The humanistic movement led these learned writers to engraft the graces of the antique upon their native literature, and to refine it by emulating the lucidity of Petrarch.
The relativism or phenomenalism which Hamilton afterwards adopted from Kant and sought to engraft upon Scottish philosophy is wholly absent from the original Scottish doctrine.
The latter were often little more than historical novels founded on facts; and the former, though nominally intended to engraft the doctrines of Buddhism and Shinto upon the philosophy of China, were really of rationalistic tendency.