Adam Smith

CHAPTER III
THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS

The age into which Adam Smith was born was an age of religious doubt and philosophic curiosity. During his lifetime the governing classes in England, undisturbed by enthusiasms, were little disposed to entertain revolutionary ideas in politics or religion. It seemed to be the function of philosophic thinkers to leave the constitution of a tolerably liberal State and a tolerably lax Church, and to advance in other directions. The fierce storms that bent the course of Selden and Milton and Hobbes had abated. Men tried to forget

No one believed that the Deity created kings; many doubted whether there was a Deity at all. Since the great days of Athens, philosophy had seldom reaped a richer harvest than in Great Britain during the eighty years that followed the Act of Union. Newton’s Principia, and the philosophy of Shaftesbury, Clarke, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, as well as of Hume and Adam Smith, all fall within this period. Speculative discovery went hand in hand with mechanical invention. The poetry of enthusiasm, religious and political fervour, persecution, martyrdom, with all their heroic and squalid accompaniments, preceded and followed this prosaic illumination. It was a chapter of dry light between two of heat and fire and smoke. Reason reigned; and as reason seldom wears an air of originality, we need not wonder if later ingenuity has discovered that all these philosophers borrowed their doctrines either from the ancients or from one another or from foreigners.

But though there appears to be just now a tendency to carry the search for the genealogy and pedigree of ideas rather too far, it is certainly not our purpose to show that Adam Smith was a solitary conqueror who founded a kingdom entirely for himself, and peopled it with the creatures of his imagination. Every great thinker holds the past in fee, as he levies a perpetual tribute on the future. We may see how in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and in his lectures on Justice and Police Smith selected and used his materials; how, with the aid of Hutcheson and Mandeville and Hume, he invented a new doctrine of sympathy, and how he worked up the Platonic idea of the division of labour, and the Aristotelian theory of money, into a true science of national wealth. Nothing is left of the first part of the lectures, which dealt (briefly, no doubt) with natural theology and, in the earliest years of his professorship, very fully with moral philosophy. His pupil and friend Millar says that under the head of Natural Theology, the first part of his course, Smith considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded.

In the Moral Sentiments and his other writings there are plenty of passages to indicate that he was a theist with a belief rather more active and definite than that of his friend Hume or of his master Aristotle, but few or none that he was a Christian. As professor he had to sign the Westminster Confession of Faith, a perfunctory act which even Hume would readily have performed without the scandal that surrounded Jowett’s cynical subscription a century later. But it was noticed by the orthodox that he was sadly wanting in zeal. Hutcheson, doubtless with the purpose of naturalising theology, had conducted a Sunday class on Christian evidences. Adam Smith discontinued this practice, and it was even whispered that he had applied to the authorities shortly after his appointment to be excused from opening his class with prayer. The request was refused, but the results were not satisfactory; for according to a contemporary, John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, his opening prayers “savoured strongly of natural religion,” while his theological lectures, though shorter, were no less flattering to human pride than those of Hutcheson, and led “presumptuous striplings” to draw the unwarranted conclusion “that the great truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature without any special revelation.” He was also, they say, often seen to smile openly during divine service in his place in the college chapel. When one remembers what orthodox Scottish sermons at that time meant, it is safe to conjecture that the smile was not always due (as Ramsay would have it) to an absent thought.

Although the lectures on Natural Theology have disappeared, the lectures on Morals were elaborated and published in 1759 as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. From this, his first important work, we may sufficiently ascertain how far Smith’s philosophy of life was based upon religious conceptions. Fortune governs the world. Nature intended the happiness and perfection of the species. Every part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providential care of its Author. Smith’s own scepticism is so carefully phrased and so disguised in soft language, that a stupid reader is never perplexed, a devout one never offended. Take, for example, his reflections upon the doctrine of a future life. That there is a world to come, he says in a passage of striking eloquence, “is a doctrine in every respect so venerable, so comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the grandeur of human nature, that the virtuous man, who has the misfortune to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to believe it. It could never have been exposed to the derision of the scoffer, had not the distribution of rewards and punishments, which some of its most zealous assertors have taught us was to be made in that world to come, been too frequently in direct opposition to all our moral sentiments.” Smith had no great respect for the devout. To him the ritual and worship of the Deity seemed like the service and courtship of kings. He refuses to believe that an all-wise Deity would have a mind for adulation or would offer heavenly rewards to those who consecrate their lives to His worship:—

“That the assiduous courtier is often more favoured than the faithful and active servant; that attendance and adulation are often shorter and surer roads to preferment than merit or service; and that a campaign at Versailles or St. James’s is often worth two either in Germany or Flanders, is a complaint which we have all heard from many a venerable, but discontented, old officer. But what is considered as the greatest reproach even to the weakness of earthly sovereigns, has been ascribed, as an act of justice, to divine perfection; and the duties of devotion, the public and private worship of the Deity, have been represented even by men of virtue and abilities, as the sole virtues which can either entitle to reward or exempt from punishment in the life to come.”

