In his back-breaking programme of teaching, Hutcheson succeeded in placing the moral philosophy curriculum at the apex of the philosophy curriculum at Glasgow, as the discipline which would teach students preparing to enter Divinity Hall or one of the professions the duties of the Christian citizen. It was a deeply controversial programme in Presbyterian circles and, as Hutcheson knew all too well from his days as a Dissenting minister in Dublin, one which was bound to provoke opposition.19 His appointment had aroused suspicion among the orthodox, even though there were some, like Robert Wodrow, who were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that he was a good man who might be able to introduce a modicum of order into a notoriously unruly college.20 Hutcheson went out of his way to discuss some of the points of his inaugural lecture with potential opponents and took the precaution of delivering it ‘very fast and lou [sic] being a modest man, and it was not well understood’21– which was just as well, because the lecture was designed to prepare the ground for some of Hutcheson’s most radical thinking. Once established, Hutcheson began to push his luck, chatting to divinity students and discussing the sermons they were working on, a matter which normally lay within the province of the Professor of Divinity. He began looking out for prospective professors who shared his tastes and opinions, scoring his greatest triumph in 1743 in securing the appointment of William Leechman to the Divinity chair. ‘It will put a new face upon Theology in Scotland!’ he exclaimed. ‘We have at last got a right Professor of Theology, the only thoroughly right one in Scotland.’22 He was instrumental in setting up two of his former students, Robert and Andrew Foulis, as printers to the university and charging them with the business of publishing – in exquisite and highly collectable editions – the ancient and modern authors he and his colleagues admired and taught; his own works, which went through twenty-eight editions, were the most widely published of the Foulises’ list.23 By the end of his career in 1746 he had built up a substantial core of disciples among English and Irish students, as well as among the Scots who had studied with him, and many of these were to play a crucial part in shaping moderate Presbyterianism in Britain and in America. Indeed, it was predictable that when he was attacked by a troubled former student who was unable to square his professor’s teaching with the provisions of the Westminster Confession of Faith, a group of students should have rushed into print in Hutcheson’s defence. For Hutcheson, like Smith after him, had an extraordinary ability to generate affection and loyalty.
Hutcheson and Islay between them had transformed the reputation of the university at Glasgow and had done much to turn it into one of the most interesting in northern Europe. And although it did not yet have the resources to provide the sort of legal and medical education that its great rival at Edinburgh could provide, its philosophy curriculum was unrivalled in Scotland. Much of this must have been known to Margaret Smith and her intelligent and cultivated Kirkcaldy friends, and it was not in the least surprising that she should have decided that Glasgow was the right place for her son. Smith for his part cannot have failed to be impressed by the physical presence of the college and by its distinctive ethos, as well as by a curriculum that was to suit him very well. The college building was one of the largest public buildings in Scotland, built in the middle decades of the previous century with the proceeds of a large benefaction from a grateful alumnus, Zachary Boyd, and a large public subscription. It now resembled one of the grander Oxford colleges, with two large courts, a common hall, a well-stocked library and lodgings for students, regents and professors. When Smith matriculated in 1737, a line of houses – or manses – for the new generation of professors had just been completed. ‘The whole building is of freestone,’ Defoe wrote, ‘very high and very august’, and, with the Cathedral, it dominated the city’s skyline.24
At the same time the university had developed a distinctive social ethos that emphasized its cultural distance from the city as well as its commanding presence within it, and stood in striking contrast to the academic ethos of its great rival at Edinburgh. Edinburgh lacked Glasgow’s splendid buildings and collegiate sense of identity. Its professors generally led second lives as ministers of city parishes, as practising doctors and lawyers, and, because the university had no lodgings, its students had to make their own domestic arrangements in the city. By Smith’s time, Edinburgh’s professors and students had begun to see themselves as part of a wider social, political and cultural world and were even beginning to think of this environment as one which encouraged useful learning and politeness. In Glasgow, however, the academic community tended to keep itself to itself. Not many professors had church livings and, anyway, the university lacked the large and rapidly expanding medical and legal faculties which would have encouraged the growth of a professoriate with professional interests in the city. And while many better-off students preferred to lodge in the city, they soon discovered that Glasgow’s puritan culture discouraged the easy passage between town and gown that was characteristic of the capital. Alexander Carlyle thought that this meant that Glasgow students worked harder