttering or gesticulating more than one word at a time created a spatial structure and laid the foundation for ordered sentences and, ultimately, grammar. This means that one of the main attributes that Blair associated with primitive history was the way in which space and words overcame different kinds of non-linguistic disorder in the world of early humans. Thus, discussing the origin of words in this manner implicitly created a mode of anthropological comparison in which the history of print culture served as the implicit cognitive framework against which the history of all world cultures was compared.

ANCIENT

HISTORY AND ORDERED MINDS

The spatial element of words developed by primitive cultures led to written language. More specically, it led to linear forms of representation that were xed into different kinds of print. This kind of visual xity was one of the main characteristics shared by the languages that Blair associated with ancient history; that is, the second chronological stage in his natural history of language. In particular, he mentions Chinese and Egyptian pictograms as well as Hebrew, Greek and Latin phonograms.26 Throughout his lectures he did not present an explicit list of the visuospatial traits that he assumed were present during the period that occurred between the dawn of simple syntactical arrangements and the emergence of the grammatical categories of the Ancients. Instead, he treated the topic implicitly in his many comments about the indigenous languages spoken in European colonies, thereby participating in a larger Enlightenment climate in which colonial observations were used to provide examples for theories that sought to create a more detailed picture of the language structures used by preliterate societies. To a certain extent this method mirrored classical authors such as Herodotus and Pliny, who

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used the seemingly irrational sounds and syntax of African and Central Asian languages to highlight the merits and accomplishments of Greek and Latin culture.27 For Englishspeaking Lowland Scots such as Blair and many of his students, a similar pattern of philological reconstruction began very close to home with the observations that were made of the Gaelic-speaking populations that inhabited the Hebrides and Highlands.28 Aside from a shared desire to commit words to inscribable surfaces, ancient cultures had developed two forms of proximate differentiation for written words. These spatial modes were based on how close one word was to another. The rst spatial mode was the space delineated by the surface on which the writing was xed. The second was the linear space that existed within a vertically or horizontally written sentence. Surfaces and sentences were therefore forms into which words were placed. The shape of space offered by one surface was different from that offered by another. Writing, or refraining from writing, certain kinds of words on rock, vellum or paper was essentially an act of order in which the mediums surface facilitated selective grouping. Additionally, within paginal parameters, the sentence functioned as another form of order. It grouped related words into a linear unit, the formation of which, again, was an act of selective order. Thus, the manipulation of material surfaces and the inscription techniques associated with writing sentences were fundamentally spatial acts that allowed Blair to differentiate disordered primitive languages from ordered ancient languages. Crucially, this spatial mode of analysis worked in conversation with his belief that When we attend to the order in which words are arranged in a sentence, or signicant proposition, we nd a very remarkable difference between the antient and modern Tongues.29 The foregoing perception of linguistic space allowed Blair to create an intellectual hierarchy for cultures that existed before, or even alongside, modernity because the invention of syntactical space facilitated reection on the order of words within the sentence itself. Most of his comments on this topic are made in relation to Greek and Latin, thereby signalling his view that these languages were more advanced than others of the time:
Accordingly, no Tongue is so full of them [ particles] as the Greek, in consequence of the acute and subtle genius of that rened people. In every Language, much of the beauty and strength of it depends on the proper use of conjunctions, prepositions, and those relative pronouns, which also serve the same purpose of connecting the different parts of discourse. It is the right, or wrong management of these, which chiey makes discourse appear rm or compacted, or disjointed or loose, which causes it to march with smooth and even pace, or with gouty and hobbling steps.30

The close proximity of words in Greek and Latin sentences led authors to realize that different words had unique roles and this engendered early taxonomies for parts of speech. The recognition that such parts had different roles then facilitated the formation of rules that could be applied to the sequential use of words. Such verbal categories and rules effectively created a grammatical mindset. As inferred above, Blairs views on the linear space of sentences were intimately linked to, and perhaps motivated by, a desire to explain the origins of morality. This point is very important, as the space of words was also a moral corollary to the order that he attributed to civilized societies. Blair illustrated this transformation by extending the Savage and the tree example. He fast-forwarded the hypothetical story and picked up at a point where the savages culture had reached a place where simple names (such as fruit), verbs (such

