Beattie, James (1735–1803)

Abstract

James Beattie was a Scottish poet and philosopher. Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, he was one of the leading figures of the School of Common Sense, supporting a traditional current of realism in opposition to the sceptical tenets of David Hume. His major philosophical treatise, An Essay on Truth (1770), won him a royal pension granted by George III. Beattie held traditional religious views which tended to reconcile the more moderate branches of the Church of England and of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. A staunch defender of faith, he was highly suspicious of such eighteenth-century notions as the essential trustworthiness of human reason and the inevitability of progress. At the same time, he shared his contemporaries’ heightened sensibility and fascination with nature. Beattie’s miscellaneous poems include odes, epitaphs, elegies and fables written in the classical mode. He advocated the principle of the imitation of nature and the use of poetic diction. His most famous poem, The Minstrel (1771–3), composed in Spenserian stanzas, brought him renown and helped pave the way for Wordsworth’s Prelude and Clare’s The Village Minstrel’. The poem traces the ‘progress of genius’, the growth of Edwin’s mind from childhood to maturity.