In Doctor Barnard’s verses, addressed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and his literary friends, Adam Smith is introduced as a peer amidst that brilliant company:
“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
In words select and terse;
Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
Smith how to think, Burke how to speak,
And Beauclerc to converse.”
It is this power of teaching other men how to think that has given to the works of Adam Smith an immortality of influence. In his first university chair, the chair of Logic, he had given scant time to the investigation of the formal laws of reasoning, and had insisted, by preference, upon the practical uses of discourse, as the living application of logic, treating of style and of the arts of persuasion and exposition; and here in his other chair, of Moral Philosophy, he was practically illustrating the vivifying power of the art he had formerly sought to expound to his pupils. “When the subject of his work,” says Dugald Stewart, speaking of the “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” “when the subject of his work leads him to address the imagination and the heart, the variety and felicity of his illustrations, the richness and fluency of his eloquence, and the skill with which he wins the attention and commands the passions of his hearers, leave him, among our English moralists, without a rival.”
Such, then, were the matters which this great lecturer handled, and such was the form he gave them. Two personal characteristics stand out in apparent contrast with what he accomplished: he is said to have been extremely unpractical in the management of his own affairs, and yet he fathered that science which tells how other people’s affairs, how the world’s affairs, are managed; he is known to have been shy and silent, and yet he was the most acceptable lecturer of his university. But it is not uncommon for the man who is both profound and accurate in his observation of the universal and permanent forces operative in the life about him, to be almost altogether wanting in that sagacity concerning the local and temporary practical details upon which the hourly facilitation and comfort of his own life depend; nor need it surprise any one to find the man who sits shy and taciturn in private, stand out dominant and eloquent in public. “Commonly, indeed,” as Mr. Bagehot has said, “the silent man, whoso brain is loaded with unexpressed ideas, is more likely to be a successful public speaker than the brilliant talker who daily exhausts himself in sharp sayings.” There are two distinct kinds of observation: that which makes a man alert and shrewd, cognizant of every trifle and quick with every trick of speech; and that which makes a man a philosopher, conscious of the steady set of affairs and ready in the use of all the substantial resources of wise thought. Commend me to the former for a chat; commend me to the latter for a book. The first will sparkle; the other burns a steady flame.
Here, then, is the picture of this Old Master: a quiet, awkward, forceful Scotchman, whose philosophy has entered everywhere into the life of politics and become a world force in thought; an impracticable Commissioner of Customs, who has left for the instruction of statesmen a theory of taxation; an unbusiness-like professor, who established the science of business; a man of books, who is universally honored by men of action; plain, eccentric, learned, inspired. The things that strike us most about him are, his boldness of conception and wideness of outlook, his breadth and comprehensiveness of treatment, and his carefully clarified and beautified style. He was no specialist, except in the relations of things.