Chapter IX: The "theory of Moral Sentiments"

1759. _Aet._ 36

Smith enjoyed a very high Scotch reputation long before his name was known to the great public by any contribution to literature. But in 1759 he gave his _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ to the press, and took his place, by almost immediate and universal recognition, in the first rank of contemporary writers. The book is an essay supporting and illustrating the doctrine that moral approbation and disapprobation are in the last analysis expressions of sympathy with the feelings of an imaginary and impartial spectator, and its substance had already been given from year to year in his ordinary lectures to his students, though after the publication he thought it no longer necessary to dwell at the same length on this branch of his course, giving more time, no doubt, to jurisprudence and political economy. The book was published in London by Andrew Millar in two vols. 8vo. It was from the first well received, its ingenuity, eloquence, and great copiousness of effective illustration being universally acknowledged and admired. Smith sent a copy to Hume in London, and received the following reply, which contains some interesting particulars of the reception of the book there:--

LONDON, _12th April 1759_.

DEAR SIR--I give you thanks for the agreeable present of
your _Theory_. Wedderburn and I made presents of our copies
to such of our acquaintances as we thought good judges and
proper to spread the reputation of the book. I sent one to
the Duke of Argyle, to Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Soame
Jenyns, and Burke, an Irish gentleman who wrote lately a
very pretty treatise on the Sublime. Millar desired my
permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton.

I have delayed writing you till I could tell you something
of the success of the book, and could prognosticate with
some probability whether it should be finally damned to
oblivion or should be registered in the temple of
immortality. Though it has been published only a few weeks,
I think there appear already such strong symptoms that I can
almost venture to foretell its fate. It is, in short, this--

But I have been interrupted in my letter by a foolish
impertinent visit of one who has lately come from Scotland.
He tells me that the University of Glasgow intend to declare
Rouet's office vacant upon his going abroad with Lord Hope.
I question not but you will have our friend Ferguson in your
eye, in case another project for procuring him a place in
the University of Edinburgh should fail. Ferguson has very
much polished and improved his _Treatise on Refinement_, and
with some amendments it will make an admirable book, and
discovers an elegant and singular genius. The _Epigoniad_, I
hope, will do, but it is somewhat uphill work. As I doubt
not but you consult the Reviews sometimes at present, you
will see in _The Critical Review_ a letter upon that poem;
and I desire you to employ your conjectures in finding out
the author. Let me see a sample of your skill in knowing
hints by guessing at the person.

I am afraid of Kames's _Law Tracts_. The man might as well
think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and
aloes as an agreeable combination by joining metaphysics and
Scottish law. However, the book, I believe, has merit,
though few people ever take the pains of inquiring into it.
But to return to your book and its success in this town. I
must tell you--

A plague to interruptions! I ordered myself to be denied,
and yet here is one that has broke in upon me again. He is a
man of letters, and we have had a good deal of literary
conversation. You told me that you was curious of literary
anecdotes, and therefore I shall inform you of a few that
have come to my knowledge. I believe I have mentioned to you
already Helvetius's book _De l'Esprit_. It is worth your
reading, not for its philosophy, which I do not highly
value, but for its agreeable composition. I had a letter
from him a few days ago, wherein he tells me that my name
was much oftener in the manuscript, but that the censor of
books at Paris obliged him to strike it out.

Voltaire has lately published a small work called _Candide,
ou l'Optimisme_. I shall give you a detail of it. But what
is all this to my book, say you? My dear Mr. Smith, have
patience; compose yourself to tranquillity. Show yourself a
philosopher in practice as well as profession. Think on the
impotence and rashness and futility of the common judgments
of men, how little they are regulated by reason on any
subject, much more on philosophical subjects, which so far
exceed the comprehension of the vulgar--

Non, si quid turbida Roma
Elevet, accedas: examenve improbum in iliâ
Castiges trutinâ: nec te quaesiveris extra.

A wise man's kingdom is his own heart; or, if he ever looks
farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few,
who are free from prejudices and capable of examining; his
work. Nothing, indeed, can be a stronger presumption of
falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and
Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder
when he was attended with the applause of the populace.

