Chapter V

AN EXAMINATION OF THE SCOTCH INTELLECT DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

To complete the history and analysis of the Scotch mind, I have now to examine the peculiar intellectual movement which appeared in the eighteenth century, and which, for several reasons, deserves careful attention. It was essentially a reaction against that theological spirit which predominated during the seventeenth century. Such a reaction would hardly have been possible, except for the fact which I have already noticed, namely, that the political activity which produced the rebellion against the Stuarts, saved the Scotch mind from stagnating, and prevented that deep slumber into which the progress of superstition would naturally have thrown it. The long and stubborn conflict with a despotic government, kept alive a certain alertness and vigour of understanding, which survived the struggle that gave it birth. When the contest was ended, and peace was restored, the faculties which, for three generations, had been exercised in resisting the executive authority, sought other employment, and found another field in which they could disport themselves. Hence it was, that the boldness which, in the seventeenth century, was practical, became, in the eighteenth century, speculative, and produced a literature, which attempted to unsettle former opinions, and to disturb the ancient landmarks of the human mind. The movement was revolutionary, and bore the same relation to ecclesiastical tyranny, which the previous movement had borne to political tyranny. But this new rebellion had one striking characteristic. In nearly every other country, when the intellect has fairly arrayed itself against the exclusive pretensions of the Church, it has happened that the secular philosophy, which has been engendered, has been an inductive philosophy, taking for its basis individual and specific experience, and seeking, by that means, to overthrow the general and traditional notions, on which all church power is founded. The plan has been, to refuse to accept principles which could not be substantiated by facts; while the opposite and theological plan is, to force the facts to yield to the principles. In the former case, experience precedes theory; in the latter case, theory precedes experience, and controls it. In theology, certain principles are taken for granted; and, it being deemed impious to question them, all that remains for us is to reason from them downwards. This is the deductive method. On the other hand, the inductive method will concede nothing, but insists upon reasoning upwards, and demands that we shall have the liberty of ascertaining the principles for ourselves. In a complete scheme of our knowledge, and when all our resources are fully developed and marshalled into order, as they must eventually be, the two methods will be, not hostile, but supplementary, and will be combined into a single system. At present, however, we are very far from such a result; and not only is every mind more prone to one method than to another, but we find, historically, that different ages and different countries have been characterised by the extent to which one of these two schemes has predominated; and we also find, that a study of this antagonism is the surest way of understanding the intellectual condition of any period.

That the inductive philosophy is even more marked by its secular tendencies than by its scientific ones, will be evident to whoever observes the epochs in which it has been most active, and has possessed most adherents. Of this, the history of the French mind, in the eighteenth century, affords a good instance, where, after the death of Louis XIV., we may clearly trace the connexion between the growth of the inductive method, and the subsequent overthrow of the Gallican Church. In England, too, the rise of the Baconian philosophy, with its determination to subordinate ancient principles to modern experience, was the heaviest blow which has ever been inflicted on the theologians, whose method is to begin, not with experience, but with principles, which are said to be inscrutable, and which we are bound to believe without further difficulty. And I need hardly remind the reader, that scarcely was that philosophy established among us, when it produced those bold inquiries which quickly ended in the downfall of the English Church under Charles I. From that terrible defeat, our clergy did, for a time, partly rally; but as their apparent success, in the reign of Charles II., was owing to political changes, and not to social ones, they were unable to recover their hold over society, and, unless the nation should retrograde, there is no possibility that they ever should recover it. Over the inferior order of minds, they still wield great influence; but the Baconian philosophy, by bringing their favourite method into disrepute, has sapped the very base of their system. From the moment that their mode of investigation was discredited, the secret of their power was gone. From the moment that men began to insist on inquiring into the validity of first principles, instead of accepting them without inquiry, and humbly submitting to them as matters of faith and of necessary belief; from that moment, the theologians, driven from one post to another, and constantly receding before the pressure of advancing knowledge, have been forced to abandon entrenchment after entrenchment, until what they have retained of their former territory is hardly worth the struggle. As a last resource, they, at the close of the eighteenth century, determined to use the weapons of their opponents; and Paley and his successors, enlarging the scheme which Ray and Derham had feebly sketched, endeavoured, by a skilful employment of the inductive method, to compensate their party for the failure of the deductive one. But their project, though ably conceived, has come to naught. It is now generally admitted, that nothing can be made of it, and that it is impossible to establish the old theological premises by a chain of inductive reasoning. Respecting this, the most eminent philosophers agree with the most eminent theologians; and, since the time of Kant in Germany, and of Coleridge in England, none of our ablest men, even among divines themselves, have recurred to a plan which Paley, indeed, pursued with vigour, but of which our Bridgewater Treatises, our Prize-Essays, and such schoolboy productions, are poor and barren imitations.[613] No great thinkers now follow this course in matters of religion. On the contrary, they prefer the safer, as well as the more philosophic, method, of dealing with these subjects on transcendental grounds, frankly confessing that they elude the grasp of that inductive philosophy which, in the department of science, has achieved such signal triumphs.

The opposition of these two methods, and the inapplicability of the inductive method to theological pursuits being thus apparent, it is not strange that the Scotch should have adopted one of the methods with great zeal, and to the almost complete exclusion of the other. Scotland, being essentially theological, followed the theological plan. The intellectual history of that country, in the seventeenth century, is almost entirely the history of theology. With the single exception of Napier, who was born in the middle of the sixteenth century, all the most vigorous thinkers were divines. In physical science, scarcely anything was done.[614] There was no poetry, no drama, no original philosophy, no fine compositions, no secular literature, now worth reading.[615] The only men of real influence were the clergy. They governed the nation and the pulpit was the chief engine of their power. From the pulpit, they moved all classes and all sorts intellects; the highest as well as the lowest. There, they instructed them, and threatened them; saying whatever they liked, and knowing that what they said would be believed.[616] But all their sermons, and all their controversial writings, are eminently deductive; not of them attempts an inductive argument. The idea of such a thing never entered their heads. They assumed the truth of their own religion and moral notions, most of which they had borrowed from antiquity; they made those notions the major premises of their syllogisms, and from them they reasoned downwards till they obtained their conclusions. They never suspected that premises, taken from ancient times might be the result of the inductions of those times and that, as knowledge advanced, the inductions might need revising. They assumed, that God has given us first principles, and that He, having revealed them it would ill become us to scrutinize them. That He had revealed them, they took for granted, and deemed it unnecessary to prove.[617] Their method being entirely deductive, all they were concerned with was to beware that no error crept in between the premises and the conclusions. And this part of their task they accomplished with great ability. They were acute dialecticians, and rarely blundered in what is termed the formal part of logic. In dealing with their premises after they obtained them, they were extremely skilful; how they obtained them, they were very heedless. That was a point they never examined with anything approaching to impartiality. According to their method, all that was requisite was, to draw inferences from what had been supernaturally communicated. On the other hand, the inductive method would have taught them that the first question was, whether or not they had been supernaturally communicated? They, as deductive reasoners, assumed the very preliminaries which inductive reasoners would have disputed. They proceeded from generals to particulars, instead of from particulars to generals. And they would not allow either themselves or others to sift the general propositions, which were to cover and control the particular facts. It was enough for them that the wider propositions were already established, and were to be treated according to the rules of the old and syllogistic logic. Indeed, they were so convinced of the impropriety of the inductive method, that they did not hesitate to assert, that it was by means of the syllogism that the Deity communicated His wishes to man.[618]

It was naturally to be expected, that the clergy, holding these views respecting the best means of arriving at truth, should do all in their power to bring over the nation to their side, and should labour to make their own method of investigation entirely supersede the opposite method. Nor was this a very difficult task. The prevailing credulity was one great point in their favour, inasmuch as it made men more willing to accept propositions than to scrutinise them. When the propositions were accepted, nothing was left but to reason from them; and the most active intellects in Scotland, being constantly engaged in this process, acquired complete mastery over it, and the dexterity they displayed increased its repute. Besides this, the clergy, who were its zealous champions, had monopolized all the sources of education, both public and private. In no other Protestant country, have they exercised such control over the universities; not only the doctrines taught, but also the mode of teaching them, being, in Scotland, placed under the supervision of the Church.[619] This power they, of course, used to propagate their own plan of obtaining truth; and, as long as their power remained undiminished, it was hardly possible that the opposite, or inductive, plan should gain a hearing. Over grammar-schools, the clergy possessed an authority fully equal to that which they had in the universities.[620] They also appointed and removed, at their own pleasure, teachers of every grade, from village schoolmasters to tutors in private families.[621] In this way, each generation, as it arose, was brought under their influence, and made subject to their notions. Taking the mind of Scotland while it was young and flexible, they bent it to their own method. Hence, that method became supreme; it reigned every where; not a voice was lifted up against it; and no one had an idea that there was more than one path by which truth could be reached, or that the human understanding was of any use, except to deal deductively with premisses, which were not to be inductively examined.

