Adam Smith

by Francis W. Hirst

Hutcheson’s work in Glasgow (1730-1746) was of the utmost importance to Scotland. “I am called the New Light here,” he said. He stood for reform of the universities, for the criticism of abuses and privileges, for free thought, free speech, and the spirit of inquiry. He took a lively interest in his pupils, and tried to keep them abreast of the times. He set Adam Smith to write an analysis of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature as soon as it appeared, and the lad of seventeen did his exercise so well that Hume got it printed in London and had a copy of the Treatise sent him by way of reward. Hutcheson has been called an eclectic. Certainly he had read widely and thought deeply upon the difficulties and perplexities of a new age, an age of scientific discovery and philosophic doubt, an age tired of the syllogism, disdainful of divine right, eager to find natural principles of morality, law, and government. From the System of Moral Philosophy, published after his death, we get a clear notion of the range of his lectures. He considered man as a social animal, and accordingly refused to divorce the science of individual ethics from the science of politics. He followed Aristotle in including chapters on jurisprudence and economics in his scheme of moral philosophy. It has been well said that the same natural liberty and optimism which served Smith as assumptions were the theses of Hutcheson, who himself learned much from Shaftesbury. Hutcheson and Smith were both reformers, and were more hopeful, if less cheerful, than Hume. Hume was a genial cynic without any zeal for reform, who found repose in Butler’s doctrine that things are what they are, and that their consequences will be what they will be.

But with Hutcheson and Smith it was a real religion to see that society should be better governed; they made it the supreme object of their lives to increase the happiness of mankind by diffusing useful truths and exposing mischievous errors. In the scope of his philosophy, in temper and practical aim, Smith may be called the spiritual descendant of Hutcheson. There are also marked resemblances in their subject matter and even in some minor points of doctrine, as a careful comparison recently instituted by a very competent writer abundantly shows.[2] We find Smith using the same authorities as his predecessor and quoting them to much the same purpose. Even Hutcheson’s crude and fragmentary economics offered many suggestions that were afterwards developed and harmonised by Smith in his lectures. The Sunday lectures on Natural Theology, by which Hutcheson sought to reduce the intolerance and soften the harshness of Scottish orthodoxy, made a lasting impression upon the mind of his great pupil.

Besides his work with Hutcheson, Smith laid at Glasgow the foundation of an early mastery of the classics, and prepared himself for a wide course of reading in the literature and wisdom of the ancients. But mathematics and natural philosophy are said to have been his favourite pursuits at this time—indeed he seems to have attained in both a considerable proficiency, which never escaped the tenacious grip of his memory. Matthew Stewart, Dugald’s father, was one of his fellow-students. Long afterwards, when Professor of Mathematics in Edinburgh, he was heard discussing with Smith “a geometrical problem of considerable difficulty,” which had been set them as an exercise by Simson. Matthew Stewart, who died in 1785, is commemorated with Simson in the sixth edition of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published fifty years after this time. After observing that “mathematicians who may have the most perfect assurance of the truth and of the importance of their discoveries, are frequently very indifferent about the reception which they may meet with from the public,” Adam Smith cites Dr. Robert Simson of Glasgow, and Dr. Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, “the two greatest mathematicians that I ever had the honour to be known to, and I believe, the two greatest that have lived in my time,” as men who never seemed to feel the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with which some of their most valuable works were received. For several years, he adds, even Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia fell flat, but his tranquillity did not suffer for a single quarter of an hour. Newton always stood at the very top of Smith’s calendar.

Smith left Glasgow at the early age of seventeen. His mother, acting on the advice of her relatives, had destined the boy for the Church of England, which then opened the door to so many lucrative positions. Perhaps they hoped from his talents for a career like that of his famous countryman, Bishop Burnet, who indeed had himself been a Professor of Divinity at Glasgow. The intention went so far that in his third year Smith sought and obtained one of those exhibitions which have taken so many distinguished Scots from the University of Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford. The Snell Exhibitions, as they are called, were founded by an old Glasgow student of that name in 1679, with a view to educating Scots for the service of the Episcopalian Church. It chanced, however, that during his residence at Oxford, an application made by the Oxford authorities to compel the Snell Exhibitioners “to submit and conform to the doctrines of the Church of England and to enter into holy orders” was refused by the Court of Chancery; so that when the time came Smith was able to choose his own career and to strike off from the easier road which took his Fifeshire friend Douglas in due time to a bishopric. The change from Glasgow to Oxford was immense. It was more than exile; it was transmigration from a living to a dead society, from the thrill of a rising and thriving community, where men lived and moved and thought, to a city of dreaming spires and droning dons. In June 1740 he rode on horseback to Oxford and matriculated on the 17th of July, entering himself in a round schoolboy hand as “Adamus Smith, e Coll. Ball. Gen. Fil. Jul. 7mo. 1740.”