Supposing, therefore, that you have duly prepared yourself
for the worst by all these reflections, I proceed to tell
you the melancholy news that your book has been very
unfortunate, for the public seem disposed to applaud it
extremely. It was looked for by the foolish people with some
impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to
be very loud in its praises. Three bishops called yesterday
at Millar's shop in order to buy copies, and to ask
questions about the author. The Bishop of Peterborough said
he had passed the evening in a company where he heard it
extolled above all books in the world. The Duke of Argyle is
more decisive than he used to be in its favour. I suppose he
either considers it as an exotic, or thinks the author will
be very serviceable to him in the Glasgow elections. Lord
Lyttelton says that Robertson and Smith and Bower[107] are
the glories of English literature. Oswald protests he does
not know whether he has reaped more instruction or
entertainment from it, but you may easily judge what
reliance can be placed on his judgment. He has been engaged
all his life in public business, and he never sees any
faults in his friends. Millar exults and brags that
two-thirds of the edition are already sold, and that he is
now sure of success. You see what a son of the earth that
is, to value books only by the profit they bring him. In
that view, I believe, it may prove a very good book.

Charles Townshend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in
England, is so much taken with the performance that he said
to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleugh under the
author's care, and would make it worth his while to accept
of that charge. As soon as I heard this I called on him
twice with a view of talking with him about the matter, and
of convincing him of the propriety of sending that young
gentleman to Glasgow, for I could not hope that he could
offer you any terms which would tempt you to renounce your
professorship; but I missed him. Mr. Townshend passes for
being a little uncertain in his resolutions, so perhaps you
need not build much on his sally.

In recompense for so many mortifying things, which nothing
but truth could have extorted from me, and which I could
easily have multiplied to a greater number, I doubt not but
you are so good a Christian as to return good for evil, and
to flatter my vanity by telling me that all the godly in
Scotland abuse me for my account of John Knox and the
Reformation. I suppose you are glad to see my paper end, and
that I am obliged to conclude with--Your humble
servant.[108]

On the 28th of July Hume again writes from London on the same subject:--

I am very well acquainted with Bourke,[109] who was much
taken with your book. He got your direction from me with a
view of writing to you and thanking you for your present,
for I made it pass in your name. I wonder he has not done
it. He is now in Ireland. I am not acquainted with
Jenyns,[110] but he spoke very highly of the book to Oswald,
who is his brother in the Board of Trade. Millar showed me a
few days ago a letter from Lord Fitzmaurice,[111] where he
tells him that he has carried over a few copies to the Hague
for presents. Mr. York[112] was very much taken with it, as
well as several others who had read it.

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. Indeed, _when we converse with a man with whom we can
entirely sympathise_, that is when there is a warm and
intimate friendship, the cordial openness of such a commerce
overbears the pain of a disagreeable sympathy, and renders
the whole movement agreeable, but in ordinary cases this
cannot have place. A man tired and disgusted with
everything, always _ennuié_, sickly, complaining,
embarrassed, such a one throws an evident damp on company,
which I suppose would be accounted for by sympathy, and yet
is disagreeable.

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.[113]

Burke, who was thus reported by Hume to have been so much taken with the book, reviewed it most favourably in the _Annual Register_, and not only recognised Smith's theory as a new and ingenious one, but accepted it as being "in all its essential parts just and founded on truth and nature." "The author," he says, "seeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions, and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and showing that these are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory that has perhaps ever appeared. The illustrations are numerous and happy, and show the author to be a man of uncommon observation. His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing."[114] One of the most interesting characteristics of the book, from a biographical point of view, is that mentioned by this reviewer; it certainly shows the author to have been a man of uncommon observation, not only of his own mental states, but of the life and ways of men about him; as Mackintosh remarks, the book has a high value for "the variety of explanations of life and manners which embellish" it, apart altogether from the thesis it is written to prove.[115]

Charles Townshend adhered to his purpose about Smith with much more steadiness than Hume felt able to give him credit for. Townshend, it need perhaps hardly be said, was the brilliant but flighty young statesman to whom we owe the beginnings of our difficulties with America. He was the colonial minister who first awoke the question of "colonial rights," by depriving the colonists of the appointment of their own judges, and he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer who imposed the tea duty in 1767 which actually provoked the rebellion. "A man," says Horace Walpole, "endowed with every great talent, who must have been the greatest man of his age if he had only common sincerity, common steadiness, and common sense." "In truth," said Burke, "he was the delight and ornament of this house, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence. Perhaps there never arose in this country nor in any other a man of a more pointed and finished wit, and (when his passions were not concerned) of a more refined and exquisite and penetrating judgment." He had in 1754 married the Countess of Dalkeith, daughter and co-heiress of the famous Duke of Argyle and Greenwich, and widow of the eldest son of the Duke of Buccleugh. She had been left with two sons by her first husband, of whom the eldest had succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Buccleugh in 1751, and was now at Eton under the tutorship of Mr. Hallam, father of the historian. On leaving Eton he was to travel abroad with a tutor for some time, and it was for this post of tutor to the Duke abroad that Townshend, after reading the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, had set his heart on engaging its author.

