To the inquiring layman, Adam Smith was the author of the Wealth of Nations; to the philosopher, of a comparable classic, the Theory of Moral Sentiments; these were the only books published in his lifetime. Within five years of his death (1790), however, appeared under the editorship of his two friends, Joseph Black and James Hutton, a substantial volume entitled Essays on Philosophical Subjects . . . to which is prefixed an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author by Dugald Stewart. Though far less celebrated than the two major works the EPS nevertheless appeared during the next hundred years in at least eight editions, including one from Revolutionary Paris and one from Basel (see Bibliographical Note, Nos. 3, 4). In the present century the book has acquired a renewed interest, attention having been drawn principally to the first three essays, consideration of which has formed the basis of a significant secondary literature. The subject of each of these essays is the history of a branch of science, namely, of Astronomy, of the Ancient Physics, and of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics. Of these the first alone is of any considerable length; the other two are hardly more than fragments. To none of them would a modern scholar turn for enlightenment on the history of the sciences; at most he could expect to discover what an outstanding mind living in the second half of the eighteenth century believed to represent the histories of these subjects. Wherein then lies the attraction to writers during recent decades? It lies in the full titles of the three essays: The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries; illustrated by the History of Astronomy; the preamble is repeated before each of the other two histories. It might be conjectured from this that the first three essays are to be taken rather as chapters in a book than as separate pieces; that such a conjecture might be correct is supported by the Advertisement of the editors in which they emphasize that though immediately before his death Smith had destroyed many other manuscripts, he had left these ‘in the hands of his friends to be disposed of as they thought proper’, and that on inspection ‘the greater number of them appeared to be parts of a plan he once had formed, for giving a connected history of the http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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liberal sciences and elegant arts’ but that he had long since ‘found it necessary to abandon that plan as far too extensive’. Though there is now no trace of the manuscripts on which the collection was based, we know from other sources that this is hardly an adequate account. of the allegedly projected history was to embrace the ‘elegant arts’ why was the telling preamble to the first three essays omitted from the remainder? To the modern reader it seems evident that whereas the former, inadequate though they may now appear, do conform to a unitary and highly significant plan, the remainder, though not without their interesting features, are neither treated historically nor do they illustrate the ‘principles which lead and direct philosophical enquiry’. The editors, though in other respects men of high eminence, were not noted for scholarship as such.
We must turn to other sources to discover what part the composition of these essays played in the author’s intellectual scheme of things.
Fortunately we do not have to look beyond the volume itself: the Essays were preceded by a long and detailed ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’, read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1793 and subsequently published in their Transactions. The author was Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh from 1785 to 1810, and the editor of the first Collected Works of Smith published in 1811–12. Towards the end of this
‘Account’ is cited Smith’s earliest reference to the EPS of which we have any knowledge; it was contained in letter (137) to David Hume dated ‘Edinburgh, 16th. April 1773’ when Smith was preparing to go to London where he expected to remain some time. In the expectation that Hume would in the event of his own earlier death act as his literary executor, Smith insisted that of all the papers he was about to leave behind ‘there are none worth the publishing but a fragment of a great work which contains a history of the Astronomical Systems that were successively in fashion down to the time of Des Cartes. Whether that might not be published as a fragment of an intended juvenile work, I leave entirely to your judgment; tho I begin to suspect myself that there is more refinement than solidity in some parts of it.’ There is neither here nor anywhere else reference to other ‘fragments’ such as the Ancient Physics and Ancient Logics that ultimately came to be published in the same volume as the Astronomy; the possible significance of this omission will be discussed later (below, 26–7).
In 1773 Smith was already fifty; it is unlikely, therefore, that he would have referred to any work as ‘juvenile’ except such as had been written many years earlier. This supposition receives some support from his asking (Astronomy, II.12) ‘Why has the chemical philosophy in all ages crept along in obscurity, and been so disregarded by the generality of mankind . . . ?’ How Smith could have formed such a judgement nearly a century after the prominence of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke at the Royal Society it is difficult to understand; but such an opinion would surely have 1
been modified by intercourse with William Cullen with whom Smith is known to have been on intimate terms after he assumed the Glasgow Chair of Logic in 1751. Since by 1748, almost two years after relinquishing the Snell Exhibition at Balliol College, Oxford, he must have been heavily engaged in the preparation and reading of his lectures on belles–lettres at Edinburgh, it has been fairly generally assumed that he at least laid the foundation of the History of Astronomy at Oxford; but from further internal evidence it may be inferred that he did not finish it there.
