ADAM SMITH. 87 



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 foun- 

 dation in Scotland of the modern ethical school. In this 

 he restored and revised, rather than created a taste for 

 moral and intellectual science, which had prevailed in 

 the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries, 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 communication, or even 

 knowledge of each other's speculations, 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 demonstration can be cited than the argument in a 

 single sentence, by which he overthrows the position, that 



* Hutchiuson had taught his doctrines in Dublin some years 

 before Butler's ' Sermons ' were published in 1726, and had even pub- 

 lished 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. Indeed, 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. 



