The Theory of Moral Sentiments (74 page)

1
See Malebranche,
Search After Truth
5.11; Smith also cites the passage in
Astronomy
3.1.

2
See also 7.3.3 (p. 378).

PART III, CHAPTER V

1
vicegerent: “a lieutenant; one who is entrusted with the power of the superiour” (Johnson); see also 3.2 (p. 136).

2
See also Hume’s account of the sensible knave in
Enquiry Concerning Morals
9.22-23.

3
Smith here translates a passage from Massillon’s sermon for the first Sunday of Lent in his popular collection of Lenten sermons. Its topic is the truth of a future state, which would naturally have been of interest to Smith given his own emphasis in the ways in which belief in the afterlife promotes happiness and justice.

PART III, CHAPTER VI

1
Matthew 22:36-40; Mark 12:30-31; Galatians 5:14. Smith’s insistence on the centrality of love to Christian ethics, coupled with his critique of an ethics limited to divine command further develops his conception of the “natural principles of religion” introduced in 3.5 (p. 186).

2
Smith returns to the distinction between critics and grammarians at 7.4 (p. 386).

3
Smith here contributes to the distinction between “false religion” and “true religion” fundamental to the Scottish Enlightenment; see Shaftesbury,
Inquiry Concerning Virtue
2.2.1; Hutcheson,
Short Introduction
1.2.7; Hume, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.”

4
Voltaire’s play of 1742 (full title
Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet
), chronicles the tyrannical methods of its title character to gratify his passion for Palmira, including manipulating Palmira’s pious lover, Seid, into murdering Mahomet’s political rival, Zopir, (also the father of Palmira and Seid, unbeknownst to all but Mahomet). The “instructive spectacle” celebrated by Smith comes in Act 4, Scene 3.

5
The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (August 1572) is thought to have begun when Catherine de Medici approved the assassination of several leading Huguenots; the spreading violence ultimately claimed the lives of several thousand Protestants in Paris and beyond.

PART IV, CHAPTER I

1
Among eighteenth-century British writers who speak of utility as a source of beauty, see, e.g., Berkeley,
Alciphron
3.8-9; Hume,
Treatise
2.1.8.2 and 3.3.1.8; and (after 1759) Kames,
Elements of Criticism
1.3. For important countering views, see Hutcheson,
Enquiry into Beauty and Virtue
1.1.15; and Burke,
Philosophical Enquiry
3.6. For helpful context, see Paul Guyer in
Eighteenth Century Studies
35 (2002).

2
Smith is thinking of Hume; for the arguments summarized here, see
Treatise
2.2.5.14-20, 3.3.5.5 and
Enquiry Concerning Morals
5.19-20, 6.33n. For helpful commentary on Smith’s critique of Hume, see Marie Martin in
Hume Studies
16 (1990), and Schliesser and Pack in
Journal of the History of Philosophy
44 (2006).

3
bauble: “a gew-gaw; a trifling piece of finery” (Johnson).

4
Compare to Rousseau,
Discourse on Inequality
, penultimate paragraph of Part 2, and Smith’s translation of this passage in his
Letter to the Edinburgh Review
(in
Essays on Philosophical Subjects
, p. 253); for commentary, see Force.

5
operose: “laborious; full of trouble and tediousness” (Johnson).

6
Here and below Smith responds to Rousseau; see esp. his translation of a key passage from the
Discourse on Inequality
in his 1756 “Letter to the Edinburgh Review” (
Essays
, pp. 251-52); for commentary, see Force and Rasmussen.

7
The relationship between self-interested behavior and the distribution of material goods is a principal theme of Smith’s economics; in the present context see esp.
Wealth of Nations
3.4.

8
Smith’s famous “invisible hand” was invoked by many other writers; Rothschild has noted it in Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Ovid; Force in Defoe, Rollin, and Charles Bonnet; and Hont in Rousseau. To these can be added (among many others), Swift (“To Lady Betty Berkeley”), Montesquieu (
Temple of Gnide
) and Fénelon (
Telemachus
). Smith himself only used the term on two other occasions (
History of Astronomy
3.2 and
Wealth of Nations
4.2.9).

PART IV, CHAPTER II

1
A précis of Hume’s theory of the four sources of virtue—useful to self, useful to others, agreeable to self, and agreeable to others—summarized at
Treatise
3.3.1.30 and
Enquiry Concerning Morals
9.1-2, and developed at length in
Enquiry Concerning Morals
5-8.

2
See Hume,
Treatise
2.2.5.17 and
Enquiry Concerning Morals
5.1 and n.

3
See 1.1.4 (p. 25).

4
Smith may have had several such defenses in mind, including d’Alembert’s article on “Géométrie” for the
Encyclopédie
.

5
Compare to the discussion of the role of “a pleasing consciousness of the actual love, merited esteem or approbation of others” at Shaftesbury,
Inquiry Concerning Virtue
2.2.1.

6
See 1.1.3 (p. 21).

7
Smith here intervenes in an eighteenth-century debate over the status of the modern virtue of humanity; compare his criticism here (and of the “the soft power of humanity” in 3.3, p. 156) to, e.g., Montesquieu,
Considerations on the Romans
15; and Hume,
Enquiry Concerning Morals
9.5-6.

8
“Women rarely make donations.”

9
The Mediterranean island of Minorca, a key strategic outpost, was captured by the British in 1708, lost to the French at the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, returned to the British by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and then recaptured by the French and given to the Spanish in 1783.