Towards the end of the Astronomy Smith wrote that ‘the observations of Astronomers at Lapland and Peru have fully confirmed Sir Isaac’s system’ (IV.72); Bouguer’s account of his observations in Peru confirming Newton’s model of the figure of the Earth was published in 1749—three years after Smith left Balliol.
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The reader may have noticed a discrepancy between this reference to ‘Sir Isaac’s [Newton]
system’ and (in the letter to David Hume) the description of the History as being of the astronomical systems that were successively in fashion down to the time of Descartes: the last ten pages of the original printed text are in fact devoted to establishing ‘the superior genius and sagacity of Sir Isaac Newton’. Relevant to this question is the editors’ terminal note: ‘The Author, at the end of this Essay, left some Notes and Memorandums, from which it appears, that he considered this last part of his History of Astronomy as imperfect, and needing several additions.
The Editors, however, chose rather to publish than to suppress it. It must be viewed, not as a History or Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Astronomy, but chiefly as an additional illustration of those Principles in the Human Mind which Mr. Smith has pointed out to be the universal motives of Philosophical Researches.’
This is consistent with the view put forward above that though the Astronomy may well have been largely composed in Oxford the ‘last part’ of it could have been added after Smith’s return to Scotland. That even this ‘last part’ was written before 1758 appears from his statement (Astronomy, IV.74) that Newton’s ‘followers have, from his principles, ventured even to predict the returns of several of them [sc. comets], particularly of one which is to make its appearance in 1758. We must wait for that time . . .’. Thus the text; a footnote on the same page reads: ‘It must be observed, that the whole of this Essay was written previous to the date here mentioned; and that the return of the comet happened agreeably to the prediction.’ There is in the original text no indication as to who added this note; but P. Prevost, the translator of the French edition (see Bibliographical Note 3), describes the note as ‘de l’editeur anglais’. Since Prevost was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and claimed to be personally acquainted with Dugald Stewart he may have had first–hand information.
The apparent discrepancy in the letter to Hume disappears if it is recalled that Smith was expressing an opinion as to what of his literary remains might be worthy of publication: the
‘Notes and Memorandums’ referred to in the editors’ final note to the Astronomy, suggest that Smith was more than doubtful as to whether the ‘last part’ should qualify.
The period 1746–8 when Smith was residing at Kirkcaldy with his mother and before he was committed to the reading of lectures on Rhetoric and Belles–Lettres at Edinburgh would seem as likely as any for laying the foundation of a project on the scale that he is known to have envisaged. Whether the other two ‘fragments’ were composed during that period is a matter of no special consequence; there would, at any rate, be no inconsistency in his having spoken more than once [and presumably much later] to Dugald Stewart of having ‘projected, in the earlier part of his life, a history of the other sciences on the same plan’ (Stewart, II.52) and of his editors having referred to a ‘plan he had once formed, for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts’. There were, of course, neither then nor for a long time afterwards, any Faculties of Science in the Scottish universities and the boundary between ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’
was hardly, if at all, clearly drawn. ‘Logics and Metaphysics’ are still mainly the concern of Faculties of Arts, as would also be the sort of ‘ancient physics’ that Smith was describing in the essay so entitled.
There is extant one other allusion by Smith which, though somewhat inconsistent with those that have been referred to, cannot be ignored in any attempt to date the composition of the EPS. It occurs in a letter (248) to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld written from Edinburgh in November http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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1785 but not published until 1895; the relevant section runs as follows:
I have likewise two other great works upon the anvil; the one is a sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry and Eloquence; the other is a sort of theory and History of Law and Government. The materials of both are in a great measure collected, and some Part of both is put into tollerable good order. But the indolence of old age, tho’ I struggle violently against it, I feel coming fast upon me, and whether I shall ever be able to finish either is extremely uncertain.
Now whereas the description of the former of these ‘other great works’ could well refer to the Histories of Astronomy, Ancient Physics, and Logics and Metaphysics included in the Essays on Philosophical Subjects, the remaining essays, though falling under the generous heading of
‘Literature, Philosophy, Poetry and Eloquence’, are almost wholly devoid of any reference to any historical development. Moreover, the limited range of topics hardly warrants the claim that the
‘materials’ were ‘in a great measure collected’. In the fitful light of such evidence as is now available it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that after the exacting labour of the Wealth of Nations with its successive revisions Smith’s ‘great work on a sort of philosophical history’ existed more in the hope of realizing a youthful ambition than in any adequate progress towards its 2
achievement. Fortunately the impossibility of any precise dating of its components does not preclude further fruitful consideration of the part this ambition continued to play in Smith’s intellectual development.