The inductive or analytic spirit being thus unknown, and the deductive or synthetic spirit being alone favoured, it happened that, when, early in the eighteenth century, the circumstances already mentioned gave rise to a great intellectual movement, that movement, though new in its results, was not new in the method by which the results were obtained. A secular philosophy was, indeed, established, and the ablest men, instead of being theological, became scientific. But so completely had the theological plan occupied Scotland, that even philosophers were unable to escape from its method, and, as I am about to show, the inductive method exercised no influence over them. This most curious fact is the key to the history of Scotland in the eighteenth century, and explains many events which would otherwise appear incompatible with each other. It also suggests an analogy with Germany, where the deductive method has, for a long period, been equally prevalent, owing to precisely the same causes. In both countries, the secular movement of the eighteenth century was unable to become inductive; and this intellectual affinity between two such otherwise different nations, is, I have no doubt, the principal reason why the Scotch and German philosophies have so remarkably acted and reacted upon each other; Kant and Hamilton being the most finished specimens of their intercourse. To this, England forms a complete contrast. For more than a hundred and fifty years after the death of Bacon, the greatest English thinkers, Newton and Harvey excepted, were eminently inductive; nor was it until the nineteenth century that signs were clearly exhibited of a counter-movement, and an attempt was made to return in some degree to the deductive method.[622] This we are, in many respects, justified in doing, because, in the progress of our knowledge, we have, by a long course of induction, arrived at several conclusions which we may safely treat deductively; that is to say, we may make them the major premisses of new arguments. The same process has been seen in France, where the exclusively inductive philosophy of the eighteenth century preceded a partial resuscitation of deductive philosophy in the nineteenth century. In Scotland, however, there have been no such vicissitudes. In that country, men have always been deductive; even the most original thinkers being unable to liberate themselves from the universal tendency, and being forced to accept a method which time had consecrated, and which was interwoven with all the associations of the national mind.

To understand the investigation into which we are about to enter, the reader must firmly seize, and keep before his eyes, the essential difference between deduction, which reasons from principles, and induction, which reasons to principles. He must remember, that induction proceeds from the smaller to the greater; deduction, from the greater to the smaller. Induction is from particulars to generals, and from the senses to the ideas; deduction is from generals to particulars, and from the ideas to the senses. By induction, we rise from the concrete to the abstract; by deduction, we descend from the abstract to the concrete. Accompanying this distinction, there are certain qualities of mind, which, with extremely few exceptions, characterize the age, nation, or individual, in which one of these methods is predominant. The inductive philosopher is naturally cautious, patient, and somewhat creeping; while the deductive philosopher is more remarkable for boldness, dexterity, and often rashness. The deductive thinker invariably assumes certain premisses, which are quite different from the hypotheses essential to the best induction. These premisses are sometimes borrowed from antiquity; sometimes they are taken from the notions which happen to prevail in the surrounding society; sometimes they are the result of a man's own peculiar organization; and sometimes, as we shall presently see, they are deliberately invented, with the object of arriving, not at truth, but at an approximation to truth. Finally, and to sum up the whole, we may say that a deductive habit, being essentially synthetic, always tends to multiply original principles or laws; while the tendency of an inductive habit is to diminish those laws by gradual and successive analysis.

These being the two fundamental divisions of human inquiry, it is surely a most remarkable fact in the history of Scotland, that, during the eighteenth century, all the great thinkers belonged to the former division, and that, in the very few instances of induction which their works contain, it is evident, from the steps they subsequently took, that they regarded such inductions as unimportant in themselves, and as only valuable in so far as they supplied the premisses for another and deductive investigation. As the various departments of our knowledge have never yet been co-ordinated and treated as a whole, probably no one is aware of the universality of this movement in Scotland, and of the extent to which it pervaded every science, and governed every phase of thought. To prove, therefore, the force with which it acted, I now purpose to examine its working in all the principal forms of speculation, whether physical or moral, and to show that in each the same method was adopted. In doing this, I must, for the sake of clearness, proceed according to a natural arrangement of the different topics; but I will, whenever it is possible, also follow the chronological order in which the Scotch mind unfolded itself; so that we may understand, not only the character of that remarkable literature, but likewise the steps of its growth, and the astonishing vigour with which it emancipated itself from the shackles which superstition had imposed.

The beginning of the great secular philosophy of Scotland is undoubtedly due to Francis Hutcheson.[623] This eminent man, though born in Ireland, was of Scotch family, and was educated in the University of Glasgow, where he received the appointment of Professor of Philosophy in the year 1729.[624] By his lectures, and by his works, he diffused a taste for bold inquiries into subjects of the deepest importance, but concerning which it had previously been supposed nothing fresh was to be learned; the Scotch having hitherto been taught, that all truths respecting our own nature, which were essential to be known, had been already revealed. Hutcheson, however, did not fear to construct a system of morals according to a plan entirely secular, and no example of which had been exhibited in Scotland before his time. The principles from which he started, were not theological, but metaphysical. They were collected from what he deemed the natural constitution of the mind, instead of being collected, as heretofore, from what had been supernaturally communicated. He, therefore, shifted the field of study. Though he was a firm believer in revelation, he held that the best rules of conduct could be ascertained without its assistance, and could be arrived at by the unaided wit of man; and that, when arrived at, they were, in their aggregate, to be respected as the Law of Nature.[625] This confidence in the power of the human understanding was altogether new in Scotland, and its appearance forms an epoch in the national literature. Previously, men had been taught that the understanding was a rash and foolish thing, which ought to be repressed, and which was unfit to cope with the problems presented to it.[626] Hutcheson, however, held that it was quite able to deal with them, but that, to do so, it must be free and unfettered. Hence, he strenuously advocated that right of private judgment which the Scotch Kirk had not only assailed, but had almost destroyed. He insisted that each person had a right to form his opinion according to the evidence he possessed, and that, this right being inalienable, none but weak minds would abstain from exercising it.[627] Every one was to judge according to his own light, and nothing could be gained by inducing men to profess sentiments contrary to their convictions.[628] So far, however, was this from being understood, that we found all the little sects quarrelling among themselves, and abusing each other, merely because their views were different. It was strange to hear how the professors of one creed would stigmatize the professors of other creeds as idolatrous, and would demand that penalties should be inflicted on them. In point of fact, all had much that was good; and their only real evil was, this love of persecution.[629] But the vulgar deemed every one a heretic who did not believe what they believed; and this way of thinking had been too much countenanced by the clergy, many of whom felt their vanity offended at the idea of laymen pretending to be wiser than their spiritual teachers, and venturing to disagree with what they said.[630]

Such large views of liberty were far in advance of the country in which they were propounded, and could exercise no influence, except over a few thinking men. These, and similar doctrines, were, however, repeated by Hutcheson, in his lectures, every year.[631] And strange, indeed, they must have seemed. To those who received them, they were utterly subversive of the prevailing theological spirit, which regarded toleration as impious, and which, seeking to confine the human mind within the limits of foregone conclusions, deemed it a duty to chastise those who overstepped them. In opposition to this, Hutcheson let in the elements of inquiry, of discussion, and of doubt. There is also another point in which his philosophy is memorable, as the beginning of the great rebellion of the Scotch intellect. We saw, in the last chapter, how successfully the teachers of the people had inculcated doctrines of the darkest asceticism, and how naturally those doctrines had arisen out of the enormous authority possessed by the Church. Against such notions, Hutcheson set his face strenuously. He rightly supposed, that an admiration of every kind of beauty, so far from being sinful, is essential to a complete and well-balanced mind; and the most original part of his philosophy consists of the inquiries which he made into the working and origin of our ideas on that subject. Hitherto, the Scotch had been taught that the emotions which beauty excites, were owing to the corruption of our nature, and ought to be repressed. Hutcheson, on the other hand, insisted that they were good in themselves; that they were part of the general scheme of human affairs, and that they deserved a special and scientific study.[632] And with such skill did he investigate them, that, in the opinion of one of the highest living authorities, he is the originator of all subsequent inquiries into these matters; his being the first attempt to deal with the subject of beauty in a broad and comprehensive spirit.[633]

