Horner reckoned "from six to eight hundred hearers and not a seat to be procured, even if you go there an hour before the time." Sir Robert Peel, who had just left Harrow, was one of the audience, and remembered the lectures forty years after their delivery. As late as 1843, Dr. Whewell[29] inquired if they were still accessible. Sydney Smith, according to Lord Houghton, described his performances as "the most successful swindle of the season"; and, writing to Jeffrey in April 1805, he says:—
"My lectures are just now at such an absurd pitch of celebrity, that I must lose a good deal of reputation before the public settles into a just equilibrium respecting them. I am most heartily ashamed of my own fame, because I am conscious I do not deserve it, and that the moment men of sense are provoked by the clamour to look into my claims, it will be at an end."
Notwithstanding this premonition, the lecturer adventured on a third course, which was delivered at the same place in the spring of 1806. "Galleries were erected, which had never before been required, and the success was complete." The general subject of this third course was "The Active Powers of the Mind," and it dealt with "The Evil Affections," "The Benevolent Affections," "The Passions," "The Desires," "Surprise, Novelty, and Variety," and "Habit."
As soon as the lectures were delivered, the lecturer threw the manuscripts into the fire; and it is satisfactory to find that he did not take his performance very seriously, or set a very high value on his philosophical attainments. In 1843 he wrote, in reply to Dr. Whewell's inquiry:—
"My lectures are gone to the dogs, and are utterly forgotten. I knew nothing of Moral Philosophy, but I was thoroughly aware that I wanted £200 to furnish my house. The success, however, was prodigious; all Albemarle Street blocked up with carriages, and such an uproar as I never remember to have seen excited by any other literary imposture. Every week I had a new theory about Conception and Perception, and supported it by a natural manner, a torrent of words, and an impudence scarcely credible in this prudent age. Still, in justice to myself, I must say there were some good things in them. But good and bad are all gone."
As a matter of fact, however, they were not "all gone." Mrs. Smith had rescued the manuscripts, a good deal damaged, from the flames, and after her husband's death she published the three courses in one volume under the title, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy.
Was it worth while to publish them? The answer must depend on the object of publication. If the book was meant to be considered as a serious contribution to mental science, the manuscripts might as well have remained where their author threw them. If, on the other hand, it was intended only to show the versatility, adroitness, and plausibility of a young man in need of money, nothing could have better illustrated those aspects of Sydney Smith's character and career. He is thirty-three years old, married, with an increasing family, and no means of subsistence beyond periodical journalism and odd jobs of clerical duty. "Two or three random sermons," he says, "I have discharged, and thought I perceived that the greater part of the congregation thought me mad. The clerk was as pale as death in helping me off with my gown, for fear I should bite him." He wants money to furnish his house. A benevolent friend obtains him the opportunity of lecturing. It is not uncharitable to suppose that he chooses a subject in which accurate knowledge and close argument will be less requisite than fluency, fancy, bold statement, and extraordinarily felicitous illustration. The five years spent in Edinburgh can now be turned to profitable account. Dugald Stewards lectures can be exhumed, decorated, and reproduced. The whole book reeks of Scotland. The lecturer sets out by declaring that Moral Philosophy is taught in the Scotch Universities alone. England knows nothing about it. At Edinburgh Moral Philosophy means Mental Philosophy, and is concerned with "the faculties of the mind and the effects which our reasoning powers and our passions produce upon the actions of our lives." It has nothing to do with ethics or duty. And the definition used in Edinburgh is also used in Albemarle Street. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown[30] and Adam Smith, Hume and Reid and Oswald and Beattie and Ferguson, are names which meet us on every page. The lecturer has learnt from Scotsmen, and reproduces what the Scotsmen taught him. Mind and Matter are two great realities. When people are informed that all thought is explained by vibrations and "vibratiuncles" of the brain, and that what they consider their arms and legs are not arms and legs but ideas, then, says the lecturer, they will pardonably identify Philosophy with Lunacy. "Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one octavo volume; and nothing remained after his time but Mind; which experienced a similar fate at the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737…. But is there any one out of Bedlam who doubts of the existence of matter? who doubts of his own personal identity? or of his consciousness? or of the general credibility of memory?"
From this rough-and-ready delimitation of the area within which Moral Philosophy must work, if it is to escape the reproach of insanity, the lecturer goes on, as becomes a divine, to champion his study against the reproach of tending to Atheism. He groups all our senses, faculties, and impulses together, and says: "All these things Moral Philosophy observes, and, observing, adores the Being from whence they proceed."
Having thus defined his subject, the lecturer goes on, in his second and third lectures, to trace the history of Moral Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Mrs. Trimmer. Plato is praised for beauty of style, and blamed for mistiness of doctrine. Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his disadvantage, with Bacon. "Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been written which, if piled one upon another, would have equalled the Tower of Babel in Height, and far exceeded it in Confusion." But to Bacon "we are indebted for an almost daily extension of our knowledge of the laws of nature in the outward world; and the same modest and cautious spirit of enquiry, extended to Moral Philosophy, will probably give us clear, intelligible ideas of our spiritual nature."
The remaining lectures of this course are those which suffered most severely from the flames, and are indeed in so fragmentary a condition as to render any close criticism of them impossible. But enough has been quoted to show that Sydney Smith, so far as he was in any sense concerned with philosophy, was a sworn foe to mysticism and ideality, and a worshipper of Baconian common-sense even in the sphere of mind and soul.