An astonishing intellectual, artistic and scientific flourishing in the 18- and early 1900s, would become known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Reason overcame the supremacy of dogma and a new climate of cultural freedom enabled people of humble origin to join the nation's élite. Centred in Edinburgh, the concentration of thinkers who helped create the modern world transformed the capital's High Street into 'a city-scaled university'; or as a character in Tobias Smollett's novel Humphrey Clinker put it, 'a hot-bed of genius'.

As an institution the University of Edinburgh had been founded away back in 1583 by James VI. But the name 'Old College' applies to the magnificent building on South Bridge.  Scotland possesses nothing more grand than the entrance front, and as you pace round the quadrangle of Robert Adam's greatest public work, it is hard to envisage a building which would better symbolise the Enlightenment.

However no one person embodies that flowering of art, thought and literature better than David Hume - philosopher, essayist, bon viveur and reputed atheist, he was christened by James Boswell 'the Great Infidel'. Hume's Treatise on Human Nature advances his philosophy of reason and emotion, but anecdotes abound of a man shrewdly in touch with humanity. While supervising the building of his house, and before the North Bridge was opened, Hume customarily took a short cut to the New Town across the Nor' Loch bog. On one trip he slipped and fell in. Luckily he caught the attention of an old fishwife who, recognising 'Hume the Atheist', doubted the propriety of helping him. "But my good woman, does not your religion as a Christian teach you to do good, even to your enemies?"  "That may well be," she replied, "but ye shallna get oot o' that, til ye become a Christian yersel: and repeat the Lord's Prayer..." To her astonishment Hume readily complied, and was pulled out of the bog. Henceforth he was ever ready to acknowledge that the Edinburgh fishwife was the most acute theologian he had ever encountered. The night after Hume's funeral, some of the crowd crouched behind the gravestones, to see if the devil would come to carry off his soul. As ever, two sides of Edinburgh: darkness and light.

David Hume's magnificent octagonal tomb can still be seen in the burial ground on Calton Hill. And among the Enlightenment luminaries commemorated with statues in modern Edinburgh, are Hume and Adam Smith on the Royal Mile, while James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist and forerunner of Einstein, is planned for George Street. To the west of Old College is leafy George Square where Sir Walter Scott was brought up, and where Jane Welsh Carlyle, letter writer of genius and husband to Thomas, lived as a young woman.  Arthur Conan Doyle also resided here for a time, and all three houses are marked by plaques.

One of Scott's university teachers was the moral philosopher Dugald Stewart 'whose striking and impressive eloquence riveted the attention even of the most volatile students'. He has his own monument on Calton Hill, but for many others their main legacy is their work. Among those who transformed their disciplines, were the pioneering photographers Robert Adamson and David Octavius Hill; Joseph Black who discovered carbon dioxide, Daniel Rutherford, discoverer of nitrogen; and Charles Darwin, famed (and still today, demonised) for his theory of evolution. James Hutton, founder of modern geology, has his own memorial looking onto Holyrood Park whose volcanic formations gave him a vital clue to the immense age of planet earth.

Among the writers, Robert Louis Stevenson studied at Edinburgh University, like his famous grandfather the lighthouse and bridge building engineer before him Thomas Carlyle the Victorian sage was a student here, while later the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle studied in the school of anatomy. He was no lover of the city or its university, which he saw as having 'a stoic and Spartan cast'. Like so many Scots he headed for London, to house his detective Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. Yet Conan Doyle acknowledged as the model for Holmes's genius Professor Joseph Bell, who astounded Edinburgh students with demonstrations of his acute deductions from evidence.

In the twentieth century, JM Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, not only attended the University as a 'lad o' pairts' but became its Lord Chancellor; as did John Buchan the biographer and author of the Richard Hannay adventures. In 1995 Alexander McCall Smith became Professor of Medical Law at the University, prior to international success with novels set in Edinburgh and Botswana. Another former student, the poet Norman MacCaig, was the university's first writer in residence. With its fellow institutions across the city, Edinburgh University continues to champion worldwide literary and intellectual excellence.

This material was commissioned and produced by Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, with support from the Scottish Arts Council.  The scripts were written by Edinburgh poet and author, Stewart Conn, and performed by Shonagh Price and Donald Smith, with additional editorial material by Donald Smith.

All material is copyright Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust unless otherwise stated.

© Allan Ramsay, David Hume, 1711 - 1776. Historian and philosopher, Scottish National Portrait Gallery