His indignation flames out against celebrated doctors, both civil and ecclesiastical, who have questioned whether faith should be kept with rebels and heretics (“those unlucky persons who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party”). Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, “faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest.”

Morality is natural, but its rules have been sanctioned by the rudest forms of religion. Whether our moral faculties depend upon a modification of reason, upon a moral sense, or upon some other principle of our nature, they carry with them the most evident badges of authority, and were plainly set up within us to superintend our passions and appetites and to be the supreme arbiters of our actions. They are described in religious language as the vice-regents of God within us; they never fail to punish sin by the torments of inward shame and self-condemnation; they reward obedience with tranquillity and contentment. Oncken thinks that Smith’s eloquent vindication of conscience helped to form Kant’s moral idealism; but it puts us more in mind of the Roman satirist’s great line—

“Nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem.”

Moral judgments likewise help to correct in some measure the course of this world. “The industrious knave cultivates the soil; the indolent good man leaves it uncultivated. Who ought to reap the harvest?” Here the natural course of things decides against the natural sentiments of mankind. Human laws therefore often punish the knave or traitor though industrious, and reward the good citizen though improvident. Thus man is by nature prompted to correct nature; but even so his endeavours are often impotent; the current is too strong. Our natural sentiments are often shocked. We see great combinations oppress small. We see the innocent suffer. Despairing of earthly forces to check the triumph of injustice, we naturally appeal to heaven, “and thus we are led to a belief in the future state by the love of virtue,” and moral rules acquire new sanctity by being regarded as the laws of an all-powerful Deity. As religion in this way enforces an innate sense of duty, mankind is generally disposed to place great confidence in the probity of those who seem to be deeply religious.

And where religion has not been corrupted, “wherever men are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate duties of religion, than acts of justice and beneficence; and to imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and vain supplications, they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence, the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man’s behaviour.”

Upon the dangerous question of religious establishments and dissenting sects he wrote afterwards in the Wealth of Nations (Book v. i.) with a boldness and an air of detachment that might well startle even that age of tolerant indifference. He contrasts the teachers of new religions with the clergy of an ancient system, who are frequently possessed of learning, eloquence, and all the gentlemanly virtues. “Such a clergy, when attacked by a set of popular and bold though perhaps stupid and ignorant enthusiasts, feel themselves as perfectly defenceless as the indolent, effeminate, and full-fed nations of the southern parts of Asia, when they were invaded by the active, hardy, and hungry Tartars of the north.” Commonly, the only resource of such a clergy upon such an emergency is to summon the government to persecute or expel their adversaries. “It was thus that the Roman Catholic clergy called upon the civil magistrate to persecute the Protestants, and the Church of England to persecute the Dissenters.”

An established church may have a superiority of learning, but in the art of gaining popularity the advantage is always with its adversaries. He finds that, as dissenting bodies grow richer, their zeal and activity abate. The Independents, for instance, had many learned, ingenious, and respectable men; but the Methodists, without half the learning of the Dissenters, were more in vogue. The strength of the Church of Rome he attributed to the fact that the industry of its inferior clergy was better fostered by motives of self-interest than in the case of any established Protestant church; for many of the parish priests subsisted largely on voluntary gifts, “a source of revenue which confession gives them many opportunities of improving.” He notes also Machiavelli’s observation, that the establishment of the begging orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis revived, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the languishing faith and devotion of the Catholic Church. Upon the question of the value of a State Church, Smith quotes from a certain passage of Hume’s History, referring to his friend as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age.” Hume had come to the conclusion that the civil magistrate who neglects to establish a religion will find he has dearly paid for his frugality, “and that in reality the most decent and advantageous composition which he can make with the spiritual guides, is to bribe their indolence by assigning stated salaries to their profession,” so that ecclesiastical establishments, “though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society.”