10
See Livy 2.5.

PART V, CHAPTER I

1
The question of whether the proportions of classical architecture were founded on nature or on custom was revived in the 1750s in the debates of the philosophical clubs of Edinburgh, as noted in Peter Jones’s introduction to Kames’s
Elements of Criticism
. Smith here follows the argument of Claude Perrault, the French architect and translator of Vitruvius, who similarly argued that the proportions established by the ancients were arbitrary, but once established could not be altered (see Perrault,
A Treatise of the Five Orders in Architecture
2.7).

2
Among “ancient rhetoricians,” Aristotle examines such questions relative to both poetic meter (e.g.,
Poetics
24) and prose rhythm (
Rhetoric
3.8). Smith’s quotation is from a poem by Swift: “The Grand Question Debated . . . ”

3
Quintilian’s text reiterates and defends his earlier judgments on Seneca; see
Institutio Oratoria
10.1.125-131.

4
Buffier,
Treatise on First Truths
1.13.94.

5
On the complexion and face, see Buffier,
Treatise on First Truths
1.13.101-103 (under the marginal note “beauty arbitrary”).

PART V, CHAPTER II

1
Suetonius, Tacitus (
Annals
11-14) and Cassius Dio (60-61) are the chief classical sources for the former’s folly and the latter’s wickedness.

2
Smith’s invocations of various national stereotypes here and below reflect an interest typical of Enlightenment political thought, fueled by a boom in travel literature (including the works of Charlevoix and Lafitau cited below) that provided data on which philosophical inquiries into the ways in which institutions and cultural practices shape national character might draw (see, e.g., Montesquieu,
Spirit of the Laws
19; and Hume, “Of National Characters”).

3
The transition from savagery and barbarism to civilization was a preeminent theme of the historical and political inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment and forms a crucial component of Smith’s economic inquiry; see esp. the theory of the stages of social progress as developed in
Jurisprudence
A 1.27-35 and B 149-150. The Scottish Enlightenment also focused on the contrast of humane modern virtues with awful primitive virtues; see, e.g., Hume,
Enquiry Concerning Morals
7.13-18; Kames,
Sketches of Man
1.5.

4
In
Jurisprudence
A 4.5 Smith invokes Charlevoix and Lafitau as the best authorities on native North Americans. Their accounts are the principal sources for his comments here as well; “Spartan discipline” is a particularly prominent theme in particular in Lafitau’s work; see, e.g., the comparison of the North Americans to the ancient Spartans at 1.6 (vol. 1, pp. 599-602). For commentary, see Maureen Harkin in
ELH
72 (2005).

5
Lafitau discusses the deference of young men to their parents and the indifference of young men to their brides at
Manners of the American Savages
1.6 (vol. 1, pp. 561-564), and discusses the separation of newlyweds and compares it to ancient Spartan practice at p. 576.

6
Smith here draws on Charlevoix,
History of New France with Historical Journal
(Paris, 1744), Letter 14 (vol. 5, pp. 319ff.), Letter 16 (vol. 5, pp. 358-65), Letter 21 (vol. 6, pp. 8-10), and Letter 27 (vol. 6, p. 122ff.); and Lafitau,
Manners of the American Savages
2.3. (vol. 2, pp. 275-281, 284-285).

7
From Dubos,
Critical Reflections
1.42 (“Of our manner of reciting tragedy and comedy”).

8
Cicero in his
Brutus
profiles the oratory of each of the figures here named, and occasionally signals the advent of the new eloquence (see, e.g.,
Brutus
82).

9
From Charlevoix,
History of New France with Historical Journal
, Letter 23 (vol. 6, p. 38).

10
See, e.g., Lafitau,
Manners of the American Savages
, 1.6 (vol. 1, pp. 592-593); Lafitau himself cites Plutarch on Lycurgus.

11
See Aristotle,
Politics
7.16, 1335b20-21; Plato,
Republic
5, 460c- 461c.

PART VI, SECTION I

1
The whole of Part 6 was an addition to the sixth edition of 1790. In a letter to his publishers, Smith called it a “practical system of morality.” It also contains his most complete answer to the first of the two questions posed in the introduction to Part 7 below, “wherein does virtue consist?” Smith’s approach here is to answer this question in a manner akin to Aristotle and Cicero and much admired by Smith (see 7.4).

2
See 1.3.1 (p. 133).

3
Eighteenth-century histories of philosophy tended to classify ancient philosophers as Stoic, Epicurean, Academic (Platonic), or Peripatetic (Aristotelian).

4
Machiavelli was at Borgia’s court as a Florentinian ambassador at the time (January 1503) of the events here described; he alludes to them in
Prince
7 and describes them more fully in his “Description of the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, and Others.”

PART VI, SECTION II

1
This and the following two chapters describe three successive and ever-widening spheres of connections with others, a movement closely related to the classical conception of
oikeiosis
as described by Cicero among others (e.g.,
De finibus
3.62-64 and
De officiis
1.50-57); for helpful commentary, see the books and articles by Brown, Vivenza, Montes, and Forman-Barzilai.

2
See 3.3 above.

3
Smith’s argument for domestic education over boarding schools parallels Locke’s argument in
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
69-70. Smith’s related critique of the Grand Tour at
Wealth of Nations
5.1.f similarly parallels Locke’s arguments here and in
Education
212-213.

4
See, e.g., Aulus Gellius 13.3; Burke also discussed the Roman ties of necessitudo in his
Thoughts on the Present Discontents
(1770).

5
Among the classic distinctions between friendships of utility and friendships of virtue that Smith is likely to have in mind here are Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
8.3-4; and Cicero,
De amicitia
5-6 and
De officiis
1.55-56.

6
See also Smith’s critique of casuistry in 7.4 below.

7
Smith refers to Voltaire,
L’Orphelin de la Chine
.

8
See Plutarch,
Lives
, “Marcus Cato” 27; Appian,
Punic Wars
69.