… With all its faults, the Theory of Moral Sentiments is still one of the most instructive and entertaining of all our English treatises on ethics. There is plenty of warmth and colour. The argument is never bare; you follow its thread through a wondrous maze, till your perplexities are solved, and you finally congratulate yourself as well as the author on having rejected all the errors and collected all the wisdom of the ages. When the main theme threatens to be tedious he entertains you with an imaginary portrait, or digresses into some subsidiary discussion upon fortune, or fashion, or some other of the currents that turn men from their purpose. It has been observed that the strongest antagonists of Smith's central doctrine are enthusiastic in praising his skill in the analysis of human nature. The truth is, that the most absent-minded was also the most observant of men. He seems to have watched the actions and passions of his acquaintances with extraordinary precision. Motives interested him at least as much as conduct; he rather blames philosophers for having of late years given too much attention to the tendency of affections, and too little to the relationship in whiche they stand to their causes.

His immediate predecessors and contemporaries in the field of ethics were principally concerned with the origin and authority of right and wrong. Why does mankind generally agree as to what is right and what is wrong; whence are the notions of "ought" and "ought not" derived if not from the church or the Bible? At the time Smith wrote, English moralists were divided upon this point into two main schools. Of the first, who derived all moral rules from self-interest, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Hume were the principal exponents. The second school sought for a less variable standard, and have been called Intuitionalists, because they believed either with Clarke and Price that moral truths are perceived like axioms of Euclid, by the intellect, or with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, that there is innate in us a moral sense or taste (developed by Bishop Butler into conscience) which prompts us to do right and tells us the difference between good and evil.

Moralists were equally divided upon the question, "In what does virtue consist?" His old teacher Hutcheson had answered that it consisted in benevolence; others thought that prudence was the true mark of the good man. In Adam Smith's view, prudence and benevolence are equally essential ingredients in the constitution of a perfectly virtuous character. With virtue he associates happiness, and his individual view of both is based partly upon the Greek philosophy of an independent leisure, partly upon the Christian conception of doing good to others; and we feel that he does not always succeed in reconciling the new ideal with the old. "Happiness," he says, "consists in tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment." Tranquillity, he thinks, is "the natural and usual state of a man's mind." But the tranquillity to be desired was as far removed from indolence or apathy as from avarice or ambition. It was the active tranquillity of a well furnished mind and a benevolent heart.

Peace of mind, family peace, a country free from civil, religious, and foreign strife,—these he thought in their order the things most momentous to happiness. Yet he would not allow the leisurely philosopher to bask in the selfish sunshine of tranquillity. "The most sublime contemplation of the philosopher will scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest act of virtue." The study of politics tends to promote public spirit, and political disquisitions are therefore the most useful of all speculations. The trade of the vulgar politician was often ignoble and deceitful; but the best happiness attended the patriotism and public spirit of those who sought to improve government and extend trade. The leader of a successful party may do far more for his country than the greatest general. He may re-establish and reform its constitution, and from the doubtful and ambiguous character of a party leader he may assume "the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state," who by the wisdom of his institutions secures the international tranquillity and happiness of his fellow-citizens for many succeeding generations.

For the man of system in politics Smith has no liking. Wise in his own conceit, such a man "seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard." He forgets that "in the great chessboard of human society every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it."

A true son of Oxford in his admiration for Aristotle, he was fond, as we have seen, of appealing to common life and popular opinion. But another of Aristotle's methods, that of the eclectic who arrives at the truth by choosing out and combining what is good in other philosophers, may almost be said to be the foundation of The Moral Sentiments. When, after explaining his system, he comes in his last (seventh) part to describe and criticise his predecessors, it is apparent that he considers his own theory to be an assemblage or reconciliation in one harmonious whole of all the happiest efforts of ethical speculation:—

If we examine the most celebrated and remarkable of the different theories which have been given concerning the nature and origin of our moral sentiments, we shall find that almost all of them coincide with some part or other of that which I have been endeavouring to give an account of; and that if everything which has already been said be fully considered, we shall be at no loss to explain what was the view or aspect of nature which led each particular author to form his particular system. From some one or other of those principles which I have been endeavouring to unfold, every system of morality that ever had any reputation in the world has, perhaps, ultimately been derived.

