This was Smith attempting to view the extraordinarily vivid and complex psychological dilemmas that interested the French moralists in the light of a very different psychology. Here, he followed the lead of the playwright and novelist Marivaux, a writer he greatly admired and must surely have read at Oxford. Marivaux was interested in the moral dilemmas of the ordinary citizens about whom Nicole had written, for these seemed to be as urgent and complex in their way as those of Pascal and his followers. Marivaux admired Addison’s Spectator and published his own version of it, the Spectateur Français, between 1721 and 1724. He was interested in the study of manners because they furnished all the materials a moralist needed to lay the foundations of ‘la science du coeur’, a ‘science of the heart’, which could be pursued by ‘one who reflected on human affairs’.20 Like Hutcheson, he was interested in ‘the unreflective aspects of knowing and feeling’ and, in a way Smith was to find particularly congenial, in the value of fiction in acquiring materials for such an enterprise.21 Above all,
It is society, it is the whole of humanity even, which stands as the only acceptable school, the only school which is always open, where every man studies the others, and is studied by them in turn, where every man is, in his turn, pupil and master. This knowledge is to be found in the commerce which we all, without exception, have with each other.22
Much as he admired Addison, Marivaux’s approach to the science du coeur was deeply French. Instead of writing for a cheerful, gregarious, Addisonian coffee-house public, he addressed the salons and the gens de lettres of Paris, and whereas Addison had emphasized the ‘easiness’ of living honestly in the world, Marivaux emphasized the difficulties. This is the subject of his enormous and intricate novel of manners, La Vie de Marianne, which appeared between 1730 and 1742. It tells the story of an orphan who does not know who she is or where she has come from and has nothing apart from a sense of her own nobility and a sense of honour. Her story is a tale of encounters with people who befriend and abuse her. She is plagued by the problem that troubled many of her contemporaries – how to interpret the behaviour of others and know that we are interpreting it properly. Her life is ‘a web of events which have given her a certain understanding of life and of the character of men’ but it is never enough to give her an understanding of herself; indeed, the gigantic novel was never finished.23 In Marivaux, Smith found a moralist who was interested in the psychological needs of ordinary citizens and who realized that these were more complex and demanding than most Anglo-Saxon moralists had perceived. It was for this reason that he commented in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus.’24
If Oxford gave Smith the time and resources to extend his knowledge of ancient and modern philosophy and to deepen his understanding of the workings of the passions, his encounter with the philosophy of David Hume was to be the decisive event in his intellectual development, providing him with a resource he could use to lay the foundations of a philosophy and a deep and enduring friendship. Hume was born in 1711 and was thus twelve years older than Smith, but their backgrounds and upbringing had something in common. Both came from the middling ranks, Hume being the younger son of a Berwickshire laird whose family had connections with the law, the army and local government. Both were brought up by strongly Presbyterian widowed mothers, indeed Hume admitted to James Boswell that he had been religious as a child.25 Hume went to Edinburgh University in 1723 at the remarkably early age of twelve, to prepare himself for a legal career, but like so many others he found the law boring and turned instead to philosophy and letters. By the late 1720s he seems to have lost all vestiges of Christian belief and had probably laid the epistemological foundations of what he was to call his ‘Science of Man’. The next decade was spent working on his own in Berwickshire, and later in France and it was there that he wrote the first volume of his Treatise of Human Nature, which appeared in January 1739 in the last months of Smith’s Glasgow career. The second volume, ‘Of Morals’, appeared in November 1740, three months after Smith’s move to Oxford.