In 1755, four years after Smith had been appointed to the Glasgow Chair, he wrote the two well–
known letters to the Edinburgh Review. In the second of these letters Smith evidently considered himself so much a master of the state of the sciences in Europe as to include a critical review of
‘the new French Encyclopedia’ (below, 245–8); and though the modern reader will detect a certain degree of superficiality—not to say even contradiction—in his judgements he had clearly a wide–ranging knowledge relevant to the task. Among the contributors he refers to—‘many of them already known to foreign nations by the valuable works which they have published’ (Letter,
§6)—he singles out ‘Mr. Alembert’ and ‘Mr. Diderot’ and refers to the former’s famous Discours préliminaire.
A perusal of d’Alembert’s Discours reveals a strong resemblance to Smith’s approach to the
‘principles which lead and direct philosophical enquiries’. In his stress on what he called Smith’s
‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’ Dugald Stewart (II.49) expressed the view that the
‘mathematical sciences, both pure and mixed, afford, in many of their branches, very favourable subjects for theoretical history’; and he went on to note d’Alembert’s recommendation of this historical approach for teaching. More striking still, he follows this reference by instancing a passage in Montucla’s Histoire des mathématiques (Paris, 1758) which included long sections on
‘mixed’ mathematics (viz. astronomy, mechanics, optics, and their applications) where an attempt is made to ‘exhibit the gradual progress of philosophical speculation, from the first conclusions suggested by a general survey of the heavens, to the doctrines of Copernicus. It is somewhat remarkable, that a theoretical history of this very science . . . was one of Mr. Smith’s earliest compositions’. Since Stewart shared with Smith the habit of almost total lack of significant documentation, we do not know where he read d’Alembert’s reference to Montucla, but it obviously could not have been in the first (1751) edition of the Encyclopédie, which we know to have been in Smith’s hands before 1755.
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Although we can beyond all reasonable doubt reject any charge of plagiarism, there is nevertheless one feature in Smith’s appreciation of the Encyclopédie that must strike us as rather odd: in acclaiming the outstanding quality of d’Alembert’s contributions he makes no mention of the strong affinity between the latter’s views on the nature, significance, and enlargement of
‘philosophy’ and those we believe he had already set forth in the ‘historical’ essays. Smith’s review of the Encyclopédie was part of the evidence he submitted to the ‘Authors’ of the newly founded Edinburgh Review in support of the proposal that they should enlarge the scope of their Review to include not only English but also European letters. Is it not a matter for some surprise that a young man, little more than thirty, recently established as the leading philosophical teacher in a small but ancient university, should not in such circumstances have at least briefly impressed upon the Review the universal significance of the Discours préliminaire? D’Alembert, though only six years older than Smith, was already accepted as one of the most brilliant analytical and comprehensive of European minds: a mathematician of the first rank, who appreciated both the power of mathematics and its limitations as a mode for ‘philosophy’ in general, and whose concern for this ‘philosophy’ was primarily in its significance for human welfare. The broad agreement of the views of such an authority with this ‘juvenile’ plan would, one might have supposed, have prompted Smith to a more enthusiastic welcome to the Discours than that ‘Mr.
Alembert gives an account of the connection of the different arts and sciences, their genealogy and filiation, as he calls it; which, a few alterations and corrections excepted, is nearly the same with that of my Lord Bacon’ (Letter, §6). It is perhaps necessary to emphasize that the ‘broad agreement’ in the views of Smith and d’Alembert was mainly (as noted above) in respect of their approach. A review of the details of their argument would here be out of place; but one especially marked difference in their emphasis may be the clue to the puzzle: it is that whereas Smith sets so much store on ‘wonder’ and ‘surprise’ (below, 13–14), d’Alembert, following Bacon, stresses the greater significance of ‘need and use’ in discovery—a position that the author of the Wealth of Nations as dogmatically rejects (Astronomy, III.3). Could it have been that the ‘juvenile’ author of the Essays on Philosophical Subjects held his horses in the hope that an opportunity would later present itself for the systematic refutation of a theory whose wrong–headedness he evidently deplored?