A good example of this eclecticism is his treatment of Mandeville, an author from whom Smith no less than Rousseau derived many fruitful ideas. In the first edition of The Moral Sentiments he writes:—

There are, however, some other systems which seem to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the tendency is upon that account wholly pernicious: I mean the systems of the Duke of Rochefoucauld and Dr. Mandeville. Though the notions of both these authors are in almost every respect erroneous, there are, however, some appearances in human nature which, when viewed in a certain manner, seem at first sight to favour them. These, first slightly sketched out with the elegance and delicate precision of the Duke of Rochefoucauld, and afterwards more fully represented with the lively and humorous, though coarse and rustic, eloquence of Dr. Mandeville, have thrown upon their doctrine an air of truth and probability which is very apt to impose upon the unskilful.

Bishop Butler, more justly, classed Rochefoucauld with Hobbes. But in Smith's sixth edition (1790) the name of Rochefoucauld was omitted, at the instance of the Duke's grandson, who pointed out that the author of the Maxims is not really in the same category with Mandeville. Coarse and licentious, but entertaining and ingenious, the author of the Fable of the Bees hit human nature hard. He traced virtuous actions to vanity, and whittled away the distinction between vice and virtue, until he reached the paradox that private vices are public benefits. But this profligate system could never have caused so much stir and alarm in the world "had it not in some respects bordered upon the truth." We are very easily imposed upon by the most absurd travellers' tales about distant countries. But falsehoods about the parish we live in must, if they are to deceive us, bear some resemblance to the truth, nay, "must even have a considerable mixture of truth in them." A natural philosopher has an analogous advantage over the speculator in ethics. The vortices of Descartes passed for nearly a century as a most satisfactory account of the revolutions of heavenly bodies, though they neither existed nor could possibly exist, and though if they did exist they could not produce such effects as were ascribed to them. But the moral philosopher is no better off than the parish liar. He is giving an account of things that are constantly before us, around us, and within us. "Though here, too, like indolent masters who put their trust in a steward that deceives them, we are very liable to be imposed upon, yet we are incapable of passing any account which does not preserve some little regard to the truth."

In describing those systems which make virtue consist in propriety, Smith displays a profound knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, and the later schools of Greek philosophy. His admiration of Zeno and Epictetus is almost unbounded, especially when he contemplates their confident opinion that a man should always be able to support worldly misfortunes. "They endeavour to point out the comforts which a man might still enjoy when reduced to poverty, when driven into banishment, when exposed to the injustice of popular clamour, when labouring under blindness, deafness, in the extremity of old age, upon the approach of death." He holds that the few fragments which have been preserved of this philosophy are among the most instructive remains of antiquity. "The spirit and manhood of their doctrines make a wonderful contrast with the desponding, plaintive, and whining tone of some modern systems." Chrysippus, on the other hand, did but reduce stoicism into a scholastic or technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and subdivisions, "one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical system."

Admirable as were the best stoics and epicureans and those Roman writers who, like Cicero and Seneca, direct us to the imperfect but attainable virtues, they quite misunderstood nature. "By nature, the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and direction, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows." Here and in similar passages he follows his favourite, Pope:—

God loves from whole to parts; but human soul
Must rise from individual to the whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle straight succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads;
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race.

Every moralists's, even Epictetus's, description of virtue is just as far as it goes. But Smith claims to have been the first to give any precise or distinct measure by which the fitness or propriety of affection can be ascertained and judged. Such a measure he finds in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed spectator. Here, then, we have the central and peculiar doctrine that stamps with originality Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. ¹