But Smith, with the same dislike for “zeal,” had too much respect for liberty, too much love of honesty in politics, to adopt Hume’s cynical solution. He would find security in numbers. A State should extend toleration to all; society would naturally divide itself into hundreds of small sects, none of which could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquillity. The teachers of each sect would be forced to learn a candour and moderation which is seldom to be found among an established clergy; and in this way, by mutual concessions, their doctrine would probably be reduced in time “to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established, but such as positive law has perhaps never yet established in any country.” This plan of ecclesiastical government, he adds, or more properly no ecclesiastical government, was what the Independents, “a sect no doubt of very wild enthusiasts,” proposed to establish in England towards the end of the Civil War. “If it had been established, though of a very unphilosophical origin, it would probably by this time have been productive of the most philosophical good temper and moderation with regard to every sort of religious principle.” Such is the plan favoured by Adam Smith, and he observes that in Pennsylvania, where it had been adopted, experience justified his opinion.

Smith was so popular with his orthodox contemporaries that they tried to parry charges of infidelity by saying either that he had adopted Hume’s opinions out of the intense affection he felt for him, or that he had been perverted by French atheists. “In the course of his travels,” says one of the most broad-minded of his Presbyterian contemporaries (John Ramsay), “he became acquainted with Voltaire and the other French philosophers who were then labouring with unhallowed industry in the vineyard of infidelity.” What impression they made upon him, adds this cautious man, “cannot be precisely known, because neither before nor after this period was his religious creed ever properly ascertained.”

Twenty years after Adam Smith’s death, Archbishop Magee, in a controversy with Unitarian theologians, cited a passage from the Moral Sentiments on the doctrine of atonement, in which Smith had said that the doctrines of revelation coincide in every respect with the original anticipations of nature. “Such,” wrote the divine, “are the reflections of a man whose powers of thinking and reasoning will surely not be pronounced inferior to those of any even of the most distinguished champions of the Unitarian school.” The rejoinder was at once made that in the sixth edition, which Smith prepared for the press in 1790, the passage was omitted; whereupon the prelate (forgetting that Hume died in 1776, after four editions had appeared with this presentation of the reasonableness of an atonement) deftly turned a new moral: “It adds one proof more to the many that already existed of the danger, even to the most enlightened, from a familiar contact with infidelity.”

CHAPTER IV
THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

In 1759, the seventh year of his professorship, Smith completed the first of his two capital achievements. His scholiasts are still curiously hazy about its early editions, partly perhaps because neither the first, second, nor third is to be found in the library of the British Museum. The first edition is a single octavo volume of 551 pages, printed in good large type.[10] The title-page runs as follows:—

THE
THEORY
OF
MORAL SENTIMENTS

by Adam Smith

Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Glasgow.

London:
Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand
and A. Kincaid and J. Bell in Edinburgh.
MDCCLIX.

Andrew Millar was then at the head of the London publishers. He had shown some time before, when Hume’s History fell into his hands, that he knew how to push a good book, and on this occasion too the firm lived up to its reputation.

Early in April, Hume, who was in London, received some copies, and wrote to thank Smith “for the agreeable present.” Always zealous in the service of friendship and Scottish literature, he employed all the wiles of diplomacy to promote the success of the book. “Wedderburn and I,” he writes, “made presents of our copies to such of our acquaintances as we thought good judges and proper to spread the reputation of the book. I sent one to the Duke of Argyle, and Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, and Bourke, an English gentleman who wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the Sublime. Millar (the publisher) desired my permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton.” Hume had delayed writing till he could tell how the book had been received and “could prognosticate with some probability whether it should be finally damned to oblivion, or should be registered in the Temple of Immortality.” Though it has only been out for a few weeks, he thinks he can now foretell its fate. But instead of gratifying an author’s impatience, Hume pretends to have been interrupted by an impertinent visitor, and digresses upon vacancies in the Scottish Universities, upon a new edition of Ferguson’s Treatise on Refinement, on Wilkie’s Epigoniad, and Lord Kames’s Law Tracts. At last he seems to be coming to the point:—

“But to return to your book and its success in this town. I must tell you——

“A plague to interruptions!—I ordered myself to be denied, and yet here is one that has broken in upon me again.” The second visitor was a man of letters, and Hume goes off on a new scent. He advises Smith to read Helvetius’s new book De L’Esprit, and adds, “Voltaire has lately published a small work called Candide ou L’Optimisme. I shall give you a detail of it.”

