The Theory of Moral Sentiments (73 page)

10
For anticipations of Smith’s claim, see, e.g., Shaftesbury,
Inquiry Concerning Virtue
1.2.1; Hutcheson,
Short Introduction
1.1.10, 1.2.7. Smith uses similar language in the conclusion of his comparison of Epicurus to Aristotle, Plato and Zeno (7.2.2, p. 346).

11
The discussion of guilt and atonement that occupies the remainder of this paragraph and the next was an addition to the sixth edition of 1790.

12
Smith’s three examples refer to cases of unintentional transgressions of sexual norms: Oedipus’s unwitting incest with his mother (in Sophocles,
Oedipus the King
), Monimia’s unwitting relationship with her brother-in-law (in Otway,
The Orphan
), and Isabelle’s remarriage while her husband was still living (in Thomas Southerne,
The Fatal Marriage
).

PART III, CHAPTER I

1
Hume uses the same metaphor in
Treatise
2.2.5.21.

PART III, CHAPTER II

1
Most of this chapter was an addition to the sixth edition. The distinction between what is merely praised and what is genuinely praiseworthy is fundamental to Smith’s ethics, and has important implications for his attempts to preserve moral sentimentalism from degenerating into moral relativism. The nature and reality of this distinction between praise and virtue or praiseworthiness had also been examined by several others before Smith; see esp. Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations
4.20, 8.1; Seneca,
De otio
1.3; Cicero,
De of ficiis
1.14-15;
De finibus
2.49-50; Locke,
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
2.28.10-11; Hutcheson,
Essay with Illustrations
2.5; Hume,
Enquiry Concerning Morals
1.10 and “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature.”

2
emulation: “rivalry; desire of superiority” or “envy; desire of depressing another; contest; contention” (Johnson).

3
paint: “to lay colours on the face” (Johnson); to use makeup.

4
This paragraph and the two paragraphs that follow were added to the sixth edition; they restate the distinction between three levels of praise that Smith draws in his discussion of Mandeville in 7.2.4 (p. 362).

5
Smith’s distinction between the desire to appear virtuous and the desire of being virtuous is central to his efforts to preserve his sentimentalist theory from relativism. The distinction has an important history (e.g., Plato,
Republic
2, 360e-361d; Sallust,
Conspiracy of Catiline
53-55); particularly important interlocutors include Mandeville (see 7.2.4, p. 362) and Rousseau, whose passage on the distinction between being and appearing was one of three passages from the
Discourse on Inequality
that Smith translated in his
Letter to the Edinburgh Review
(in
Essays on Philosophical Subjects
, pp. 252-53).

6
gibbet: “a gallows; the post on which malefactors are hanged, or on which their carcasses are exposed” (Johnson).

7
Voltaire reported the last words of Calas differently in his
History of Elisabeth Canning, and of Jean Calas
(1762) but likewise emphasized his magnanimity and protestations of innocence. Smith’s account is likely less indebted to print sources than to conversations with Voltaire in 1765, and with those he met in Toulouse during his stay there from 1764-65.

8
See 1.3.1 (p. 55).

9
Throughout his life Racine was caught in a complex web of literary jealousy, with rival factions sponsoring competing versions of both his
Iphigénie
and
Phèdre
. Smith’s story is likely drawn from the extracted version of the memoirs of Racine’s life commonly prefaced to the first volume of eighteenth-century collections of Racine’s works.

10
Among examples of Voltaire’s vanity known to Smith would have been Voltaire’s angry reaction to Kames’s relatively innocuous criticism in
Elements of Criticism
22.

11
The
Dunciad
, published in various successively expanded editions between 1728 and 1743, was a satirical assault on Whig literary and political circles.

12
Smith reiterates elsewhere his admiration for Gray (see
Rhetoric
2.96 and the remark reported at
Rhetoric
, p. 230), who treats several characteristically Smithean themes, including the torments of ambition and envy (“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton-College”), fellow-feeling and “sympathetic tears” (“Ode to Adversity” and “The Progress of Poesy,” 3.1), and the vanity of glory (“Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard”). Two of Gray’s odes (“Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard”) were parodied in 1760, but most reports emphasize that Gray remained unruffled; see, e.g., Johnson,
Lives of the Poets
, “Gray” 14-16.

13
Several eighteenth-century accounts of Newton’s genius emphasize his tranquility and indifference to fame in manners that anticipate Smith; see, e.g., Hume,
History of England
71; and esp. Fontenelle’s
éloge
of Newton in the collection to which Smith refers three paragraphs down, which emphasizes that Newton had “not the least sentiment of vanity” and that his
Principia
“had not at first all the praise it merited.”

14
Smith refers here to the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” in which those here named were all principal figures. The dispute concerned the imitation of the classical style in seventeenth-century French literature and other arts, with the advocates of the superiority of the ancient literature—esp. Racine and Boileau-Despréaux—ranged against advocates of the moderns—esp. Perrault, Fontenelle, and La Motte. In his
éloge
to Boileau-Despréaux in the collection to which the end of the present paragraph alludes, d’Alembert details Boileau-Despréaux’s struggles with the above-named rivals.

15
Smith refers to the support of Addison’s “Buttonian” circle for a translation of the
Iliad
prepared by one of Addison’s protégés—a resentment that culminated in Pope’s attack on the cowardly deference of Addison’s circle in his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1734).

16
Fontenelle comments on the simplicity of manners in several places in his
éloges
; some are helpfully detailed in Gregory Matthew Adkins in
Journal of the History of Ideas
61 (2000).

