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.”