History of Civilization in England, Vol. 3 of 3

Still, the amazing triumphs effected in this branch of mathematics, show how powerful a weapon that form of deduction is, which proceeds by an artificial separation of facts, in themselves inseparable. So little, however, is the philosophy of the method understood, that when, late in the eighteenth century, political economy assumed a scientific form, many persons, who were otherwise well instructed, reproached its cultivators with their hard-heartedness; such objectors being unable to see, that the science could not be constructed if it were necessary to take in the whole range of generous and benevolent affections. The political economist aims at discovering the laws of wealth, which are far too complicated to be studied under every aspect. He, therefore, selects one of those aspects, and generalizes the laws as they are exhibited in the selfish parts of human nature. And he is right in doing so, simply because men, in the pursuit of wealth, consider their own gratification oftener than the gratification of others. Hence, he, like the geometrician, blots out one part of his premisses, in order that he may manipulate the remaining part with greater ease. But we must always remember, that political economy, though a profound and beautiful science, is only a science of one department of life, and is founded upon a suppression of some of the facts in which all large societies abound. It suppresses, or, what comes to the same thing, it ignores, many high and magnanimous feelings which we could ill afford to lose. We are not, therefore, to allow its conclusions to override all other conclusions. We may accept them in science, and yet reject them in practice. Thus, the political economist, when confining himself to his own department, says, with good reason, that it is both absurd and mischievous for government to undertake to supply the working-classes with employment. This assertion, he, as a political economist, can prove; and yet, notwithstanding its scientific truth, it may be practically right for a government to do the exact opposite. It may be right for a government to supply the employment, when the people are so ignorant as to demand it, and when, at the same time, they are so powerful as to plunge the country into anarchy if the demand is refused. Here, the view of the politician takes in all the premisses of which the political economist had only taken in a portion. In the same way, as a matter of economic science, it is wrong for any one to relieve the poor; since nothing is better established, than that to relieve poverty increases it, by encouraging improvidence. But, in spite of this, the antagonistic principle of sympathy will come into play, and will, in some minds, operate with such force, as to make it advisable, that he who feels it should give alms, because, if he abstains from giving them, the violence which he does to his own nature may inflict more mischief on himself, than his bestowal of charity would inflict on the general interests of society.

It will not, I hope, be considered that, in these remarks, I have digressed from the main argument of the present chapter, since, although, in making them, I have aimed at clearing up a general question respecting the nature of scientific proof, I have only done so with the more particular object of illustrating the philosophy of Adam Smith, and of explaining the method which that most profound and original thinker pursued. We shall now be able to see how entirely his plan was deductive, and what a peculiar form of deduction it was. In his two great works, he first lays down certain ideas, and from them he marches on to the facts of the external world. And, in each work, he reasons from only part of his premisses; supplying the other part in the other work. None of us are exclusively selfish, and none of us are exclusively sympathetic. But Adam Smith separates in speculation qualities which are inseparable in reality. In his Moral Sentiments, he ascribes our actions to sympathy; in his Wealth of Nations, he ascribes them to selfishness. A short view of these two works will prove the existence of this fundamental difference, and will enable us to perceive that each is supplementary to the other; so that, in order to understand either, it is necessary to study both.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith lays down one great principle from which he reasons, and to which all the others are subordinate. This principle is, that the rules which we prescribe to ourselves, and which govern our conduct, are solely arrived at by observing the conduct of others.649 We judge ourselves, because we had previously judged them. Our notions are obtained from without, and not from within. If, therefore, we lived entirely alone, we could have no idea of merit or demerit, and it would be impossible for us to form an opinion as to whether our sentiments were right or wrong.650 To acquire this knowledge, we must look abroad. Inasmuch, however, as we have no direct experience of what other persons actually feel, we can only gain the information by conceiving what we should feel if we were in their place.651 Hence, all men are, in imagination, constantly changing situations with others; and though the change is ideal, and lasts but for a moment, it is the foundation of that great and universal impulse which is called Sympathy.652

