ADAM SMITH. 167 



In this he restored and revised, rather than created a 

 taste for moral and intellectual science, which had pre- 

 vailed in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth cen- 

 turies, but which the prevalence of religious zeal and 

 of political faction had for above two hundred years 

 extinguished. He restored it, too, in a new, a purer, 

 and a more rational form, adopting, as Butler did nearly 

 at the same time, though certainly without any com- 

 munication, or even knowledge of each other's specu- 

 lations, the sound and consistent doctrine which rejects 

 as a paradox, and indeed a very vulgar fallacy, the 

 doctrine that all the motives of human conduct are 

 directly resolvable into a regard for self-interest.* 

 Nothing more deserving of the character of a demon- 

 stration can be cited than the argument in a single 

 sentence, by which he overthrows the position, that 

 we seek other men's happiness, because by so doing we 

 gratify our own feelings. This presupposes, says he, 

 that there is a pleasure to ourselves in seeking their 

 happiness, else the motive, by the supposition, wholly 

 fails. Therefore there is a pleasure as independent of 

 selfish gratification, as the thing pursued is necessarily 

 something different from the being that pursues it. 



These two great philosophers, then, may be reckoned 

 the founders of the received and sound ethical system, 

 to which Tucker, by his profound and original specu- 

 lations, added much. Hartley and Bonnet, who were 

 a few years later, only introduced a mixture of gross 



* Hutchinson had taught his doctrines in Dublin some years before 

 Butler's 'Sermons' were published in 1726, and had even published his 

 ' Inquiry into Beauty and Virtue,' for the second edition of that work 

 appeared in the same year. The ' Sermons ' had indeed been preached at 

 the Rolls, where he began to officiate as early as 1718 ; but nothing can 

 be more unlikely than that any private intimation of their substance should 

 have been conveyed to the young Presbyterian minister in Ireland. In- 

 deed, his book was written soon after he* settled at the academy, in 1716, 

 which he taught near Dublin ; for the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Molesworth, 

 who was appointed in that year, revised the manuscript of it. Butler and 

 Hutchinson were contemporaries; one born 1692, the other 1694. Dr. 

 Smith was born considerably later, in 1723 ; Mr. Hume in 1711. 



