Cultivation

Adeptness in fulfilling assigned purposeful prospects, a forward-looking faith in the betterment of people and nations, and developing predispositions, skills, and talents, as well as instilling new ones—such was a core set of beliefs of the theorists, artists, and connoisseurs of the Scottish Enlightenment. Two currents seem to define the course of these ideas throughout the century. First, as part of the initial theorizing on sense perception, improving practices do not provide the original power of perceiving certain qualities that are not already part of our natural aptitude. It would be a mistake, for example, to believe that only the musically educated can appreciate the beauty of a Scots song. ¹ Instruction and cultivation can increase our ideas of beauty, but the perceptions themselves come from senses that are already present. Hutcheson puts this idea forward rhetorically:

A Man naturally void of Taste could by no Education receive the Ideas of Taste, or be prejudic’d in favour of Meats so delicious: So, had we no natural Sense of Beauty and Harmony, we could never be prejudic’d in favour of Objects or Sounds as Beautiful or Harmonious. Education may make an unattentive Goth imagine that his Countrymen have attain’d the Perfection of Architecture; and an Aversion to their Enemys the Romans, may have join’d some disagreeable Ideas to their very Buildings, and excited them to their Demolition; but he had never form’d these Prejudices, had he been void of a Sense of Beauty. Did ever blind Men debate whether Purple or Scarlet were the finer Colour? or could any Education prejudice them in favour of either as Colours? ²