Similar thoughts arise with respect to the following passage, wherein Adam Smith contends, in words that seem a foretaste of the Wealth of Nations , that Nature leads us intentionally, by an illusion of the imagination, to the pursuit of riches. "It is well that Nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth .... It is to no purpose that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and, without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows upon them....
The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. (7) The rest he is obliged to distribute among those who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets which are employed in the economy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice that share of the necessaries of life which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor; and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants....
When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.
These last, too, enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them."Adam Smith applies the same argument to the condition of children. Nature, he maintains, has for the wisest purposes rendered parental tenderness in all or most men much stronger than filial affection. For the continuance of the species depends upon the former, not upon the latter; and whilst the existence and preservation of a child depends altogether on the care of its parents, the existence of the parents is quite independent of the child. In the Decalogue, though we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers, there is no mention of love for our children, Nature having sufficiently provided for that. "In the eye of Nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively as well as a more universal sympathy." Thus, again, with regard to the excessive credulity of children, and their disposition to believe whatever they are told, "nature seems to have judged it necessary for their preservation that they should, for some time at least, put implicit confidence in those to whom the care of their childhood, and of the earliest and most necessary parts of their education, is entrusted."The love of our country, again, is by nature endeared to us, not only by all our selfish, but by all our private benevolent affections; for in its welfare is comprehended our own, and that of all our friends and relations.
We do not therefore love our country merely as a part of the great society of mankind, but for its own sake, and independently of other considerations.
"That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections, as well as that of every other part of nature, seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual to that particular portion of it which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding."To sum up our author's application of his theory to his general scheme of ethics. Man, having been intended by nature for society, was fitted by her for that situation. Hence she endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend, his brethren. By teaching him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regards, she laid, in the reward of their approbation, or the punishment of their disapproval, the foundation of human ethics. In the respect which she has taught him to feel for their judgment and sentiments, she has raised in his mind a sense of Duty, and girt her laws for his conduct with the sanction of obligatory morality. And so happily has she adjusted the sentiments of approbation and disapprobation to the advantage both of the individual and of society, that it is precisely those qualities which are useful or advantageous to the individual himself, or to others, which are always accounted virtuous or the contrary.
CHAPTER XII.ADAM SMITH'S THEORY OF UTILITY.