Townshend bore, as Hume hints, a bad character for changeability. He was popularly nicknamed the Weathercock, and a squib of the day once reported that Mr. Townshend was ill of a pain in his side, but regretted that it was not said on which side. But he stood firmly to his project about Smith; paid him a visit in Glasgow that very summer, saw much of him, invited him to Dalkeith House, arranged with him about the selection and despatch of a number of books for the young Duke's study, and seems to have arrived at a general understanding with Smith that the latter should accept the tutorship when the time came. Townshend of course delighted the Glasgow professors during this visit, as he delighted everybody, but he seems in turn to have been delighted with them, for William Hunter wrote Cullen a little later in the same year that Townshend had come back from Scotland passing the highest encomiums on everybody. Smith seems to have acted as his chief cicerone in Glasgow, as appears from one of the trivial incidents which were all that the contemporary writers of Smith's obituary notices seemed able to learn of his life. He was showing Townshend the tannery, one of the spectacles of Glasgow at the time--"an amazing sight," Pennant calls it--and walked in his absent way right into the tanpit, from which, however, he was immediately rescued without any harm.

In September 1759, on the death of Mr. Townshend's brother, Smith wrote him the following letter:--[116]

SIR--It gives me great concern that the first letter I ever
have done myself the honour to write to you should be upon
so melancholy an occasion. As your Brother was generally
known here, he is universally regretted, and your friends
are sorry that, amidst the public rejoicings and prosperity,
your family should have occasion to be in mourning.
Everybody here remembers you with the greatest admiration
and affection, and nothing that concerns you is indifferent
to them, and there are more people who sympathise with you
than you are aware of. It would be the greatest pedantry to
offer any topics of consolation to you who are naturally so
firm and so manly. As your Brother dyed in the service of
his country, you have the best and the noblest consolation:
That since it has pleased God to deprive you of the
satisfaction you might have expected from the continuance of
his life, it has at least been so ordered that y^e manner of
his death does you honour.

You left Scotland so much sooner than you proposed, when I
had the pleasure of seeing you at Glasgow, that I had not an
opportunity of making you a visit at Dalkieth (_sic_), as I
intended, before you should return to London.

I sent about a fortnight ago the books which you ordered for
the Duke of Buccleugh to Mr. Campbell at Edinburgh.[117] I
paid for them, according to your orders, as soon as they
were ready. I send you enclosed a list of them, with the
prices discharged on the back. You will compare with the
books when they arrive. Mr. Campbell will further them to
London. I should have wrote to you of this a fortnight ago,
but my natural dilatoriness prevented me.--I ever am, with
the greatest esteem and regard, your most obliged and most
obedient humble servant,

ADAM SMITH.

COLLEGE OF GLASGOW,
_17th September 1759._

The second edition of the _Theory_, which Hume was anticipating immediately in 1759, did not appear till 1761, and it contained none of the alterations or additions he expected; but the _Dissertation on the Origin of Languages_ was for the first time published along with it. The reason for the omission of the other additions is difficult to discover, for the author had not only prepared them, but gone the length of placing them in the printer's hands in 1760, as appears from the following letter. They did not appear either in the third edition in 1767, or the fourth in 1774, or the fifth in 1781; nor till the sixth, which was published, with considerable additions and corrections, immediately before the author's death in 1790. The earlier editions were published at 6s., and the 1790 edition at 12s. This was the last edition published in the author's lifetime, and it has been many times republished in the century that has elapsed since. This is the letter just referred to:--