Not only in speculative views, but also in practical recommendations, Hutcheson displayed the same tendency; every where endeavouring to break down that gloomy fabric which superstition had built up.[634] His predecessors, and, indeed, nearly all his contemporaries who exercised much influence, represented pleasure as immoral, and opposed themselves to the fine arts, which they considered dangerous, as ministering to our pleasures, and thereby distracting our minds from serious concerns. Hutcheson, however, declared that the fine arts were to be cherished; for, he said, they are not only agreeable, but also reputable, and to employ our time with them is honourable.[635] That such is the case is obvious enough to us, but it was long, indeed, since similar language had been heard in Scotland from a great public teacher, and it was completely opposed to the prevailing notions. But Hutcheson went even further. Not content with raising his voice in favour of wealth,[636] which the Scotch clergy stigmatized as one of the most pernicious and carnal of all things, he fearlessly asserted that all our natural appetites are lawful, and that the gratification of them is consistent with the highest virtue.[637] In his eyes, they were lawful, because they were natural; while, according to the theological theory, their being natural made them unlawful. And here lies the fundamental difference between the practical views of Hutcheson and those previously received. He, like every great thinker since the seventeenth century, loved human nature, and respected it; but he neither loved nor respected those who unduly trammelled it, and thereby weakened its vigour, as well as impaired its beauty. He placed more confidence in mankind, than in the rulers of mankind. The Scotch divines, who preceded him, were the libellers of their species; they calumniated the whole human race. According to them, there was nothing in us but sin and corruption; and, therefore, all our desires were to be checked. It is the peculiar glory of Hutcheson, that he was the first man in Scotland who publicly combated these degrading notions. With a noble and lofty aim did he undertake his task. Venerating the human mind, he was bent on vindicating its dignity against those who disputed its titles. Unhappily, he could not succeed; the prejudices of his time were too strong. Still, he did all that was in his power. He opposed the tide which he was unable to stem; he attacked what it was impossible to destroy; and he cast from his philosophy, with vehement scorn, those base prejudices, which, by aspersing all that is great and magnanimous, had long blinded the eyes of their contemporaries, and, by bringing into fresh prominence the old and mischievous dogma of moral degeneracy, had represented our nature as a compound of vices, and had been unable to see how many virtues we really possess, how much of the spirit of self-sacrifice, and of free disinterested benevolence has always existed; how much of good even the worst of us retain; and how, among the ordinary and average characters of whom the world is composed, the desire of benefiting others is more frequent than the desire of hurting them, kindness is more common than cruelty, and the number of good deeds does, on the whole, far outweigh the number of bad ones.[638]

Thus much as to the tendency of Hutcheson's philosophy.[639] We have now to ascertain his method, that is to say, the plan which he adopted in order to obtain his results. This is a very important part of our present inquiry; and we shall find that, in the study of moral philosophy, as in the study of all subjects not yet raised to sciences, there are not only two methods, but that each method leads to different consequences. If we proceed by induction, we arrive at one conclusion; if we proceed by deduction, we arrive at another. This difference in the results, is always a proof that the subject, in which the difference exists, is not yet capable of scientific treatment, and that some preliminary difficulties have to be removed, before it can pass from the empirical stage into the scientific one. As soon as those difficulties are got rid of, the results obtained by induction, will correspond with those obtained by deduction; supposing, of course, that both lines of argument are fairly managed. In such case, it will be of no importance whether we reason from particulars to generals, or from generals to particulars. Either plan will yield the same consequences, and this agreement between the consequences, proves that our investigation is, properly speaking, scientific. Thus, for instance, in chemistry, if, by reasoning deductively from general principles, we could always predict what would happen when we united two or more elements, even supposing those elements were new to us; and if, by reasoning inductively from each element, we could arrive at the same conclusion, one process would corroborate the other, and, by their mutual verification, the science would be complete. In chemistry, we cannot do this; therefore, chemistry is not yet a science, although, since the introduction into it, by Dalton, of the ideas of weight and number, there is every prospect of its becoming one. On the other hand, astronomy is a science, because, by employing the deductive weapon of mathematics, we can compute the motions and perturbations of bodies; and, by employing the inductive weapon of observation, the telescope reveals to us the accuracy of our previous, and, as it were, foregone, inferences. The fact agrees with the idea; the particular event confirms the general principle; the principle explains the event; and their unanimity authorizes us to believe that we must be right, since, proceed as we may, the conclusion is the same; and the inductive plan, of striking averages, harmonizes with the deductive plan, of reasoning from ideas.

But, in the study of morals there is no such harmony. Partly from the force of prejudice, and partly from the complexity of the subject, all attempts at a scientific investigation of morals have failed. It is not, therefore, surprising that, in this field, the inductive inquirer arrives at one conclusion, and the deductive inquirer at another. The inductive inquirer endeavours to attain his object by observing the actions of men, and subjecting them to analysis, in order to learn the principles which regulate them. The deductive inquirer, beginning at the other end, assumes certain principles as original, and reasons from them to the facts which actually appear in the world. The former proceeds from the concrete to the abstract; the latter, from the abstract to the concrete. The inductive moralist looks at the history of past society, or at the condition of the present, and takes for granted that the first step is, to assemble the facts, and then to generalize them. The deductive inquirer, using the facts rather to illustrate his principles, than to suggest them, appeals, in the first place, not to external facts, but to internal ideas, and he makes those ideas the major premiss of a syllogistic argument. Both parties agree, that we have the power of judging some actions to be right, and others to be wrong. But as to how we get that power, and as to what that power is, they are at utter variance. The inductive philosopher says, that its object is happiness, that we get it by association, and that it is due to the action and reaction of social causes, which are susceptible of analysis. The deductive philosopher says, that this power of distinguishing between right and wrong, aims, not at happiness, but at truth; that it is inherent, that it cannot be analyzed, that it is a primary conviction, and that we may assume it and reason from it, but can never hope to explain it by reasoning to it.

It requires but a slight acquaintance with the works of Hutcheson to see that he belongs to the latter of these two schools. He assumes, that all men have what he terms a moral faculty, which, being an original principle, does not admit of analysis.[640] He further assumes, that the business of this faculty is to regulate all our powers.[641] From these two assumptions, he reasons downwards to the visible facts of our conduct, and deductively constructs the general scheme of life. His plan being entirely synthetic, he depreciates the analytic method, and complains of it as an artful attempt to diminish the number of our perceptive powers.[642] The truth is, that every such diminution would have taken away some of his original principles, and would thereby have prevented him from using them as the major premisses of separate arguments. And if you deprive a deductive reasoner of his major premisses, you leave him nothing on which to stand. Hutcheson, therefore, like all the philosophers of his school, was extremely jealous of the invasions of the inductive spirit, with its constant tendency to attack convictions supposed to be primary, and seek to resolve them into their elements. He repulsed such encroachments upon his major premisses, because the power and beauty of his method were displayed in reasoning from the premisses, and not in reasoning to them. According to him, the moral faculty, and the authority which it exercised, were impervious to analysis; it was impossible to track them higher, or to resolve them into simpler constituents; and it was in vain that many attempted to refer them to circumstances external to themselves, such as education, custom, or the association of ideas.[643]

Hence, the judgments which men pass upon the conduct of others, or of themselves, are, in their origin, altogether inexplicable; each judgment being merely a different form of one great moral faculty. Inasmuch, however, as that faculty escapes observation, and is only known by its results, it is evident that, for all purposes of reasoning, the judgments must be deemed primary, and arguments are to be constructed from them, as if they were the ultimate and highest conditions of our nature. In this way, Hutcheson was led to that love of multiplying original principles, which Sir James Mackintosh has justly noticed as a characteristic of his philosophy, and, after him, of the Scotch philosophy in general;[644] though the distinguished author of this remark has failed to perceive that such characteristic was but a single part of a far larger scheme, and was intimately connected with those habits of deductive thought which a long train of preceding circumstances had indelibly imprinted on the Scotch mind.

In Hutcheson, the tendency was so strong, as to make him believe, that, by arguing from a certain number of original principles, he could construct the theory and explain the march of human affairs, with little or no aid from the experience of the past, or, indeed, of the present. His views, for instance, respecting the nature and objects of legislation, criminal, as well as civil, might have been written by a recluse who had never quitted his hermitage, and whose purity was still unsoiled by the realities of the world. Starting from the so-called nature of things, his first steps were ideal, and from them he sought to advance to the actual. In his account of the duties of life, as they existed before the power of government was consolidated, he quotes no evidence to show what really happened among barbarous tribes who were in that state; but he contents himself with deductive inferences from the principles he had previously laid down.[645] Difficult questions relating to the laws of property, are treated in the same manner; that is to say, the conclusions respecting them are arrived at on speculative grounds, and not by comparing how the different enactments have worked in different countries.[646] Experience is either shut out, or made subordinate to theory; and facts are adduced to illustrate the inference, but not to suggest it. So, too, the proper relation between the people and their rulers, and the amount of liberty which the people should possess, instead of being inductively generalized from an historical inquiry into the circumstances which had produced most happiness, might, in the opinion of Hutcheson, be ascertained by reasoning from the nature of government, and from the ends for which it was instituted.[647]

The next great attempt to study the actions of men scientifically, and to generalize the principles of their conduct without the intervention of supernatural ideas, was made by Adam Smith, who, in 1759, published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and, in 1776, his Wealth of Nations. To understand the philosophy of this, by far the greatest of all the Scotch thinkers, both works must be taken together, and considered as one; since they are, in reality, the two divisions of a single subject. In the Moral Sentiments, he investigates the sympathetic part of human nature; in the Wealth of Nations, he investigates its selfish part. And as all of us are sympathetic as well as selfish; in other words, as all of us look without as well as within, and as this classification is a primary and exhaustive division of our motives to action, it is evident, that if Adam Smith had completely accomplished his vast design, he would at once have raised the study of human nature to a science, leaving nothing for subsequent inquirers except to ascertain the minor springs of affairs, all of which would find their place in this general scheme, and be deemed subordinate to it. In his attempt to perform this prodigious task, and to traverse the enormous field which he saw lying before him, he soon perceived that an inductive investigation was impossible, because it would require the labour of many lives even to assemble the materials from which the generalization was to be made. Moved by this reflection, and, probably, moved still more by the intellectual habits which prevailed around him, he resolved on adopting the deductive method instead of the inductive; but, in seeking for the premisses from which he was to reason, and on which his structure was to be built, he resorted to a peculiar artifice, which is perfectly valid, and which he had an undoubted right to employ, though, to make it available, requires such delicate tact, and involves so many refinements, that extremely few writers have used it with effect on social questions either before or since.