By proceeding from these premisses, a vast number of social phenomena may be explained. We naturally sympathize with joy more than with sorrow.653 Hence, that admiration for prosperous and successful persons, which is quite independent of any benefit we expect from them; and hence, too, the existence of different ranks and of social distinctions, all of which emanate from the same source.654 Hence, also, the feeling of loyalty, which is a product, not of reason, nor of fear, nor of a sense of public convenience, but rather of sympathy with those above us, begetting an extraordinary compassion for even their ordinary sufferings.655 Custom and fashion play a great part in the world, but they owe their origin entirely to sympathy;656 and so do the various systems of philosophy which have flourished at different times, the disagreement between which depends on the fact, that each philosopher has sympathized with different ideas, some sympathizing with the notion of fitness or congruity, some with that of prudence, some with that of benevolence, and every one developing the conception paramount in his own mind.657 To sympathy, again, we must ascribe the establishment of rewards and punishments, and the whole of our criminal laws, none of which would have existed but for our disposition to sympathize with those who either do good or suffer harm; for the circumstance of society being protected by penal laws, is a subsequent and subordinate discovery, which confirms our sense of their propriety, but did not suggest it.658 The same principle causes the difference of character exhibited by different classes, such as the irritability of poets, compared with the coolness of mathematicians;659 it likewise causes that social difference between the sexes, which makes men more remarkable for generosity, and women for humanity.660 All these results illustrate the workings of sympathy, and are the remote, but still the direct, operations of that principle. Indeed, we can trace to it some of the minutest divisions of character; pride and vanity, for instance, being dependent on it, although those two passions are often confused together, and are sometimes strangely blended in the same mind.661

Sympathy, then, is the main-spring of human conduct. It arises, not so much from witnessing the passions of other persons, as from witnessing the situation which excites those passions.662 To this single process we are indebted, not only for the highest principles, but also for the deepest emotions. For, the greatest affection of which we are capable, is merely sympathy fixed into habit; and the love which exists between the nearest relations, is not inherent, but is derived from this mighty and controlling principle, which governs the whole course of affairs.663

By this bold hypothesis, Adam Smith, at one stroke, so narrowed the field of inquiry, as to exclude from it all considerations of selfishness as a primary principle, and only to admit its great antagonist, sympathy. The existence of the antagonism, he distinctly recognizes. For, he will not allow that sympathy is in any way to be deemed a selfish principle.664 Although he knew that it is pleasurable, and that all pleasure contains an element of selfishness, it did not suit the method of his philosophy to subject the principle of sympathy to such an inductive analysis as would reveal its elements. His business was, to reason from it, and not to it. Concentrating his energy upon the deductive process, and displaying that dialectic skill which is natural to his countrymen, and of which he himself was one of the most consummate masters the world has ever seen, he constructed a system of philosophy, imperfect indeed, because the premisses were imperfect, but approaching truth as closely as it was possible for any one to do who abstained from giving due consideration to the selfish part of human nature. Into the workings of its sympathetic part, he looked with a minuteness, and he reasoned from it with a subtlety, which make his work the most important that has ever been written on this interesting subject. But, inasmuch as his plan involved a deliberate suppression of preliminary and essential facts, the results which he obtained do not strictly correspond to those which are actually observed in the world.665 This, however, as I have shown, is not a valid objection; since such discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, or between the abstract and the concrete, is the necessary consequence of that still early condition of our knowledge, which forces us to study complicated questions piecemeal, and to raise them to sciences by separate and fragmentary investigations.

