NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. NOTE A, p. 6. THE late James Oswald, Esq., for many years one of the most active, able, and public-spirited of our Scottish representatives in Parliament. He was more particularly distinguished by his knowledge in matters of finance, and by his attention to whatever concerned the commercial or the agricultural interests of the country. From the manner in which he is mentioned in a paper of Mr. Smith's which I have perused, he appears to have combined, with that detailed information which he is well known to have possessed as a statesman and man of business, a taste for the more general and philosophical discussions of Political Economy. He lived in habits of great intimacy with Lord Kames and Mr. Hume, and was one of Mr. Smith's earliest and most confidential friends. NOTE B, p. 8. Those who have derived their knowledge of Dr. Hutcheson solely from his publications, may perhaps be inclined to dispute the propriety of the epithet eloquent, when applied to any of his compositions, more particularly when applied to The System of Moral Philosophy, which was published after his death, as the substance of his Lectures in the University of Glasgow. His talents, however, as a public speaker, must have been of a far higher order than what he has displayed as a writer; all his pupils whom I have happened to meet with (some of them, certainly, very competent judges) having agreed exactly with each other in their accounts of the extraordinary impression which they made on the minds of his hearers. I have mentioned, in the text, Mr. Smith as one of his warmest admirers; and to his name I shall take this opportunity of adding those of the late Earl of Selkirk, the late Lord President Miller, and the late Dr. Archibald Maclaine, the very learned and judicious translator of Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History. My father, too, who had attended Dr. Hutcheson's Lectures for several years, never spoke of them without much sensibility. On this occasion we can only say, as VOL. X. F Quintilian has done of the eloquence of Hortensius:-" Apparet placuisse aliquid eo dicente, quod legentes non invenimus." Dr. Hutcheson's Inquiry into our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; his Discourse on the Passions; and his Illustrations of the Moral Sense, are much more strongly marked with the characteristical features of his genius, than his posthumous work. His great and deserved fame, however, in this country, rests now chiefly on the traditionary history of his Academical Lectures, which appear to have contributed very powerfully to diffuse, in Scotland, that taste for analytical discussion, and that spirit of liberal inquiry, to which the world is indebted for some of the most valuable productions of the eighteenth century. NOTE C, According to the learned English translator of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, the general idea which runs through Mr. Smith's Theory, was obviously borrowed from the following passage of Polybius :-" From the union of the two sexes, to which all are naturally inclined, children are born. When any of these, therefore, being arrived at perfect age, instead of yielding suitable returns of gratitude and assistance to those by whom they have been bred, on the contrary, attempt to injure them by words or actions, it is manifest that those who behold the wrong, after having also seen the sufferings and the anxious cares that were sustained by the parents in the nourishment and education of their children, must be greatly offended and displeased at such proceeding. For Man, who among all the various kinds of animals is alone endowed with the faculty of reason, cannot, like the rest, pass over such actions, but will make reflection on what he sees; and comparing likewise the future with the present, will not fail to express his indignation at this injurious treatment, to which, as he foresees, he may also at some time be exposed. Thus, again, when any one who has been succoured by another in the time of danger, instead of shewing the like kindness to this benefactor, endeavours at any time to destroy or hurt him; it is certain that all men must be shocked by such ingratitude, through sympathy with the resentment of their neighbour, and from an apprehension also, that the case may be their own. And from hence arises, in the mind of every man, a certain notion of the nature and force of Duty, in which consists both the beginning and the end of Justice. In like manner, the man who, in defence of others, is seen to throw himself the foremost into every danger, and even to sustain the fary of the fiercest animals, never fails to obtain the loudest acclamations of applause and veneration from all the multitude; while he who shews a different conduct is pursued with censure and reproach. And thus it is, that the people begin to discern the nature of things honourable and base, and in what consists the difference between them; and to perceive that the former, on account of the advantage that attends them, are fit to be admired and imitated, and the latter to be detested and avoided." "The doctrine," says Dr. Gillies, "contained in this passage, is expanded by Dr. Smith into a Theory of Moral Sentiments. But he departs from his author, in placing the perception of right and wrong, in sentiment or feeling, ultimately