Life of Adam Smith | Page 8

of the
three eminent teachers who were then drawing students to this little
western College from the most distant quarters, and keeping its courts
alive with a remarkable intellectual activity. Dr. A. Carlyle, who came
to Glasgow College for his divinity classes after he had finished his arts
course at Edinburgh, says he found a spirit of inquiry and a zeal for
learning abroad among the students of Glasgow which he remembered
nothing like among the students of Edinburgh. This intellectual
awakening was the result mainly of the teaching of three
professors--Alexander Dunlop, Professor of Greek, a man of fine
scholarship and taste, and an unusually engaging method of instruction;

Robert Simson, the professor of Mathematics, an original if eccentric
genius, who enjoyed a European reputation as the restorer of the
geometry of the ancients; and above all, Francis Hutcheson, a thinker of
great original power, and an unrivalled academic lecturer.
Smith would doubtless improve his Greek to some extent under Dunlop,
though from all we know of the work of that class, he could not be
carried very far there. Dunlop spent most of his first year teaching the
elements of Greek grammar with Verney's Grammar as his textbook,
and reading a little of one or two easy authors as the session advanced.
Most of the students entered his class so absolutely ignorant of Greek
that he was obliged to read a Latin classic with them for the first three
months till they learnt enough of the Greek grammar to read a Greek
one. In the second session they were able to accompany him through
some of the principal Greek classics, but the time was obviously too
short for great things. Smith, however, appears at this time to have
shown a marked predilection for mathematics. Dugald Stewart's father,
Professor Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, was a class-fellow of Smith's
at Glasgow; and Dugald Stewart has heard his father reminding Smith
of a "geometrical problem of considerable difficulty by which he was
occupied at the time when their acquaintance commenced, and which
had been proposed to him as an exercise by the celebrated Dr. Simson."
The only other fellow-student of his at Glasgow of whom we have any
knowledge is Dr. Maclaine, the translator of Mosheim, and author of
several theological works; and Dr. Maclaine informed Dugald Stewart,
in private conversation, of Smith's fondness for mathematics in those
early days. For his mathematical professor, Robert Simson himself,
Smith always retained the profoundest veneration, and one of the last
things he ever wrote--a passage he inserted in the new edition of his
Theory of Moral Sentiments, published immediately before his death in
1790--contains a high tribute to the gifts and character of that famous
man. In this passage Smith seeks to illustrate a favourite proposition of
his, that men of science are much less sensitive to public criticism and
much more indifferent to unpopularity or neglect than either poets or
painters, because the excellence of their work admits of easy and
satisfactory demonstration, whereas the excellence of the poet's work or
the painter's depends on a judgment of taste which is more uncertain;

and he points to Robert Simson as a signal example of the truth of that
proposition. "Mathematicians," he says, "who may have the most
perfect assurance of the truth and of the importance of their discoveries,
are frequently very indifferent about the reception which they may
meet with from the public. The two greatest mathematicians that I ever
have had the honour to be known to, and I believe the two greatest that
have lived in my time, Dr. Robert Simson of Glasgow and Dr. Matthew
Stewart of Edinburgh, never seemed to feel even the slightest
uneasiness from the neglect with which the ignorance of the public
received some of their most valuable works."[8] And it ought to be
remembered that when Smith wrote thus of Simson he had been long
intimate with D'Alembert.
But while Smith improved his Greek under Dunlop, and acquired a
distinct ardour for mathematics under the inspiring instructions of
Simson, the most powerful and enduring influence he came under at
Glasgow was undoubtedly that of Hutcheson--"the
never-to-be-forgotten Hutcheson," as he styled him half a century later
in recalling his obligations to his old College on the occasion of his
election to the Rectorship. No other man, indeed, whether teacher or
writer, did so much to awaken Smith's mind or give a bent to his ideas.
He is sometimes considered a disciple of Hume and sometimes
considered a disciple of Quesnay; if he was any man's disciple, he was
Hutcheson's. Hutcheson was exactly the stamp of man fitted to stir and
mould the thought of the young. He was, in the first place, one of the
most impressive lecturers that ever spoke from an academic chair.
Dugald