The publication of the Treatise was the great non-event of the Scottish Enlightenment for, as Hume famously commented, ‘it fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’.26 The first volume was certainly known to Hutcheson as the lawyer and philosopher Henry Home had sent him a copy for comment. But Hutcheson was horrified by Hume’s flagrant religious scepticism, to the point that he was to use all his influence to block Hume’s bid for the Moral Philosophy chair at Edinburgh in 1745, and it seems unlikely that he would have advertised the work even to a star pupil like Smith. It is more likely that Smith got to know Hume’s work through the publication of the first two volumes of his Essays Moral, Political and Literary of 1741 and 1742, in which Hume applied the principles of his theory of human nature to topical questions about morality and politics. These attracted rather more attention than the Treatise, not least because they were written in a quasi-Addisonian style and were addressed to what Hume described as the ‘conversable’ rather than the ‘learned’ members of society. What is more, they were puffed by Hume’s friends, who included James Oswald. ‘Nothing can be more agreeable to me than either to recommend our friend Hume or his book,’ he told Henry Home. ‘In either of these Cases the Person who recommends does himself in my opinion an honour as he becomes a Sharer of that Merit which is in both.’ He concluded, ‘I am convinced Mr Humes things will make their way & Nothing shall be left on my Part to lett them be known as far as I can.’27 It is surely inconceivable that a close friend like Oswald would not have told Smith about the publication of the Essays, and equally inconceivable that Smith would not have found his way from the Essays to the Treatise at much the same time. At all events, it was said shortly after Smith’s death that he had been caught reading the Treatise in his rooms at Balliol. ‘We have heard that the heads of the college thought proper to visit his chamber, and finding Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, then recently published, the reverend inquisitors seized that heretical book, and severely reprimanded the young philosopher.’28
Whatever the precise timing, it is clear that by the time Smith and Hume met in 1749–50, Smith was a committed Humean who was using Hume’s theory of human nature in a highly distinctive way to lay the foundations of his own philosophy. Moreover, as far as Smith was concerned the Treatise could not have appeared at a better time. Mandeville, the French dévots and Bayle had demonstrated the complexity and power of the passions, the frailty of reason and the all-pervasive power of the imagination in shaping our conduct, and had done so in a way that cleared the ground for Hutcheson’s hypothesis that our moral behaviour was driven and shaped by a moral sense of whose existence these philosophers had been entirely ignorant. What Hume had to offer Smith was an approach to the study of human nature that drew these different strands together and provided a new method of looking at how we acquire those sentiments about morality, justice, political obligation and religion which make it possible for us to survive and prosper in civil society. It was, Hume claimed, an approach that was ‘entirely new’ and one which would form the basis for a ‘science of man’, constructed on genuinely experimental principles.29
The backbone of Hume’s philosophy was an absolutely conclusive demonstration that all claims that reason has the power to supply us with knowledge about the world, and the power to regulate our understanding and conduct, rest on essentially theological claims about the special powers of reason and are therefore ‘unphilosophical’. What passes as ‘knowledge’ has its roots in the imagination and the passions and in the use of intellectual powers we acquire through habit, custom, education and the experience of common life. As Hume asserted somewhat iconoclastically, turning conventional wi
sdom on its head, ‘Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions’.30 This was deeply sceptical, an assault on the authority of all known forms of Christian theology and, indeed, on the authority of all systems of thought, past, present and future. For in the last resort, all philosophy, all science, even mathematics itself could be shown to be products, or even figments, of the imagination. The mind, Hume concluded triumphantly (he could seldom resist the temptation of revelling in descriptions of the delusive powers of the imagination and the exploded authority of philosophy), was ‘the empire’ or even ‘the universe’ of the imagination.
Over the course of the next half-century, the Scottish intellectual community, Christian and non-Christian alike, was to take this devastating assault on reason as being decisive and of foundational importance to an understanding of human nature and to the task of rebuilding a Christian understanding of man, society and nature. Indeed it is the pattern of response to Hume’s challenge that gives the Scottish Enlightenment its distinctive philosophical character. Smith was to be no exception, except that his task would be to develop the implications of Hume’s philosophy and extend its reach into territories he was to make his own. For although he was no iconoclast, and studiously resisted the temptation of making fun of religion, he never forgot the fundamental Humean principle that theology, like any other system of knowledge, was a product of the imagination and one that was capable of breeding delusions that could be peculiarly destructive of society.