17
See 7.2.4 (p. 360).

18
See Cicero,
De officiis
1.71.

19
Genesis 1:26 -27; for commentary, see Otteson, chs. 1 and 6. A related idea is central to Stoicism; see, e.g., Epictetus,
Discourses
2.8.9-23; Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations
12.26.

20
Respectively the courts of France and Great Britain.

21
Smith here translates a passage from Massillon’s
Discours prononcé à une bénédiction des drapeaux du régiment de Catinat
.

22
The quotation is from Voltaire’s
La Pucelle d’Orléans
, chant 5.

PART III, CHAPTER III

1
Smith engages with the theory of vision at greater length in his “Of the External Senses”; a helpful introduction to the debate over the theories of vision is provided in Kames,
Essays on Morality and Religion
2.3.

2
Smith may have in mind the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which elicited a notorious exchange between Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire himself mentions a Chinese earthquake of 1699 that claimed the lives of 400,000, far eclipsing those of Lima and Lisbon; see his preface to his
Poem upon the Destruction of Lisbon
and his
Essai sur les moeurs
195.

3
A similar example is used in Hume,
Treatise
2.3.3.6.

4
The category of “the honourable and noble” here invoked plays a central role in several other passages in
TMS
; see, e.g., 3.2-3, 7.2.1, 7.2.4. The category is perhaps best regarded as Smith’s rendering of the perfect moral beauty and worthiness that is suggested in Greek by
to kalon
(Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
3.7; 1115b12-13) and in Latin by
honestum
(Cicero,
De finibus
2.44-50). In identifying this category with conscience Smith may also have in mind Hutcheson’s identification of conscience with “the sense of what is right and honourable” (
Short Introduction
1.2.7); though see also Shaftesbury,
Inquiry Concerning Virtue
2.2.1; and the opening of Butler,
Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue
.

5
The remainder of this paragraph and the whole of the next paragraph were additions to the sixth edition of 1790.

6
While common to speak of “Stoic maxims,” Smith’s discussions of such maxims is likely to have been indebted to the collection of “Maxims of the Stoics” assembled and annotated by Thomas Gataker and included in Hutcheson’s translation of Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
(see also the notes to 7.2, p. 476). Gataker’s efforts to harmonize Stoic and Christian ethics on the grounds of their shared emphases on active beneficence, indifference to the things of this world, and belief in providence, influenced Hutcheson’s presentation of the
Meditations
and thereby much Scottish thinking on Stoicism.

7
Smith quotes from
The Seasons, Winter
, l. 322-28, which focuses on the indifference of the wealthy and powerful to the sufferings of others. In referring to Pascal, Smith likely has in mind Pascal’s
Pensées
, which treat several of the leading themes of 3.3 at length, including vanity, restlessness, and happiness.

8
For the Stoic concept of the “citizen of the world,” see, e.g., Epictetus,
Discourses
1.9.1; Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations
6.44.

9
From Epictetus,
Enchiridion
26.

10
The remainder of this chapter was an addition to the sixth edition of 1790.

11
Exodus 20:12. The obligations of children to parents were a prominent component of the inquiries of natural lawyers and other “moralists”; see, e.g., Pufendorf,
On the Duty of Man and Citizen
2.3.9, 2.3.12; Hutcheson,
Short Introduction
3.2.4; and Smith’s own comments at
Jurisprudence
A 3.78-87.

12
See also Smith’s more elaborate discussion of Stoicism in 7.2.1 (p. 318). Here he makes his own intervention in the Quarrel in advocating modern sentimentalism over ancient Stoicism as a source of instruction in manners. For related critiques of Stoic apathy as an extension of selfishness, see, e.g., Hutcheson,
Essay with Illustrations
1.4.5; and Hume, “The Stoic.”

13
From Gray, “Epitaph on Mrs Clerke” (1758).

14
See 1.2.1 (p. 35).

15
Smith returns to this theme in several places; see, e.g., 1.3.3 (p. 73);
Rhetoric
1.107-110, 2.90-91; and
Jurisprudence
B 12-13.

16
paroxysm: “a fit; periodical exacerbation of a disease” (Johnson).

17
Smith elaborates on these points in 7.2.1 (p. 318).

18
The story of Lauzun’s spider-training was well known in the eighteenth century; among authors known to Smith, see, e.g., Helvétius,
De l’esprit
4.10; William Eden,
Principles of Penal Law
6; and Kames,
Sketches of the History of Man
2.1. Most accounts, including these, use the anecdote to illustrate malevolence, calling attention to the jailer’s squashing of the spider and the grief Lauzun consequently suffered.

19
See Plutarch,
Lives
, “Pyrrhus” 14.

20
The maxim reappears in several eighteenth-century texts known to Smith; see most prominently Addison,
Spectator
25.

21
Robertson includes the story about Joanna as evidence of “the disorder of her understanding, and her incapacity for government,” and mentions neither the monk’s endorsement of prayer nor the queen’s efforts at such (see
Reign of Charles V
, Book 1, under marginal note “The disorder of Joanna’s mind increases”).

22
Smith elaborates on his theory of “the laws of nations” at greater length at
Jurisprudence
B 339-358. For the context of his critical discussion here of the relationship between ordinary morality and the laws of war as represented by the “laws of nations,” see esp. Pufendorf,
Duty of Man and Citizen
2.16 (and the several citations to Grotius there); Hutcheson,
Short Introduction
3.9 and
System
3.10; and Hume,
Treatise
3.2.11.

23
See also Smith’s discussions of corruption in 1.3.3, and his discussions of faction in
Wealth of Nations
, esp. 5.1.f-g.

24
See Seneca,
De providentia
6.6.

PART III, CHAPTER IV