That Adam Smith saw this necessity, and that his seeing it was the cause of the method he pursued, is evident from the fact, that in his next great work he followed the same plan, and, though he argued from new premisses, he carefully avoided arguing from any of the old ones. Convinced that, in his theory of morals, he had reasoned as accurately as possible from the principles supplied by sympathy, his capacious and insatiable mind, deeming that nothing had been done while aught remained to do, urged him to pass on to the opposite passion of selfishness, and treat it in the same manner, so that the whole domain of thought might be covered. This he did in his Wealth of Nations, which, though even a greater work than his Moral Sentiments, is equally one-sided, in reference to the principles which it assumes. It assumes that selfishness is the main regulator of human affairs, just as his previous work had assumed sympathy to be so. Between the two works there elapsed an interval of seventeen years; the Wealth of Nations not being published till 1776. But what shows that to their author both were part of a single scheme, is the notable circumstance, that, so early as 1753, he had laid down the principles which his later work contains.666 This was while his former work was still in meditation, and before it had seen the light. It is, therefore, clear, that the study which he made, first of one passion, and then of its opposite, was not a capricious or accidental arrangement, but was the consequence of that vast idea which presided over all his labours, and which, when they are rightly understood, gives to them a magnificent unity. And a glorious object of ambition it was. His aspiring and comprehensive genius, sweeping the distant horizon, and taking in the intermediate space at a glance, sought to traverse the whole ground in two separate and independent directions, indulging the hope, that, by supplying in one line of argument the premisses which were wanting in the other, their opposite conclusions would be compensatory rather than hostile, and would serve as a broad and permanent basis on which one great science of human nature might be safely built.

The Wealth of Nations is, as I have elsewhere observed,667 probably the most important book which has ever been written, whether we consider the amount of original thought which it contains, or its practical influence. Its practical recommendations were extremely favourable to those doctrines of freedom which the eighteenth century ushered in; and this secured to them an attention which otherwise they would not have received. While, therefore, the Wealth of Nations was the proximate cause of a great change in legislation,668 a deeper analysis will show, that the success of the book, and, consequently, the alteration of the laws, depended upon the operation of more remote and general causes. It must also be confessed, that those same causes predisposed the mind of Adam Smith to the doctrines of liberty, and gave him a sort of prejudice in favour of conclusions which limited the interference of the legislator. Thus much he borrowed from his age; but one thing he did not borrow. His wide and organizing mind was all his own. This would have made him great under any circumstances; to make him powerful, required a peculiar conjunction of events. That conjunction he enjoyed, and he turned it to good account. The influence of his contemporaries was enough to make him liberal; his own capacity was enough to make him comprehensive. He had, in a most remarkable degree, that exuberance of thought, which is one of the highest forms of genius, but which leads those who possess it into distant excursions, which, though they have one common aim, are often stigmatized as digressions, simply because they who criticize are unable to discern the great principle which pervades the whole, and unites the various parts into a single scheme. This has been especially the case with Adam Smith, whose immortal work has often been exposed to such shallow objections. And certainly, the Wealth of Nations displays a breadth of treatment which those who cannot sympathize with, are very likely to ridicule. The phenomena, not only of wealth, but also of society in general, classified and arranged under their various forms; the origin of the division of labour, and the consequences which that division has produced; the circumstances which gave rise to the invention of money, and to the subsequent changes in its value; the history of those changes traced in different ages, and the history of the relations which the precious metals bear to each other; an examination of the connection between wages and profits, and of the laws which govern the rise and fall of both; another examination of the way in which these are concerned, on the one hand, with the rent of land, and, on the other hand, with the price of commodities; an inquiry into the reason why profits vary in different trades, and at different times; a succinct, but comprehensive, view of the progress of towns in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire; the fluctuations, during several centuries, in the prices of the food of the people, and a statement of how it is, that, in different stages of society, the relative cost of land and of meat varies; the history of corporation laws and of municipal enactments, and their bearing on the four great classes of apprentices, manufacturers, merchants, and landlords; an account of the immense power and riches formerly enjoyed by the clergy, and of the manner in which, as society advances, they gradually lose their exclusive privileges; the nature of religious dissent, and the reason why the clergy of the established Church can never contend with it on terms of equality, and, therefore, call on the State to help them, and wish to persecute when they cannot persuade; why some sects profess more ascetic principles, and others more luxurious ones; how it was, that, during the feudal times, the nobles acquired their power, and how that power has, ever since, been gradually diminishing; how the rights of territorial jurisdiction originated, and how they died away; how the sovereigns of Europe obtained their revenue, what the sources of it are, and what classes are most heavily taxed in order to supply it; the cause of certain virtues, such as hospitality, flourishing in barbarous ages, and decaying in civilized ones; the influence of inventions and discoveries in altering the distribution of power among the various classes of society; a bold and masterly sketch of the peculiar sort of advantages which Europe derived from the discovery of America and of the passage round the Cape; the origin of universities, their degeneracy from their original plan, the corruption which has gradually crept over them, and the reason why they are so unwilling to adopt improvements, and to keep pace with the wants of the age; a comparison between public and private education, and an estimate of their relative advantages; – these, and a vast number of other subjects, respecting the structure and development of society, such as the feudal system, slavery, emancipation of serfs, origin of standing armies, and of mercenary troops, effects produced by tithes, laws of primogeniture, sumptuary laws, international treaties concerning trade, rise of European banks, national debts, influence of dramatic representations over opinions, influence of foreign travels over opinions, colonies, poor-laws, – all topics of a miscellaneous character, and many of them diverging from each other, – all are fused into one great system, and irradiated by the splendour of one great genius. Into that dense and disorderly mass, did Adam Smith introduce symmetry, method, and law. At his touch, anarchy disappeared, and darkness was succeeded by light. Much, of course, he took from his predecessors, though nothing like so much as is commonly supposed. On this sort of borrowing, the best and strongest of us are dependent. But, after making every possible allowance for what he gathered from others, we must honestly say, that no single man ever took so great a step upon so important a subject, and that no single work which is now preserved, contains so many views, which were novel at the time, but which subsequent experience has ratified. What, however, for our present purpose, is most important to observe, is, that he obtained these results by arguing from principles which the selfish part of human nature exclusively supplied, and that he omitted those sympathetic feelings of which every human being possesses at least some share, but which he could not take into consideration, without producing a problem, the number of whose complications it would have been hopeless to unravel.

