Review and listing of a copy from Classic Rare Books, London, England:

This work was the principal work of Adam Ferguson, professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leader of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson is today remembered for his 'Essay' rather than for his contributions to moral philosophy or Roman history: he was what we would now call an intellectual historian, tracing the gradual rise of the human mind from barbarism to political and social refinement. Debates between Reid, Dugald Stewart, Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and Ferguson himself reveal Scottish philosophy, in general, to be important sociologically. Ferguson's thought was part of a general eighteenth century movement, stimulated by the French, built upon English empirical traditions, and hostile to Cartesian speculation. Ferguson is sometimes considered the father of modern systematic sociology, and although he himself was soon forgotten amidst the anti empirical reactions of Heglian disciples, the influence of the philosophical group to which he belonged was attested to by such nineteenth-century political thinkers as Comte, Mill and Marx. His discussions of politics, economics, history, aesthetics, literature and ethnology were a synthesis of the thought of his time.' Encyclopedia of Philosophy.