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as give) and personal particles (such as me) had been developed but had not yet been strung together in any order. Thus, staring at the tree in hunger, an early human created the framework for ordered thought by passionately crying, Fruit give me. Blair held that this primeval formulation was a momentous occurrence because it was an intentional act of ordered thought that transported, or materialized, an idea into the oral spaces of communication. Notably, fruit, the object of desire, was placed at the front of the phrase, and the other less passionate words followed. This stringing of words together laid the foundations for further intentional acts of collocation, especially inversion and transposition, in which moral or social concerns led the speaker to place the object of passion at a later stage in the phrase. The ability to change the formulation from Fruit give me to Give me fruit was not only the foundation for more effective forms of communication, but also strengthened the will, thereby establishing a volitional precedent for future moral acts. This meant that the order of language developed by ancient cultures was strongly linked to the ethical implications of verbal communication.31 The key contribution of the Ancients in the foregoing process was the recognition, collection and codication of grammatical patterns that had emerged over time through linguistic practices. In short, the ordered sentences of the Ancients further subjugated language to the will and, by extension, to the moral obligations of individuals living in increasingly literate societies. In this view, it was the linear relationship of the words to each other that proved to be just as important as what the words were taken to representespecially because the direct correspondence between primitive words and objects deteriorated over time. This point was summarized by Blair in the following manner: Words, as we now employ them, taken in general, may be considered as symbols, not as imitations; as arbitrary, or instituted, not natural signs of ideas.32 Yet although the Greeks and Romans developed grammatical frameworks that were inherently spatial in nature, the internal structure of their sentences was not governed by specic rules of word order; rather, the relationships of words were determined more by inected endings. This lack of ordinal space within the line of the sentence was criticized by Blair because he believed that it generated conceptual ambiguity. The overarching view of language that emerges from this criticism is that the spatial form of order provided by the linear sentences of the Greeks and Romans was disordered internally. Thus, whereas the prehistoric mind of primitives had no written form, and hence no linearity, the linguistic order provided by the historic ancients was one of form and not strictly content.

MODERN

HISTORY AND REORDERED MINDS

Blair held that modern European languages had improved the structure of sentences by introducing more specic rules of word order. The absence of this new kind of sentential order was one of the main characteristics that he used to differentiate ancient from modern languages. Such an interest in the systematic representation of language was one of the hallmarks of European pedagogy around 1800 and this led to a wide variety of spatialized charts, with some good Scottish examples appearing in the rst edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica during the 1770s. Blairs views on the spatial importance of modern word order become most visible in his comments on grammar. He taught his students that there were three kinds of grammatical category: substantives, attributives and connectives. He then classied parts of speech under these categories, as shown in table 1.

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Table 1. Blairs grammatical system.
substantives nouns pronouns attributives verbs participles adverbs adjectives connectives prepositions conjunctions interjections

He states that he discerned this system from the works of Quintilian.33 It is also likely that he was inuenced by James Harriss Hermes.34 When it came to the spatialization of words, the most important category for Blair was connectives, and they had a special role in sentential order for two reasons. First, modern languages used them more frequently; this meant that there was more space between words in the line of the sentence. Such a structural feature made the relationship between words more visually accessible. Second, modern connectives had to be placed in a more standardized order within the line of the sentence, thereby using linear proximity to establish a precise relationship between words. Blair believed that the language which made the most judicious use of connectives was, unsurprisingly, English. Although its grammar did have some drawbacks,35 he reserved particular praise for the fact that, unlike its Anglo-Saxon and Middle French progenitors, English no longer attached gender distinctions to substantives. Its great advantage was its multifarious use of connective particles, and it was this kind of grammatical category that was underused or lacking in the languages spoken by primitive cultures. Thus, the difference between disorganized primitive languages and nominally ordered ancient languages reected a relative scale of mental ability that continued straight up to Blairs day:
It is abundantly evident, that all these connective particles must be of the greatest use in Speech; seeing they point out the relations and transitions by which the mind passes from one idea to another. They are the foundation of all reasoning, which is no other thing than the connection of thoughts. And, therefore, though among barbarous nations, and in the rude uncivilised ages of the world, the stock of these words might be small, it must always have increased, as mankind advanced in the arts of reasoning and reection. The more any nation is improved by science, and the more perfect their Language becomes, we may naturally expect, that it will abound the more with connective particles; expressing relations of things, and transitions of thought, which escaped a grosser view.36