To avoid, therefore, being baffled, he simplified the problem, by erasing from his view of human nature those premisses which he had already handled in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. At the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, he lays down two propositions: 1st, that all wealth is derived, not from land, but from labour; and 2d, that the amount of the wealth depends, partly on the skill with which the labour is conducted, and partly on the proportion between the number of those who labour and the number of those who do not labour. The rest of the work, is an application of these principles, to explain the growth and mechanism of society. In applying them, he everywhere assumes, that the great moving power of all men, all interests, and all classes, in all ages, and in all countries, is selfishness. The opposite power of sympathy he entirely shuts out; and I hardly remember an instance in which even the word occurs in the whole course of his work. Its fundamental assumption is, that each man exclusively follows his own interest, or what he deems to be his own interest. And one of the peculiar features of his book is, to show that, considering society as a whole, it nearly always happens that men, in promoting their own interest, will unintentionally promote the interest of others. Hence, the great practical lesson is, not to restrain selfishness, but to enlighten it; because there is a provision in the nature of things, by which the selfishness of the individual accelerates the progress of the community. According to this view, the prosperity of a country depends on the amount of its capital; the amount of its capital depends on the habit of saving, that is, on parsimony, as opposed to generosity; while the habit of saving is, in its turn, governed by the desire we all feel of bettering our condition, – a desire so inherent in our nature, that it comes with us from the womb, and only leaves us in the grave.669

