The second book of the Minstrel appeared in 1774. In 1776 he was prevailed on to publish, by subscription, in a more splendid form, his Essay on Truth, which was now accompanied by two other essays, on Poetry and Music, and on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition; and by Remarks on the Utility of Classical Learning. This was succeeded in 1783, by dissertations moral and critical, on Memory and Imagination, on Dreaming, on the Theory of Language, on Fable and Romance, on the Attachments of Kindred, and on Illustrations of Sublimity; being, as he states in the preface, "part of a course of prelections read to those young gentlemen whom it was his business to initiate in the elements of moral science." In 1786, he published a small treatise, entitled Evidences of the Christian Religion, at the suggestion of Porteus, who was now a bishop; and in 1790 and 1793 two volumes of Elements of Moral Science, containing an abridgment of his public lectures on moral philosophy and logic.
His only remaining publication was an edition of the juvenile works of the elder of his two sons, who was taken off by a consumption (November 1790), at the age of twenty-two. To the education of this boy he had attended with such care and discernment as the anxiety of a parent only could dictate, and had watched his unfolding excellence with fondness such as none but a parent could feel. At the risque of telling my reader what he may, perhaps, well remember, I cannot but relate the method which he had taken to impress on his mind, when a child, the sense of his dependence on a Supreme Being; of which Porteus well observed, that it had all the imagination of Rousseau, without his folly and extravagance.
"The doctrines of religion," said Beattie, "I had wished to impress on his mind, as soon as it might be prepared to receive them; but I did not see the propriety of making him commit to memory theological sentences, or any sentences which it was not possible for him to understand. And I was desirous to make a trial how far his own reason could go in tracing out, with a little direction, the great and first principle of all religion, the being of God. The following fact is mentioned, not as a proof of superior sagacity in him (for I have no doubt that most children would, in like circumstances, think as he did), but merely as a moral or logical experiment. He had reached his fifth or sixth year, knew the alphabet, and could read a little; but had received no particular information with respect to the Author of his being: because I thought he could not yet understand such information; and because I had learned, from my own experience, that to be made to repeat words not understood, is extremely detrimental to the faculties of a young mind. In a corner of a little garden, without informing any person of the circumstance, I wrote in the mould, with my finger, the three initial letters of his name; and sowing garden cresses in the furrows, covered up the seed, and smoothed the ground. Ten days after, he came running to me, and with astonishment in his countenance told me, that his name was growing in the garden. I smiled at the report, and seemed inclined to disregard it; but he insisted on my going to see what had happened. 'Yes,' said I, carelessly, on coming to the place, 'I see it is so; but there is nothing in this worth notice; it is mere chance;' and I went away. He followed me, and taking hold of my coat, said with some earnestness, 'It could not be mere chance, for that somebody must have contrived matters so as to produce it.' I pretend not to give his words, or my own, for I have forgotten both; but I give the substance of what passed between us in such language as we both understood.—'So you think,' I said, 'that what appears so regular as the letters of your name cannot be by chance.' 'Yes,' said he, with firmness, 'I think so.' 'Look at yourself,' I replied, 'and consider your hands and fingers, your legs and feet, and other limbs; are they not regular in their appearance, and useful to you?' He said, 'they were.' 'Came you then hither,' said I, 'by chance?' 'No,' he answered, 'that cannot be; something must have made me.' 'And who is that something?' I asked. He said, 'he did not know.' (I took particular notice, that he did not say, as Rousseau fancies a child in like circumstances would say, that his parents made him.) I had now gained the point I aimed at; and saw, that his reason taught him (though he could not so express it) that what begins to be must have an intelligent cause, I therefore told him the name of the Great Being who made him and all the world; concerning whose adorable nature I gave him such information as I thought he could, in some measure, comprehend. The lesson affected him greatly, and he never forgot either it or the circumstance that introduced it."
So great was the docility of this boy, that before he had reached his twentieth year, he had been thought capable of succeeding his father in his office of public professor. When death had extinguished those hopes, the comfort and expectation of the parent were directed to his only surviving child, who, with less application and patience, had yet a quickness of perception that promised to supply the place of those qualities. But this prospect did not continue to cheer him long. In March 1796, the youth was attacked by a fever, which, in seven days, laid him by the side of his brother. He was in his eighteenth year. The sole consolation, with which this world could now supply Beattie, was, that if his sons had lived, he might have seen them a prey to that miserable distemper under which their mother, whose state had rendered a separation from her family unavoidable, was still labouring. From this total bereavement he sometimes found a short relief in the estrangement of his own mind, which refused to support the recollection of such a load of sorrow. "Many times," says Sir William Forbes, "he could not recollect what had become of his son; and after searching in every room of the house, he would say to his niece, 'Mrs. Glennie, you may think it strange, but I must ask you, if I have a son, and where he is?'" That man must be a stern moralist who would censure him very severely for having sought, as he sometimes did, a renewal of this oblivion in his cups.
