Religion and the Science of Human Nature in the Scottish Enlightenment / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"Robin Mills' new book is a comprehensive and insightful account of the academic study of religion by philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment. It is especially valuable for its attention to figures who are not well known today, but who were influential in the eighteenth century."

Religion and Science are often seen as hostile concepts, but as the example of the Scottish Enlightenment shows, this is not necessarily the case. In Robin Mills' new book he takes us beyond the headline of David Hume's alleged atheism and explores the enlightened Scottish conversation about religion. In doing so he shows how the Scottish Enlightenment sought to apply an empirically based social theory to explain religion and its evolution, and the impact this had on the religious views of this significant group of thinkers. It sheds new light on an important moment in intellectual history.

Dr Craig Smith, University of Glasgow

Absorbing and thoughtful, Robin Mills's book on the natural history of religion in the Scottish Enlightenment fills a conspicuous gap in the history of ideas. With remarkable erudition and no little finesse, he brings home the originality and distinctiveness of the Scottish endeavour to produce a naturalistic account of religion in the second half of the eighteenth century. What is particularly refreshing about Mills's study, however, is his unfashionable insistence that this venture represented a rupture with previous approaches to the study of religion, inaugurating a recognisably modern outlook.

Dr Niall O'Flaherty, King's College London

"There has been a lot of scholarly interest in the Scottish Enlightenment's thinking on religion, but surprisingly little has been written on the links between this writing and the Scots' famous 'Science of Man'. In this excellent volume Robin Mills sets out to remedy this by offering a survey of the social scientific examination of religion by a range of key Scottish thinkers of the time. Clear, concise, and elegantly written, it is a welcome addition to the literature."

- Craig Smith, Professor of the History of Political Thought, The University of Glasgow, UK