Nicholas Phillipson
Page 17
The fourth society to which Smith belonged, Lord Provost Andrew Cochrane’s so-called Political Economy Club, was rather different. Cochrane was a tobacco merchant of some substance and learning. The club was founded in the early 1740s, as a means of encouraging its members to inquire ‘into the Nature and the Principles of Trade in all its Branches, and to Communicate their Knowledge and Views on that Subject to each other’.20 It was primarily a club for merchants, and Smith and the Rev. William Wight, a future Professor of Ecclesiastical History, were the only professorial members. The club’s records are lost but there can be little doubt that it interested Smith because it gave him the opportunity of listening to intelligent merchants talking about their business and about their attitudes to commercial policy. It is tempting to think that it was here that Smith learned to appreciate the force that the ‘wretched spirit of monopoly’ exerted over the minds of even the most literate merchants. When he wrote in the Wealth of Nations that, ‘the interest of the dealers … in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the publick. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers’, it is hard not to think that he was reflecting in part on thirteen years of conversations heard in Glasgow.21 Nor was Smith a merely passive observer of the folk-ways of the merchant community. As we have already seen, Dugald Stewart saw a paper Smith had given in 1755 to what sounds like Cochrane’s club in which he had somewhat testily claimed the ownership of some of the central aspects of his thinking about free trade and the police of a commercial polity. What Stewart did not say, however, was that these were ideas which were seriously at odds with those of many merchants he knew in the 1750s.
This, then, was a university reforming itself in a way which was distancing it from the heartland of the city it inhabited, and it is not altogether surprising that by the 1760s it should have been on the receiving end of a Glaswegian version of the critical invective to which Oxford had been subjected a generation earlier, an invective which castigated the professors for offering a ‘philosophical’ rather than a ‘practical’ education. ‘We are generally a Commercial People,’ one pamphleteer wrote in 1762. ‘Except in Matters of Commerce our ideas are pretty much circumscribed. The Thoughts of great Numbers among us move in no very wide Circle and never towards Metaphysics. We figure not to ourselves any very wide or noble Plan of Education, which might dignify high Life, but would be merely imaginary and unattainable in our Circumstances: To these our Education must be suitable.’22 This was putting it politely. Others, like the College’s most doughty critic, William Thom, sneered at the greed and self-importance of professors who, by 1765, had thought themselves too grand to worship in city churches, preferring the decent seclusion of a College chapel.23 There were calls for the establishment of new academies devoted to the practical arts and sciences needed by a commercial people. As for the civilizing power of philosophy and politeness, so much vaunted by the professors, ‘who, in the name of wonder, appears with greatest dignity in a company of merchants? Or, who is listened to with the most reverent attention? Is it not the richest man? and the man who can talk experimentally of the largest transactions?’24
In this way, between 1751 and the publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, Smith’s academic career developed in circumstances which were far from straightforward. Although there was a somewhat easier relationship between town and gown to the one he had known as a student, it was restricted by Edinburgh standards. His interest in mercantile life, the part he seems to have played in founding and running the Literary Society, his interest in developing the educational and cultural reach of the university, all suggest a sensitivity to these problems and to the wider purposes of university education and academic life in an enlightened university. Nor is it to be forgotten that during the 1750s he became an experienced and successful academic administrator with something of a taste for management. In his first year as a professor he was put in charge of moving the library into a new problem-ridden building designed by William Adam. From 1755 he was to be effectively in charge of the library as Quaestor and responsible for its accounts – which he kept meticulously – and for purchases, which were generally made through the Foulis brothers, an arrangement which incidentally gave him excellent opportunities for building up a first-rate library of his own.25 Smith was a serious university librarian, acquiring stocks of classical literature, contemporary history, philosophy, law and, interestingly, commerce. One of his earlier and most expensive purchases was the first seven volumes of the Encyclopédie, to which he had already had access in the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. It was purchased for Glasgow University between 1758 and 1760 and paid for with nearly a third of his budget. By 1754 Smith had also gained a reputation for property management. He was responsible for the protracted and intricate negotiations involved in rebuilding the Principal’s house, in building a new natural philosophy classroom, for accommodating the Academy of the Fine Arts, and for housing James Watt’s workshop. By the late 1750s he was in charge of the university’s accounts and the university’s dealings with the town council on property matters and the students’ tax liability. He dealt with the Barons of Exchequer in Edinburgh and the Treasury in London on matters concerning the university’s accounts and its bequests. By the late 1750s seniority and competence had established him as one of the most powerful and heavily worked members of the College. He was Quaestor from 1758 to 1760, Dean of Faculty – twice – from 1760 to 1762 and Vice-Rector from 1762 to 1764. As we shall see, by the end of his professorial career he had also been drawn into the thick of the complicated and often acrimonious political life of the College.