He was unable any longer to apply himself to study, and left most of the letters he received from his friends unanswered. Music, in which he had formerly delighted, he could not endure to hear from others, after the loss of his first son; though a few months before the death of the second, he had begun to accompany him when he sang, on his own favourite instrument, which was the violoncello. Afterwards, as may be supposed, the sound of it was painful to him. He still took some pleasure in books, and in the company of a very few amongst his oldest friends. This was his condition till the beginning of April 1799, when he was seized with a paralytic stroke, which rendered his speech imperfect for several days. During the rest of his life he had repeated attacks of the same malady: the last, which happened on the 5th of October, 1802, entirely deprived him of motion. He languished, however, till the 18th of August in the following year, when nature being exhausted, he expired without a struggle.
He was interred, according to his own desire, by the side of his two sons, in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, at Aberdeen, with the following inscription from the pen of Dr. James Gregory, Professor of Physic, at Edinburgh.
Memoriae. Sacrum.
JACOBI. BEATTIE. LL.D.
Ethices.
In. Academia. Marescallana. hujus. Urbis.
Per. XLIII. Annos.
Professoris. Meritissimi.
Viri.
Pietate. Probitate. Ingenio. atque. Doctrina.
Praestantis.
Scriptoris. Elegantissimi. Poetae. Suavissimi.
Philosophi. Vere. Christiani.
Natus. est. V. Nov. Anno. MDCCXXXV.
Obiit. XVIII. Aug. MDCCCIII.
Omnibus. Liberis. Orbus.
Quorum. Natu. Maximus. JACOBUS. HAY.
BEATTIE.
Vel. a. Puerilibus. Annis.
Patrio. Vigens. Ingenio.
Novumque. Decus. Jam. Addens. Paterno.
Suis. Carissimus. Patriae. Flebilis.
Lenta. Tabe. Consumptus. Periit.
Anno. Aetatis. XXIII.
GEO. ET. MAR. GLENNIE.
H.M.P.
"In his person," says Sir William Forbes, "Doctor Beattie was of the middle size, though not elegantly yet not awkwardly formed, but with something of a slouch in his gait. His eyes were black and piercing, with an expression of sensibility somewhat bordering on melancholy; except when engaged in cheerful and social intercourse with his friends, when they were exceedingly animated." In a portrait of him, taken in middle life by Reynolds, and given to him as a mark of his regard by the painter, he is represented with his Essay on Truth under his arm. At a little distance is introduced the allegorical figure of Truth as an angel, holding in one hand a balance, and with the other thrusting back the visages of Prejudice, Scepticism, and Folly.
He is, I believe, the solitary instance of a poet, having received so much countenance at the Court of George the Third; and this favour he owed less to any other cause than to the zeal and ability with which he had been thought to oppose the enemies of religion. The respect with which he was treated, both at home and abroad, was no more than a just tribute to those merits and the excellence of his private character. His probity and disinterestedness, the extreme tenderness with which he acquitted himself of all his domestic duties, his attention to the improvement of his pupils, for whose welfare his solicitude did not cease with their removal from the college; his unassuming deportment, which had not been altered by prosperity or by the caresses of the learned and the powerful, his gratitude to those from whom he had received favours, his beneficence to the poor, the ardour of his devotion, are dwelt on by his biographer with an earnestness which leaves us no room to doubt the sincerity of the encomium. His chief defect was an irritability of temper in the latter part of his life, which shewed itself principally towards those who differed from him on speculative questions.
In his writings, he is to be considered as a philosopher, a critic, and a poet. His pretensions in philosophy are founded on his Essay on Truth. This book was of much use at its first appearance, as it contained a popular answer to some of the infidel writers, who were then in better odour among the more educated classes of society than happily they now are. If (as I suspect to have been the case) it has prevented men, whose rank and influence make it most desirable that their minds should be raised above the common pitch, from pursuing those studies by which they were most likely so to raise them, the good which it may have done has been balanced by no inconsiderable evil. One can scarcely examine it with much attention, and not perceive that the writer had not ascended to the sources of that science, which notwithstanding any thing he may say to the contrary, it was evidently his aim to depreciate. Through great part of it he has the appearance of one who is struggling with some unknown power, which he would fain comprehend, and at which, in the failure to comprehend it, his terror is changed into anger. The word metaphysics, or, as he oftener terms it, metaphysic, crosses him like a ghost. Call it pneumatology, the philosophy of the mind, the philosophy of human nature, or what you will, and he can bear it.