It will be remembered that when Captain Waverley crossed the border, five years later, on his way to join the Young Pretender, the houses of Tully Veolan seemed miserable in the extreme, “especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages.” Smith rode through Carlisle, and he told Samuel Rogers in 1789 that he recollected being much struck as he approached that town by the richness of England and by the superiority of English agriculture. England indeed was then remarkably prosperous, thanks to a long peace, low taxes, and good harvests. Food was generally cheap and plentiful. Trade was good; and better means of transit by road and canal were being developed. But the land of the Scots, “during fifty generations the rudest perhaps of all European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled,” was still unimproved. The roads were almost impassable for wheeled vehicles. Coaches were unknown.[3] Many of the most fertile tracts were waste, and there is respectable authority for the opinion that some parts of the Lowlands were worse cultivated than in the thirteenth century. Under such conditions, rude beyond conception, poverty was universal. Even the gentry could seldom afford such bare comforts as half a century later their own farmers possessed. As for the common people, clothed in the coarsest garb and starving on the meanest fare, they dwelt in despicable huts with their cattle. It is significant that in those days Scotland had no fatted kine. There was no market for good meat, and the taste only grew with the means for gratifying it. Adam Smith was fond of telling at his own table in after years, how on the first day he dined in the hall of Balliol, having fallen into one of his fits of absent-mindedness, he was roused by the servitor who told him to “fall to, for he had never seen such a piece of beef in Scotland.”

Of the hundred undergraduates then at Balliol about eight came from Scotland, and four of these were Snell Exhibitioners. Their peculiarities of manner and dialect marked them off from the rest of the college, and they were treated as foreigners. Their relations with the authorities were unpleasant. In 1744, Smith and the other Exhibitioners stated their grievances to the Senate of Glasgow University, and explained how their residence might be made “more easy and commodious.” A few years afterwards, one of them told the Master that what the Exhibitioners wanted was to be transferred to some other college on account of their “total dislike of Balliol.” The friction between Balliol and Glasgow lasted long, and it was no doubt his own unsatisfactory experience that drew from Adam Smith thirty years afterwards a strong condemnation of close scholarships.[4]

The University of Oxford was at that time and for the rest of the century sunk deep in intellectual apathy, a muddy reservoir of sloth, ignorance, and luxury from which men sank as by a law of gravitation into the still lower level of civil and ecclesiastical sinecures. In the colleges there were only degrees of badness; but the charity of Snell had been rather unkind to Smith, for Balliol being Jacobite was particularly rowdy and intolerant. It has been mentioned that in his last year at Glasgow, Smith wrote for Hutcheson an abstract of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature which brought him a presentation copy from the author. This copy he seems to have carried south with him; for the Balliol authorities, it is recorded, caught Smith in the act of reading the godless work, censured him severely, and confiscated a book which more than a century afterwards was to be sumptuously edited by two honoured alumni of the same college.

The narrow spirit which this incident illustrates seems to have made a painful impression upon the student’s memory. In the Wealth of Nations he complains bitterly of the compulsory “sham-lecture,” and visits with severe censure the casuistry and sophistry by which the ancient course of philosophy had been corrupted. This completed course, he says, was meant to train ecclesiastics, and “certainly did not render it more proper for the education of gentlemen or men of the world, or more likely either to improve the understanding or to mend the heart.” At Oxford “the greater part of the public professors have for many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.” College discipline was in general contrived “not for the benefit of the students, but for the interests, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.”

In England the public schools were “much less corrupted than the universities; for in the schools a boy was taught, or at least might be taught Greek and Latin,” whereas “in the universities the youth neither are taught, nor always can find any proper means of being taught, the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to teach.” It is only fair to add that Gibbon’s experiences of Magdalen, Bishop Butler’s of Christ Church, and Bentham’s of Queen’s, were equally adverse. And Balliol could at least offer its undergraduates the advantage of an excellent library. When such a cloud lay heavy upon that ancient seat of learning, it is no wonder if Smith with his sedentary disposition and frugal habits—he probably lived on his exhibition of £40—should have spent his six years at Balliol in the society of its books rather than of its tipsy undergraduates. Oxford, it has been observed by the most diligent of his biographers, is the only place he lived in which failed to furnish him with friends. But he never displayed towards it the lively antipathy of Gibbon; far from regretting his residence there, he mentioned it with gratitude many years afterwards. In Oxford he certainly gained the liberal knowledge of ancient and modern literature that enriches and adorns all his writings. The bookshops must have introduced him to his favourite Pope, to Swift and Addison, and the fashionable writers of the day. He employed himself frequently, he used to say, in the practice of translations, especially of French authors, in order to improve his style.

“How intimately,” writes Dugald Stewart, “he had once been conversant with more ornamental branches of learning, in particular with the works of the Roman, Greek, French, and Italian poets, appeared sufficiently from the hold they kept of his memory after all the different occupations and inquiries in which his maturer faculties had been employed.” He had an extraordinary knowledge of English poetry, and could quote from memory with a correctness which, says the same grave Scot, “appeared surprising even to those whose attention had never been directed to more important acquisitions.” What little intellectual activity outside politics still lingered on at Oxford was probably connected with philological speculations such as those of James Harris, the learned, if somewhat priggish, author of Hermes. At any rate, Smith went deeply into every branch of grammar. Andrew Dalzel, who was Professor of Greek at Edinburgh in Adam Smith’s old age, often remarked on “the uncommon degree in which Mr. Smith retained possession even to the close of his life of different branches of knowledge which he had long ceased to cultivate,” and particularly mentioned to his colleague Dugald Stewart, “the readiness and correctness” of his memory on philological subjects and his acuteness in discussing the minutiæ of Greek grammar.