The plan to which I allude is, that when any subject becomes unmanageable by the inductive method, whether from the impossibility of experimenting upon it, or from its extreme natural complexity, or from the presence of immense and bewildering details collected around it, we may, in all such cases, make an imaginary separation of inseparable facts; and reason upon trains of events which have no real and independent existence, and which are nowhere to be found except in the mind of the inquirer. A result obtained in this way, cannot be strictly true; but, if we have reasoned accurately, it will be as near truth as were the premisses from which we started. To make it perfectly true, we must confront it with other results, which we have arrived at in a similar way, and from the same subject. These separate inferences may eventually be coördinated into a single system; so that, while each inference contains only an imperfect truth, the whole of the inferences, when put together, will contain perfect truth.

Such hypothetical arguments are evidently based upon an intentional suppression of facts; and the artifice is necessary, because, without the suppression, the facts would be unmanageable. Each argument leads to a conclusion which approximates to truth; hence, whenever the premisses are so comprehensive as almost to exhaust the facts to which they refer, the conclusion will be so near to complete truth as to be of the greatest value, even before it is coördinated with other conclusions drawn from the same department of inquiry.

Geometry exhibits the most perfect example of this logical stratagem. The object of the geometrician is, to generalize the laws of space; in other words, to ascertain the necessary and universal relations of its various parts. Inasmuch, however, as space would have no parts unless it were divided, the geometrician is forced to assume such a division; and he takes the simplest possible form of it, a division by lines. Now, a line considered as a fact, that is, as it is found in the actual world, must always have two qualities, length and breadth. However slight these qualities may be, every line has them both. But if the geometrician took both into consideration, he would find himself in the presence of a problem too complicated for the resources of the human understanding to deal with; or, at all events, too complicated for the present resources of our knowledge. He, therefore, by a scientific artifice, deliberately strikes off one of these qualities, and asserts that a line is length without breadth. He knows that the assertion is false, but he also knows that it is necessary. For, if you deny it, he can prove nothing. If you insist upon his letting into his premisses the idea of breadth, he is unable to proceed, and the whole fabric of geometry falls to the ground. Since, however, the breadth of the faintest line is so slight as to be incapable of measurement, except by an instrument used under the microscope, it follows that the assumption, that there can be lines without breadth, is so nearly true, that our senses, when unassisted by art, cannot detect the error. Formerly, and until the invention of the micrometer, in the seventeenth century, it was impossible to detect it at all. Hence, the conclusions of the geometrician approximate so close to truth, that we are justified in accepting them as true. The flaw is too minute to be perceived. But that there is a flaw, appears to me certain. It appears certain, that whenever something is kept back in the premisses, something must be wanting in the conclusion. In all such cases, the field of inquiry has not been entirely covered; and part of the preliminary facts being suppressed, it must, I think, be admitted, that complete truth is unattainable, and that no problem in geometry has yet been exhaustively solved.[648]

Still, the amazing triumphs effected in this branch of mathematics, show how powerful a weapon that form of deduction is, which proceeds by an artificial separation of facts, in themselves inseparable. So little, however, is the philosophy of the method understood, that when, late in the eighteenth century, political economy assumed a scientific form, many persons, who were otherwise well instructed, reproached its cultivators with their hard-heartedness; such objectors being unable to see, that the science could not be constructed if it were necessary to take in the whole range of generous and benevolent affections. The political economist aims at discovering the laws of wealth, which are far too complicated to be studied under every aspect. He, therefore, selects one of those aspects, and generalizes the laws as they are exhibited in the selfish parts of human nature. And he is right in doing so, simply because men, in the pursuit of wealth, consider their own gratification oftener than the gratification of others. Hence, he, like the geometrician, blots out one part of his premisses, in order that he may manipulate the remaining part with greater ease. But we must always remember, that political economy, though a profound and beautiful science, is only a science of one department of life, and is founded upon a suppression of some of the facts in which all large societies abound. It suppresses, or, what comes to the same thing, it ignores, many high and magnanimous feelings which we could ill afford to lose. We are not, therefore, to allow its conclusions to override all other conclusions. We may accept them in science, and yet reject them in practice. Thus, the political economist, when confining himself to his own department, says, with good reason, that it is both absurd and mischievous for government to undertake to supply the working-classes with employment. This assertion, he, as a political economist, can prove; and yet, notwithstanding its scientific truth, it may be practically right for a government to do the exact opposite. It may be right for a government to supply the employment, when the people are so ignorant as to demand it, and when, at the same time, they are so powerful as to plunge the country into anarchy if the demand is refused. Here, the view of the politician takes in all the premisses of which the political economist had only taken in a portion. In the same way, as a matter of economic science, it is wrong for any one to relieve the poor; since nothing is better established, than that to relieve poverty increases it, by encouraging improvidence. But, in spite of this, the antagonistic principle of sympathy will come into play, and will, in some minds, operate with such force, as to make it advisable, that he who feels it should give alms, because, if he abstains from giving them, the violence which he does to his own nature may inflict more mischief on himself, than his bestowal of charity would inflict on the general interests of society.

It will not, I hope, be considered that, in these remarks, I have digressed from the main argument of the present chapter, since, although, in making them, I have aimed at clearing up a general question respecting the nature of scientific proof, I have only done so with the more particular object of illustrating the philosophy of Adam Smith, and of explaining the method which that most profound and original thinker pursued. We shall now be able to see how entirely his plan was deductive, and what a peculiar form of deduction it was. In his two great works, he first lays down certain ideas, and from them he marches on to the facts of the external world. And, in each work, he reasons from only part of his premisses; supplying the other part in the other work. None of us are exclusively selfish, and none of us are exclusively sympathetic. But Adam Smith separates in speculation qualities which are inseparable in reality. In his Moral Sentiments, he ascribes our actions to sympathy; in his Wealth of Nations, he ascribes them to selfishness. A short view of these two works will prove the existence of this fundamental difference, and will enable us to perceive that each is supplementary to the other; so that, in order to understand either, it is necessary to study both.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith lays down one great principle from which he reasons, and to which all the others are subordinate. This principle is, that the rules which we prescribe to ourselves, and which govern our conduct, are solely arrived at by observing the conduct of others.[649] We judge ourselves, because we had previously judged them. Our notions are obtained from without, and not from within. If, therefore, we lived entirely alone, we could have no idea of merit or demerit, and it would be impossible for us to form an opinion as to whether our sentiments were right or wrong.[650] To acquire this knowledge, we must look abroad. Inasmuch, however, as we have no direct experience of what other persons actually feel, we can only gain the information by conceiving what we should feel if we were in their place.[651] Hence, all men are, in imagination, constantly changing situations with others; and though the change is ideal, and lasts but for a moment, it is the foundation of that great and universal impulse which is called Sympathy.[652]

By proceeding from these premisses, a vast number of social phenomena may be explained. We naturally sympathize with joy more than with sorrow.[653] Hence, that admiration for prosperous and successful persons, which is quite independent of any benefit we expect from them; and hence, too, the existence of different ranks and of social distinctions, all of which emanate from the same source.[654] Hence, also, the feeling of loyalty, which is a product, not of reason, nor of fear, nor of a sense of public convenience, but rather of sympathy with those above us, begetting an extraordinary compassion for even their ordinary sufferings.[655] Custom and fashion play a great part in the world, but they owe their origin entirely to sympathy;[656] and so do the various systems of philosophy which have flourished at different times, the disagreement between which depends on the fact, that each philosopher has sympathized with different ideas, some sympathizing with the notion of fitness or congruity, some with that of prudence, some with that of benevolence, and every one developing the conception paramount in his own mind.[657] To sympathy, again, we must ascribe the establishment of rewards and punishments, and the whole of our criminal laws, none of which would have existed but for our disposition to sympathize with those who either do good or suffer harm; for the circumstance of society being protected by penal laws, is a subsequent and subordinate discovery, which confirms our sense of their propriety, but did not suggest it.[658] The same principle causes the difference of character exhibited by different classes, such as the irritability of poets, compared with the coolness of mathematicians;[659] it likewise causes that social difference between the sexes, which makes men more remarkable for generosity, and women for humanity.[660] All these results illustrate the workings of sympathy, and are the remote, but still the direct, operations of that principle. Indeed, we can trace to it some of the minutest divisions of character; pride and vanity, for instance, being dependent on it, although those two passions are often confused together, and are sometimes strangely blended in the same mind.[661]