Accordingly, because Greek was (at the time) one of the rst known languages to have included such particles, Blair placed its sentential constructions in a higher grammatical category than those that appeared in Latin. Similarly, because modern European languages used particles to a lesser extent, they had reached a similar stage of sentential specicity (especially Italian and French); so the difference was one of degree and not of kind. Yet, even though modern grammar was inherently a spatial enterprise for Blair, the internal, sequential and formal order of sentential units xed on paper did not provide a exible mode of invention through which different kinds of thematic information could be reordered into new conceptual arrangements. As a reader who lived during the largest explosion of printed texts since the invention of the hand press, Blair needed a way of

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transforming words, clauses and narrative blocks into units that could be respatialized in a manner that did not violate the priority that he gave to the linear order instantiated by grammatically organized sentences. One form of reordering was commonplacing; that is, a kind of note-taking proposed by the ancients but which had been hyper-spatialized by the moderns. Following spatial models practised throughout Enlightenment Europe,37 Blairs commonplacing consisted of two units. First, there was a block of information extracted from a text. Second, there was the head; that is, a one-word or two-word label that was spatially or typographically differentiated from the text that it was meant to capsulate. He schematically arranged his own heads in a printed syllabus entitled Heads of the Lectures of Rhetorick and Belles Lettres. This form of vertical order, which required students to read along the line of the margin, was known well by his pupils, because it was often used to arrange grammatical and geographical word tables in contemporary textbooks. The vertical order of Blairs heads was a form of coded space that he had learned when he himself was a student. Building on the commonplacing tradition, he developed a notational system during the late 1730s in which he copied and then ordered abstracts of notable passages under heads. The history of humanity, which, for Blair, followed a progressivist framework, proved particularly conducive to this kind of reordering. According to James Finlayson, Blairs younger colleague:
History, in particular, he resolved to study in this manner; and, in concert with some youthful associates, he constructed a very comprehensive scheme of chronological tables, for receiving into its proper place every important fact that should occur. The scheme was devised by this young student for his own private use was afterwards improved, lled up, and given to the public by his learned friend Dr. John Blair, Prebendary of Westminster, in his valuable work, The Chronology and History of the World.38

The larger point to draw from this pedagogical reection is that the spatial arrangement of heads, either as lecture titles or dates, had a crucial role in the vertical linearization of information in Blairs teaching. What is notable is that, like John Blairs expansion of Hugh Blairs chronology tables, most of the latters students used the schemata of his lecture heads as a framework, a visual catalogue, into which they inserted the written notes that they took in his course. While he lectured, he read out and discussed long quotations that were relevant to the head under discussion. Crucially, these extracts could be obtained only by attending his lectures. Thus, he was not only teaching his students how to extract quotations from texts, he was also showing them how to regroup and respatialize sentences in a manner that could be used in the future to suit themes or topics of their own choosing. Such a method was explicitly more spatialized than ancient commonplacing and was implicitly a form of linguistic spatialization unknown to primitive cultures. A second form of reordering within the sentence was facilitated by style; that is, the peculiar manner in which a man expresses his conceptions, by means of Language.39 It was peculiar because it worked creatively alongside the ordered space of grammatically aligned words. A modern persons style was not simply an aesthetic ideal. Rather, it was an external representation of the inner workings of an ingenious mind that allowed a writer to connect things that had not been seen before and to understand how such connections tted into larger systems of language. For style to be used effectively, Blair

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held that sentences should be kept relatively simple. Following French literary critics, he riodique, long sentences with taught his students to strike a balance between style pe multiple clauses, and style coupe, sentences formed from short independent propositions, each complete within itself.40 Like commonplace heads, the advantage of stylistic clauses was that they could be rearranged, which meant that they could be moved around in a manner that did not upset the order required of a grammatical template. Indeed, they were truly ordinal. They were an order within an order that used tropes to add deeper meaning to existing forms of organized representation. On this point, Blair wrote:
Style has always some reference to an authors manner of thinking. It is a picture of the ideas which rise in his mind, and of the manner in which they rise there; and hence, when we are examining an authors composition, it is, in many cases, extremely difcult to separate Style from sentiment.41