At last the badinage comes to an end with a warning that popularity is no test of merit. A wise man should rather be disquieted than elated by the approbation of the multitude:—

“Supposing, therefore, that you have duly prepared yourself for the worst by all these reflections, I proceed to tell you the melancholy news that your book has been very unfortunate, for the public seem disposed to applaud it extremely. It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises. Three bishops called yesterday at Millar’s shop in order to buy copies, and to ask questions about the author. The Bishop of Peterborough said he had passed the evening in a company where he heard it extolled above all books in the world. The Duke of Argyle is more decisive than he used to be in its favour. I suppose he either considers it as an exotic, or thinks the author will be very serviceable to him in the Glasgow elections. Lord Lyttelton says that Robertson and Smith and Bower are the glories of English literature. Oswald protests he does not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment from it, but you may easily judge what reliance can be placed on his judgment. He has been engaged all his life in public business, and he never sees any faults in his friends. Millar exults and brags that two-thirds of the edition are already sold, and that he is now sure of success. You see what a son of the earth that is, to value books only by the profit they bring him. In that view, I believe, it may prove a very good book.

“Charles Townshend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in England, is so much taken with the performance, that he said to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleugh under the author’s care, and would make it worth his while to accept of that charge. As soon as I heard this, I called on him twice with a view of talking with him about the matter, and of convincing him of the propriety of sending that young gentleman to Glasgow, for I could not hope that he could offer you any terms which would tempt you to renounce your professorship; but I missed him. Mr. Townshend passes for being a little uncertain in his resolutions, so perhaps you need not build much on his sally.”

On this occasion, as will appear in a later chapter, Townshend proved true to his resolve and false to his reputation.

Burke, who afterwards became one of Smith’s most intimate friends, was at this time known for his philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). He was also a principal contributor to the Annual Register; and that publication, in its admirable account of books published during the year 1759, quotes a long passage from the Theory of Moral Sentiments, with a prefatory tribute from Burke’s pen, which might quench the thirst of the thirstiest author. Smith is praised for having struck out a new, and at the same time a perfectly natural, road of ethical speculation.

“The theory is in all its essential parts just, and founded on truth and nature. The author seeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions; and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and shewing that those are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth, one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory, that has perhaps ever appeared. The illustrations are numerous and happy, and shew the author to be a man of uncommon observation. His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing.”

“Perhaps there is no ethical work since Cicero’s Offices,” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, “of which an abridgment enables the reader so inadequately to estimate the merit, as the Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is not chiefly owing to the beauty of diction, as in the case of Cicero, but to the variety of explanations of life and manners which embellish the book often more than they illuminate the theory.”

This criticism has been adopted by Mr. Farrer in his luminous account of Smith’s moral philosophy, and its justice may be conceded. With all its faults, the Theory of Moral Sentiments is still one of the most instructive and entertaining of all our English treatises on ethics. There is plenty of warmth and colour. The argument is never bare; you follow its thread through a wondrous maze, till your perplexities are solved, and you finally congratulate yourself as well as the author on having rejected all the errors and collected all the wisdom of the ages. When the main theme threatens to be tedious he entertains you with an imaginary portrait, or digresses into some subsidiary discussion upon fortune, or fashion, or some other of the currents that turn men from their purpose. It has been observed that the strongest antagonists of Smith’s central doctrine are enthusiastic in praising his skill in the analysis of human nature. The truth is, that the most absent-minded was also the most observant of men. He seems to have watched the actions and passions of his acquaintances with extraordinary precision. Motives interested him at least as much as conduct; he rather blames philosophers for having of late years given too much attention to the tendency of affections, and too little to the relationship in which they stand to their causes.

His immediate predecessors and contemporaries in the field of ethics were principally concerned with the origin and authority of right and wrong. Why does mankind generally agree as to what is right and what is wrong; whence are the notions of “ought” and “ought not” derived if not from the church or the Bible? At the time Smith wrote, English moralists were divided upon this point into two main schools. Of the first, who derived all moral rules from self-interest, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Hume were the principal exponents. The second school sought for a less variable standard, and have been called Intuitionalists, because they believed either with Clarke and Price that moral truths are perceived like axioms of Euclid, by the intellect, or with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, that there is innate in us a moral sense or taste (developed by Bishop Butler into conscience) which prompts us to do right and tells us the difference between good and evil.