Sympathy, then, is the main-spring of human conduct. It arises, not so much from witnessing the passions of other persons, as from witnessing the situation which excites those passions.[662] To this single process we are indebted, not only for the highest principles, but also for the deepest emotions. For, the greatest affection of which we are capable, is merely sympathy fixed into habit; and the love which exists between the nearest relations, is not inherent, but is derived from this mighty and controlling principle, which governs the whole course of affairs.[663]

By this bold hypothesis, Adam Smith, at one stroke, so narrowed the field of inquiry, as to exclude from it all considerations of selfishness as a primary principle, and only to admit its great antagonist, sympathy. The existence of the antagonism, he distinctly recognizes. For, he will not allow that sympathy is in any way to be deemed a selfish principle.[664] Although he knew that it is pleasurable, and that all pleasure contains an element of selfishness, it did not suit the method of his philosophy to subject the principle of sympathy to such an inductive analysis as would reveal its elements. His business was, to reason from it, and not to it. Concentrating his energy upon the deductive process, and displaying that dialectic skill which is natural to his countrymen, and of which he himself was one of the most consummate masters the world has ever seen, he constructed a system of philosophy, imperfect indeed, because the premisses were imperfect, but approaching truth as closely as it was possible for any one to do who abstained from giving due consideration to the selfish part of human nature. Into the workings of its sympathetic part, he looked with a minuteness, and he reasoned from it with a subtlety, which make his work the most important that has ever been written on this interesting subject. But, inasmuch as his plan involved a deliberate suppression of preliminary and essential facts, the results which he obtained do not strictly correspond to those which are actually observed in the world.[665] This, however, as I have shown, is not a valid objection; since such discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, or between the abstract and the concrete, is the necessary consequence of that still early condition of our knowledge, which forces us to study complicated questions piecemeal, and to raise them to sciences by separate and fragmentary investigations.

That Adam Smith saw this necessity, and that his seeing it was the cause of the method he pursued, is evident from the fact, that in his next great work he followed the same plan, and, though he argued from new premisses, he carefully avoided arguing from any of the old ones. Convinced that, in his theory of morals, he had reasoned as accurately as possible from the principles supplied by sympathy, his capacious and insatiable mind, deeming that nothing had been done while aught remained to do, urged him to pass on to the opposite passion of selfishness, and treat it in the same manner, so that the whole domain of thought might be covered. This he did in his Wealth of Nations, which, though even a greater work than his Moral Sentiments, is equally one-sided, in reference to the principles which it assumes. It assumes that selfishness is the main regulator of human affairs, just as his previous work had assumed sympathy to be so. Between the two works there elapsed an interval of seventeen years; the Wealth of Nations not being published till 1776. But what shows that to their author both were part of a single scheme, is the notable circumstance, that, so early as 1753, he had laid down the principles which his later work contains.[666] This was while his former work was still in meditation, and before it had seen the light. It is, therefore, clear, that the study which he made, first of one passion, and then of its opposite, was not a capricious or accidental arrangement, but was the consequence of that vast idea which presided over all his labours, and which, when they are rightly understood, gives to them a magnificent unity. And a glorious object of ambition it was. His aspiring and comprehensive genius, sweeping the distant horizon, and taking in the intermediate space at a glance, sought to traverse the whole ground in two separate and independent directions, indulging the hope, that, by supplying in one line of argument the premisses which were wanting in the other, their opposite conclusions would be compensatory rather than hostile, and would serve as a broad and permanent basis on which one great science of human nature might be safely built.

The Wealth of Nations is, as I have elsewhere observed,[667] probably the most important book which has ever been written, whether we consider the amount of original thought which it contains, or its practical influence. Its practical recommendations were extremely favourable to those doctrines of freedom which the eighteenth century ushered in; and this secured to them an attention which otherwise they would not have received. While, therefore, the Wealth of Nations was the proximate cause of a great change in legislation,[668] a deeper analysis will show, that the success of the book, and, consequently, the alteration of the laws, depended upon the operation of more remote and general causes. It must also be confessed, that those same causes predisposed the mind of Adam Smith to the doctrines of liberty, and gave him a sort of prejudice in favour of conclusions which limited the interference of the legislator. Thus much he borrowed from his age; but one thing he did not borrow. His wide and organizing mind was all his own. This would have made him great under any circumstances; to make him powerful, required a peculiar conjunction of events. That conjunction he enjoyed, and he turned it to good account. The influence of his contemporaries was enough to make him liberal; his own capacity was enough to make him comprehensive. He had, in a most remarkable degree, that exuberance of thought, which is one of the highest forms of genius, but which leads those who possess it into distant excursions, which, though they have one common aim, are often stigmatized as digressions, simply because they who criticize are unable to discern the great principle which pervades the whole, and unites the various parts into a single scheme. This has been especially the case with Adam Smith, whose immortal work has often been exposed to such shallow objections. And certainly, the Wealth of Nations displays a breadth of treatment which those who cannot sympathize with, are very likely to ridicule. The phenomena, not only of wealth, but also of society in general, classified and arranged under their various forms; the origin of the division of labour, and the consequences which that division has produced; the circumstances which gave rise to the invention of money, and to the subsequent changes in its value; the history of those changes traced in different ages, and the history of the relations which the precious metals bear to each other; an examination of the connection between wages and profits, and of the laws which govern the rise and fall of both; another examination of the way in which these are concerned, on the one hand, with the rent of land, and, on the other hand, with the price of commodities; an inquiry into the reason why profits vary in different trades, and at different times; a succinct, but comprehensive, view of the progress of towns in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire; the fluctuations, during several centuries, in the prices of the food of the people, and a statement of how it is, that, in different stages of society, the relative cost of land and of meat varies; the history of corporation laws and of municipal enactments, and their bearing on the four great classes of apprentices, manufacturers, merchants, and landlords; an account of the immense power and riches formerly enjoyed by the clergy, and of the manner in which, as society advances, they gradually lose their exclusive privileges; the nature of religious dissent, and the reason why the clergy of the established Church can never contend with it on terms of equality, and, therefore, call on the State to help them, and wish to persecute when they cannot persuade; why some sects profess more ascetic principles, and others more luxurious ones; how it was, that, during the feudal times, the nobles acquired their power, and how that power has, ever since, been gradually diminishing; how the rights of territorial jurisdiction originated, and how they died away; how the sovereigns of Europe obtained their revenue, what the sources of it are, and what classes are most heavily taxed in order to supply it; the cause of certain virtues, such as hospitality, flourishing in barbarous ages, and decaying in civilized ones; the influence of inventions and discoveries in altering the distribution of power among the various classes of society; a bold and masterly sketch of the peculiar sort of advantages which Europe derived from the discovery of America and of the passage round the Cape; the origin of universities, their degeneracy from their original plan, the corruption which has gradually crept over them, and the reason why they are so unwilling to adopt improvements, and to keep pace with the wants of the age; a comparison between public and private education, and an estimate of their relative advantages;—these, and a vast number of other subjects, respecting the structure and development of society, such as the feudal system, slavery, emancipation of serfs, origin of standing armies, and of mercenary troops, effects produced by tithes, laws of primogeniture, sumptuary laws, international treaties concerning trade, rise of European banks, national debts, influence of dramatic representations over opinions, influence of foreign travels over opinions, colonies, poor-laws,—all topics of a miscellaneous character, and many of them diverging from each other,—all are fused into one great system, and irradiated by the splendour of one great genius. Into that dense and disorderly mass, did Adam Smith introduce symmetry, method, and law. At his touch, anarchy disappeared, and darkness was succeeded by light. Much, of course, he took from his predecessors, though nothing like so much as is commonly supposed. On this sort of borrowing, the best and strongest of us are dependent. But, after making every possible allowance for what he gathered from others, we must honestly say, that no single man ever took so great a step upon so important a subject, and that no single work which is now preserved, contains so many views, which were novel at the time, but which subsequent experience has ratified. What, however, for our present purpose, is most important to observe, is, that he obtained these results by arguing from principles which the selfish part of human nature exclusively supplied, and that he omitted those sympathetic feelings of which every human being possesses at least some share, but which he could not take into consideration, without producing a problem, the number of whose complications it would have been hopeless to unravel.