and simply. . . . Polybius, on the contrary, maintains with Aristotle, that these notions arise from reason or Intellect, operating on affection or Appetite; or, in other words, that the Moral Faculty is a compound, and may be resolved into two simpler principles of the mind."1 The only expression I object to in the two preceding sentences, is the phrase, kis author, which has the appearance of insinuating a charge of plagiarism against Mr. Smith; a charge which, I am confident, he did not deserve, and to which the above extract does not, in my opinion, afford any plausible colour. It exhibits, indeed, an instance of a curious coincidence between two philosophers in their views of the same subject; and as such, I have no doubt that Mr. Smith himself would have remarked it, had it occurred to his memory when he was writing his book. Of such accidental coincidences between different minds, examples present themselves every day to those who, after having drawn from their internal resources all the lights they could supply on a particular question, have the curiosity to compare their own conclusions with those of their predecessors. And it is extremely worthy of observation, that, in proportion as any conclusion approaches to the truth, the number of previous approximations to it may be reasonably expected to be multiplied. In the case before us, however, the question about originality is of little or no moment, for the peculiar merit of Mr. Smith's work does not lie in his general principle, but in the skilful use he has made of it to give a systematical arrangement to the most important discussions and doctrines of Ethics. In this point of view, The Theory of Moral Sentiments may be justly regarded as one of the most original efforts of the human mind in that branch of science to which it relates; and even if we were to suppose that it was first suggested to the author by a remark of which the world was in possession for two thousand years before, this very circumstance would only reflect a stronger lustre on the novelty of his design, and on the invention and taste displayed in its execution. I have said, in the text, that my own opinion about the foundation of morals, does not agree with that of Mr. Smith; and I propose to state, in another publication, the grounds of my dissent from his conclusions on that question.* At present, I shall only observe, that I consider the defects of his Theory as originating rather in a partial, than in a mistaken view of the subject; while, on some of the most essential points of Ethics, it appears to me to approximate very nearly to a correct statement of the truth. I must not omit to add, in justice to the author, that his zeal to support his favourite system never has led him to vitiate or misrepresent the phenomena which he has employed it to explain; and that the connected order which he has given to a multiplicity of isolated facts, must facilitate greatly the studies of any of his successors, who may hereafter prosecute the same inquiry, agreeably to the severe rules of the inductive Logic. After the passage which I have quoted in the beginning of this Note, I hope I shall be pardoned if I express my doubts, whether the learned and ingenious writer has not, upon this, as well as on some other occasions, allowed his partiality to the Ancients to blind him a little too much to the merits of his contemporaries. Would not his laborious and interesting researches into the remains of the Greek philosophy, have been employed still more usefully in revealing to us the systems 1 Gillies's Aristotle, Vol. I. pp. 302, 303, 2d edit. * [Vide supra, Works, Vol. VII. pp. 35, 36, 39, 329, seq., 407, seq.] and discoveries to which our successors may yet lay claim, than in conjectures concerning the origin of those with which we are already acquainted? How does it happen that those men of profound erudition, who can so easily trace every past improvement to the fountainhead of antiquity, should not sometimes amuse themselves, and instruct the world, by anticipating the future progress of the human mind? In studying the connexion and filiation of successive Theories, when we are at a loss, in any instance, for a link to complete the continuity of philosophical speculation, it seems much more reasonable to search for it in the systems of the immediately preceding period, and in the inquiries which then occupied the public attention, than in detached sentences, or accidental expressions gleaned from the relics of distant ages. It is thus only that we can hope to seize the precise point of view, in which an author's subject first presented itself to his attention; and to account, to our own satisfaction, from the particular aspect under which he saw it, for the subsequent direction which was given to his curiosity. In following such a plan, our object is not to detect plagiarisms, which we suppose men of genius to have intentionally concealed, but to fill up an apparent chasm in the history of Science, by laying hold of the thread which insensibly guided the mind from one station to another. By what easy and natural steps Mr. Smith's Theory arose from the state of Ethical discussion in Great Britain, when be began his literary career, I shall endeavour elsewhere to explain. A late author, of taste and learning, has written a pleasing and instructive Essay on the Marks of Poetical