Moralists were equally divided upon the question, “In what does virtue consist?” His old teacher Hutcheson had answered that it consisted in benevolence; others thought that prudence was the true mark of the good man. In Adam Smith’s view, prudence and benevolence are equally essential ingredients in the constitution of a perfectly virtuous character. With virtue he associates happiness, and his individual view of both is based partly upon the Greek philosophy of an independent leisure, partly upon the Christian conception of doing good to others; and we feel that he does not always succeed in reconciling the new ideal with the old. “Happiness,” he says, “consists in tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment.” Tranquillity, he thinks, is “the natural and usual state of a man’s mind.” But the tranquillity to be desired was as far removed from indolence or apathy as from avarice or ambition. It was the active tranquillity of a well furnished mind and a benevolent heart.

Peace of mind, family peace, a country free from civil, religious, and foreign strife,—these he thought in their order the things most momentous to happiness. Yet he would not allow the leisurely philosopher to bask in the selfish sunshine of tranquillity. “The most sublime contemplation of the philosopher will scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest act of virtue.” The study of politics tends to promote public spirit, and political disquisitions are therefore the most useful of all speculations. The trade of the vulgar politician was often ignoble and deceitful; but the best happiness attended the patriotism and public spirit of those who sought to improve government and extend trade. The leader of a successful party may do far more for his country than the greatest general. He may re-establish and reform its constitution, and from the doubtful and ambiguous character of a party leader he may assume “the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state,” who by the wisdom of his institutions secures the international tranquillity and happiness of his fellow-citizens for many succeeding generations.

For the man of system in politics Smith has no liking. Wise in his own conceit, such a man “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.” He forgets that “in the great chessboard of human society every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”

A true son of Oxford in his admiration for Aristotle, he was fond, as we have seen, of appealing to common life and popular opinion. But another of Aristotle’s methods, that of the eclectic who arrives at the truth by choosing out and combining what is good in other philosophers, may almost be said to be the foundation of The Moral Sentiments. When, after explaining his system, he comes in his last (seventh) part to describe and criticise his predecessors, it is apparent that he considers his own theory to be an assemblage or reconciliation in one harmonious whole of all the happiest efforts of ethical speculation:—

“If we examine the most celebrated and remarkable of the different theories which have been given concerning the nature and origin of our moral sentiments, we shall find that almost all of them coincide with some part or other of that which I have been endeavouring to give an account of; and that if everything which has already been said be fully considered, we shall be at no loss to explain what was the view or aspect of nature which led each particular author to form his particular system. From some one or other of those principles which I have been endeavouring to unfold, every system of morality that ever had any reputation in the world has, perhaps, ultimately been derived.”

A good example of this eclecticism is his treatment of Mandeville, an author from whom Smith no less than Rousseau derived many fruitful ideas. In the first edition of The Moral Sentiments (p. 474) he writes:—

“There are, however, some other systems which seem to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the tendency is upon that account wholly pernicious: I mean the systems of the Duke of Rochefoucauld and Dr. Mandeville. Though the notions of both these authors are in almost every respect erroneous, there are, however, some appearances in human nature which, when viewed in a certain manner, seem at first sight to favour them. These, first slightly sketched out with the elegance and delicate precision of the Duke of Rochefoucauld, and afterwards more fully represented with the lively and humorous, though coarse and rustic, eloquence of Dr. Mandeville, have thrown upon their doctrine an air of truth and probability which is very apt to impose upon the unskilful.”

Bishop Butler, more justly, classed Rochefoucauld with Hobbes. But in Smith’s sixth edition (1790) the name of Rochefoucauld was omitted, at the instance of the Duke’s grandson, who pointed out that the author of the Maxims is not really in the same category with Mandeville. Coarse and licentious, but entertaining and ingenious, the author of the Fable of the Bees hit human nature hard. He traced virtuous actions to vanity, and whittled away the distinction between vice and virtue, until he reached the paradox that private vices are public benefits. But this profligate system could never have caused so much stir and alarm in the world “had it not in some respects bordered upon the truth.” We are very easily imposed upon by the most absurd travellers’ tales about distant countries. But falsehoods about the parish we live in must, if they are to deceive us, bear some resemblance to the truth, nay, “must even have a considerable mixture of truth in them.” A natural philosopher has an analogous advantage over the speculator in ethics. The vortices of Descartes passed for nearly a century as a most satisfactory account of the revolutions of heavenly bodies, though they neither existed nor could possibly exist, and though if they did exist they could not produce such effects as were ascribed to them. But the moral philosopher is no better off than the parish liar. He is giving an account of things that are constantly before us, around us, and within us. “Though here, too, like indolent masters who put their trust in a steward that deceives them, we are very liable to be imposed upon, yet we are incapable of passing any account which does not preserve some little regard to the truth.”

