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ADAM SMITH, 



WITH AN ANALYSIS OF HIS GREAT WORK. 



IN the last years of the seventeenth century were born 

 two men, who laid the foundation of ethical science as 

 we now have it, greatly advanced and improved beyond 

 the state in which the ancient moralists had left it, and 

 as the modern inquirers took it up after the revival of 

 letters, Bishop Butler and Dr. Hutchinson. The former, 

 bred a Presbyterian, and exercised in the metaphysical 

 subtleties of the Calvinistic school, had early turned 

 his acute and capacious mind to the more difficult 

 questions of morals, and having conformed to the 

 Established Church, he delivered, as preacher at the 

 Eolls Chapel, to which office he was promoted by Sir 

 Joseph Jekyjl, at the suggestion of Dr. Samuel Clarke, 

 a series of discourses, in which the foundations of our 

 moral sentiments and our social as well as prudential 

 duties were examined with unrivalled sagacity. Dr. 

 Hutchinson having published his speculations upon 

 the moral sense, and the analogy of our ideas of beauty 

 and virtue, while a young teacher among the Presby- 

 terians in the north of Ireland, was afterwards for many 

 years Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University 

 of Glasgow, and there delivered his Lectures, which, 

 by their copious illustrations, their amiable tone of 

 feeling, their enlightened views of liberty and human 

 improvement, and their persuasive eloquence, made a 

 deeper impression than the more severe and dry com- 

 positions of Butler could ever create, and laid the 

 foundation in Scotland of the modern ethical school. 