DEAR STRAHAN--I sent up to Mr. Millar four or five Posts ago
the same additions which I had formerly sent to you, with a
good many corrections and improvements which occurred to me
since. If there are any typographical errors remaining in
the last edition which had escaped me, I hope you will
correct them. In other respects I could wish it was printed
pretty exactly according to the copy which I delivered to
you. A man, says the Spanish proverb, had better be a
cuckold and know nothing of the matter, than not be a
cuckold and believe himself to be one. And in the same
manner, say I, an author had sometimes better be in the
wrong and believe himself in the right, than be in the right
and believe or even suspect himself to be in the wrong. To
desire you to read my book over and mark all the corrections
you would wish me to make upon a sheet of paper and send it
to me, would, I fear, be giving you too much trouble. If,
however, you could induce yourself to take this trouble, you
would oblige me greatly; I know how much I shall be
benefitted, and I shall at the same time preserve the
pretious right of private judgment, for the sake of which
our 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.

_Apropos_ to the Pope and the Pretender, have you read
Hook's Memoirs?[118] I have been ill these ten days,
otherwise I should have written to you sooner, but I sat up
the day before yesterday in my bed and read them thro' with
infinite satisfaction, tho' they are by no means well
written. The substance of what is in them I knew before,
tho' not in such detail. I am afraid they are published at
an unlucky time, and may throw a damp upon our militia.
Nothing, however, appears to me more excusable than the
disaffection of Scotland at that time. The Union was a
measure from which infinite good has been derived to this
country. The Prospect of that good, however, must then have
appeared very remote and very uncertain. The immediate
effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order
of men in the country. The dignity of the nobility was
undone by it. The greater part of the gentry who had been
accustomed to represent their own country in its own
Parliament were cut out for ever from all hopes of
representing it in a British Parliament. Even the merchants
seemed to suffer at first. The trade to the Plantations was,
indeed, opened to them. But that was a trade which they knew
nothing about; the trade they were acquainted with, that to
France, Holland, and the Baltic, was laid under new
embar(r)assments, which almost totally annihilated the two
first and most important branches of it. The Clergy, too,
who were then far from insignificant, were alarmed about the
Church. No wonder if at that time all orders of men
conspired in cursing a measure so hurtful to their immediate
interest. The views of their Posterity are now very
different; but those views could be seen by but few of our
forefathers, by those few in but a confused and imperfect
manner.

It will give me the greatest satisfaction to hear from you.
I pray you write to me soon. Remember me to the Franklins. I
hope I shall have the grace to write to the youngest by next
post to thank him, in the name both of the College and of
myself, for his very agreeable present. Remember me likewise
to Mr. Griffiths. I am greatly obliged to him for the very
handsom character he gave of my book in his review.--I ever
am, dear Strahan, most faithfully and sincerely yours,

ADAM SMITH.

GLASGOW,
_4th April 1760_.[119]

The Franklins mentioned in this letter are Benjamin Franklin and his son, who had spent six weeks in Scotland in the spring of the previous year--"six weeks," said Franklin, "of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life." We know from Dr. Carlyle that during this visit Franklin met Smith one evening at supper at Robertson's in Edinburgh, but it seems from this letter highly probable that he had gone through to Glasgow, and possibly stayed with Smith at the College. Why otherwise should the younger, or, as Smith says, youngest, Franklin have thought of making a presentation to Glasgow College, or Smith of thanking him not merely in the name of the College, but in his own? Strahan was one of Franklin's most intimate private friends. They took a pride in one another as old compositors who had risen in the world; and Smith had no doubt heard of, and perhaps from, the Franklins in some of Strahan's previous letters.

The Mr. Griffiths to whom Smith desires to be remembered was the editor of the _Monthly Review_, in which a favourable notice of his book had appeared in the preceding July.

FOOTNOTES:

[107] Burton thinks with great probability that this junction of names was meant as a sarcasm on Lord Lyttelton's taste.

[108] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 55.

[109] Edmund Burke.

[110] Soame Jenyns.

[111] Afterwards the Earl of Shelburne, the statesman.

[112] Probably Charles Yorke, afterwards Lord Chancellor Morden.

[113] Burton's _Hume_, ii. 59.

[114] _Annual Register_, 1776, p. 485.

[115] Mackintosh, _Miscellaneous Works_, i. 151.

[116] _Buccleuch MSS._, Dalkeith Palace.

[117] Mr. Campbell was the Duke's law-agent.

[118] _The Secret History of Colonel Hooke's Negotiations in Scotland in Favour of the Pretender in 1707_, written by himself. London, 1760.

[119] Bonar's _Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library_, p. x.