It may here be said that, though judged by modern standards of criticism Smith’s taste was faulty, yet all his favourite authors are in the first rank, and there is no instance recorded of his having bestowed praise on anything bad either in prose or poetry. “You will learn more as to poetry,” he once said, “by reading one good poem than by a thousand volumes of criticism.” Wordsworth in one of his prefaces calls him most unjustly “the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced.” The Lake Poet, who did not distinguish between the quality of the “Ode on the Intimations” and “Peter Bell,” was probably thinking of some literary anecdotes that appeared in The Bee in 1791 after Smith’s death. The writer, who may or may not be trustworthy, is only repeating table talk. He mentions that Smith depreciated Percy’s Reliques and some of Milton’s minor poems. With regard to blank verse, Smith said: “they do well to call it blank, for blank it is. I myself, even I, who never could find a single rhyme in my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak.” From this censure he always excepted Milton; but he thought the English dramatists should have used rhyme like the French. Racine’s Phèdre appealed to him as the finest of all tragedies. Voltaire was his literary pope. Oddly enough, his first publisher’s commission was to collect and edit (anonymously, of course) for the Foulis Press an edition of the poems of a well-known Jacobite, Hamilton of Bangour. The book was published in 1748, and contained the “Braes of Yarrow,” which Wordsworth called an exquisite ballad. Hamilton had played poet laureate to the Young Pretender in 1745, and was still an exile in France. In 1750, when the poet was pardoned, he struck up a warm friendship with his anonymous editor, and (according to Sir John Dalrymple) Smith spent with him “many happy and flattering hours.”

It has been said that in addition to his lectures on English literature Smith also delivered a course on Economics. This we know from a manuscript by which Dugald Stewart vindicates Adam Smith’s claim to have been the original discoverer of the leading principles of political economy. This manuscript, a paper read by Smith to a learned society some years later, proves that he wrote, or rather dictated, his economic lectures in 1749, and delivered them in the following winter.

At this time David Hume and James Oswald were corresponding on commercial topics. In 1750 Hume, who was then abroad, sent Oswald his famous essay on the Balance of Trade, and asked for criticism. Oswald replied in a long letter which shows that he too held very enlightened views on public finance, and we may be pretty certain that Smith as well as Hume derived at this time much benefit from intercourse with Oswald. In fact, in his preface to Oswald’s correspondence, Oswald’s grandson boasts that he has heard Adam Smith, then the renowned author of the Wealth of Nations, “dilate with a generous and enthusiastic pleasure on the qualifications and merits of Mr. Oswald, candidly avowing at the same time how much information he had received on many points from the enlarged views and profound knowledge of that accomplished statesman.” Some allowance should be made for the natural exaggeration of a Scotch kinsman; but Smith certainly rated Oswald high, describing him in the paper above mentioned as one who combined a taste for general principles with the detailed information of a statesman. Stewart adds that “he was one of Mr. Smith’s earliest and most confidential friends.” They must have seen a great deal of one another both in Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh in the five years between his return from Oxford and the appointment we have now to record.

CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF A CAREER

By his Edinburgh lectures Smith had proved that he could be at once learned and popular, and the fact that he was probably the only Scottish savant who had thoroughly acquired the English accent at a time when English had suddenly become highly fashionable north of the Tweed, would do him no harm in loyal Glasgow, where the English connection, with all its solid advantages, was well esteemed. Accordingly in 1750, when a vacancy occurred in the chair of Logic at Glasgow, Adam Smith’s candidature proved very acceptable, and he was unanimously appointed by the Senate. A week later he read a Latin dissertation on the Origin of Ideas, signed the Westminster Confession of Faith before the Presbytery of Glasgow, and took the usual oath of fidelity to the authorities. So far as I am aware, it has not been noticed hitherto that the substance of Smith’s inaugural dissertation, De Origine Idearum, has been preserved in a fragment published by his literary executors after his death. The History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics, as the piece is called, deserves notice not only as one of the earliest specimens of Smith’s extraordinary power of reasoning, but because it proves his interest in some metaphysical questions which are suppressed or ignored in his larger treatises, and at the same time exhibits the range and accuracy of his classical scholarship.

In describing the ancient dialectic Smith had to give an explanation of what Plato meant by “ideas.” The later Platonists imagined their master to mean no more than that “the Deity formed the world after what we would now call an idea or plan conceived in his own mind, in the same manner as any other artist.” Against them the young philosopher proceeded to turn the formidable battery of ratiocination that was one day to demolish a living and formidable foe. It is characteristic of Adam Smith that whether he is attacking the harmless errors of an extinct school of thought, or the noxious fallacies of an established policy, he tries every mode of assault. He “swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies”:—

“If Plato had meant to express no more than this most natural and simple of all notions, he might surely have expressed it more plainly, and would hardly, one would think, have talked of it with so much emphasis, as of something which it required the utmost reach of thought to comprehend. According to this representation, Plato’s notion of species, or Universals, was the same with that of Aristotle. Aristotle, however, does not seem to understand it as such; he bestows a great part of his Metaphysics upon confuting it, and opposes it in all his other works.”

Again, this notion of the separate existence of Species is the very basis of Plato’s philosophy; and there is not a single dialogue in all his works which does not refer to it. Can Aristotle, “who appears to have been so much superior to his master in everything but eloquence,” wilfully have misinterpreted Plato’s fundamental principle when Plato’s writings were in everybody’s hands and his disciples were spread all over Greece; when Speusippus, the nephew and successor of Plato, as well as Xenocrates, who continued the school in the Academy, at the same time as Aristotle held his in the Lyceum, must have been ready at all times to expose and affront him for such gross disingenuity? Aristotle’s interpretation had been followed by Cicero, Seneca, and every classical authority down to Plutarch, “an author who seems to have been as bad a critic in philosophy as in history, and to have taken everything at second-hand in both.”

Whether Smith either then or at any time arrived at metaphysical certainty is very doubtful. “To explain the nature, and to account for the origin of general Ideas is,” he says, “even at this day, the greatest difficulty in abstract philosophy.”

“How the human mind when it reasons concerning the general nature of triangles, should either conceive, as Mr. Locke imagines it does, the idea of a triangle, which is neither obtusangular, nor rectangular, nor acutangular; but which was at once both none and of all those together; or should, as Malbranche thinks necessary for this purpose, comprehend at once, within its finite capacity, all possible triangles of all possible forms and dimensions, which are infinite in number, is a question to which it is not easy to give a satisfactory answer.”