Wealth of Nations 19 



a most important secondary guide and object. But 

 the social instincts, including sympathy, always serve 

 as the primary impulse and guide." * 



Wealth of Nations 



In his well-known Wealth of Nations, the foundation 

 of our so-called dismal science of Political Economy, 

 Adam Smith ascribed all human actions to selfishness, 

 enlightened or otherwise. 2 In his equally important 

 but far less known Theory o] Moral Sentiments, pub- 

 lished some seventeen years earlier, Smith ascribed all 

 human actions to sympathy. 3 The two works would 

 appear to have been not antagonistic but supplementary 

 to each other, inasmuch as Smith was already deliver- 

 ing the lectures which comprehended the fundamentals 

 of his later work at least six years prior to the publica- 

 tion of his earlier work. 4 But man's intellect, with 

 its inevitable one-sidedness, its customary naive ten- 

 dency to exaggerate only its own side of human nature 

 (precisely as you may see men doing in the case of their 

 several professions, vocations, or specialties in life), has 

 taken up the later of Adam Smith's works alone, and 

 attempted to build an imperfect, incomplete philosophy 

 of life thereon. As a matter of fact, Smith's method 

 seems to have been an honest, catholic-minded attempt 

 lo investigate, undisturbed by the interfering action of 



i The Descent of Man, vol. I. pp. 93, 94. 



2 Buckle, Hist, of Civ. vol. II. p. 344. 3 Ibid. p. 348. 



4 Dugald Stewart's Life of Adam Smith, p. lxxviii., Smith's Post- 

 humous Essays. 



