Adam Smith

by Francis W. Hirst

He suggests that notions like those of Plato, or Cudworth, or Malebranche, depend a good deal upon the vague and general language in which they are expressed. So long as a philosophy is not very distinctly explained, it “passes easily enough through the indolent imagination accustomed to substitute words in the room of ideas.” Platonism vanishes indeed, and is discovered to be altogether incomprehensible upon an attentive consideration. It did, however, require attentive consideration, and but for Aristotle “might without examination have continued to be the current philosophy for a century or two.” This early and unnoticed composition proves that Smith had thought deeply on metaphysics though he deliberately avoided them in his masterpieces.

He found time to translate and read part of the essay as a Latin dissertation; but his engagements in Edinburgh prevented him from taking up his new work before the autumn. When October came he found his task doubled. Craigie, the Professor of Ethics, had fallen ill, and had been ordered to Lisbon for his health. Smith was informed of this by Dr. Cullen, one of his new colleagues, and was requested to undertake Craigie’s duties. It was further suggested that he should pay particular attention to jurisprudence and politics, which were held to fall within the province of moral philosophy. Smith replies (3rd September 1751) that he will gladly relieve Craigie of his class, and will willingly undertake to lecture on natural jurisprudence and politics.

The session began on the 10th of October, and soon afterwards came the news of Craigie’s death. Smith detested the sophisms of what he called “the cobweb science” of Ontology, and cared little for the Logic of the schools. He was anxious, therefore, to be transferred to the chair of Ethics, and at the same time formed a design with other friends to procure the appointment of his friend David Hume to the chair of Logic. But the prejudice against Hume proved too strong. “I should prefer David Hume to any man for the college,” Smith wrote privately to Cullen, “but I am afraid the public would not be of my opinion, and the interest of the society will oblige us to have regard to the opinion of the public.” This was from Edinburgh, whither Smith had made what was then (incredible as it may seem) a two-days’ journey from Glasgow, in order to wait upon Archibald, Duke of Argyll, nicknamed King of Scotland, because he exercised a sort of royal influence over all Scottish appointments. At the duke’s levee Smith was duly introduced, and his application was successful. The transfer was effected, and in April Smith was appointed to the chair which he was to adorn for twelve years. It was perhaps the most important event of his life. For a temperament like his, so prone to study and reflection, so averse to the toil of the pen, required some constant external stimulus, some congenial inducement to undertake the task of exposition. His gifts might have remained idle, his talents buried, had not the warm and sympathetic atmosphere of a full, eager, and admiring class-room set his tongue and his more reluctant pen in motion. We need not brood over the might-not-have-beens; but when we think of the power that fortune exercises over men’s lives, we may thank her for assigning Adam Smith at this critical moment to the town and University of Glasgow. By that propitious act she lent powerful aid to the construction of a science that must ever be associated with the prosperity and peaceful progress of mankind.

Smith himself has indicated in a general statement the advantages he derived from this professorship:—

“To impose upon any man the necessity of teaching, year after year, any particular branch of science, seems, in reality, to be the most effectual method for rendering him completely master of it himself. By being obliged to go every year over the same ground, if he is good for anything he necessarily becomes, in a few years, well acquainted with every part of it: and if upon any particular point he should form too hasty an opinion one year, when he comes in the course of his lectures to reconsider the same subject the year thereafter, he is very likely to correct it. As to be a teacher of science is certainly the natural employment of a mere man of letters, so is it likewise perhaps the education which is most likely to render him a man of solid learning and knowledge.”

He regarded the profession of teacher as an education, and for that very reason he never ceased to be a learner and a discoverer. Instead of sticking in the muddy ruts of dogma, he drove on gathering facts and opinions till he reached the goal. To vary a well-known inscription, he might have written over the door of his class-room, “Deverticulum philosophi ad veritatem proficiscentis,”—the resting-place of a philosopher on march to truth. Assuredly a happier appointment was never made, whether we look at the true interests of the Professor himself or at those of the University. Smith always thought the years at Glasgow the happiest and most useful of his life. Besides his strong preference for Morals over Logic, he had carnal reasons to rejoice in the transference, for it gave a rather better income. Altogether the chair of Morals at Glasgow seems to have yielded about £170 a year—a fine income in Scotland at a time when, as Mr. Rae observes, the largest stipend in the Presbyterian Church was £138.