The heart of his academic life nevertheless lay in the time-consuming business of teaching moral philosophy. Smith’s timetable was governed by long-standing university tradition. The ‘public’ course in moral philosophy was taught every weekday from 7.30 to 8.30 a.m. from 10 October to 10 June, with a day’s break at Christmas. Smith had tried to break with the custom of beginning each lecture with prayer but had not been allowed to do so. His prayers were clearly as perfunctory as possible and were said to have rehearsed the truths of natural theology. However, according to the memorialist John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smith did manage to abandon Hutcheson’s practice of providing Sunday discourses ‘suited to that day’.26 The hour between eleven and midday was spent discussing the morning’s lecture and examining students on it. The ‘private’ class, in which Smith delivered his lectures on rhetoric, was taught from midday until one from about mid-November to late February. The afternoons were spent teaching students privately, either by reading them lectures or by chatting, sessions which students like James Boswell, William Richardson and the future Earl of Buchan remembered with affection; Richardson, a future Professor of Humanity at Glasgow, recalled ‘many of those incidental and digressive illustrations and even discussions, not only on morality, but in criticism, which were delivered by him with animated and extemporaneous eloquence, as they were suggested in the course of question and answer’.27 Overall, it has been reckoned that by 1759 Smith could count on a public class of around eighty or ninety students and a private class of around twenty out of a total student population of about three hundred.28
John Millar provided Dugald Stewart with the fullest and most perceptive account we have of his old professor’s course.
About a year after his appointment to the Professorship of Logic, Mr Smith was elected to the chair of Moral Philosophy. His course of lectures on this subject was divided into four parts. The first contained Natural Theology; in which he considered the proofs of the being and attributes of God, and those principles of the human mind upon which religion is founded. The second comprehended Ethics, strictly so called, and consisted chiefly of the doctrines which he afterwards published in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the third part, he treated at more length of that branch of morality which relates to justice, and which, b
eing susceptible of precise and accurate rules, is for that reason capable of a full and particular explanation.
Upon this subject he followed the plan that seems to be suggested by Montesquieu; endeavouring to trace the gradual progress of jurisprudence, both public and private, from the rudest to the most refined ages, and to point out the effects of those arts which contribute to subsistence, and to the accumulation of property, in producing correspondent improvements or alterations in law and government. This important branch of his labours he also intended to give to the public; but this intention, which is mentioned in the conclusion of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, he did not live to fulfil.
In the last part of his lectures, he examined those political regulations which are founded, not upon the principle of justice, but that of expediency, and which are calculated to increase the riches, the power, and the prosperity of a State. Under this view, he considered the political institutions relating to commerce, to finances, to ecclesiastical and military establishments. What he delivered on these subjects contained the substance of the work he afterwards published under the title of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.29
We know nothing about the natural theology lectures except that they drew the somewhat acid comment from John Ramsay that ‘his speculations … though not extended to a great length, were no less flattering to human pride than those of Hutcheson’; they argued that the truths of religion could be discovered ‘by the light of nature without any special revelation’. ‘Even then,’ Ramsay continued, ‘from the company he kept and other circumstances, suspicion was entertained that his principles were not sound, though he was very guarded in conversation.’30 Smith clearly hurried through this unwelcome assignment as quickly as possible so as to be able to spend most of his time on the following three sections of a course of notable sophistication and complexity, one which made demands on Smith as well as on his students, not least because of a custom that ensured that his classes were generally composed of students of mixed ages and abilities. The fee for the class was one and a half guineas per year and those who wished to hear the course a second time had to pay a second fee. Thereafter, they were free to attend the class as often as they pleased for nothing. This meant that by the mid-1750s, when he was thinking about the problem of turning his lectures into a book, Smith was facing an audience composed of some who had never heard him before and others who not only knew his ethics but knew his jurisprudence and politics as well, and were probably on the verge of qualifying as ministers or doctors. Such advanced students were in an excellent position to think about the relevance of Smith’s ethics to his theories of government and his thinking about the duties of citizens and magistrates.
Smith seems to have taken time to settle down as a university lecturer. At first he followed Hutcheson’s practice of lecturing extempore, but it was not a success and he reverted to the practice he had adopted at Edinburgh of reading a text he had already dictated to a clerk, interpolating as he read, a practice which some came to think of as his own form of extemporary lecturing. Millar’s account of his lecturing is vivid and precise and throws light on his style and on that distinctive method of arguing from axioms which were substantiated by means of ‘illustrations’, and often massive displays of erudition.
