Campbell, George (1719–96)

George Campbell, Scottish minister, professor and religious thinker, is now remembered primarily for The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Here he employed the Scottish Enlightenment’s developing science of human nature to explain the effectiveness of the classical rules of rhetoric. He did this by relating the various ends of persuasive discourse to the natural faculties and propensities of the human mind. In his own time Campbell was better known as a religious apologist, using an enlightened theory of evidence in A Dissertation on Miracles (1762) to defend the believability of Christian miracles against the sceptical attack of David Hume.