That sympathy or fellow-feeling is a primary instinct of man appears from the commonest incidents of life. Do we not shrink when a blow is aimed at another, do not the spectators wriggle as they follow a rope-dancer's contortions, are we not moved by tears, is not laughter infectious? Sympathy is agreeable. We like to give it, and we long for it. It is too instinctive to be explained (though some would do so) by a refinement of self-love. Yet it is not a mere reflection or shadow. Generally speaking, we only sympathise when our sentiments and feelings correspond with those of another. Sympathy means approval. To give it is to praise, to withhold it to blame. How, then, does Adam Smith account for the growth of moral sentiments in the man, and for the progress of morality in mankind? He holds that what we call conscience, or the sense of duty, arises from a certain reflex action of sympathy. We apply to ourselves the moral judgements we have learned to pass on others. We imagine what they will say and think about our own thoughts and words and actions. We try to look at ourselves with the impartial eyes of other people, and seek to anticipate that judgment which they are likely to pass upon us. This is the first stage. But men have very different degrees of morality and wisdom. One man's praise or blame carries infinitely more weight than another's. Thus what is called conscience, that is our idea of the impartial spectator, insensibly develops. The impartial spectator becomes more and more our ideal man, and we come to pay more homage to his still small voice than to the judgment of the world. The pangs of conscience are far more terrible than the condemnation of the market-place. Praiseworthiness comes to be better than praise; blameworthiness comes to be worse than blame. The true hell is the hell within the breast; the worst tortures are those that follow the sentence of the impartial spectator. One feature in the phenomena of sympathy, which Smith points out, perhaps constitutes a weak point in his theory. The spectator's emotions are apt to fall short of the sufferer's. Compassion is never exactly the same as original sorrow.

Smith, like Kant, has his own way, and a curious one it is, of putting the rule of Christ. "As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us." Our philosopher readily admits that there are passions, like love, which, "though almost unavoidable in some part of life," are not at first sight very agreeable to his theory. He says we cannot enter into the eagerness of a lover's emotions. They are always "in some measure ridiculous." "The passion appears to everybody but the man who feels it entirely disproportioned to the value of the object." Ovid's gaiety and Horace's gallantry are pleasant enough, but you grow weary of the "grave, pedantic, and long-sentenced love of Cowley and Petrarca."

Resentment provides him with a better illustration. The counterpart of gratitude, it is a very difficult passion to realise in a proper degree. "How many things," he exclaims, "are requisite to render the gratification of resentment completely agreeable and to make the spectator thoroughly sympathise with our revenge?" First, the provocation must be such that if unresented we should become contemptible and be exposed to perpetual insults. Second, smaller offences had better be neglected. Third, we should resent from a sense of propriety and of what is expected of us. Above all, we should diligently consider what would be the sentiments of the cool and impartial spectator.

Though the love of the lover has to be belittled for the purpose of this theory, friendship and all the social and benevolent affections are dear to sympathy and "please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion." True friendship is one of the virtues which prove the limitations of the utilitarian theory: "There is a satisfaction in the consciousness of being beloved which to a person of delicacy and sensibility is of more importance to happiness than all the advantage which he can expect to derive from it."

As Smith goes through the list of virtues and vices his "Impartial Spectator" constantly reminds us of Aristotle's theory that every virtue is a mean between two extremes. The impartial spectator dislikes excess. The rise of the upstart, for example, is too sudden an extreme, nor does his behaviour often conciliate our affections:—

If the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune seldom contribute much to happiness. He is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness, whom the public destines to every step of his preferment long before he arrives at it, in whom, upon that account, when it comes, it can excite no extravagant joy, and with regard to whom it cannot reasonably create either any jealousy in those he overtakes or any envy in those he leaves behind.

The Impartial Spectator is rather a fickle and illogical person; he does not like unexampled prosperity, but he is always ready to sympathise with trivial joys. "It is quite otherwise with grief. Small vexations excite no sympathy, but deep affliction calls forth the greatest." It takes a great grief to enlist our sympathy, for "it is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter it with reluctance." So when we hear a tragedy we struggle against sympathetic sorrow as long as we can, and when we finally give way, carefully conceal our tears! In a letter of July the 28th, 1759, from which we have already quoted, Hume made some objections to this part of Smith's theory:—

I am told that you are preparing a new edition, and propose to make some additions and alterations in order to obviate objections. I shall use the freedom to propose one; which, if it appears to be of any weight, you may have in your eye. I wish you had more particularly and fully proved that all kinds of sympathy are agreeable. This is the hinge of your system, and yet you only mention the matter cursorily on p. 20. Now it would appear that there is a disagreeable sympathy as well as an agreeable. And, indeed, as the sympathetic passion is a reflex image of the principal, it must partake of its qualities, and be painful when that is so….

It is always thought a difficult problem to account for the pleasure from the tears and grief and sympathy of tragedy, which would not be the case if all sympathy was agreeable. An hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball. I am afraid that on p. 99 and 111 this proposition has escaped you, or rather is interwoven with your reasoning. In that place you say expressly, "It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance." It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this sentiment, and reconcile it to your system.