The untangling of style from sentiment, moreover, was an act of the will and, like the early forms of syntax and grammar, it created the volitional foundation for an Enlightened moral mind. On the whole, the use of language in this way was part of the wider Scottish intellectual climate in which words were viewed as oral or visual signs of ideas, and which treated stylistic language as the most important cultural artefact that a given society, or even the human race, could create.42 Such a view meant that the languages of the colonial indigenes that he so often cited in his sections on primitive speech fell short of the style exhibited in the writing of Modern authors. Strikingly, because he believed that the progression towards style was gradual, he also held that the Romans fell short of the clarity that could be achieved in modern languages.43 He displayed this sentiment throughout his lectures by the way in which he used Roman writers to illustrate non-perspicuous constructions. It was only in modern times that the renement of perspicuity had reached the stage in which the resemblance and connections between objects could be clearly communicated with carefully selected words that connoted precise meanings.

CONCLUSION
In this essay I have shown that Hugh Blair placed a high value on the spatial characteristics provided by print culture. Primitive minds were disordered, either in terms of the absence of words in space, or in terms of unstandardized sentences. Ancient minds were ordered because they had identied the spatial importance of articles and parts of speech, leading them to promote sentences that followed loose rules of word order. Modern minds had not only rened this order but also developed alternative ways of spatializing thought that operated in parallel with grammar. Notably, all the characteristics associated with these three stages reinforced the contemporary linguistic model used to assess all cultures of the globe. Overall, the space of words provided a classicatory tool that his students could use to evaluate both the archaeological and anthropological evidence that they encountered as naturalists, travellers, scientists, curators and colonial civil servants. The progressive stages of Blairs approach provided a temporal framework that both ordered and explained the structure of primitive, ancient and modern minds. Moreover, the intimate link between order and explanation was present in most linguistic models of the day and it served as an interpretive tool for many travellers going to European colonies and for early nineteenth-century thinkers whose writings contributed to the nascent

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disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Importantly, Blairs three stages were premised on the concept that human artefacts could be used to create a temporal structure that explained change in human behaviour over time. In his case, the artefacts were the signs and spaces of print culture; however, it would be only a decade or two later when naturalists and antiquarians turned their thoughts to tools, thereby inaugurating a shift from one kind of artefactual line to another.

NOTES
1 2 3 4 Tim Ingold, Lines: a brief history (Routledge, London, 2007), p. 116. Barbara Tversky, Spatial schemata in depictions, in Spatial schemas and abstract thought (ed. Merideth Gattis), pp. 79112 (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001), at p. 99. Jack Goody, The domestication of the savage mind (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 124. Blairs ideas were disseminated through Britain and North America through bound copies of manuscript lecture notes written or commissioned by his students. See Gary Layne Hatch, Student notes of Hugh Blairs Lectures on Rhetoric, in Scottish rhetoric and its inuences (ed. Lynee Lewis Gaillet), pp. 79 94 (Erlbaum, Mahwah, 1998); J. R. Irvine and G. J. Gravlee, Hugh Blair: a select bibliography of manuscripts in Scottish archives, Rhetoric Soc. Q. 13, 75 77 (1983); J. R. Irvine, Rhetoric and moral philosophy: a selected inventory of lecture notes and dictates in Scottish archives, Rhetoric Soc. Q. 13, 159164 (1983). Throughout this essay I cite the three volumes of the 1783 edition of Blairs lectures that was printed in Dublin: Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters, vols 13 (Whiteston, Collins, Burnet, etc., Dublin, 1783). I note that although the content was effectively the same, the ofcial edition published jointly in London and Edinburgh was in only two volumes: see Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters, vols 1 and 2 (Strahan & Cadell, London; Creech, Edinburgh, 1783). This means that the pagination of the two editions is different. The anthropological centrality of mind and language during the early nineteenth century is addressed in H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichards anthropology (Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1999); see especially ch. 6. It was also inuential through its translations. Don Abbott summarizes Rhetorics dissemination and its translation into Spanish, French and Italian translations, in Blair abroad: the European reception of Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters, in Gaillet (ed.), op. cit. (note 4), pp. 67 77. A list of rst-edition translations occurs in the bibliography. See also Abbotts The inuence of Blairs Lectures in Spain, Rhetorica 7, 275 289 (1989). Blairs inuence is also addressed in John Hill, An account of the life and writings of Hugh Blair (Cadell & Davies, Edinburgh, 1807). Paul B. Wood addresses this context in The science of man, in Cultures of Natural History (ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary), ch. 12 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and in Science, philosophy, and the mind, in The Cambridge history of science (ed. Roy Porter), vol. 4 (Eighteenth century science), ch. 34 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). See the footnotes in these sources for further reading. For the geographical placement of the Science of Man during this time period, see David N. Livingstone, Geographical inquiry, rational religion and moral philosophy: Enlightenment discourse of the human condition, in Geography and Enlightenment (ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers), pp. 93 120 (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The broader humanist foundations of early modern anthropology are addressed in Anthony Grafton, The identities of history in early modern Europe: prelude to a study of the Artes Historicae, in Historia: empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe (ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi), pp. 4174 (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005).

