114 ADAM SMITH. 



' Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of 

 Nations;' at first published in two quarto volumes, and 

 afterwards in three octavo. Mr. Hume lived to see it, 

 having died in the autumn of the same year ; and he 

 immediately wrote to express his high sense of its merits, 

 specifying accurately the chief points of its excellence 

 "depth, solidity, acuteness, with much illustration of 

 curious facts ;" to which, if we add the extraordinary merit 

 of showing in what way economical reasoning should 

 be conducted with a constant recourse to the general 

 principles of human nature, and a distrust of all empi- 

 rical details, though with a due attention to ascertained 

 facts of a general and not a topical or accidental class we 

 sum up the great services rendered to science, as well as 

 to government and legislation generally, by this celebrated 

 work. In regard to the originality of its views, it ranks, 

 perhaps, less highly, as most of its doctrines had been 

 broached by the Italian writers and the French econo- 

 mists, and still more by Mr. Hume in his 'Political 

 Discourses/ We must, however, bear in mind, that 

 Dr. Smith had begun to lecture upon those subjects as 

 early as the year after he settled in Glasgow, that is, 

 in 1752, when Mr. Hume's Essays were published; and 

 in 1755 he drew up a paper containing an abstract of 

 his doctrines, which he asserts that he taught the winter 

 before he left Edinburgh, and consequently in 1750. As 

 far as regards himself, therefore, we may affirm that 

 those opinions were not borrowed from any others, but 

 were the results of his own speculations.* 



* He says that they are contained in lectures which he had 

 composed and had caused to be written in the hand of an amanu- 

 ensis, who left his service in 1749 or the beginning of 1750. 