In the following spring (April 4th) Smith wrote from Glasgow to Strahan, Millar's [Andrew Millar, the publisher of The Theory of Moral Sentiments] young and very able partner, about the second edition, for which he had sent "a good many corrections and improvements." He asks Strahan to take care that the book is printed "pretty exactly according to the copy I delivered to you." Strahan, it seems, had offered his services as a critic, and Smith was a little afraid that he might find unauthorised alterations in the text. He will be much obliged to his publisher for suggestions, but cannot consent to surrender "the precious right of private judgment, for the sake of which your forefathers kicked out the Pope and the Pretender. I believe you to be much more infallible than the Pope, but as I am a Protestant, my conscience makes me scruple to submit to any unscriptural authority."

The second edition was issued soon afterwards. It has been erroneously described as a reprint of the first.² As a matter of fact, the corrections and alterations made in it were very numerous and it was set up in much smaller type, so that the 551 pages of the first edition are compressed, in spite of some enlargements of the text, into 436 pages. What is particularly noteworthy is that the author, without altering any of the passages criticised by Hume, does make what we conceive to be a perfectly satisfactory answer in an important foot-note on page 76 of the second edition after the sentence, "It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance." We give the note in full in order that the reader may judge for himself:—

It has been objected to me that as I found the sentiment of approbation, which is always agreeable, upon sympathy, it is inconsistent with my system to admit any disagreeable sympathy. I answer, that in the sentiment of approbation there are two things to be taken notice of: first, the sympathetic passion of the spectator; and secondly, the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself, and the original passion in the person principally concerned. This last emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always agreeable and delightful. The other may either be agreeable or disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose features it must always, in some measure, retain. Two sounds, I suppose, may each of them, taken singly, be austere, and yet, if they are perfect concords, the perception of their harmony and coincidence may be agreeable.

Of modern philosophers, those to whom Smith is most indebted are certainly Mandeville, his old master Hutcheson, and his friend Hume, "an ingenious and agreeable philosopher who joins the greatest depth of thought to the greatest elegance of expression, and possesses the singular and happy talent of treating the abstrusest subjects not only with the most perfect perspicuity, but with the most lively eloquence." (Was it the religious prejudice against Hume that left his name unmentioned in the Theory?) All four were in a greater or less degree utilitarians. But Smith denies that the perception of a distinction between virtue and vice originates in the utility of the one and the disadvantageousness of the other. Hume would explain all virtues by their usefulness to oneself or society. But Smith only regards utility as a powerful additional reason for approving virtue and virtuous actions. It influences our ideas of virtue, as custom and fashion influence our ideas of beauty. Usefulness is seldom the first ground • of approval, and "it seems impossible that we should have no other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest of drawers." Even our approval of public spirit arises at first rather from a feeling of its magnificence and splendour than of its utility to the nation, though a sense of utility greatly strengthens our approval. Adam Smith notes, by the way, what Hume had not observed, that the fitness of a thing to produce its end is often more admired than the end itself. Most people prefer order and tidiness to the utility which they are intended to promote.

Buckle has remarked on a contrast between Smith's theory of morals and his theory of economics. In the first, sympathy is the premise, and he works out the principle of sympathy to its logical conclusions. In the Wealth of Nations, on the contrary, the word sympathy scarcely occurs. He assumes self-interest as the sole motive of the economic man, and works out all the consequences without troubling about that other-regarding principle which is the foundation and measure of morality, though he shows, it is true, that the motive of self-interest, if sufficiently enlightened, will result in the general good. Without denying that Buckle's contention is suggestive, we may observe that Smith distinctly refuses to confine virtue to benevolence, and parts company on this very point from "the amiable system" of Hutcheson. "Regard to our own private happiness, and interest too, appear," says he, "upon many occasions very laudable principles of action. The habits of economy, industry, discretion, attention, and application of thought are generally supposed to be cultivated from self-interested motives, and at the same time are apprehended to be very praiseworthy qualities, which deserve the esteem and approbation of everybody."³ Benevolence may perhaps be the sole principle of action in the Deity, but an imperfect creature like man must and ought often to act from other motives.

