152 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Buckle has asserted that Adam Smith’s greatness is shown by his basing 
everything in his Moral Philosophy upon Sympathy and everything in 
his Economics upon Self-interest, and by his leaving his readers to make 
the necessary adjustment between them. It would be a doubtful compli- 
ment, if true ; but no one can suppose it to be true who has read his two 
works attentively. I am not concerned to maintain Smith’s philosophical 
consistency ; my own impression, for what it is worth, is that his system 
of moral philosophy is by no means water-tight. But Smith himself, down 
to the end of his life, thought of his Moral Philosophy and his Economics 
as forming one whole.* And the recurrence of certain characteristic 
phrases in the second of his books shows clearly enough that he looked 
back on his earlier work as laying his philosophical foundation. 
It is so necessary that this should be realised if we are to judge fairly 
some of his successors, that I will ask you to let me adduce one or two pieces 
of evidence. 
Perhaps the most formal statement of his belief will be found in the 
generalisations to which he is led when considering the social utility of 
‘resentment ’—a passion which, he says, is ‘commonly regarded’ as 
‘odious.’ Odious though it be, it is, he holds, useful; and it is useful, in 
spite of the fact that it is not itself the outcome of conscious reasoning. 
For, as the very existence of society is at stake, ‘ the Author of Nature has 
not entrusted it to man’s reason to find out . . . the proper means of 
attaining this end.’ He then proceeds to generalise—substituting a per- 
sonified Nature for her Author. ‘The economy of Nature is in this respect 
exactly of a piece with what it is upon many other occasions. With regard 
to all those ends which, upon account of their peculiar importance may be 
regarded, if such an expression is allowable, as the favourite ends of Nature, 
she has constantly not only endowed mankind with an appetite for the end 
which she proposes, but likewise with an appetite for the means by which 
alone the end can be brought about, for their own sakes and independently 
of their tendency to produce it. Thus self-preservation and the propaga- 
tion of the species are the great ends which Nature seems to have proposed 
in the formation of all animals. But... it has not been entrusted to 
the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper 
means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater 
part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the pas- 
sion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure and the dread of pain 
prompt us to apply these means for their own sakes, and without any 
consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great 
Director of Nature intended to produce by them.’ You will notice how 
he again falls back into theistic phraseology.* 
Scotch caution abundantly shows itself in both of Smith’s books; and 
the method of hedging implied in the insertion of ‘ upon many occasions’ 
is highly characteristic.> | But such hedging is never intended to give, 
3 Compare the last paragraph of the first edition (1759) of the Moral Sentiments 
with the Advertisement to the sixth edition (1790). 
4This is in the long note at the end of Moral Sentiments, Part II., Sec. L., 
ch. vee Lock & Co.’s Reprint, p. 71, under the title Essays . . . by Adam 
Smith). 
5 Even this qualification, it will be noticed, disappears with respect to ‘all the 
favourite ends of Nature,’ where she has ‘ constantly ’ pursued the policy described. 