than those at Edinburgh, but added (rather snobbishly) that they lacked ‘knowledge of the world and a Certain Manner and Address that can only be attained in the Capital’.25 They also lacked the clubs and societies dedicated to the cultivation of learning, letters and politeness that shaped the interplay of academic and civic life in Edinburgh and made it possible for the capital to develop its own distinctive form of enlightenment. Though Glasgow had its merchant-intellectuals like Lord Provost Andrew Cochrane, whose Political Economy Club flourished in the 1750s and whose discussions were to provide Smith with the opportunity of listening to merchants discussing their business and their attitudes to commercial policy, it was the university and its professors who shaped the city’s enlightenment. However, this enclosed collegiate culture was one that suited Smith very well. In later life his friends found it difficult to get him to visit Edinburgh, and he went out of his way to describe his Glasgow years as ‘by far the most useful, and, therefore, as by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life’.26 And it was here in this newly reformed institution that he settled down to study a philosophy curriculum of intellectual sophistication and ideological interest.
In outline, the Glasgow curriculum was traditional and resembled that of any other Scottish university. The academic year ran from 10 October to mid-June almost without a break. The first two years were devoted to Humanity – or Latin – and Greek, though students who were competent in Latin were generally excused the first year. The third year was devoted to logic and metaphysics, the traditional introduction to philosophy, the fourth to moral philosophy and the fifth to natural philosophy. By Smith’s time, however, this outline had been much refined. Geometry and advanced Greek were available in the third year. Advanced geometry and advanced Humanity were available in the fourth year. In the final year, it was also possible to study further mathematics, natural jurisprudence, Latin and Greek. During the three philosophy years ‘the Scholars have frequent Exercises in Declaiming and Disputing, both in the several Classes and in the Common Hall: And, about the 10th of December there is a publick Examination of all the under Graduates, which continues a Fortnight or three Weeks, three Days each Week at least.’27
Smith’s Latin and Greek seem to have been good enough already to exempt him from the first two years of the curriculum. He entered the third year in 1737 at the age of fourteen as a member of John Loudon’s logic and metaphysics class and may have attended Alexander Dunlop’s special Greek course. Loudon, who was no friend of Hutcheson, was a serious, intelligent orthodox Presbyterian and one of the last orthodox professors of the old school. His intellectual world was Augustinian, shaped by a belief in the natural depravity of man and by a sense of the yawning gulf which separates the world of the flesh from that of the heavenly city to which God’s grace alone could grant access. It was a profoundly different intellectual world from that which Smith was to inhabit: his great pupil was to retort t
hat, so far from being the enemy of morality, earthly needs were the parents of morality and virtue. Loudon saw his task as one of introducing his students to the different properties of the mind and to the art of thinking, and, like most orthodox Christians, he seems to have done this by relying on the sophisticated writings of modern Augustinians like Malebranche, De Vries and the Port-Royal and by using Arnauld and Nicole’s classic Art of Thinking as his textbook. His more avant-garde students found his teaching old-fashioned – Tobias Smollett complained that the ‘art of logic has been transformed into a kind of legerdemain, by which boys can syllogize’.28 And although Loudon introduced his students to the main metaphysical systems used in the ancient and modern world, he did so in order to protect them against theological error, on the classic assumption that, in the last resort, the real purpose of philosophy was to illustrate and reinforce the fundamental truths of Christianity and, more especially, those set out for Presbyterians to observe in the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Smith must have realized that Loudon’s view of the mind and his theology were controversial. Francis Hutcheson’s course on pneumatology – a discipline which dealt with proofs of the being and nature of the deity – ran concurrently with Loudon’s course on logic and metaphysics and was taught on very different principles. It is true that Hutcheson dealt with this explosive subject with characteristic circumspection, minimizing his differences with Loudon as far as possible. Nevertheless, his real opinions on the subject soon became apparent in his classes on moral philosophy and natural jurisprudence, in which he contradicted everything Loudon and the orthodox Presbyterians stood for. As William Leechman put it, ‘[Hutcheson] still continued extremely doubtful of the justice and force of all the metaphysical arguments, by which many have endeavoured to demonstrate the existence, unity, and perfections of the Deity.’ He went on: ‘Such attempts instead of conducting us to the absolute certainty proposed, leave the mind in such a state of doubt and uncertainty as leads to absolute scepticism.’29 Hutcheson regarded the study of human nature and the natural world as the only sure foundation on which theological knowledge could be built.