Though this account of the circumstances of time, place, and purpose of the composition of the EPS has been if not wholly negative at least mainly ‘conjectural’, it may have given some insight into the nature of the undertaking and the reason for its continued interest to scholars. Reference to d’Alembert’s Discours has shown that Smith’s attempt at ‘conjectural history’ was no isolated phenomenon; Dugald Stewart claims that the ‘expression . . . coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History, as employed by Mr. Hume [i.e. The Natural History of Religion, 1757], and with what some French writers have called Histoire Raisonnée’ (Stewart, II.48). Among examples of the latter he names Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748). The title of that great work is itself indicative of what many writers were doing at that time: Paul Hazard reminds us of the numerous attempts to distil the Esprit of this, that, and the other; frequently by means of a search for the origin and growth of the ‘science’ or ‘art’ concerned. The Encyclopédie was not the first to envisage this task: something of the same sort had appeared in Ephraim Chambers’s relatively concise Cyclopaedia; or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), but never before had it been accomplished in such a penetrating manner or on such an immense scale.
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY
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The importance of this essay to modern scholars lies mainly in the preamble and the first three sections; these contain a statement and elaboration of the chief ‘principles’ that Smith believed to
‘lead and direct philosophical enquiries’. The History of Astronomy sensu stricto, that begins only in Section IV, is of interest partly as an indication of contemporary knowledge of the subject, but mainly for the incidental remarks made by the author in pursuance of his central aim. Though acceptable to a modern historian in its main lines, it contains so many errors of detail and not a few serious omissions as to be no longer more than a museum specimen of its kind. This is not to deny its high merit for an age when systematic study of the history of the sciences was in its infancy. But by 1758 a student would have been better advised to read Jean–Étienne Montucla’s Histoire des mathématiques (written incidentally in the enlightened spirit characteristic of the young Adam Smith) which by 1802 had been revised and extended by Jérôme de Lalande. The first history of astronomy still used as an important work of reference was completed by Jean–
Baptiste–Joseph Delambre in 1827.
In any attempt to assess the success of Smith’s enterprise we are met at the outset by his inconsistent and ill–defined terminology ‘philosophy is the science . . . Philosophy . . . may be regarded as one of those arts . . .’ (both in Astronomy, II.12). In fact the terms philosophy, physics, arts, sciences, and natural philosophy are used almost indiscriminately. In this of course he was not alone: Hume ( Treatise of Human Nature, Introduction) speaks of ‘philosophy and the sciences’, which seems to promise a distinction more in line with modern usage; but by including Natural Religion and Criticism among the ‘sciences’ he introduced a possible source of confusion.
The actual words ‘natural science’ in the sense of an ‘inquiry by reason alone into all things in the natural kingdom of God’ were first used by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan; but ‘natural philosophy’
was preferred (though not in the restricted sense still current in the Scottish universities) throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first demarcation between ‘science’
and ‘art’ is attributed by the Oxford English Dictionary to Richard Kirwan: ‘Previous to the year 1780 mineralogy tho’ tolerably understood as an art could scarcely be termed a science’ (1796).
James Hutton about the same time wrote that ‘philosophy must proceed in generalising those truths which are the objects of particular sciences’. In respect of the recent blossoming of the so–
called ‘social sciences’ the failure of English to distinguish the species Naturwissenschaft from the genus Wissenschaft has become even more embarrassing than heretofore.
Had Smith consistently used ‘philosophy’ to include natural philosophy, leaving it to the context to indicate whether the general term or the specific application was concerned, there could, in relation to the period, be no quarrel. When he writes (Astronomy, IV.18) ‘Philosophers, long before the days of Hipparchus [ c. 140 B.C.], seem to have abandoned the study of nature . . .’
and to have regarded ‘all mathematicians, among whom they counted astronomers’ with
‘supercilious and ignorant contempt’ his usage (whatever we may think of his judgement) was in general accord with ancient and medieval practice.
In the Middle Ages the interpretation of ‘philosophy’ varied from one university to another.
Roughly speaking when the trivium was enlarged under the term studia humanitatis (and in many cases the quadrivium, as such, disappeared in practice), ‘philosophy’ meant moral philosophy.