To the third edition of the Moral Sentiments (1767) was appended an essay on the formation of Languages and the different genius of original and compounded languages. It is the fruit of his philological studies, and contains no doubt the substance of lectures that he had read in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He starts with the proposition that names of objects, that is to say, nouns substantive, must have been the first steps toward the making of a language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak would naturally begin to make their mutual wants intelligible by uttering certain sounds, as cave, tree, fountain, whenever they wanted to denote particular objects. What was at first a proper name would thus be extended to similar objects, by the same law which leads us to call a great philosopher a Newton. Similarly, "a child that is just learning to speak calls every person who comes into the house its papa or its mamma." Smith could call to mind a clown "who did not know the proper name of the river which ran by his own door." It was "the river." This process of generalisation explains the formation of those classes and assortments called genera and species in the schools, "of which the ingenious and eloquent M. Rousseau of Geneva finds himself so much at a loss to account for the origin."⁴ In his account of the dual number, which he finds in all primitive and uncompounded languages, he says that in the rude beginnings of society, one, two, and more, might possibly be all the numerical distinctions which mankind would have any occasion to take notice of. But these words, though custom has rendered them familiar to us, "express perhaps the most subtle and refined abstractions which the mind of man is capable of forming." His purpose through all this ingenious train of reasoning was to suggest a new mode of approaching a subject which, in itself so fascinating, had been reduced to a dull routine. He is very severe on the Minerva of Sanctius and on some other grammarians who, neglecting the progress of nature, had expended all their industry in drawing up a number of artificial rules so as to exclude exceptions. He sees that languages are the products not of art but of nature or circumstance. He explains how the modern dialects of Europe arose from conquest, migration, and mixture—through Lombards trying to speak Latin, or Normans trying to speak Saxon. In this way the older tongues were decomposed and simplified in their rudiments while they grew more complex in composition. The processes of linguistic development provoke a comparison of philology with mechanics:—

All machines are generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles, and there is often a particular principle of motion for every particular movement which, it is intended, they should perform. Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as to produce several of those movements, and thus the machine becomes gradually more and more simple, and produces its effects with fewer wheels, and fewer principles of motion. In Language, in the same manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observation discovered that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the end of all the declensions, and of all the conjugations in the antient Languages.

The comparison, however, suggests a contrast. The simplification of machines renders them more perfect, but the simplification of languages renders them more and more imperfect, and less proper (in his opinion) for many of the purposes of expression. Thus in a decomposed and simple language, he observes, we are often restrained from disposing words and sounds in the most agreeable order. When Virgil writes

Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,

we can easily see that tu refers to recubans, and patulae to fagi, though the related words are separated from one another by the intervention of several others. But if we translate the line literally into English, Tityrus, thou of spreading reclining under the shade beech, Œdipus himself could not make sense of it, because there is no difference in termination to assist us in tracking out the meaning. In the same way Milton's exquisite translation of Horace, "Who now enjoys thee, credulous all gold," etc., can only be interpreted by aid of the original. We may dissent when he goes on to denounce "the prolixness, constraint, and monotony of modern languages." Yet it would be as unfair to estimate the scientific value of these speculations by the accumulated achievements of modern philologists, as to sneer at his essay on the "Imitative Arts" or at Burke's treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, because Lessing has helped inferior men to see so much further.

Notes

¹ The crude theory that sympathy is the foundation of altruism was noticed by Hutcheson. In his System of Moral Philosophy (B. I. ch. iii.) he writes: "Others say that we regard the good of others, or of societies … as the means of some subtiler pleasures of our own by sympathy with others in their happiness." But this sympathy, he adds, "can never account for all kind affections, tho' it is no doubt a natural principle and a beautiful part of our constitution."

² Mr. Rae's Life of Adam Smith, pp. 148–9. Mr. Rae also says that it contained none of the alterations or additions that Hume expected, and expresses surprise that the additions, etc., which had been placed in the printer's hands in 1760 were not incorporated in the text until the publication of the sixth edition thirty years afterwards. On the other hand, he says that the "Dissertation on the Origin of Languages" was added. But the "Dissertation" was first appended in the third edition (1767).

³ See Moral Sentiments, 1st edition, p. 464.

⁴Origine de l'inégalité. Partie première, pp. 376, 377. Édition d'Amsterdam des œuvres diverses de J. J. Rousseau. The reference is from Moral Sentiments, 3rd ed. p. 440.