Smith was taught by most of the most notable scholars in the university. Robert Dick introduced him to Newtonian physics and turned him into a serious student of natural philosophy. The great mathematician Robert Simson, the heterodox Professor of Divinity’s nephew, introduced him to Euclidean geometry, a discipline Smith admired for its elegance, lucidity and ‘the absolute rigour of its demonstrations’.30 Smith’s friend Archibald Maclaine told Dugald Stewart that Smith’s ‘favourite pursuits while at that university were mathematics and natural philosophy’, and he certainly retained a lifelong respect for mathematical explanation. Stewart remembered ‘to have heard my father [Matthew Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh] remind him of a geometrical problem of considerable difficulty, about which he was occupied at the time when their acquaintance commenced, and which had been proposed to him as an exercise by the celebrated Dr. Simpson’.31 As we shall see, Euclidean geometry was to provide Smith with important insights into methods which could be employed for placing the study of human nature on experimental foundations. But for all Smith’s interests in natural philosophy and mathematics his greatest debt was to Francis Hutcheson. It was he who introduced Smith to the moral philosophy of the ancients and moderns and gave him a distinctive way of thinking about the importance of philosophy in the modern world. His total dedication to teaching and his powerful philosophical intelligence gave his courses an intellectual excitement that led Smith to describe him as ‘the never to be forgotten Dr Hutcheson’.32 For Hutcheson was one of the most ambitious, admired and innovative philosophy teachers in the English-speaking world in the early eighteenth century.
Before his appointment to the Moral Philosophy chair, Hutcheson’s philosophical reputation had rested on his insights into the principles of human nature, the nature of virtue and the meaning of sociability. Much of his Glasgow teaching was devoted to working out the political implications of his philosophy and to doing so in a way that earned him his formidable reputation in radical Whig circles in Britain and the American colonies. The wider agenda to which he worked, however, had been laid down by Samuel von Pufendorf in the previous century in one of the most ambitious of all seventeenth-century philosophical projects, that of distilling an understanding of the principles of government from the principles of natural law and the principles of human nature. It was a project to which university students had been introduced in most of the serious universities of Europe since the later seventeenth century and it was one to which Hutcheson himself had been introduced by Gersholm Carmichael. It was a project the politically aware philosopher could admire for its relevance to the business of government; on the other hand, it was also a project which Hutcheson had every reason for regarding as flawed and in need of radical reconstruction. Smith was about to be introduced to one of the most powerful and ambitious undertakings in modern philosophy in a deeply revisionist spirit.
It is easy to see why Pufendorf’s ideas seemed so attractive to ambitious, politically minded thinkers. He had believed profoundly in the importance of philosophy to public life, had addressed some of the most difficult and disturbing political problems faced by the rulers of late seventeenth-century Europe, and had worked in the service of several of them. He had grown up in the shadow of the wars of religion of the later sixteenth century and the Thirty Years War of 1618–48, and had seen how civil wars and lethal sectarian conflicts had undermined the political foundations of nearly every European state; indeed his earliest memory had been of sectarian slaughter in his native Saxony.33 He had looked into the abyss of political anarchy that had threatened to engulf the political life of post-Reformation Europe and had asked how political society could be rebuilt on principles that were shared by the subjects of any state, whatever their credal loyalties.