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E. E. Evans-Prichard, Social anthropology: past and present. The Marrett Lecture, 1950, Man 50, 118 124 (1950), at p. 118. Lockes views on this relationship are addressed throughout Hannah Dawson, Locke, language and early modern philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007); E. J. Lowe, Locke (Routledge, London, 2005); John Yolton, John Locke and the way of ideas (Oxford University Press, London, 1956); John Yolton, Locke and French materialism (Clarendon, Oxford, 1991); Ian Hacking, Why does language matter to philosophy? (Cambridge University Press, 1975). See Woods introduction to Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation: Papers Relating to the Life Sciences (ed. Paul Wood) (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 1996). Also Gladys Bryson, Man and society: the Scottish inquiry of the eighteenth century (Princeton University Press, 1945). The foundational role of idealism, also called ideaism by early moderns, in Enlightenment thought cannot be overestimated. As Hacking, op. cit. (note 11), has shown, the notion of idea as the base unit of thought transcends the Cartestian-Rational and LockeanEmpiricist typology so often used to characterize eighteenth-century philosophers. See also Emanuele Levi Mortera, Reid, Stewart and the association of ideas, J. Scott. Phil. 3, 157 170 (2005). The volitional aspect of ideas as words inuenced many of Blairs sources and contemporaries. In addition to Hacking, op. cit. (note 11), and Dawson, op. cit. (note 11), the early inuence of this form of idealism is treated in David Bartine, Early English reading theory: origins of current debates (University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1989), esp. pp. 22 33; and throughout Murray Cohen, Sensible words: linguistic practice in England, 16401785 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1977). The ne-grained role of words as signs differed from scholar to scholar. For the Scottish context, see M. D. Eddy, The medium of signs: nominalism, language and classication in the early thought of Dugald Stewart, Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. Biomed. Sci. 37, 373 393 (2006). For comparison, see Sophia A. Rosenfeld, A revolution in language: the problem of signs in late eighteenth-century France (Stanford University Press, 2004). M. D. Eddy, Natural history, natural philosophy and readership, in The Edinburgh history of the book in Scotland, vol. 2 (17071800) (ed. Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall) (University of Edinburgh Press, in the press). The use of Cicero, Quintilian and other classical authors for rhetorical courses in Britain is addressed more broadly in W. S. Howell, Rhetoric and logic in England, 15001700 (Princeton University Press, 1956) and John L. Mahoney, The classical tradition in eighteenth century English rhetorical education, Hist. Educ. J. 9, 93 97 (1958). For the previous two centuries see Peter Mack, Elizabethan rhetoric: theory and practice (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 199. The use of conjectural history to understand the origin of language is outlined in Stephen K. Land, Lord Monboddo and the theory of syntax in the late eighteenth century, J. Hist. Ideas 37, 423 440 (1976), and in Nicholas Hudson, Writing and European thought, 1600 1830 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), chs 3 and 4. Adamic language is addressed in Peter Harrison, Religion and the religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the history of the anthropological centrality of Adam and Preadamites, see David N. Livingstone, Adams ancestors: race, religion and the politics of human origins (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD, 2008). Blair audited Smiths early Edinburgh lectures and borrowed his Rhetoric and Belles Lettres notes to help him prepare his own lectures. For Smiths view of language, see Marcelo Dascal, Adam Smiths theory of language, in The Cambridge companion to Adam Smith (ed. Knud Haakonssen), pp. 79 111 (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher

