_THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS_
In 1759, the seventh year of his professorship, Smith completed the
first of his two capital achievements. His scholiasts are still
curiously hazy about its early editions, partly perhaps because neither
the first, second, nor third is to be found in the library of the
British Museum. The first edition is a single octavo volume of 551
pages, printed in good large type.[10] The title-page runs as follows:—
THE
THEORY
OF
MORAL SENTIMENTS
by Adam Smith
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Glasgow.
London:
Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand
and A. Kincaid and J. Bell in Edinburgh.
MDCCLIX.
Andrew Millar was then at the head of the London publishers. He had
shown some time before, when Hume’s _History_ fell into his hands, that
he knew how to push a good book, and on this occasion too the firm lived
up to its reputation.
Early in April, Hume, who was in London, received some copies, and wrote
to thank Smith “for the agreeable present.” Always zealous in the
service of friendship and Scottish literature, he employed all the wiles
of diplomacy to promote the success of the book. “Wedderburn and I,” he
writes, “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, and Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole,
Soame Jenyns, and Bourke, an English gentleman who wrote lately a very
pretty treatise on the Sublime. Millar (the publisher) desired my
permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton.” Hume had delayed
writing till he could tell how the book had been received 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 only been out for a few weeks, he thinks he can now
foretell its fate. But instead of gratifying an author’s impatience,
Hume pretends to have been interrupted by an impertinent visitor, and
digresses upon vacancies in the Scottish Universities, upon a new
edition of Ferguson’s _Treatise on Refinement_, on Wilkie’s _Epigoniad_,
and Lord Kames’s _Law Tracts_. At last he seems to be coming to the
point:—
“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 broken in upon me again.” The second visitor was a man
of letters, and Hume goes off on a new scent. He advises Smith to read
Helvetius’s new book _De L’Esprit_, and adds, “Voltaire has lately
published a small work called _Candide ou L’Optimisme_. I shall give you
a detail of it.”
At last the badinage comes to an end with a warning that popularity is
no test of merit. A wise man should rather be disquieted than elated by
the approbation of the multitude:—
“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 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.”
On this occasion, as will appear in a later chapter, Townshend proved
true to his resolve and false to his reputation.
Burke, who afterwards became one of Smith’s most intimate friends, was
at this time known for his philosophical inquiry into the origin of our
ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). He was also a principal
contributor to the _Annual Register_; and that publication, in its
admirable account of books published during the year 1759, quotes a long
passage from the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, with a prefatory tribute
from Burke’s pen, which might quench the thirst of the thirstiest
author. Smith is praised for having struck out a new, and at the same
time a perfectly natural, road of ethical speculation.
“The theory is in all its essential parts just, and founded on truth
and nature. The author 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 shewing that those 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 shew 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.”
“Perhaps there is no ethical work since Cicero’s _Offices_,” wrote Sir
James Mackintosh, “of which an abridgment enables the reader so
inadequately to estimate the merit, as the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_.
This is not chiefly owing to the beauty of diction, as in the case of
Cicero, but to the variety of explanations of life and manners which
embellish the book often more than they illuminate the theory.”
This criticism has been adopted by Mr. Farrer in his luminous account of
Smith’s moral philosophy, and its justice may be conceded. 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 which 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_ (p. 474) 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 moralist’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_.[11]
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 judgments 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 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.[12]
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 footnote 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.”[13] 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.”[14] 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.