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“The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” By Adam Smith, 1759

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

J. Bonar
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Extract

To this, his first book, the author owed the opportunities of travel and leisure which enabled him to perfect his second, the Wealth of Nations, 1776. It has needed all the fame of the second to keep alive the memory of the first. The Moral Sentiments founded no school, and is usually passed over with the faint praise due to the author's reputation. Yet Burke welcomed its theory as “in all its essential parts just” (Annual Register, 1759, p. 484; Rae's Life of Adam Smith, p. 145); and it was treated by Lessing with respect, though not agreement, in the Laocoon, 1766 (ch. iv).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , July 1926 , pp. 333 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1926

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References

page 336 note 1 Cf. Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. ii, p. 62. The division of labour is a consequence of “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” So Hume, Natural History of Religion, section iii, near beginning, “a propensity in human nature which leads into a system.”

page 351 noet 1 The same is true of Burns, who may have read Moral Sentiments, 1st ed., p. 264: “If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us… a reformation would generally be unavoidable.”