To avoid, therefore, being baffled, he simplified the problem, by erasing from his view of human nature those premisses which he had already handled in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. At the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, he lays down two propositions: 1st, that all wealth is derived, not from land, but from labour; and 2d, that the amount of the wealth depends, partly on the skill with which the labour is conducted, and partly on the proportion between the number of those who labour and the number of those who do not labour. The rest of the work, is an application of these principles, to explain the growth and mechanism of society. In applying them, he everywhere assumes, that the great moving power of all men, all interests, and all classes, in all ages, and in all countries, is selfishness. The opposite power of sympathy he entirely shuts out; and I hardly remember an instance in which even the word occurs in the whole course of his work. Its fundamental assumption is, that each man exclusively follows his own interest, or what he deems to be his own interest. And one of the peculiar features of his book is, to show that, considering society as a whole, it nearly always happens that men, in promoting their own interest, will unintentionally promote the interest of others. Hence, the great practical lesson is, not to restrain selfishness, but to enlighten it; because there is a provision in the nature of things, by which the selfishness of the individual accelerates the progress of the community. According to this view, the prosperity of a country depends on the amount of its capital; the amount of its capital depends on the habit of saving, that is, on parsimony, as opposed to generosity; while the habit of saving is, in its turn, governed by the desire we all feel of bettering our condition,—a desire so inherent in our nature, that it comes with us from the womb, and only leaves us in the grave.[669]

This constant effort of every man, to better his own condition, is so salutary, as well as so powerful, that it is often capable of securing the progress of society, in spite of the folly and extravagance of the rulers of mankind.[670] If it were not for this propensity, improvement would be impossible. For human institutions are constantly stopping our advance, by thwarting our natural inclinations.[671] And no wonder that this should be the case, seeing that the men who are at the head of affairs, and by whom the institutions are contrived, have, perhaps, a certain rough and practical sagacity; but being, from the narrowness of their understandings, incapable of large views, their councils are determined by those mere casual fluctuations which alone they are able to perceive.[672] They do not see that we have prospered, not on account of their enactments, but in the teeth of them; and that the real cause of our prosperity is the fact that we enjoy undisturbed the fruit of our own labour.[673] Whenever this right is tolerably secure, every man will be bent on procuring for himself either present enjoyment or future profit; and if he does not aim at one of these objects, he is void of common understanding.[674] If he possess capital, he will probably aim at both, but, in doing so, he will never consider the interest of others; his sole motive will be his own private profit.[675] And it is well that such should be the case. For, by thus pursuing his personal interest, he aids society more than if his views were generous and exalted. Some people affect to carry on trade for the good of others; but this is mere affectation, though, to say the truth, it is an affectation not very common among merchants, and many words are not needed to dissuade them from so foolish a practice.[676]

In this way, Adam Smith completely changes the premisses which he had assumed in his earlier work. Here, he makes men naturally selfish; formerly, he had made them naturally sympathetic.[677] Here, he represents them as pursuing wealth for sordid objects, and for the narrowest personal pleasures; formerly he represented them as pursuing it out of regard to the sentiments of others, and for the sake of obtaining their sympathy.[678] In the Wealth of Nations, we hear no more of this conciliatory and sympathetic spirit; such amiable maxims are altogether forgotten, and the affairs of the world are regulated by different principles. It now appears that benevolence and affection have no influence over our actions. Indeed, Adam Smith will hardly admit common humanity into his theory of motives. If a people emancipate their slaves, it is a proof, not that the people are acted on by high moral considerations, nor that their sympathy is excited by the cruelty inflicted on these unhappy creatures. Nothing of the sort. Such inducements to conduct are imaginary, and exercise no real sway. All that the emancipation proves, is, that the slaves were few in number, and, therefore, small in value. Otherwise, they would not have been emancipated.[679]

So, too, while in his former work, he had ascribed the different systems of morals to the power of sympathy, he, in this work, ascribes them entirely to the power of selfishness. He observes, that, among the lower ranks of society, dissipation is more fatal to individuals, than it is among the higher ranks. The extravagance which dissipation produces, may injure the fortune of a wealthy man, but the injury is usually capable of being repaired, or, at all events, he can indulge his vices for years without completely destroying his fortune, and without bringing himself to utter ruin. To the labourer, a similar indulgence would be fatal in a single week; it would not merely reduce him to beggary, and perhaps send him to jail, but it would destroy his future prospects, by taking away that character for sobriety and regularity on which his employment depends. Hence, the better class of common people, guided by their interest, look with aversion on excesses which they know to be fatal; while the upper ranks finding that a moderate amount of vice hurts neither their purse nor their reputation consider such license to be one of the advantages which their fortune confers, and they value, as one of the privileges belonging to their station, the liberty of indulging themselves without being censured. Therefore it is, that they who dissent from the established Church have a purer system of morals, or, at all events, an austerer one, than they who agree with it. For, new religious sects usually begin among the common people, the thinking part of whom are, by their interest, driven to strict views of the duties of life. Consequently, the advocates of the new opinion profess a similar strictness, seeing that it is the surest means of increasing their proselytes. Thus it is that sectaries and heretics, governed by interest rather than by principle, adopt a code of morals which is suited to their own purpose, and the rigidity of which is strongly contrasted with the laxer code of more orthodox believers.[680] Owing to the operation of the same principle, we also find, that, among the orthodox themselves, the clergy embrace a stricter system of morals in countries where church benefices are nearly equal than they do in countries where the benefices are very unequal. This is because, when all the benefices are nearly equal, none can be very rich, and, consequently, even the most conspicuous among the clergy will have but small incomes. But a man who has little to spend can have no influence, unless his morals are exemplary. Having no wealth to give him weight the vices of levity would make him ridiculous. To avoid contempt, and also to avoid the expense which a looseness of conduct occasions, and which his narrow circumstances cannot afford, he has but one remedy, and that remedy he adopts. He retains his influence, and saves his pocket, by protesting against pleasures which he cannot conveniently enjoy; in this, as in all other cases, pursuing that plan of life which his own interest urges him to follow.[681]

In these striking generalizations, which, though they contain a large amount of truth, are far from containing the whole truth, no room is left for the magnanimous parts of our nature to act; but the system of morals, prevailing at any one time or in any one class, is solely ascribed to the dictates of unalloyed selfishness. Adam Smith, by reasoning from this principle, with that exquisite subtlety which characterized his mind, explains many other circumstances which society presents, and which at first sight appear incongruous. According to the old notions, which, indeed, are not yet quite extinct, those who received wages were under a personal obligation to those who paid them; that is to say, they were under a moral obligation, over and above the obligation of performing certain services. It was believed that a master could not only select what servants he chose, but could pay them what he chose; or, at all events, that it was the will of the masters, considered as a body, which fixed the usual and average rate of wages.[682] The lower classes were, therefore, much indebted to the higher ones for giving them so much as they did; and it was incumbent upon all persons, who received wages, to take them with humble thankfulness, and with a feeling of gratitude, on account of the favour bestowed upon them by the generosity of their superiors.

This doctrine, so convenient to the upper classes of society, and so natural to the universal ignorance which formerly prevailed on these matters, began to be shaken by the speculative thinkers of the seventeenth century; but it was reserved for the eighteenth century to overthrow it, by letting in the great idea of necessity, and proving, that the rate of wages established in a country, was the inevitable consequence of the circumstances in which that country was placed, and had no connexion with the wishes of any individual, or, indeed, with the wishes of any class. To all instructed persons, this is now a familiar truth. Its discovery has excluded the notion of gratitude from the pecuniary relation between employers and employed, and has made known that servants or workmen who receive wages, have no more reason to be grateful than those who pay them. For, no choice having been exercised in fixing the wages, no favour can be conferred in their payment. The whole process is compulsory, and is the result of what had previously happened. Scarcely had the eighteenth century passed away, when this most important discovery was completed. It was decisively proved, that the reward of labour depends solely on two things; namely, the magnitude of that national fund out of which all labour is paid, and the number of the labourers among whom the fund is to be divided.

