Enlightenment Links – Collin Jennings

Rather than attempting to assign a specific, exclusive refence for these terms, Smith’s index was designed to produce links across the text that indicate how a reader might trace abstract principles through a wide range of applications. Like the concept of gravity in physics, concepts such as the division of labor, capital, and stock can only be observed in their effects. The index organized terms that abstracted social experience, just as language historically developed categories for understanding different aspects of the world.

Smith’s interest in the abstracting power of language is not surprising given that his contributions to moral philosophy focused on abstracting principles of human nature observable in social interactions, jurisprudence, and political economy, among other fields. Smith and his Scottish cohort sought to elevate moral philosophy, defined by Smith’s friend David Hume as the “science of man,” to the position of natural philosophy, the science of the physical world.6 By and large, Scottish writers recognized history as the fundamental evidence of moral philosophy.

Hume and another of Smith’s students, John Millar, compared the function of history in moral philosophy to that of experiments in natural philosophy.7 Smith, Millar, Robertson, and others attempted to observe universal principles of human nature at work in historical events. Just as Smith observed how parts of speech transform continuous, concrete experience into abstract components that can be applied to any event, Scottish writers transformed history writing by organizing the past into stages of historical advancement that derived from abstract, philosophical principles.

Although philosophical histories, such as Robertson’s History of America (1777) and Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779), are most famous for introducing the four-stage theory of advancement referred to as stadial history, I am not interested in focusing on that theory here.

© 2024 by Collin Jennings. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper ISBN 978-1-5036-3797-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-5036-3906-5 (electronic) Library of Congress Control Number: 2024003516 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design and art: Aufuldish & Warinner OceanofPDF.com Dedicated to the memory of Melvin Jennings. OceanofPDF.com CONTENTS Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION: What’s in a Link? 1. Cross-References: Shapes of Knowledge in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia 2. Footnotes: The Poetics of Progress 3. Indexes: Techniques of Abstraction in the Scottish Philosophical History 4. Epigraphs: Paratextual Spaces in Novels of the 1790s CONCLUSION: The Future of Links Appendix: Data and Methods Notes Bibliography Index OceanofPDF.com ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I BEGIN BY THANKING MY invaluable teachers and mentors, starting with Paula McDowell at New York University, who showed me the selfless commitment entailed in teaching and advising students.

Mary Poovey read my work as rigorously as anyone, and any improvement I have made as a writer in the last fifteen years is a credit to her. John Guillory posed incisive questions and comments that have stayed with me across multiple projects. Lisa Gitelman introduced me to media studies and supported my first forays into the digital humanities. My interest in the contact points between contemporary and Enlightenment media forms developed from seminars with Thomas Augst, Richard Halpern, Laurence Lockridge, Lytle Shaw, G.

Gabrielle Starr, and Susanne Wofford. Wendy Anne Lee and Bill Blake offered tremendous support in my final couple of years at NYU. Even before graduate school, I learned from wonderful professors at the University of Texas at Austin who helped me develop a love of eighteenth- century literature. The courses I took and support I received from Susan S. Heinzelman, Samuel Baker, Lisa L. Moore, and Lance Bertelsen stay with me. After NYU, I had the good fortune to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Experimental Humanities program at Bard College.

This time gave me the opportunity to teach interdisciplinary courses and develop wide ranging collaborations. I thank Sven Anderson, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Adhaar Noor Desai, Heidi Knoblach, Keith O’Hara, and Gretta Tritch Roman for their collegiality and friendship. At NYU and after, my work benefited from seminars at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I thank Paul Halliday, Jonathan Hope, Elyse Martin, Owen Williams, and Michael Witmore for coordinating and leading these seminars.

The “Early Modern Digital Agendas” institute at the Folger was an amazing academic summer camp in 2015. I thank Anupam Basu, Michael Gavin, Lauren Kersey, Brad Pasanek, and Mary Erica Zimmer for the collaboration and conversations.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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