This constant effort of every man, to better his own condition, is so salutary, as well as so powerful, that it is often capable of securing the progress of society, in spite of the folly and extravagance of the rulers of mankind.670 If it were not for this propensity, improvement would be impossible. For human institutions are constantly stopping our advance, by thwarting our natural inclinations.671 And no wonder that this should be the case, seeing that the men who are at the head of affairs, and by whom the institutions are contrived, have, perhaps, a certain rough and practical sagacity; but being, from the narrowness of their understandings, incapable of large views, their councils are determined by those mere casual fluctuations which alone they are able to perceive.672 They do not see that we have prospered, not on account of their enactments, but in the teeth of them; and that the real cause of our prosperity is the fact that we enjoy undisturbed the fruit of our own labour.673 Whenever this right is tolerably secure, every man will be bent on procuring for himself either present enjoyment or future profit; and if he does not aim at one of these objects, he is void of common understanding.674 If he possess capital, he will probably aim at both, but, in doing so, he will never consider the interest of others; his sole motive will be his own private profit.675 And it is well that such should be the case. For, by thus pursuing his personal interest, he aids society more than if his views were generous and exalted. Some people affect to carry on trade for the good of others; but this is mere affectation, though, to say the truth, it is an affectation not very common among merchants, and many words are not needed to dissuade them from so foolish a practice.676

In this way, Adam Smith completely changes the premisses which he had assumed in his earlier work. Here, he makes men naturally selfish; formerly, he had made them naturally sympathetic.677 Here, he represents them as pursuing wealth for sordid objects, and for the narrowest personal pleasures; formerly he represented them as pursuing it out of regard to the sentiments of others, and for the sake of obtaining their sympathy.678 In the Wealth of Nations, we hear no more of this conciliatory and sympathetic spirit; such amiable maxims are altogether forgotten, and the affairs of the world are regulated by different principles. It now appears that benevolence and affection have no influence over our actions. Indeed, Adam Smith will hardly admit common humanity into his theory of motives. If a people emancipate their slaves, it is a proof, not that the people are acted on by high moral considerations, nor that their sympathy is excited by the cruelty inflicted on these unhappy creatures. Nothing of the sort. Such inducements to conduct are imaginary, and exercise no real sway. All that the emancipation proves, is, that the slaves were few in number, and, therefore, small in value. Otherwise, they would not have been emancipated.679

So, too, while in his former work, he had ascribed the different systems of morals to the power of sympathy, he, in this work, ascribes them entirely to the power of selfishness. He observes, that, among the lower ranks of society, dissipation is more fatal to individuals, than it is among the higher ranks. The extravagance which dissipation produces, may injure the fortune of a wealthy man, but the injury is usually capable of being repaired, or, at all events, he can indulge his vices for years without completely destroying his fortune, and without bringing himself to utter ruin. To the labourer, a similar indulgence would be fatal in a single week; it would not merely reduce him to beggary, and perhaps send him to jail, but it would destroy his future prospects, by taking away that character for sobriety and regularity on which his employment depends. Hence, the better class of common people, guided by their interest, look with aversion on excesses which they know to be fatal; while the upper ranks finding that a moderate amount of vice hurts neither their purse nor their reputation consider such license to be one of the advantages which their fortune confers, and they value, as one of the privileges belonging to their station, the liberty of indulging themselves without being censured. Therefore it is, that they who dissent from the established Church have a purer system of morals, or, at all events, an austerer one, than they who agree with it. For, new religious sects usually begin among the common people, the thinking part of whom are, by their interest, driven to strict views of the duties of life. Consequently, the advocates of the new opinion profess a similar strictness, seeing that it is the surest means of increasing their proselytes. Thus it is that sectaries and heretics, governed by interest rather than by principle, adopt a code of morals which is suited to their own purpose, and the rigidity of which is strongly contrasted with the laxer code of more orthodox believers.680 Owing to the operation of the same principle, we also find, that, among the orthodox themselves, the clergy embrace a stricter system of morals in countries where church benefices are nearly equal than they do in countries where the benefices are very unequal. This is because, when all the benefices are nearly equal, none can be very rich, and, consequently, even the most conspicuous among the clergy will have but small incomes. But a man who has little to spend can have no influence, unless his morals are exemplary. Having no wealth to give him weight the vices of levity would make him ridiculous. To avoid contempt, and also to avoid the expense which a looseness of conduct occasions, and which his narrow circumstances cannot afford, he has but one remedy, and that remedy he adopts. He retains his influence, and saves his pocket, by protesting against pleasures which he cannot conveniently enjoy; in this, as in all other cases, pursuing that plan of life which his own interest urges him to follow.681