This was no easy matter. Like Hobbes, he thought that men were naturally dangerous, unsociable, ‘impolitick animals’, driven by ‘thirst after things superfluous’, by ambition (‘the most pernicious of all Evils’), and by a ‘quick Resentment of injuries, and eager Desire of Revenge’.34 Like Hobbes, his interests in philosophy, politics and the business of government were directed to the question of explaining how this naturally ungovernable species acquired the understanding of morality and justice and the overriding need to submit to government, for these were the forms of understanding on which political life and sociable living depended. Pufendorf thought that life in the family made men aware of their natural weaknesses and taught them the need for co-operation, long before they realized the need to submit to a political sovereign. In his view, so far from being a product of Hobbesian fears, civil society was the product of a series of contracts made by cautious, prudent, patriarchal heads of households who were anxious ‘to guard themselves against those Injuries; which one Man was in danger of sustaining from another’; and it was on the behaviour of these patriarchs that the future of society effectively depended.35 His view of civil society was, therefore, austere, disenchanted and authoritarian. Most rulers were faced with the problem of governing subjects whose appetites and ambitions were constantly at odds with whatever rudimentary sense of justice they might have acquired, and he worked on the assumption that in most states the threat of faction, sedition and civil war was bound to be endemic. Absolute monarchy – supported, as Pufendorf continually pointed out, by learned counsellors like himself and a carefully educated magistracy – was the only sure way of preserving peace and ensuring that subjects behaved sociably. Mixed constitutions, like that of modern Britain, in which king and people continually quarrelled about their rights and liberties, posed a constant threat to stability. Lutheran churches, which recognized the king as their supreme head, were to be preferred to Presbyterian churches, which distrusted the sovereignty of princes. Religious dissent was distrusted and luxury and commerce were suspect in Pufendorf’s scheme, because conspicuous consumptio
n tended to encourage greed and ambition. However, with luck, prudent management and well-regulated schools and universities, a sovereign could hope ‘to train up some few, by long Discipline, to a tolerable Behaviour [in the performance of the civil duties]’; the vulgar ‘who are the greater Part of Mankind’ could only be ruled by fear.36 What he wanted was a citizen class which had a disenchanted view of human nature, a bleak Stoic appreciation of the necessities which bound them together in civil society, and a fear of the deity. Under these circumstances there was a reasonable chance the citizens would learn to respect political authority and the rules of justice and morality and come to think of them as right in themselves and incumbent on every virtuous and god-fearing citizen. In which case there was also a reasonable chance that citizens would have learned the foundational lesson that ‘in order to be safe, it is necessary for [them] to be sociable’.37 When Pufendorf’s moral philosophy is viewed as a philosopher-statesman’s response to the problem of securing the tenuous state of international peace that had been made possible by the treaty of Westphalia of 1648, its political purposes seem clear enough – to secure the minimal level of sociability needed to ensure a state’s survival and no more.
However, by the early eighteenth century this bleak system of natural jurisprudence began to look dated and unconvincing. The circumstances of the European state system had changed and were changing. Fears of political implosion and a descent into a state of endemic civil war were being replaced by fears of French imperialism. The expansion of commerce and overseas empires were transforming international relations and raising difficult questions about the effects of economic expansion and luxury on the political and moral fabric of the state. There were also questions being asked about the principles on which the Pufendorfian system was based. Scots and English philosophers were convinced that their mixed constitution and the limited monarchy brought into existence by the Glorious Revolution and the Revolution Settlement was a better way of fostering sociable behaviour than absolute monarchy, and many moderate theologians were repelled by Pufendorf’s Lutheran vision of a harsh and retributive deity. So far as Smith was concerned, the importance of Hutcheson’s teaching was not simply that he provided a critical introduction to these important questions, but that he opened up wider and more fundamental questions about the nature of sociability itself and the principles of human nature on which it rested.
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