In addition to salary and fees, Smith was allotted a good house in the Professors’ Court, which he shared with his mother and cousin (Miss Jane Douglas), who came from Kirkcaldy to live with him. The manses in the old Professors’ Court were held by the professors in order of seniority, and Smith removed three times in order to take full advantage of his privileges, obtaining the best in 1762, when Leechman, Hutcheson’s biographer, was appointed Principal. In 1761, when a second edition of the Moral Sentiments appeared, with a newly inserted passage describing the view from his study window, he was in the house previously occupied by Dr. Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy. To this house nature seems to have been especially kind,—though in reading Smith’s description of his view we must recollect that Glasgow, the garden city, was then famous for the clearness of its atmosphere and the beauty of its surroundings. “In my present situation,” that is to say, looking from the window of his study, he sees “an immense landscape of lawns and woods and distant mountains.” The landscape illustrates the philosophy of the mind: it “seems to do no more than cover the little window which I write by and to be out of all proportion less than the chamber in which I am sitting.” He can form a just comparison between the great objects of the remote scene and the little objects in the room only by transporting himself to a different station from whence both could be surveyed at nearly equal distances. The image, it will be seen, is introduced by Adam Smith to illustrate his theory of “the impartial spectator,” the judge within the breast, whom we must consult if we are to see the things that concern ourselves and others in their true shape and proportions. Just as a man must in some measure be acquainted with the philosophy of vision before he can be thoroughly convinced how small is his own room compared with the mountains he sees from his window, so to the selfish and original passions of human nature, unschooled by experience, unassisted by scale or measure, “the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connection.”[9]

With the failure of Hume’s candidature for the Logic chair was lost a golden opportunity of associating two of the first philosophers of that age on the staff of a small provincial college in one of the poorest, rudest, and least frequented kingdoms of Western Europe. The legend that Burke (four years before he published his Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful) was another candidate has been adjudged apocryphal, though it was formerly accepted by good authorities. Many of the Glasgow students were Irish Presbyterians, and an Irishman might well have been encouraged to seek a chair in the University of Hutcheson.

George Jardine, a student in 1760 and Professor of Logic from 1774, dated the first radical reform in the teaching of philosophy at Glasgow, from a royal visitation of 1727, after which each professor was restricted to a particular department instead of being required to lecture for three successive years in logic, ethics, and physics. He adds that the improvements thus introduced were greatly promoted by fortunate appointments. First came Dr. Francis Hutcheson, whose “copious and splendid eloquence” illustrated an amiable system of morality, and at the same time popularised the use of English as the medium of instruction. Hutcheson’s reforms were not suspended by his death. But the Logic class continued to be conducted in Latin until Adam Smith, being rather unexpectedly called to the office in 1750, “found it necessary to read in the English language a course of lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres which he had formerly delivered in Edinburgh.” The last department in the University to abandon Latin was Law, and the innovator was Smith’s pupil and friend, John Millar.

After Smith’s brief tenure of the chair, Logic fell back for a time to its old subject-matter, but the Latin medium could not be revived. “From the time that the lectures began to be delivered in English the eyes of men were opened,” writes Jardine. It was felt that the old logic of the schools, even when perfectly understood, had little or no connection with modern thought, and none with the active business of life. The local situation, too, of the University in a great commercial city, where men had a quick perception of utility, and looked for a clear adaptation of means to ends, helped to promote reform. But dislike of Logic and Ontology was not peculiar to Smith or to Glasgow. They were discountenanced by the most popular philosopher of that age. “Had the craftiest men,” wrote Shaftesbury in his Characteristics, “for many ages together been employed in finding out a method to confound reason and to degrade the understandings of men, they could not perhaps have succeeded better than by the establishing of this mock science.” Hutcheson had ignored logic and avoided metaphysical problems. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith renounced “the abstruse syllogisms of a quibbling dialectic”; but he never made the mistake of confounding Aristotle with the Aristotelians.