Mathematics and astronomy, together with ‘natural philosophy’ (more often called ‘physics’), became mainly the concern of the Faculty of Medicine; this was especially the case in the Italian universities. But Smith’s judgement cited above follows a brief account of the epicyclic and eccentric systems of planetary motion by which ‘those philosophers (IV.9) imagined they could http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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account for the apparently unequal velocities of all those bodies’. Who are ‘those philosophers’? It was, we are told, Apollonius (IV.8) who ‘invented’ the system and Hipparchus who ‘afterwards perfected’ it. Apollonius was a mathematician of the calibre of Eudoxus and Euclid; Hipparchus pioneered the branch of mathematics that came long afterwards to be known as spherical trigonometry and he was also among the greatest observers of all time. Most of the astronomical works of each were irretrievably lost; but to neither is any interest in ‘philosophy’ attributed—a fact at which Smith himself hints in another context (Astronomy, IV.25) where he speaks of ‘the philosophy of Aristotle, and the astronomy of Hipparchus’. The precise distinction made by the Greeks themselves will be cited in the Introduction to the essay on ‘The Ancient Physics’.
It would of course be absurd to demand precisely demarcated categories which would only stifle attempts to reveal latent relationships. But that in relation to the age of Adam Smith there are 3
traps easily fallen into is shown by a recent comment that Smith referred to Isaac Newton ‘as a philosopher not scientist’. From Smith’s use of the term in this context nothing can be inferred, since the word ‘scientist’ did not exist before 1839. The use of such expressions as ‘Adam Smith’s philosophy of science’ may similarly be a source of confusion; better to risk a charge of repetitiveness and pedantry than that of circularity; each reference must be explicated on its own merits.
This caveat has an indirect bearing on the introductory sections of the Astronomy. Smith’s aim in this and the succeeding essays was to show how these histories illustrate ‘the principles which lead and direct philosophical enquiries’. Having in the first three paragraphs given the barest hint of the relevance of ‘surprise’ and ‘wonder’ to these ‘principles’ he reviews at what may seem inordinate length the influence of the sentiments of surprise and wonder on the emotions of joy, grief, panic, frenzy, etc. The modern reader, especially one unfamiliar with the pervasive significance accorded to the ‘passions’ by Smith and his contemporaries, may feel puzzled to know what all this has to do with the clearly expressed aim of the essays. Smith might have been wise to recall Bacon’s words that such observations are ‘well inquired and collected in metaphysic, but in physic they are impertinent’ ( Advancement of Learning II.vii.7). But after a dozen pages the rhetorical fog lifts: the ‘surprise’ excited in the observer by the motion of a piece of iron
‘without any visible impulse, in consequence of the motion of a loadstone at some little distance from it’ and the ‘wonder’ how it came to be ‘conjoined to an event with which, according to the ordinary train of things, he could have so little suspected it to have any connection’ (II.6) establish the thesis in the clearest possible manner. The further deployment of the thesis, even if unnecessarily prolonged, displays Smith’s elegant and imaginative style at its best. Had he but set his own words ‘philosophy is the science of the connecting principles of nature’ at the beginning instead of near the end, and then avoided the trap in the ill–defined term ‘philosophy’, this section might well have ranked as the most fundamental in the whole work. Though not free from confusion, the concluding pages of this section reveal in greater emphasis Smith’s ‘principles of philosophical enquiries’. Central among these is an interpretation of causal investigation as a search for a ‘bridge’; the examples here are much more convincing. The special characteristics of this ‘bridge’ or ‘chain’ are analogy to more familiar objects, coherence, and—of special significance for the modern scholar—‘without regarding their absurdity or probability, their agreement or inconsistency with truth and reality’ (II.12). This remarkable passage is our justification for caution in speaking about what has been called ‘Smith’s philosophy of science’.
For Smith himself who, as we have seen, defines ‘philosophy’ as ‘the science of the connecting principles of nature’ the term could have no clear connotation; nor could it for anyone until the http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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term ‘science’ was restricted to what Smith is here calling ‘philosophy’. There is still no general agreement as to the range of the ‘philosophy of science’; but that it is essentially meta–science, or talk about science, would probably not be contested. Of this there could not in Smith’s time be any explicit recognition. No doubt the study of his enterprise will shed light on the nature of the problems to be talked about; but in respect of its ‘systems’ his inquiry was less about their truth than about ‘how far each of them was fitted to sooth(e) the imagination, and to render the theatre of nature a more coherent, and therefore a more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise it would have appeared to be’ (ibid.). This has certainly a modern