In describing those systems which make virtue consist in propriety, Smith displays a profound knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, and the later schools of Greek philosophy. His admiration of Zeno and Epictetus is almost unbounded, especially when he contemplates their confident opinion that a man should always be able to support worldly misfortunes. “They endeavour to point out the comforts which a man might still enjoy when reduced to poverty, when driven into banishment, when exposed to the injustice of popular clamour, when labouring under blindness, deafness, in the extremity of old age, upon the approach of death.” He holds that the few fragments which have been preserved of this philosophy are among the most instructive remains of antiquity. “The spirit and manhood of their doctrines make a wonderful contrast with the desponding, plaintive, and whining tone of some modern systems.” Chrysippus, on the other hand, did but reduce stoicism into a scholastic or technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and subdivisions, “one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical system.”

Admirable as were the best stoics and epicureans and those Roman writers who, like Cicero and Seneca, direct us to the imperfect but attainable virtues, they quite misunderstood nature. “By nature, the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and direction, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows.” Here and in similar passages he follows his favourite, Pope:—

Every moralist’s, even Epictetus’s, description of virtue is just as far as it goes. But Smith claims to have been the first to give any precise or distinct measure by which the fitness or propriety of affection can be ascertained and judged. Such a measure he finds in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed spectator. Here, then, we have the central and peculiar doctrine that stamps with originality Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.[11]

That sympathy or fellow-feeling is a primary instinct of man appears from the commonest incidents of life. Do we not shrink when a blow is aimed at another, do not the spectators wriggle as they follow a rope-dancer’s contortions, are we not moved by tears, is not laughter infectious? Sympathy is agreeable. We like to give it, and we long for it. It is too instinctive to be explained (though some would do so) by a refinement of self-love. Yet it is not a mere reflection or shadow. Generally speaking, we only sympathise when our sentiments and feelings correspond with those of another. Sympathy means approval. To give it is to praise, to withhold it to blame. How, then, does Adam Smith account for the growth of moral sentiments in the man, and for the progress of morality in mankind? He holds that what we call conscience, or the sense of duty, arises from a certain reflex action of sympathy. We apply to ourselves the moral judgments we have learned to pass on others. We imagine what they will say and think about our own thoughts and words and actions. We try to look at ourselves with the impartial eyes of other people, and seek to anticipate that judgment which they are likely to pass upon us. This is the first stage. But men have very different degrees of morality and wisdom. One man’s praise or blame carries infinitely more weight than another’s. Thus what is called conscience, that is our idea of the impartial spectator, insensibly develops. The impartial spectator becomes more and more our ideal man, and we come to pay more homage to his still small voice than to the judgment of the world. The pangs of conscience are far more terrible than the condemnation of the market-place. Praiseworthiness comes to be better than praise; blameworthiness comes to be worse than blame. The true hell is the hell within the breast; the worst tortures are those that follow the sentence of the impartial spectator. One feature in the phenomena of sympathy, which Smith points out, perhaps constitutes a weak point in his theory. The spectator’s emotions are apt to fall short of the sufferer’s. Compassion is never exactly the same as original sorrow.

Smith, like Kant, has his own way, and a curious one it is, of putting the rule of Christ. “As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.” Our philosopher readily admits that there are passions, like love, which, “though almost unavoidable in some part of life,” are not at first sight very agreeable to his theory. He says we cannot enter into the eagerness of a lover’s emotions. They are always “in some measure ridiculous.” “The passion appears to everybody but the man who feels it entirely disproportioned to the value of the object.” Ovid’s gaiety and Horace’s gallantry are pleasant enough, but you grow weary of the “grave, pedantic, and long-sentenced love of Cowley and Petrarca.”

Resentment provides him with a better illustration. The counterpart of gratitude, it is a very difficult passion to realise in a proper degree. “How many things,” he exclaims, “are requisite to render the gratification of resentment completely agreeable and to make the spectator thoroughly sympathise with our revenge?” First, the provocation must be such that if unresented we should become contemptible and be exposed to perpetual insults. Second, smaller offences had better be neglected. Third, we should resent from a sense of propriety and of what is expected of us. Above all, we should diligently consider what would be the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator.