Imitation. The marks of Philosophical Plagiarism are not less discernible by an unprejudiced and discriminating eye, and are easily separable from that occasional similarity of thought and of illustration, which we may expect to meet with in writers of the most remote ages and countries, when employed in examining the same questions, or in establishing the same truths. As the foregoing observations apply with fully as great force to the Wealth of Nations, as to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, I trust some allowance will be made for the length of this Note.1 1 I shall have occasion afterwards to vindicate Mr. Smith's claims to originality in the former of these works, against the pretensions of some foreign writers. As I do not mean, however, to recur again to his alleged plagiarisms from the Ancients, I shall introduce here, though somewhat out of place, two short quotations, from which it will appear, that the germ of his speculations concerning National Wealth, as well as concerning the principles of Ethics, is (according to Dr. Gillies) to be found in the Greek philosophers. "By adopting Aristotle's principles on the subjects of exchangeable value and of national wealth, Dr. Smith has rescued the science of Political Economy from many false subtilties and many gross errors."-Vol. I. p. 377, 2d edition. "The subject of money is treated above, Vol. I. p. 374, et seq. In that passage, compared with another in the Magna Moralia, we find the fundamental principles of the modern Economists."-Vol. II. p. 43. In reply to these observations, I have only to request my readers to compare them with the well-known passage in the first book of Aristotle's Politics, with respect to the lawfulness of Usury. When we consider how much the interest of money enters as an element into all our modern disquisitions concerning commercial policy, is it possible to imagine, that there should be anything more than the most general and fortuitous coincidence between the reasonings of such writers as Smith, or Hume, or Turgot; and those of an author whose experience of the nature and effects of commerce was so limited, as to impress his mind with a conviction, that to receive a premium for the use of money, was inconsistent with the rules of morality?[Compare the subsequent edition of Gillies's Ethics and Politics of Aristotle.— Ed.] [NOTE D, p. 33. [Extracted by Mr. Stewart from Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, &c., Vol. III. pp. 515, 516; and appended in manuscript, to one of his own copies of this Memoir.-ED.] "DEAR SIR,-I have read over the contents of your friend's work with very great pleasure; and heartily wish it was in my power to give, or to procure him all the encouragement which his ingenuity and industry deserve. I think myself greatly obliged to him for the very obliging notice he has been pleased to take of me, and should be glad to contribute anything in my power towards completing his design. I approve greatly of his plan for a Rational Grammar, and am convinced that a work of this kind, executed with his abilities and industry, may prove not only the best system of grammar, but the best system of logic in any language, as well as the best history of the natural progress of the human mind in forming the most important abstractions upon which all reasoning depends. From the short abstract which Mr. Ward has been so good as to send me, it is impossible for me to form any very decisive judgment concerning the propriety of every part of his method, particularly of some of his divisions. If I was to treat the same subject, I should endeavour to begin with the consideration of verbs; these being, in my apprehension, the original parts of speech, first invented to express in one word a complete event: I should then have endeavoured to show how the subject was divided from the attribute; and afterwards, how the object was distinguished from both; and in this manner I should have tried to investigate the origin and use of all the different parts of speech, and of all their different modifications, considered as necessary to express all the different qualifications and relations of any single event. Mr. Ward, however, may have excellent reasons for following his own method; and, perhaps, if I was engaged in the same task, I should find it necessary to follow the same,-things frequently appearing in a very different light when taken in a general view, which is the only view that I can pretend to have taken of them, and when considered in detail. "Mr. Ward, when he mentions the definitions which different authors have given of nouns substantive, takes no notice of that of the Abbé Girard, the author of a book called Les vrais Principes de la Langue Française, which made me think it might be possible he had not seen it. It is a book which first set me a thinking upon these subjects, and I have received more instruction from it than from any other I have yet seen upon them. If Mr. Ward has not seen it, I have it at his service. The grammatical articles, too, in the French Encyclopédie have *[Probably William Ward, A.M., master of the Grammar School of Beverley, Yorkshire, who, among other grammatical works, published An Essay on Grammar as it may be applied to the English Language, in two Treatises, &c, 4to, 1765, which is perhaps the most philosophical Essay on the English language extant.] |