Henry Home, Lord Kames 1696 – 1782

Henry Home, Lord Kames, was a Scottish judge, philosopher, and polymath and one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. From his seat on the Court of Session he carried on a vast correspondence with the philosophical and improving circles of his age, encouraging the young Adam Smith, David Hume, James Boswell, and many others. His Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Elements of Criticism, and Sketches of the History of Man developed an empiricist moral philosophy, the first comprehensive theory of literary taste in English, and an ambitious conjectural history of human society passing through hunting, herding, agricultural, and commercial stages.

Henry Home, later Lord Kames, was born at the family estate of Kames in Berwickshire in 1696, the son of a small Berwickshire laird. He was apprenticed to a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, called to the Scottish bar in 1723, and after thirty years of practice was raised to the bench of the Court of Session as Lord Kames in 1752 and to the Court of Justiciary in 1763. From his judicial chambers he kept up an enormous correspondence and acted as the patron and mentor of the Scottish Enlightenment, friend and critic of his cousin David Hume, of Adam Smith, James Boswell, John Millar, James Hutton, and Adam Ferguson.

His books include the Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751), Historical Law-Tracts (1758), Principles of Equity (1760), the Introduction to the Art of Thinking (1761), the influential Elements of Criticism (1762), Sketches of the History of Man (1774), and Loose Hints upon Education (1781). He served as a leading figure in the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, the Select Society, and the Society for Improvement of Knowledge of Agriculture.

Kames combined a Scottish common-sense moral philosophy with a developmental theory of property and law, an associationist aesthetics that grounded literary judgement in human nature, and a controversial polygenetic anthropology of the human races. With Hume and Smith he is one of the founders of conjectural history and the science of man. He died at Edinburgh in December 1782.