than he got acquainted with him, and took a warm part in all his concerns. Besides chalking out a course of study and pursuits, he took care to engage him in conversation, in order to try his understanding, and discover his principles and bent. If he had a philosophical turn, and was not apt to boggle at novelty, it was an additional bond of union. He then became an inmate of the family and a companion to his lordship, who used in his walks to read lectures to his juvenile disciples.23
To be sure, he was capable of being difficult, arrogant and overbearing, and his élèves generally dropped him. Boswell remembered David Hume saying that ‘when one says of another man he is the most arrogant man in the world, it is meant only to say that he is very arrogant. But when one says it of Lord Kames it is an absolute truth.’ Boswell also remembered Smith’s sharp and intriguing comment that ‘Every man fails soonest in his weak part. Lord Kames’s weak part is writing. Some write above their parts, some under them. Lord Kames writes much worse than one should expect from his conversation.’24 Nevertheless, on being asked to account for the fecundity of intellectual life in contemporary Scotland, he was obliged to admit that ‘We must every one of us acknowledge Kames for our master.’25
Smith must have got on well with Home from the outset; the arrangements for the lectures on rhetoric must have been made or endorsed by him in early 1747, a matter of months after Smith’s return to Scotland. Certainly, he was well enough established by 1748 to have been asked to write a short preface to an unauthorized edition of the poems of one of Home’s oldest friends, the exiled Jacobite poet William Hamilton of Bangour. Smith, always the improver, cheerfully commented that he hoped that this would encourage Hamilton to publish his own edition.26 None of this is surprising. Smith and Home had plenty in common intellectually. Both wanted to develop a science of man based on the study of the sentiments and affections. They shared interests in taste and the light it threw on the workings of the mind and in the philosophical value of sentimental fiction, particularly Marivaux’s. And both were interested in the implications of the new science of man for jurisprudence. Home found in Smith a young philosopher who was exceptionally well versed in the philosophy of Hutcheson and Hume, and ready to apply their thought critically to the study of rhetoric and jurisprudence. Neither of these subjects was taught at Edinburgh in a form which interested Home. Although John Stevenson taught rhetoric and literature in the logic and metaphysics class, and clearly taught them well, earning the praise of often critical students, his teaching belonged to the world of John Locke rather than that of Hutcheson or Hume and was thus out of step with an intellectual culture that was increasingly preoccupied with questions relating to sentiment and sociability. And for a jurist like Home, jurisprudence was a sadly neglected subject in the university. The existing professor was no jurist and the professor of public law made no attempt to move beyond the teaching of Pufendorf. And while many admired Hutcheson’s philosophical insights into the origins of the sentiment of justice, it was a matter of regret to lawyers that he had no interest whatever in the study of particular systems of law or government. Smith had new thinking to offer on both subjects. His lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres would offer a new philosophical approach to the study of taste; those on jurisprudence developed a historical approach to the study of legal systems. He was to deliver both series of lectures as a historically minded philosopher who was interested in identifying the roots of those principles of improvement that were characteristic of human behaviour and which could be used to explore the principles of civilization itself. It was an agenda perfectly suited to the purposes of the remarkable cultural movement that was developing in Edinburgh. And it suited Henry Home very well indeed.
5
Smith’s Edinburgh Lectures: a Conjectural History
Smith laid out the foundations of his science of man in the courses of lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence he delivered in Edinburgh between 1748 and 1751 and in a series of posthumously published essays on the history of philosophy and science. The lectures on rhetoric discussed the sense of propriety which regulates our social discourse. Those on jurisprudence discussed the sense of justice on which our capacity to survive and prosper in political societies depends. Both sets of lectures were heavily indebted to Hume, but were the work of a pupil who had completely mastered the philosophy of his teacher and was able to turn it to his own account in two highly distinctive and topical critiques of the academic philosophy of his day. In doing so, Smith was to employ a method which raised important questions about the nature and meaning of philosophy itself.