There was no situation in which the abilities of Mr Smith appeared to greater advantage than as a Professor. In delivering his lectures, he trusted almost entirely to extemporary elocution. His manner, though not graceful, was plain and unaffected; and, as he seemed to be always interested in the subject, he never failed to interest his hearers. Each discourse consisted commonly of several distinct propositions, which he successively endeavoured to prove and illustrate. These propositions, when announced in general terms, had, from their extent, not unfrequently something of the air of a paradox. In his attempts to explain them, he often appeared, at first, not to be sufficiently possessed of the subject, and spoke with some hesitation. As he advanced, however, the matter seemed to crowd upon him, his manner became warm and animated, and his expression easy and fluent. In points susceptible of controversy, you could easily discern, that he secretly conceived an opposition to his opinions, and that he was led upon this account to support them with greater energy and vehemence. By the fulness and variety of his illustrations, the subject gradually swelled in his hands, and acquired a dimension which, without a tedious repetition of the same views, was calculated to seize the attention of his audience, and to afford them pleasure as well as instruction, in following the same object, through all the diversity of shades and aspects in which it was presented, and afterwards in tracing it backwards to that original proposition or general truth from which this beautiful train of speculation had proceeded.31
This is a description of the professor as a performer, interested in the business of holding an audience’s attention and notoriously irritated by students who paid more attention to taking notes than to their professor’s rhetoric – he often told note-takers ‘that he hated scribblers’.32 It also describes the practice of a philosopher who had every reason to know that the axioms from which he worked would only persuade if his illustrations caught his audience’s imagination and appealed to their sense of truth. It certainly worked for a sophisticated and observant student like James Boswell, who matriculated at Glasgow in 1759 expressly to hear Smith’s lectures:
My greatest reason for coming hither was to hear Mr. Smith’s lectures (which are truly excellent.) His Sentiments are striking, profound and beauitifull, the method in which they are arranged clear accurate and orderly, his language correct perspicuous and elegantly phrased. His private character is realy amiable. He has nothing of that formal stiffness and Pedantry which is too often found in Professors. So far from that, he is a most polite well-bred man, is extreamly fond of having his Students with him and treats them with all the easiness and affability imaginable.33
Part of Smith’s technique was to begin each lecture with a meticulously crafted précis of the previous one. He also resorted to older tricks, like one he recalled later in life: ‘During one whole session a certain student with a plain but expressive countenance was of great use to me in judging of my success. He sat conspicuously in front of a pillar: I had him constantly under my eye. If he leant forward to listen all was right, and I knew that I had the ear of my class; but if he leant back in an attitude of listlessness I felt at once that all was wrong, and that I must change either the subject or the style of my address.’34 As this recollection hints, much of Smith’s success as a lecturer was due to the fact that he liked students. As Ramsay put it,
He was at great pains to discover and cherish the seeds of genius, and therefore, when he met with acute studious young men, he invited them to his house, that from their turn of conversation he might discover the bents and extent of their faculties. He took great pleasure in directing their studies and solving their doubts, adapting his hints to their plans of life. The private admonitions of such a man were likely to make a deeper impression on the mind of an ingenious youth than the most able and eloquent lectures.35
His teaching was turning him into something of a cult figure, a professor whose portrait bust could be bought by students at local bookshops, a philosopher whose thinking was, according to Millar, talked about in clubs and literary societies, a guru who would succeed in turning a younger generation of Glasgow merchants into free traders.36 Characteristically, no copy of his bust has survived.
Smith’s professorial duties inevitably took a toll on his private life. There were occasional rumours of romantic attachments, but nothing ever happened; as Ian Ross puts it, ‘It is to be feared that the biographer can do little more with the topic of Smith’s sex life than contribute a footnote to the history of sublimation.’37 His visits to Edinburgh were few and far between, mostly, one would guess, en route for Kirkcaldy and Glasgow at the beginning and end of the vacation. At all events his friend Miss Hepburn probably spoke for most of his friends in regret
ting ‘very much, that you are settled at Glasgow, and that we had the Chance of seeing you so seldom’.38 What correspondence there is suggests that Smith’s Edinburgh friends were resigned to sending him letters with local news in the knowledge that he was unlikely to reply – teasing Smith on his failures as a correspondent became a recurring theme in his later correspondence. Alexander Wedderburn, one of his Edinburgh students, put it nicely in 1754: ‘Though I have not heard once from you since we parted, I make very little Doubt that I have been frequently in your Thoughts. I judge so, because amidst all the variety of Objects which have since I may rather say distracted than interested me I have always in my Best hours of reflexion, had my Thoughts turned towards you.’39 During this period Smith’s friendship with Hume ripened, though more through correspondence than personal contact, Hume’s letters of the 1750s picking up the thread of recent conversations or correspondence about his work on the history of England – he was at work on the volumes on the history of the reigns of James I and Charles I at the time – about forthcoming philosophical essays, about Edinburgh gossip and, all too frequently, about the worrying state of Smith’s health. ‘My Dear Sir,’ he wrote from Edinburgh on 26 May 1753,