‘But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay, perhaps the highest truth is that which will most certainly elude it, for this logic works by words, and “the highest,” it has been said, “cannot be expressed in words.” We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher truth also, a keen though uncultivated sense for it having existed in Burns. Mr Stewart, it will be remembered, wondered that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the doctrine of Association. We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of Association had from of old been familiar to him.’
Carlyle’s last statement is correct. He admits the great essential truth that Burns was a subtle philosopher. What a pity that such a man as Carlyle should have thought it necessary to say that Burns ‘never studied philosophy.’ The statement is incorrect, but, if it had been correct, why make it? and why call his mental strength ‘untutored,’ and his ‘keen sense of the highest philosophy’ ‘uncultivated’?
Did any other philosopher of the time of Burns in the universities reveal a more profound philosophy of human life, and make so many applications of it, as Robert Burns revealed in the quotations in this chapter, and in the chapters on Democracy, Brotherhood, and Love?
Burns was a philosopher, an independent thinker, whose thought is more highly appreciated now than it was in the time of Carlyle.
In a letter to Mrs Graham, 1791, he wrote: ‘I was born a poor dog; and however I may occasionally pick a better bone than I used to do, I know I must live and die poor. But I will indulge the flattering faith that my poetry will considerably outlive my poverty; and without any fustian affectation of spirit, I can promise and affirm that it must be no ordinary craving of the latter that shall ever make me do anything injurious to the honest fame of the former. Whatever may be my failings—for failings are a part of human nature—may they ever be those of a generous heart and an independent mind.’
Speaking of the moral character of Burns, Carlyle is wise and just. He says: ‘We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscite of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance; it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively, but negatively, less on what is done right than on what is or is not done wrong.... What Burns did under his circumstances, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.’
Burns was naturally a student gifted with a great mind. His splendid mind was trained to act logically by his remarkable father, and quickened and illuminated by his great teacher John Murdoch. He was a great philosopher, not merely because he read Locke’s ‘Essay on the Human Understanding’ when a boy, but because during his short life he read with joyous interest many books of a philosophical character, and what is of infinitely greater importance, he interpreted all he read with an independent mind, and related all truth as he understood it to human life. He could discuss even the principles of Spinoza, and ‘venture into the daring path Spinoza trod.’ Yet, as he told Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he merely ‘ventured in’ to test Spinoza’s philosophy, which he soon found to be inadequate to the true development of the human soul, and therefore he ‘was glad to grasp revealed religion.’ Not merely as a great poetic genius, but as a profound philosophic teacher of religion, democracy, and brotherhood—the most essentially vital elements related to the highest development of the souls of men and women—will the real Robert Burns become known as he is more justly and more deeply studied.