It is interesting to read the work Smith developed in the early years of his career as a commentary on the way in which he came to terms with the Treatise. He had no difficulty in accepting Hume’s proposition that what conventionally passes as knowledge is better described as a form of understanding, to be considered in terms of the ideas and sentiments we acquire in the course of common life. Two things were of particular interest. The first was the nature of those ideas and sentiments and the processes by which ordinary human beings acquire them. The second was the nature and purpose of those elaborate systems of philosophy, science, literature and the arts which human beings like to develop and are instrumental in shaping the moral, political and intellectual progress of society. The elaborate thought experiments on which Hume’s attack on the authority of reason was based had shown that the ideas and sentiments which shape our understanding of the world penetrated it so deeply that ‘we can form no wish, which has not a reference to society’.31 They were experiments which showed exactly how the passions were socialized and, at the same time, prepared the ground for the principle that was fundamental to Hume’s theory of society (and was to become the basis for Smith’s own). For Hume, all human beings were endowed with ‘the principle of sympathy or communication’ and it was on this that their capacity for sociability ultimately depended.32
No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos’d to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation for a century together.33
Hume was in fact preparing the ground for a radically different approach to Hutcheson’s claim that our moral understanding was regulated by a moral sense. His theory showed how we acquire different sorts of sentiment, which could be collectively described – though this was not an expression Hume used himself – as a moral sensibility. But this sensibility was far from being a Hutchesonian sense, god-given and hardwired into the constitution of human nature. It was composed of a set of acquired sentiments that collectively shaped the understanding and personality of the individual and enabled him or her to function as a sociable agent with a respect for the principles of morality, justice and politics. What is more, while Hutcheson had argued that our understanding of the principles of justice, politics and natural religion was derived from the moral sense, Hume was to show that all of these sentiments were built on the sense of justice every single individual must acquire if he or she is to live sociably. A society whose inhabitants did not possess an understanding of the necessity of justice and of the necessity of government to underwrite it was incapable of developing an understanding of morality; in fact it was not a society at all. As he put it in his last essay, written in the last year of his life:
Man, born in a family, is compelled to maintain society, from necessity, from natural inclination, and from habit. The same creature, in his farther progress, is engaged to establish political society, in order to administer justice; without which there can be no peace among them, nor safety, nor mutual intercourse. We are, therefore, to look upon all the vast apparatus of our government, as having ultimately no other object or purpose but the distribution of justice, or, in other words, the support of the twelve judges. Kings and parliaments, fleets and armies, officers of the court and revenue, ambassadors, ministers, and privy-counsellors, are all subordinate in their end to this part of administration. Even the clergy, as their duty leads them to inculcate morality, may justly be thought, so far as regards this world, to have no other useful object of their institution.34
Hume’s theories of justice and politics were of the utmost importance to Smith. He had no hesitation in preferring Hume’s approach to the workings of sensibility to Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense and was to show a genuinely ‘experimental’ interest in studying the processes by which these sentiments were acquired in the course of common life. Nor did he have any hesitation in adopting Hume’s theory of government and politics in preference to Hutcheson’s. Hutcheson’s theory envisaged constitutions which allowed subjects to depose their sovereigns at will, and regarded laws to regulate the accumulation of property as necessary for the eradication of luxury and the promotion of virtue. Hume’s, on the other hand, held that the primary duty of government was to administer the rules of justice and to preserve the lives and property of subjects; all attempts to redistribute property – for whatever reason – were subversive of government, stability and the material and moral progress of society. Such progress was only possible in stable polities in which the authority of governments was respected and life and property were secure; only then would curiosity and a taste for improvement thrive. It was a theory that was built on the belief that the progress of society depended on the efforts of individuals to better their lot, rather than on radical exercises in political engineering. And as such it provided the basis for a philosophy that would explore the principles of a culture of improvement which was deeply embedded in Smith’s family values and would be integral to his understanding of human nature and the progress of society.
Although the Treatise provided Smith with the foundations on which to base his own philosophical thinking, there was still much work to be done. In developing his sceptical theory of knowledge, Hume had acknowledged the importance of language in shaping our ideas and sentiments and explaining the workings of sympathy – words like ‘conversation’ and ‘discourse’ were constantly used to characterize what he thought of as the process of linguistic exchange. But he had no theory of language and showed no interest in developing one. One of the first philosophical tasks Smith set himself was to develop a conjectural theory of the origins of language which showed that it was possible to develop a coherent account of the origins of our capacity for language by invoking the power of the imagination and the love of improvement. It was a theory to which he attached some importance, for it was to be the
basis of his theories of rhetoric, morals and political economy – indeed it was central to his entire understanding of the principle of social exchange. There was also work to be done on Hume’s theory of justice and politics. Hume’s brilliant and tightly knit theory had emphasized the importance of scarcity and the idea of private property in explaining the origins of our belief in the necessity of justice. His theory showed that the sense of justice to be found in a primitive society that lacked a system of private property would be very different from that which would be found in a property-based society, and he knew very well that the different systems of property known to history – pastoral, feudal and commercial – were responsible for generating very different ideas of justice and needed very different systems of government to support them. A general theory of justice clearly needed to take account of these differences but Hume had shown little interest in developing one. It is striking that another of Smith’s early tasks was to develop such a theory on which his own account of the principles of jurisprudence, politics and political economy would be based.
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