Life of Adam Smith | Page 9

Stewart, who knew many of his pupils, states that every one of
them told of the extraordinary impression his lectures used to make on
their hearers. He was the first professor in Glasgow to give up lecturing
in Latin and speak to his audience in their own tongue, and he spoke
without notes and with the greatest freedom and animation. Nor was it
only his eloquence, but his ideas themselves were rousing. Whatever he
touched upon, he treated, as we may still perceive from his writings,
with a certain freshness and decided originality which must have
provoked the dullest to some reflection, and in a bracing spirit of
intellectual liberty which it was strength and life for the young mind to
breathe. He was not long in Glasgow, accordingly, till he was bitterly

attacked by the older generation outside the walls of the College as a
"new light" fraught with dangers to all accepted beliefs, and at the same
time worshipped like an idol by the younger generation inside the walls,
who were thankful for the light he brought them, and had no quarrel
with it for being new. His immediate predecessor in that chair,
Professor Gershom Carmichael, the reputed father of the Scottish
Philosophy, was still a Puritan of the Puritans, wrapt in a gloomy
Calvinism, and desponding after signs that would never come. But
Hutcheson belonged to a new era, which had turned to the light of
nature for guidance, and had discovered by it the good and benevolent
Deity of the eighteenth century, who lived only for human welfare, and
whose will was not to be known from mysterious signs and
providences, but from a broad consideration of the greater good of
mankind--"the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Hutcheson
was the original author of that famous phrase.
All this was anathema to the exponents of the prevailing theology with
which, indeed, it seemed only too surely to dispense; and in Smith's
first year at Glasgow the local Presbytery set the whole University in a
ferment by prosecuting Hutcheson for teaching to his students, in
contravention of his subscription to the Westminster Confession, the
following two false and dangerous doctrines: 1st, that the standard of
moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and 2nd,
that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a
knowledge of God. This trial of course excited the profoundest feeling
among the students, and they actually made a formal appearance before
the Presbytery, and defended their hero zealously both by word and
writing. Smith, being only a bajan--a first year's student--would play no
leading part in these proceedings, but he could not have lived in the
thick of them unmoved, and he certainly--either then or afterwards,
when he entered Hutcheson's class and listened to his lectures on
natural theology, or perhaps attended his private class on the Sundays
for special theological study--adopted the religious optimism of
Hutcheson for his own creed, and continued under its influence to the
last of his days.
In politics also Hutcheson's lectures exercised important practical

influence on the general opinion of his students. The principles of
religious and political liberty were then so imperfectly comprehended
and so little accepted that their advocacy was still something of a new
light, and we are informed by one of Hutcheson's leading colleagues,
Principal Leechman, that none of his lectures made a deeper or wider
impression than his exposition of those principles, and that very few of
his pupils left his hands without being imbued with some of the same
love of liberty which animated their master. Smith was no exception,
and that deep strong love of all reasonable liberty which characterised
him must have been, if not first kindled, at any rate quickened by his
contact with Hutcheson.
Interesting traces of more specific influence remain. Dugald Stewart
seems to have heard Smith himself admit that it was Hutcheson in his
lectures that suggested to him the particular theory of the right of
property which he used to teach in his own unpublished lectures on
jurisprudence, and which founded the right of property on the general
sympathy of mankind with the reasonable expectation of the occupant
to enjoy unmolested the object which he had acquired or discovered.[9]
But it is most probable that his whole theory of moral sentiments was
suggested by the lectures of Hutcheson, perhaps the germs of it even
when he was passing through the class. For Hutcheson in the course of
his lectures expressly raises and discusses the question, Can we reduce
our moral sentiments to sympathy? He answered the question himself
in the negative, on the ground that we often approve of the actions of
people with whom we have no sympathy, our enemies for example, and
his pupil's contribution