Adam Ferguson Quotes on Knowledge
Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), the Edinburgh moral philosopher and historian whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) is one of the principal Scottish Enlightenment works of historical sociology, treats the human capacity for knowledge as constitutively social rather than as the achievement of solitary minds. Knowledge for Ferguson develops with the institutions of civil society — language, law, division of labour, the practical arts — and the corresponding moral and political knowledge cannot be acquired in abstraction from the active life of citizens. The Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769) and the late Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792) extend the framework systematically.
Quotes
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Attributed to Adam Ferguson:
“Mankind, in following the present sense of their minds, in striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate.”
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Attributed to Adam Ferguson:
“If nations actually borrow from their neighbours, they probably borrow only what they are nearly in a condition to have invented themselves.”
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“Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies.”
PART I, SECTION III. -
“PART I, SECTION III.”
Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies. -
“We are fond of distinctions; we place ourselves in opposition, and quarrel under the denominations of faction and party, without any material subject of controversy.”
PART I, SECTION IV. -
“Men are to be estimated, not from what they know, but from what they are able to perform.”
PART I, SECTION V. -
“Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate.”
PART III, SECTION I. -
“PART III, SECTION I.”
Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate. -
“…if we intend to pursue the history of our species in its further attainments, we may soon enter on subjects which will confine our observation to more narrow limits. The genius of political wisdom and civil arts appears to have chosen his seats in particular tracts of the earth, and to have selected his favourites in particular races of men.”
PART III, SECTION I.