The line of reason: Hugh Blair, spatiality and the progressive structure of language
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writings of grammarians and educators such as Blair have received little attention in histories of nascent palaeoarchaeology and palaeoanthropology, I show that he addressed a number of conceptual themes that were of central relevance to the ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ typology that guided the construction of ‘prehistoric minds’ during the early decades of the Victorian era. Although I address the referential power of language to a certain extent, my main point is that the rectilinear spatiality afforded by Western forms of graphic representation created an implicitly progressivist framework of disordered, ordered and reordered minds.