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J. Berry, Adam Smiths considerations on language, J. Hist. Ideas 35, 130138 (1974), esp. p. 131; Stephen K. Land, Adam Smiths Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages, J. Hist. Ideas 38, 677 690 (1977). For Native American sign language, see Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 119. His main source on this topic was Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (T. Osborne, London, 1747). Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 119. Notably, James H. Merrell avers that the forms of Native American gesticulation that most interested British colonists were signs that were linked to survival and trade. Customs of our country: Indians and colonists in early America, in Strangers within the realm: cultural margins of the rst British empire (ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan), pp. 117 156 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991). Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, pp. 165 167. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 123. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 128. Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), treats the emergence of written language in vol. 1, pp. 138 161. For the larger use of classical histories in Scotland, see Roger L. Emerson, Conjectural history and Scottish philosophers, in Hist. Pap. Can. Hist. Assoc. 19, 6390 (1984). These tools were also used close to home in the debates over the authenticity of the Scots Gaelic in James MacPhersons Ossian poems. See the introduction to vol. 1 of Dafydd Moore (ed.), Ossian and Ossianism (Routledge, London, 2004). Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 138. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 198 199. Blairs discussion of word order and desire, as related to a piece of fruit, is addressed in Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, pp. 138 140. Blair also linked the formation of Chinese characters, which he held to be hieroglyphs, to both moral and intellectual development (ibid., pp. 150 153). These views, moreover, follow in the same vein as Adam Smiths position on the moral importance of language and grammar. Smiths position on this matter is outlined in Dascal, op. cit. (note 20), pp. 100103. Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 124. It should perhaps be noted that the grammatical categories used to classify parts of speech during the eighteenth century were unstable. Indeed, no less than 56 different Latin and vernacular systems were proposed in Britain during the course of the century. See Ian Michael, English grammatical categories and the tradition to 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 201 280. For competing classications of pronunciation, see Joan C. Beal, English pronunciation in the eighteenth century: Thomas Spences grand repository of the English language (Oxford University Press, 1999). For more on the commonality of these three classical categories, Blair directed his students to read Quintilian, but he does not state which work. He was most probably referring to De institutione oratoria, bk 1, ch. 4 (Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 164). Lectures eight and nine address Blairs grammatical divisions of language (ibid., pp. 163 199). The philosophical desire to divide language into grammatical categories, especially in the work of Blairs teacher Adam Smith, is addressed in Dascal, op. cit. (note 20), pp. 87 100. James Harris, Hermes, or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (H. Woodfall, London, for J. Nourse, and P. Vaillant, 1751). Blairs arrangement is similar to System 44 summarized in Michael, op. cit. (note 33), p. 264, which comprised substantives, attributives, conjunctives and denitives. Aside from Harris (1751), Michaels System 44 occurred in an anonymous set of articles written by W.R. in Oxford Magazine during the late 1760s and in the article Grammar in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1797).

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Blair summed up the major grammatical drawbacks of English by writing, I agree, indeed, with Dr. Lowth ( preface to his Grammar), in thinking that this very simplicity and facility of our Language proves a cause of its being frequently spoken with less accuracy (Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 212). Here Blair is referring to Lowths Short introduction to English grammar, with critical notes, but no publication details are given. Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 198. M. D. Eddy, Tools for reordering: commonplacing and the space of words in Linnaeuss Philosophia Botanica, Intellect. Hist. Rev. 20, 227252 (2010). James Finlayson, Sermons, by Hugh Blair . . . with a Short Account of the Life and Character of the Author, vol. 1 (Sharpe & Son, London, 1820), p. ix. Also John Blair, Blairs Chronological Tables, Revised and Enlarged (H. G. Bohn, London, 1856). Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, p. 217. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 245 246. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 217 218. Eddy, op. cit. (note 15). For instance, see Blair (1783), op. cit. (note 5), vol. 1, pp. 141143.

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