Though the love of the lover has to be belittled for the purpose of this theory, friendship and all the social and benevolent affections are dear to sympathy and “please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion.” True friendship is one of the virtues which prove the limitations of the utilitarian theory: “There is a satisfaction in the consciousness of being beloved which to a person of delicacy and sensibility is of more importance to happiness than all the advantage which he can expect to derive from it.”

As Smith goes through the list of virtues and vices his “Impartial Spectator” constantly reminds us of Aristotle’s theory that every virtue is a mean between two extremes. The impartial spectator dislikes excess. The rise of the upstart, for example, is too sudden an extreme, nor does his behaviour often conciliate our affections:—

“If the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune seldom contribute much to happiness. He is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness, whom the public destines to every step of his preferment long before he arrives at it, in whom, upon that account, when it comes, it can excite no extravagant joy, and with regard to whom it cannot reasonably create either any jealousy in those he overtakes or any envy in those he leaves behind.”

The Impartial Spectator is rather a fickle and illogical person; he does not like unexampled prosperity, but he is always ready to sympathise with trivial joys. “It is quite otherwise with grief. Small vexations excite no sympathy, but deep affliction calls forth the greatest.” It takes a great grief to enlist our sympathy, for “it is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter it with reluctance.” So when we hear a tragedy we struggle against sympathetic sorrow as long as we can, and when we finally give way, carefully conceal our tears! In a letter of July the 28th, 1759, from which we have already quoted, Hume made some objections to this part of Smith’s theory:—

“I am told that you are preparing a new edition, and propose to make some additions and alterations in order to obviate objections. I shall use the freedom to propose one; which, if it appears to be of any weight, you may have in your eye. I wish you had more particularly and fully proved that all kinds of sympathy are agreeable. This is the hinge of your system, and yet you only mention the matter cursorily on p. 20. Now it would appear that there is a disagreeable sympathy as well as an agreeable. And, indeed, as the sympathetic passion is a reflex image of the principal, it must partake of its qualities, and be painful when that is so....

“It is always thought a difficult problem to account for the pleasure from the tears and grief and sympathy of tragedy, which would not be the case if all sympathy was agreeable. An hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball. I am afraid that on p. 99 and 111 this proposition has escaped you, or rather is interwoven with your reasoning. In that place you say expressly, ‘It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.’ It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this sentiment, and reconcile it to your system.”

In the following spring (April 4th) Smith wrote from Glasgow to Strahan, Millar’s young and very able partner, about the second edition, for which he had sent “a good many corrections and improvements.” He asks Strahan to take care that the book is printed “pretty exactly according to the copy I delivered to you.” Strahan, it seems, had offered his services as a critic, and Smith was a little afraid that he might find unauthorised alterations in the text. He will be much obliged to his publisher for suggestions, but cannot consent to surrender “the precious right of private judgment, for the sake of which your forefathers kicked out the Pope and the Pretender. I believe you to be much more infallible than the Pope, but as I am a Protestant, my conscience makes me scruple to submit to any unscriptural authority.”

The second edition was issued soon afterwards. It has been erroneously described as a reprint of the first.[12]

As a matter of fact, the corrections and alterations made in it were very numerous and it was set up in much smaller type, so that the 551 pages of the first edition are compressed, in spite of some enlargements of the text, into 436 pages. What is particularly noteworthy is that the author, without altering any of the passages criticised by Hume, does make what we conceive to be a perfectly satisfactory answer in an important footnote on page 76 of the second edition after the sentence, “It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.” We give the note in full in order that the reader may judge for himself:—

“It has been objected to me that as I found the sentiment of approbation, which is always agreeable, upon sympathy, it is inconsistent with my system to admit any disagreeable sympathy. I answer, that in the sentiment of approbation there are two things to be taken notice of: first, the sympathetic passion of the spectator; and secondly, the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself, and the original passion in the person principally concerned. This last emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always agreeable and delightful. The other may either be agreeable or disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose features it must always, in some measure, retain. Two sounds, I suppose, may each of them, taken singly, be austere, and yet, if they are perfect concords, the perception of their harmony and coincidence may be agreeable.”