This vast step in our knowledge is due, mainly, though not entirely, to Malthus, whose work on Population, besides marking an epoch in the history of speculative thought, has already produced considerable practical results, and will probably give rise to others more considerable still. It was published in 1798; so that Adam Smith, who died in 1790, missed what to him would have been the intense pleasure of seeing how, in it, his own views were expanded rather than corrected. Indeed, it is certain, that without Smith there would have been no Malthus; that is, unless Smith had laid the foundation, Malthus could not have raised the superstructure. It was Adam Smith, who, far more than any other man, introduced the conception of uniform and necessary sequence into the apparently capricious phenomena of wealth, and who studied those phenomena by the aid of principles, of which selfishness alone supplied the data. According to his view, the employers of labour have, as employers, no benevolence, no sympathy, no virtue of any kind. Their sole aim is, their own selfish interest. They are constantly engaged in a tacit, if not in an open, combination, to prevent the lower ranks from being benefited by a rise of wages; and they sometimes combine for the purpose even of depressing those wages below their actual rate.[683] Having no bowels, they think only of themselves. The idea of their wishing to mitigate the inequalities of fortune, is to be exploded as one of the chimeras of that protective spirit, which imagined that society could not go on, unless the richer classes relieved the poorer ones, and sympathized with their troubles. This antiquated notion is further rebutted by the fact, that wages are always higher in summer than in winter, although the expenses which a labourer incurs in winter, being heavier than in summer, he ought, on principles of common humanity, to receive more money during the more expensive season.[684] In the same way, in years of scarcity, the dearness of food causes many persons to go to service, in order to support their families. The masters, instead of charitably paying such servants more on account of the unfortunate position in which they are placed, avail themselves of that position to pay them less. They make better terms for themselves; they lower wages just at the moment when sympathy for misfortune would have raised them; and, as they find that their servants, besides being worse remunerated, are, by poverty, made more submissive, they consider that scarcity is a blessing, and that dear years are to be commended as more favourable to industry than cheap ones.[685]

Adam Smith, therefore, though he failed in grasping the remote cause of the rate of wages, clearly saw that the approximate cause was, not the generosity of human nature, but its selfishness, and that the question was one of supply and demand; each side striving to extract as much as possible from the other.[686] By the aid of the same principle, he explained another curious fact, namely, the extravagant rewards bestowed on some of the most despicable classes of society, such, for instance, as opera-dancers, who always receive enormous pay for insignificant services. He observes, that one of the reasons why we pay them so highly, is, because we despise them. If to be a public dancer were a creditable occupation, more persons would be brought up to it, and the supply of public dancers becoming greater, competition would lower their wages. As it is, we look on them disdainfully. By way of compensating the disdain, we have to bribe them largely to induce them to follow their pursuit.[687] Here we see, that the reward which one class bestows on another, instead of being increased by sympathy, is increased by scorn; so that the more we contemn the tastes and the way of life of our fellow-creatures, the more liberal we are in recompensing them.

Passing to another, and somewhat different, class, Adam Smith threw new light on the cause of that hospitality for which the clergy were famous during the Middle Ages, and for the magnificence of which they have received great praise. He shows that, although they undoubtedly relieved a large amount of distress, this is not to be ascribed to them as a merit, since it resulted from the peculiarity of their position, and since, moreover, they did it for their own advantage. In the Middle Ages, the clergy possessed enormous wealth, and their revenues were mostly paid, not in money, but in kind, such as corn, wine, and cattle. Trade and manufactures being hardly known, the clergy could find no use for these commodities except to feed other people. By employing them in that way, they benefited themselves in the most effectual manner. They gained a reputation for extensive charity; they increased their influence; they multiplied the number of their adherents; and they not only advanced themselves to temporal power, but they secured to their spiritual threats a respect, which, without this contrivance, it would have been impossible for them to obtain.[688]

The reader will now be able to understand the nature of that method of investigation which is adopted in the Wealth of Nations, and of which I have given more instances than I should otherwise have done, partly because the question of philosophic method lies at the very root of our knowledge, and partly because no attempt has hitherto been made to analyze the intellect of Adam Smith, by considering his two great works as the opposite, but yet the compensatory, parts of a single scheme. And, as he is by far the greatest thinker Scotland has produced, I need hardly apologize, in a history of the Scotch mind, for devoting so much attention to his system, and endeavouring to examine it at its base. But, having done so, it would be a needless prolixity to treat with equal fulness the productions of those other eminent Scotchmen who lived at the same time, and nearly all of whom pursued a method essentially, though not entirely, the same; that is to say, they preferred the deductive process of reasoning from principles, to the inductive process of reasoning to them. In that peculiar form of deduction which consists in a deliberate suppression of part of the principles, Adam Smith stands alone. For, though others attempted to follow that plan, they did so irregularly, and at intervals, and did not, like him, see the importance of keeping close to their method, and of invariably abstaining from letting into the premisses of their arguments, considerations which would complicate the problem that they wished to solve.

Among the contemporaries of Adam Smith, one of the first, in eminence, as well as in reputation, is David Hume. His views respecting political economy were published in 1752,[689] that is, the very year in which Adam Smith taught the principles subsequently unfolded in the Wealth of Nations. But Hume, though a most accomplished reasoner, as well as a profound and fearless thinker, had not the comprehensiveness of Adam Smith, nor had he that invaluable quality of imagination without which no one can so transport himself into past ages as to realize the long and progressive movements of society, always fluctuating, yet, on the whole, steadily advancing. How unimaginative he was, appears, not only from the sentiments he expressed, but likewise from many traits in his private life.[690] It appears, also, in the very colour and mechanism of his language; that beautiful and chiselled style in which he habitually wrote, polished as marble, but cold as marble too, and wanting that fiery enthusiasm and those bursts of tempestuous eloquence, which, ever and anon, great objects naturally inspire, and which rouse men to their inmost depths. This it was, which, in his History of England,—that exquisite production of art, which, in spite of its errors, will be admired as long as taste remains among us,—prevented him from sympathizing with those bold and generous natures, who, in the seventeenth century, risked their all to preserve the liberty of their country. His imagination was not strong enough to picture the whole of that great century, with its vast discoveries, its longings after the unknown, its splendid literature, and what was better than all these, its stern determination to vindicate freedom, and to put down tyranny. His clear and powerful understanding saw these things separately, and in their various parts, but could not fuse them into a single form, because he lacked that peculiar faculty which assimilates the past to the present, and enables the mind to discern both with almost equal ease. That Great Rebellion, which he ascribed to the spirit of faction, and the leaders of which he turned into ridicule, was but the continuation of a movement which can be clearly traced to the twelfth century, and of which such events as the invention of printing, and the establishment of the Reformation, were merely successive symptoms. For all this, Hume cared nothing. In regard to philosophy, and in regard to the purely speculative parts of religious doctrines, his penetrating genius enabled him to perceive that nothing could be done, except by a spirit of fearless and unrestrained liberty. But this was the liberty of his own class; the liberty of thinkers, and not of actors. His absence of imagination prevented him from extending the range of his sympathy beyond the intellectual classes, that is, beyond the classes of whose feelings he was directly cognizant. It would, therefore, appear, that his political errors were due, not, as is commonly said, to his want of research, but rather to the coldness of his temperament.[691] It was this which made him stop where he did, and which gave to his works the singular appearance of a profound and original thinker, in the middle of the eighteenth century, advocating practical doctrines, so illiberal, that, if enforced, they would lead to despotism, and yet, at the same time, advocating speculative doctrines, so fearless and enlightened, that they were not only far in advance of his own age, but have, in some degree, outstripped even the age in which we live.

Among his speculative views, the most important are his theory of causation as discarding the idea of power, and his theory of the laws of association. Neither of these theories are, in their primary conception, quite original, but his treatment made them as valuable as if they had been entirely his own. His theory of miracles, in connexion, on the one hand, with the principles of evidence, and, on the other hand, with the laws of causation, is worked out with consummate skill, and, after having received the modifications subsequently imposed by Brown, has now become the foundation on which the best inquirers into these matters take their stand.[692] His work on the principles of morals, by generalizing the laws of expediency, prepared the way for Bentham, who afterwards incorporated with them an estimate of the more remote consequences of human actions; Hume, having chiefly confined himself to their more immediate consequences. The doctrine of utility was common to each; but while Hume applied it mainly to the individual, Bentham applied it to the surrounding society. Though Bentham was more comprehensive, yet Hume, having come first, was more original. The praise of originality must also be accorded to his economical theories, in which he advocated those principles of free trade, which politicians began to adopt many years after his death.[693] In opposition to the notions then prevailing, he distinctly asserted, that all commodities, though apparently bought by money, are in reality bought by labour.[694] Money, therefore, is not the subject of commerce, and is of no use except to facilitate it.[695] Hence, it is absurd for a nation to trouble itself about the balance of trade, or to make regulations to discourage the exportation of the precious metals.[696] Neither does the average rate of interest depend on their scarcity or abundance, but upon the operation of more general causes.[697] As a necessary consequence of these positions, Hume inferred that the established policy was wrong, which made trading states look upon each other as rivals, while, in point of fact, the question, if considered from a certain height, was one, not of rivalry, but of coöperation; every country being benefited by the increasing wealth of its neighbours.[698] Those who know the character of commercial legislation, and the opinions of even the most enlightened statesmen a century ago, will consider these views as extremely remarkable to have been propounded in the year 1752. But what is more remarkable still, is, that their author subsequently detected the fundamental error which Adam Smith committed, and which vitiates many of his conclusions. The error consists in his having resolved price into three components, namely, wages, profit, and rent; whereas it is now known that price is a compound of wages and profit, and that rent is not an element of it, but a result of it. This discovery is the corner-stone of political economy; but it is established by an argument so long and so refined, that most minds are unable to pursue it without stumbling, and the majority of those who acquiesce in it are influenced by the great writers to whom they pay deference, and whose judgment they follow. It is, therefore, a striking proof of the sagacity of Hume, that in an age when the science was but dawning, and when he could receive little help from his predecessors, he should have discovered a mistake of this sort, which lies so far beneath the surface. Directly the Wealth of Nations appeared, he wrote to Adam Smith, disputing his position that rent is a part of price;[699] and this letter, written in the year 1776, is the first indication of that celebrated theory of rent, which, a little later, Anderson, Malthus, and West, saw, and imperfectly developed, but which it was reserved for the genius of Ricardo to build up on a broad and solid foundation.

