James Burnet, Lord Monboddo

(imported from 1911 Britannica)

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), Scottish judge and anthropologist, was a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century. Born in 1714 at Monboddo in Kincardineshire, he studied at Aberdeen, and, after passing his law examinations in Edinburgh, he soon took a leading position at the Scottish bar, and was made a Lord of Session in 1767 with the title 'Lord Monboddo'.

Monboddo was particularly known for his writings on human origins. In his Ancient Metaphysics, he conceived man as gradually elevating himself from an animal condition, in which his mind is immersed in matter, to a state in which mind acts independently of body. In The Origin and Progress of Language (1773), he argued that man belonged to the same species as the orang-outang. He traced the gradual elevation of man to the social state, which he conceived as a natural process determined by "the necessities of human life." He looked on language (which is not "natural" to man in the sense of being necessary to his self-preservation) as a consequence of his social state.

His views about the origin of society and language and the faculties by which man is distinguished from the brutes have many points of contact with Darwinism and neo-Kantianism. His idea of studying man as one of the animals, and of collecting facts about savage tribes to throw light on the problems of civilization, bring him into contact with the one, and his intimate knowledge of Greek philosophy with the other.

His studied abstinence from fine writing - from "the rhetorical and poetical style fashionable among writers of the present day" - on such subjects as he handled confirmed the idea of his contemporaries that he was only an eccentric concocter of supremely absurd paradoxes. He died on the 26th of May 1799.

Boswell's Life of Johnson gives an account of Samuel Johnson's visit to Burnett at Monboddo, and is full of references to the natural contemporary view of a man who thought that the human race could be descended from monkeys