'A Clearer Light' - Lord Hailes and the Scottish Enlightenment

He was born to an important Scottish family as Scotland was emerging as one of the most influential nations in Europe. But like his native land, Lord Hailes was not to become influential by great political power or enormous wealth, but rather through the power of ideas. His was a time when Scotland – and in particular Edinburgh – was reshaping the world with new ideas in law, history, literature, philosophy, economics, medicine and science. If Lord Hailes’ Edinburgh was ‘the capital of the mind’ he was one of its intellectual senators, and his house at Newhailes ‘a mansion of the mind.’

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//sc000135?id=EVENT509325