publication, but a fragment of a great work which contains a history of the astronomical systems that were successively in fashion down to the time of Descartes. Whether that might not be published as a fragment of an intended juvenile work, I leave entirely to your judgment, though I begin to suspect myself there is more refinement than solidity in some parts of it. This little work you will find in a thin folio paper book in my back-room. All the other loose papers, which you will find in that desk, or within the glass folding doors of a bureau which stands in my bedroom, together with about eighteen thin paper folio books, which you will likewise find within the same glass-folding doors, I desire may be destroyed without any examination. Unless I die very suddenly, I shall take care that the papers I carry with me shall be carefully sent to you.—I am ever, my dear friend, most faithfully yours,

"ADAM SMITH."

In 1787 Smith was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. "No preferment," he writes, "could have given me so much real satisfaction. No man can owe greater obligations to a society than I do to the University of Glasgow. They educated me: they sent me to Oxford. Soon after my return to Scotland, they elected me one of their own members, and afterwards preferred me to another office, to which the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson had. given a superior degree of illustration. The period of

far the happiest and most honourable period of my life; and now, after three and twenty years' absence, to be remembered in so very agreeable a manner by my old friends and protectors, gives me a heartfelt joy which I cannot easily express to you."

As has already been mentioned, he sustained a severe shock through his mother's death in 1784. From this date his health seems to have declined. In 1790 he was prostrated by an obstruction of the bowels, which, after inflicting on him a good deal of prolonged suffering, terminated fatally in July of that year. He thus died at the comparatively early age of sixty-seven.

On the southern slope of the Calton Hill, opening off the London Road, there is a small and quiet cemetery, in a corner of which stands a plain but stately tomb, overlooking a rocky and precipitous descent. Below it, almost within a stonethrow, and in the heart of one of the most densely populated districts of Edinburgh, lies another burying-place, its gravestones blackened with the smoke and dust of the busy city. Above, there repose the remains of David Hume. Below, and not far separated from him, lies the dust of his dearest friend.

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

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