Smith first delivered his lectures on rhetoric in October or November 1748, the start of the professional and social seasons. The Court of Session had resumed its sittings, the College year had begun, and country gentlemen and their families were returning from their estates. They were not the only lectures on offer in the autumn of 1748; there had been a lively market for public courses in law, medicine, the natural sciences and classical languages since the Glorious Revolution, and the Caledonian Mercury contains advertisements for lectures on mathematics, experimental philosophy, medicine, chemistry and geography. However, not many lecturers can have enjoyed the sort of patronage Smith received, and, according to Henry Home’s élève and biographer Lord Woodhouselee, he managed to attract a ‘respectable auditory, chiefly composed of students in law and theology’.1 Where the lectures were given remains a mystery. They were probably not held on university premises, given that Smith was in direct competition with the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, John Stevenson. It is just possible that he lectured in the Philosophical Society rooms or in the Music Society’s rooms in Niddry Wynd, but there were many other meeting rooms in the centre of the city in the vicinity of the College and the Parliament House.2 The lectures were clearly a success because the course was repeated in 1749 and 1750 and, according to Woodhouselee, attracted important members of the literati like James Oswald, Hugh Blair, John Millar, Alexander Wedderburn the future Lord Chancellor, the future Sir William Pulteney, a close friend of both Hume and Home, ‘and others, who made a distinguished figure both in the department of literature and in public life’.3 Indeed, so lively had the interest in ‘philosophical criticism’ become that, when Smith left for Glasgow in 1751, his course was taken over by Robert Watson, another of Home’s pupils and the future biographer of Philip II and Principal of St Andrews. And when Watson left for St Andrews in 1756 his place was taken by a third, more famous pupil, Hugh Blair, who was to be appointed to a new Regius Professorship of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh University in 1762, a chair founded in recognition of the fact that the appointment would bring ‘additional numbers of Schollars to the College’.4 The creation of a new chair under royal patronage and Blair’s appointment marked the high point in the fashion for the discipline Smith had done so much to promote. It is one of the most striking examples of the way in which the culture of the city was penetrating the university, and it was fitting that Blair acknowledged the help he had received from ‘the manuscript treatise on rhetoric’ Smith had lent him.5 Smith had promoted a novel approach to rhetoric that established it as a subject of fundamental importance to an understanding of the principles of sociability and of the science of man, and had caught the public’s attention. His lectures had also established his own intellectual credentials and had helped to prepare the ground for his appointment to a Glasgow professorship.
Smith probably lectured in what was to become his usual way, by reading a text he had dictated to a clerk and garnishing it with asides. The text of the course he gave in Edinburgh is missing but it seems reasonable to suppose that the notes two students took of the course in 1762–3 give a pretty fair guide to the essentials of a system of thought that had been developed in the 1740s. As the editor of the modern edition of the lecture notes comments, it is suggestive that most of the ‘illustrations’ Smith uses came from the period before his move to Glasgow in 1751.6 As we shall see, it was only in the case of
the remarkable third lecture, on the origins of language, that he was to develop an important theme of his lectures for publication. The essay, ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages’ (1761), and the lecture on which it was based contain some of Smith’s most important thinking about the principles of human nature and the methods of modern moral science. It was thinking which surely belongs in outline at least to the earliest stages of his philosophical career.
Smith lectured as a self-confident and engaging revisionist who proposed to rescue an important subject from the pedants. He was sure that his audience would agree with him that most of the classic works on the subject were ‘a very silly set of books and not at all instructive’,7 that remarks about good style to be found in the textbooks were distorted by the absurd popular belief that ‘the farther ones stile is removed from the common manner it is so much nearer to purity and the perfection we have in view’,8 and that modern attempts to view rhetoric as an aspect of the theory of taste were underdeveloped theoretically. He proposed to relaunch the study of rhetoric by considering the workings of a sentiment with which most of his audience would have been familiar and by using a method which could show how the different characteristics of our use of language could be related to a single inclusive principle. Smith’s method was ‘mathematical’ and derived from the Euclidean geometry he had learned at Glasgow. It involved presenting the inclusive principle on which his analysis depended as an axiom whose truth value would seem, in the eyes of his audience, to depend on the precision with which he was able to formulate the definitions on which his analysis depended, and on the quantity and quality of the ‘illustrations’ which he used to sustain them. The axiom on which his rhetoric was based proposed that language is at its most persuasive and pleasing when it is used with propriety, that is to say, in a way that seems fitting to others as well as to oneself.
This was a proposition which was well designed to catch the attention of the young ministers and lawyers in Smith’s audience. They would have known from reading Cicero and Addison at school that propriety was important to effective social and linguistic intercourse. If they had heard John Stevenson’s university lectures on rhetoric they would also have realized that Smith was proposing to reconsider a principle that Aristotle had thought to be of fundamental importance to the cultivation of an eloquent style, a principle which Smith thought had much wider implications for an understanding of the principles of human nature than Aristotle had allowed. For Smith was proposing to show that the art of using language with propriety was a skill which would refine our manners and morals as well as our powers of communication, and would help us to develop that ‘character’ which played such a large part in influencing the way in which others responded to our sentiments. Properly understood, then, rhetoric was a subject that had everything to do with the study of the way in which the human personality is formed and perfected, everything to do with the study of sociability and the science of man.
