To “Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind”: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland

This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The great philosopher and economist Adam Smith is known to have had a conception of instrumental music exceptional for his time in its foreshadowing of ideas generally associated with Eduard Hanslick. As I show here, Smith’s views were decisively influenced by the psychological theories of his countryman Thomas Reid in all likelihood by way of the extraordinary proto-cognitivist music theory of their contemporary John Holden, in particular the latter’s conceptualization of the faculty of attention. The innovative contributions of these writers constitute a compact and suggestive case study in the circulation of ideas about perception and listening between philosophy and music, and suggest that the Scottish Enlightenment attitude to psychology enabled a new kind of theorizing about the musical experience: one that foregrounded the importance of the faculty of attention in the process of perceiving music and sound.