WE

CHAPTER III.

E now approach the subject of this book in his capacity of a moralist. Had his ethical writings not assumed a systematic form, but been presented as a series of essays, written by an acute observer of men and things, upon the nature of certain human emotions, Adam Smith would, in all probability, have taken rank as one of the greatest essayists in English literature. The style is the simple, direct, eighteenth-century style which is the envy of those for whom it is a lost art. The writer has the acuteness and latent humour of Montaigne, while he has something of that power of subtle analysis which characLerizes the highest type of latter-day novelist. But it is not in him to lay the foundations of a philosophical system. Such a system cannot, or, at all events, at the time he wrote, could not, dispense with some kind of metaphysical basis, whether that basis dogmatically ignored and excluded any metempirical existence, or professed to recognize and build upon something more or less of the sort. Of what Smith taught in that first part of his fourfold course at Glasgow, which dealt with these and the like topics, we have no authentic record; but there is abundant internal evidence that it could not have been

anything either very definite, or that committed him very deeply. The hesitation which both Hume and he evidently felt about the publication of the former's "Dialogues concerning Natural Religion," proves that Smith was in no hurry to enter the lists as champion of a scepticism, which in those times was as unpopular as it is popular in certain circles to-day. Besides this, during the period when these things were most in his thoughts he was a professor in a Scottish university, a position which he certainly could not have occupied had his metaphysics been unsatisfactory. Hume failed to obtain the very position Smith had held, and we may, without violence to probabilities, conjecture that the reason why a certain Mr. Clow was, as we have already seen, appointed to the chair vacated by Smith at Glasgow, in preference to both Burke and Hume, was that neither of the latter united in himself the requisites of orthodoxy and nationality. It may be, though it is hardly probable, that Smith had no taste either for metaphysics or for controversy, but if want of courage was the cause of the form assumed by his ethical system, the opinions which were repressed have taken ample vengeance. A writer on ethics so acute could not fail to make his mark as a man of letters. A philosopher so silent about the principles on which his teaching depended, could not fail to be overlooked as a scientific thinker. In every reference, excepting that of the systematic study of the subject which it professes to expound, his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" is delightful reading. As a work on Moral Philosophy it is dull and unedifying. As such, therefore, it will receive but scant notice in these pages.

To understand Smith's position as a philosopher, properly so called, it is above all things necessary to bear in mind his position in history. With Locke a revival had taken place in British philosophy. Locke'invented,' (the term is more accurate than 'discovered,') and applied to the facts of experience, a method which was his own so far as psychology was concerned.

Bacon had called men back to the investigation of the facts of experience as the foundation of knowledge. His method was what is popularly called inductive. It proceeded from particular instances to general particulars, and like all scientific methods it really got along by first inventing hypotheses and testing their truth afterwards. The success of such a method is, of course, dependent as much upon the scope of the imagination of the observer in framing hypotheses, as on the accuracy of the verification.

By pursuing this method, Locke put together a body of psychological knowledge which rested on a metaphysical basis. Most of his psychology was, and still is, of the greatest value. But the metaphysical assumptions, the worst features of which were the doctrines of what in the Scottish philosophy was afterwards known as Representative Perception, and of a supposed abstract idea of Substance, were highly vulnerable. All our knowledge, according to Locke, consists in "the view the mind has of its own ideas." "A quality in an object is the power. to produce any idea in my mind." The mind was for him a tabula rasa, upon which 'substance' imprinted ideas. "Not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist of themselves, we accustomed ourselves to

suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which, therefore, we call substance."

Bishop Berkeley made short work of the theory of Substance. He put the "New Question," what does Substance mean for those who hold that all knowledge has its origin in sense perception? His answer was that Locke's 'substance' was a meaningless attempt at an abstract, and therefore impossible, idea. There could be but one true conception of the objective world, the conception of it as a series of sensations and groups of sensations impressed upon the human mind by the only existence which, according to Berkeley, was at once independent of it, and intelligible, the Supreme Being. Hume accepted the criticism of Locke's theory of Substance put forward by Berkeley, and proceeded to make havoc of the edifice which the latter had reared

in its place. What intelligible meaning had either the mental substance upon which Berkeley imagined sensations to be impressed, or the Deity who so impressed them, for those who, like Berkeley and himself, thought that all knowledge had its source in sensation? None at all! Custom and the laws of association were responsible for the fiction that we ourselves had any existence apart from our momentary experiences, or that these experiences had any cause or validity otherwise than as our ideas. It was this conclusion which Kant critically examined, with the result that in his view Hume's reasoning proved too much, if carried to its logical conclusions, and made even the presupposed fact of a sequence of sensations an impossibility. He

went back to Hume's premises, the principles of Locke, and, agreeing that in point of time, sensation and not thought was the prius in the individual, proceeded to show that the individual experience in which sensation became a fact, and the space and time which were the forms of that experience, themselves implied, as their logical prius, an intelligence for which alone they could exist. With Kant and his successors we have nothing to do here. What concerns us is to state the position of philosophy in the hands of David Hume, who obviously had a deep influence in this reference upon his friend Smith. In morals, Hume was not, in the ordinary sense, a utilitarian. His method was to take what he conceived to be the facts, and apply to them the Baconian method. His philosophical standpoint of course led him to endeavour to resolve the facts of our moral experience into the simplest elements possible. A man for whom self meant only a series of really unrelated sensations, was not likely to set up, as the object of conduct, the attainment of ends dependent on a complicated conception of a self which for him was more or less of a metaphysical figment. He took the good and bad tendencies in human nature as he found them, and dealt with them by the same method as he had already applied to the analysis of the relations of cause and effect. His method was likewise the method of Adam Smith, and the metaphysical and psychological presuppositions on which it was made to depend, in the case of Hume explicitly, were those on which the "Theory of Moral Sentiments" was dependent implicitly.