This was ambitious enough. Even more so was Smith’s introductory discussion of language itself, which was set up in frankly conjectural terms – ‘in order to [do] this, it will be proper to premise somewhat’.9 It was surely more plausible to think of language as a human invention that was as old as the species and of fundamental importance to its survival and happiness, than to think of it as so many earlier rhetoricians had done, as God’s gift to mankind. And, as if to underline the conjectural nature of his point, he presented it in the form of a fable about the circumstances that had encouraged aboriginal men and women to use signs and sounds to articulate their ‘mutual wants’.10
Two savages who met together and took up their dwelling in the same place would very soon endeavour to get signs to denote those objects which most frequently occurred and with which they were most concerned. The cave they lodged in, the tree from whence they got their food, or the fountain from whence they drank, would all soon be distinguished by particular names, as they would have frequent occasion to make their thoughts about these known to one another, and would by mutual consent agree on certain signs whereby this might be accomplished.
Afterwards when they met with other trees, caves, and fountains concerning which they would have occasion to converse, they would naturally give the same name to them as they had before given to other objects of the same kind. The association of ideas betwixt the caves, trees, etc. and the words they had denoted them by would naturally suggest that those things which were of the same sort might be denoted by the same words. Thus it might perhaps be that those words which originally signifyed singular objects came to be Special names to certain classes of things.11
This was the first stage of what Dugald Stewart was to describe as a conjectural history of the progress of language, and was designed to show that there were plausible reasons for supposing that every stage of mankind’s linguistic progress had been driven by need. Thus primitive mankind had progressed linguistically from the state of ‘primitive jargon’, in which they had simply assigned particular names to particular objects, to one in which they had begun to use general terms to describe similar objects and parts of speech to differentiate objects of the same type (the green tree, the tree above the cave, and so on). In time, they had found themselves able to ask essentially abstract questions about the nature of greenness and the conception of above. In fact, quite unintentionally, they were constructing grammatical rules and acquiring the ability to reason about things in general. Need was making them sociable and giving them the capacity for thought. It was a conjecture that invited the speculation that the history of language was synonymous with the history of mind.12
Some of Smith’s Edinburgh audience probably realized that he was developing a line of argument that had been started by Hutcheson’s bête noire Bernard Mandeville, in the second volume of The Fable of the Bees. One or two, the great Francophile Henry Home probably among them, would have realized that he was offering a critique of Condillac’s newly published and seminal Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746). Smith, who would always keep a close eye on contemporary French philosophy, clearly admired Condillac’s attempt to use Mandeville’s fable as the starting point of a natural history of grammar but doubted whether he had been able to give a satisfactory account of that epic moment in which primitive man had acquired the capacity for abstraction. Condillac’s explanation turned upon what Smith and David Hume would have regarded as the ‘unphilosophical’ assumption that testing circumstances would have awakened man’s natural and god-given power of reason. To this Smith retorted that primitive man would have been more likely to respond to the shortcomings of his primitive jargon and his limited understanding like a child, who uses his imagination to invest a word he already knows with new meanings. Thus in using the word for cave to denote not just this particular structure but all cave-like structures, he would be using the word in two quite distinct ways, to denote what was particular and what was general: ‘A child that is just learning to speak, calls every person who comes to the house its papa or its mama; and thus bestows upon the whole species those names which it had been taught to apply to two individuals.’ In the same way we say of a great orator that he is a Cicero or a great scientist that he is a Newton.13 In all of these cases the speaker uses the language he has at his disposal, imaginatively to invest words which have particular meanings for him with general significance. He uses a figure of speech, a species of metonymy, to extend his linguistic reach.
But such figures of speech would not satisfy the linguistic needs of the child or the aboriginal for long. When their circumstances changed and the demands of ordinary life became more complicated, they would find themselves under pressure to develop more formal and powerful grammatical resources to extend their linguistic scope and satisfy their cognitive needs. ‘It is in this manner that language becomes more simple in its rudiments and principles, just in proportion as it grows more complex in its composition,’ he remarked in 1762,
and the same thing
has happened in it, which commonly happens with regard to mechanical engines. All machines are generally, when first invented, extremely complex in their principles, and there is often a particular principle of motion for every particular movement which it is intended they should perform. Succeeding improvers observe, that one principle may be so applied as to produce several of those movements; and thus the machine becomes gradually more and more simple, and produces its effects with fewer wheels, and fewer principles of motion. In language, in the same manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observation discovered that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the end of all the declensions, and of all the conjugations in the ancient languages.14
In this brilliant stroke, Smith was writing off the figurative use of speech so much admired by classical rhetoricians and their admirers as symptomatic of the linguistic immaturity of the child and the aborigine. At the same time, he was unobtrusively signalling his agreement with David Hume’s profoundly sceptical observation that the imagination, not reason, was the faculty on which all understanding ultimately depends. Additionally, in addressing the question why human beings should ever have bothered to develop the linguistic resources they had at their disposal, he was laying the foundations of a theory of improvement which showed that the seemingly natural desire to improve the resources on which we depend in everyday life had deep tap-roots in the history of an indigent and needy species. And he had done all this by using a powerful and distinctive conjectural mode of reasoning about the nature of language and the mind that he was to develop and employ in all of his later philosophical writing.
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