Of modern philosophers, those to whom Smith is most indebted are certainly Mandeville, his old master Hutcheson, and his friend Hume, “an ingenious and agreeable philosopher who joins the greatest depth of thought to the greatest elegance of expression, and possesses the singular and happy talent of treating the abstrusest subjects not only with the most perfect perspicuity, but with the most lively eloquence.” (Was it the religious prejudice against Hume that left his name unmentioned in the Theory?) All four were in a greater or less degree utilitarians. But Smith denies that the perception of a distinction between virtue and vice originates in the utility of the one and the disadvantageousness of the other. Hume would explain all virtues by their usefulness to oneself or society. But Smith only regards utility as a powerful additional reason for approving virtue and virtuous actions. It influences our ideas of virtue, as custom and fashion influence our ideas of beauty. Usefulness is seldom the first ground of approval, and “it seems impossible that we should have no other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest of drawers.” Even our approval of public spirit arises at first rather from a feeling of its magnificence and splendour than of its utility to the nation, though a sense of utility greatly strengthens our approval. Adam Smith notes, by the way, what Hume had not observed, that the fitness of a thing to produce its end is often more admired than the end itself. Most people prefer order and tidiness to the utility which they are intended to promote.

Buckle has remarked on a contrast between Smith’s theory of morals and his theory of economics. In the first, sympathy is the premise, and he works out the principle of sympathy to its logical conclusions. In the Wealth of Nations, on the contrary, the word sympathy scarcely occurs. He assumes self-interest as the sole motive of the economic man, and works out all the consequences without troubling about that other-regarding principle which is the foundation and measure of morality, though he shows, it is true, that the motive of self-interest, if sufficiently enlightened, will result in the general good. Without denying that Buckle’s contention is suggestive, we may observe that Smith distinctly refuses to confine virtue to benevolence, and parts company on this very point from “the amiable system” of Hutcheson. “Regard to our own private happiness, and interest too, appear,” says he, “upon many occasions very laudable principles of action. The habits of economy, industry, discretion, attention, and application of thought are generally supposed to be cultivated from self-interested motives, and at the same time are apprehended to be very praiseworthy qualities, which deserve the esteem and approbation of everybody.”[13] Benevolence may perhaps be the sole principle of action in the Deity, but an imperfect creature like man must and ought often to act from other motives.

To the third edition of the Moral Sentiments (1767) was appended an essay on the formation of Languages and the different genius of original and compounded languages. It is the fruit of his philological studies, and contains no doubt the substance of lectures that he had read in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He starts with the proposition that names of objects, that is to say, nouns substantive, must have been the first steps toward the making of a language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak would naturally begin to make their mutual wants intelligible by uttering certain sounds, as cave, tree, fountain, whenever they wanted to denote particular objects. What was at first a proper name would thus be extended to similar objects, by the same law which leads us to call a great philosopher a Newton. Similarly, “a child that is just learning to speak calls every person who comes into the house its papa or its mamma.” Smith could call to mind a clown “who did not know the proper name of the river which ran by his own door.” It was “the river.” This process of generalisation explains the formation of those classes and assortments called genera and species in the schools, “of which the ingenious and eloquent M. Rousseau of Geneva finds himself so much at a loss to account for the origin.”[14] In his account of the dual number, which he finds in all primitive and uncompounded languages, he says that in the rude beginnings of society, one, two, and more, might possibly be all the numerical distinctions which mankind would have any occasion to take notice of. But these words, though custom has rendered them familiar to us, “express perhaps the most subtle and refined abstractions which the mind of man is capable of forming.” His purpose through all this ingenious train of reasoning was to suggest a new mode of approaching a subject which, in itself so fascinating, had been reduced to a dull routine. He is very severe on the Minerva of Sanctius and on some other grammarians who, neglecting the progress of nature, had expended all their industry in drawing up a number of artificial rules so as to exclude exceptions. He sees that languages are the products not of art but of nature or circumstance. He explains how the modern dialects of Europe arose from conquest, migration, and mixture—through Lombards trying to speak Latin, or Normans trying to speak Saxon. In this way the older tongues were decomposed and simplified in their rudiments while they grew more complex in composition. The processes of linguistic development provoke a comparison of philology with mechanics:—

“All machines are generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles, and there is often a particular principle of motion for every particular movement which, it is intended, they should perform. Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as to produce several of those movements, and thus the machine becomes gradually more and more simple, and produces its effects with fewer wheels, and fewer principles of motion. In Language, in the same manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observation discovered that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the end of all the declensions, and of all the conjugations in the antient Languages.”

The comparison, however, suggests a contrast. The simplification of machines renders them more perfect, but the simplification of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper (in his opinion) for many of the purposes of expression. Thus in a decomposed and simple language, he observes, we are often restrained from disposing words and sounds in the most agreeable order. When Virgil writes