It is very observable, that Hume and Adam Smith, who made such immense additions to our knowledge of the principles of trade, had no practical acquaintance with it.[700] Hume had, at an early period of his life, been in a mercantile house; but he threw up that employment in disgust, and buried himself in a provincial town, to think, rather than to observe.[701] Indeed, one of the capital defects of his mind, was a disregard of facts. This did not proceed, as is too often the case, from that worst form of moral obliquity, an indifference to truth; since he, on the contrary, was an ardent lover of it, and was, moreover, a man of the purest and most exemplary character, utterly incapable of falsehood, or of prevarication of any kind.[702] In him, a contempt for facts was merely the exaggerated result of a devotion to ideas. He not only believed, with perfect justice, that ideas are more important than facts, but he supposed that they should hold the first place in the order of study, and that they should be developed before the facts are investigated. The Baconian philosophy, which, though it allows a preliminary and tentative hypothesis, strongly insists upon the necessity of first collecting the facts, and then proceeding to the ideas, excited his aversion; and this, I have no doubt, is the reason why he, who was usually so lenient in his judgments, and was so keen an admirer of intellectual greatness is, nevertheless, grossly unfair towards Bacon, with whose method it was impossible for him to sympathize, though he could not deny its utility, in physical science.[703] If Hume had followed the Baconian scheme, of always rising from particulars to generals, and from each generalization to that immediately above it, he would hardly have written one of his works. Certainly, his economical views would never have appeared, since political economy is as essentially a deductive science as geometry itself.[704] Reversing the inductive process, he was in favour of beginning with what he termed general arguments, by which he hoped to demonstrate the inaccuracy of opinions which facts were supposed to have proved.[705] He did not stop to investigate the facts from which the inference had been drawn, but he inverted the order by which the inference was to be obtained. The same dislike to make the facts of trade the basis of the science of trade, was displayed by Adam Smith, who expresses his want of confidence in statistics, or, as it was then termed, political arithmetic.[706] It is, however, evident, that statistical facts are as good as any other facts, and, owing to their mathematical form, are very precise.[707] But when they concern human actions, they are the result of all the motives which govern those actions; in other words, they are the result, not merely of selfishness, but also of sympathy. And as Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations, dealt with only one of these passions, namely, selfishness, he would have found it impossible to conduct his generalization from statistics, which are necessarily collected from the products of both passions. Such statistical facts were, in their origin, too complex to be generalized; especially as they could not be experimented upon, but could only be observed and arranged. Adam Smith, perceiving them to be unmanageable, very properly rejected them as the basis of his science, and merely used them by way of illustration, when he could select what he liked. The same remark applies to other facts which he drew from the history of trade, and, indeed, from the general history of society. All of these are essentially subsequent to the argument. They make the argument more clear, but not more certain. For, it is no exaggeration to say, that, if all the commercial and historical facts in the Wealth of Nations were false, the book would still remain, and its conclusions would hold equally good, though they would be less attractive. In it, every thing depends upon general principles, and they, as we have seen, were arrived at in 1752, that is, twenty-four years before the work was published in which those principles were applied. They must, therefore, have been acquired independently of the facts which Adam Smith, subsequently incorporated with them, and which he learnt during that long period of twenty-four years. And the ten years which he employed in composing his great work, were not spent in one of those busy haunts of men, where he might have observed all the phenomena of industry, and studied the way in which the operations of trade affect human character, and are affected by it. He did not resort to one of those vast marts and emporiums of commerce, where the events were happening which he was seeking to explain. That was not his method. On the contrary, the ten years, during which he was occupied in raising to a science the most active department of life, were passed in complete seclusion in Kirkaldy, his quiet little birthplace.[708] He had always been remarkable for absence of mind, and was so little given to observation, as to be frequently oblivious of what was passing around him.[709] In that obliviousness, he, amid the tranquil scenes of his childhood, could now indulge without danger. There, cheered, indeed, by the society of his mother, but with no opportunity of observing human nature upon a large scale, and far removed from the hum of great cities, did this mighty thinker, by the force of his own mind, unravel the numerous and complicated phenomena of wealth, detect the motives which regulate the conduct of the most energetic and industrious portion of mankind, and lay bare the schemes and the secrets of that active life from which he was shut out, while he, immured in comparative solitude, was unable to witness the very facts which he succeeded in explaining.

The same determination to make the study of principles precede that of facts, is exhibited by Hume in one of his most original works, the Natural History of Religion. In reference to the title of this treatise, we must observe that, according to the Scotch philosophers, the natural course of any movement is by no means the same as its actual course. This discrepancy between the ideal and the real, was the unavoidable result of their method.[710] For, as they argued deductively from fixed premisses, they could not take into account the perturbations to which their conclusions were liable, from the play and friction of the surrounding society. To do that, required a separate inquiry. It would have been needful to investigate the circumstances which caused the friction, and thus prevented the conclusions from being, in the world of fact, the same as they were in the world of speculation. What we call accidents, are constantly happening, and they prevent the real march of affairs from being identical with the natural march. And, as long as we are unable to predict those accidents, there will always be a want of complete harmony between the inferences of a deductive science and the realities of life; in other words, our inferences will tend towards truth, but never completely attain it.[711]

With peculiar propriety, therefore, did Hume term his work a Natural History of Religion. It is an admirable specimen of the deductive method. Its only fault is that he speaks too confidently of the accuracy of the results to which, on such a subject, that method could attain. He believed, that, by observing the principles of human nature, as he found them in his own mind, it was possible to explain the whole course of affairs, both moral and physical.[712] These principles were to be arrived at by experiments made on himself; and having thus arrived at them, he was to reason from them deductively, and so construct the entire scheme. This he contrasts with the inductive plan, which he calls a tedious and lingering process; and while others might follow that slow and patient method of gradually working their way towards first principles, his project was, to seize them at once, or, as he expresses himself, not to stop at the frontier, but to march directly on the capital, being possessed of which, he could gain an easy victory over other difficulties, and could extend his conquests over the sciences.[713] According to Hume, we are to reason, not in order to obtain ideas, but we are to have clear ideas before we reason.[714] By this means, we arrive at philosophy; and her conclusions are not to be impugned, even if they do happen to clash with science. On the contrary, her authority is supreme, and her decisions, being essentially true, must always be preferred to any generalization of the facts which the external world presents.[715]

Hume, therefore, believed that all the secrets of the external world are wrapped up in the human mind. The mind was not only the key by which the treasure could be unlocked; it was also the treasure itself. Learning and science might illustrate and beautify our mental acquisitions, but they could not communicate real knowledge; they could neither give the prime original materials, nor could they teach the design according to which those materials must be worked.

In conformity with these views, the Natural History of Religion was composed. The object of Hume in writing it, was, to ascertain the origin and progress of religious ideas; and he arrives at the conclusion, that the worship of many Gods must, every where, have preceded the worship of one God. This, he regards as a law of the human mind, a thing not only that always has happened, but that always must happen. His proof is entirely speculative. He argues that the earliest state of man is necessarily a savage state; that savages can feel no interest in the ordinary operations of nature, and no desire to study the principles which govern those operations; that such men must be devoid of curiosity on all subjects which do not personally trouble them; and that, therefore, while they neglect the usual events of nature, they will turn their minds to the unusual ones.[716] A violent tempest, a monstrous birth, excessive cold, excessive rain, sudden and fatal diseases, are the sort of things to which the attention of the savage is confined, and of which alone he desires to know the causes. Directly he finds that such causes are beyond his control, he reckons them superior to himself, and, being incapable of abstracting them, he personifies them; he turns them into deities; polytheism is established; and the earliest creed of mankind assumes a form which can never be altered, as long as men remain in this condition of pristine ignorance.[717]

These propositions, which are not only plausible, but which are probably true, ought, according to the inductive philosophy, to have been generalized from a survey of facts; that is, from a collection of evidence respecting the state of religion and of the speculative faculties among savage tribes. But this, Hume abstains from doing. He refers to none of the numerous travellers who have visited such people; he does not, in the whole course of his work, mention even a single book where facts respecting savage life are preserved. It was enough for him, that the progress from a belief in many Gods to a belief in one God, was the natural progress; which is saying, in other words, that it appeared to his mind to be the natural progress.[718] With that, he was satisfied. In other parts of his essay, where he treats of the religious opinions of the ancient Greeks and Romans, he displays a tolerable, though by no means remarkable, learning; but the passages which he cites, do not refer to that entirely barbarous society in which, as he supposes, polytheism first arose. The premisses, therefore, of the argument are evolved out of his own mind. He reasons deductively from the ideas which his powerful intellect supplied, instead of reasoning inductively from the facts which were peculiar to the subject he was investigating.