The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Key to Abbreviations and References
• General Introduction
• Introduction
• The History of Astronomy
• The History of the Ancient Physics and the History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics
• The History of Astronomy
• Section I: Of the Effect of Unexpectedness, Or of Surprise
• Section II: Of Wonder, Or of the Effects of Novelty
• Section III: Of the Origin of Philosophy
• Section IV: The History of Astronomy
• Of the External Senses
• Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place In What Are Called the Imitative Arts/of the Affinity Between Music, Dancing, and Poetry
• Of the Affinity Between Music, Dancing, and Poetry
• Of the Affinity Between Certain English and Italian Verses
• Contributions to the Edinburgh Review of 1755–56 Review of Johnson’s Dictionary a Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review
• Review of Johnson’s Dictionary
• A Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review.
• Appendix: Passages Quoted From Rousseau
• Preface and Dedication to William Hamilton’s Poems On Several Occasions
• Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, Ll.d. From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh [read By Mr Stewart, January 21, and March 18, 1793]

SECTION III

Of the Origin of Philosophy

Mankind, in the first ages of society, before the establishment of law, order, and security, have little curiosity to find out those hidden chains of events which bind together the seemingly disjointed appearances of nature.1 A savage, whose subsistence is precarious, whose life is every day exposed to the rudest dangers, has no inclination to amuse himself with searching out what, when discovered, seems to serve no other purpose than to render the theatre of nature a more connected spectacle to his imagination. Many of these smaller incoherences, which in the course of things perplex philosophers, entirely escape his attention. Those more magnificent irregularities, whose grandeur he cannot overlook, call forth his amazement. Comets, eclipses, thunder, lightning, and other meteors, by their greatness, naturally overawe him, and he views them with a reverence that approaches to fear. His inexperience and uncertainty with regard to every thing about them, how they came, how they are to go, what went before, what is to come after them, exasperate his sentiment into terror and consternation. But our passions, as Father Malbranche observes, all justify themselves;2 that is, suggest to us opinions which justify them. As those appearances terrify him, therefore, he is disposed to believe every thing about them which can render them still more the objects of his terror. That they proceed from some intelligent, though invisible causes, of whose vengeance and displeasure they are either the signs or the effects, is the notion of all others most capable of enhancing this passion, and is that, therefore, which he is most apt to entertain. To this too, that cowardice and pusillanimity, so natural to man in his uncivilized state, still more disposes him; unprotected by the laws of society, exposed, defenceless, he feels his weakness upon all occasions; his strength and security upon none.

But all the irregularities of nature are not of this awful or terrible kind. Some of them are perfectly beautiful and agreeable. These, therefore, from the same impotence of mind, would be beheld with love and complacency, and even with transports of gratitude; for whatever is the cause of pleasure naturally excites our gratitude. A child caresses the fruit that is agreeable to it, as it beats the stone that hurts it.3 The notions of a savage are not very different. The ancient Athenians, who solemnly punished the axe which had accidentally been the cause of the death of a man,4 erected altars, and offered sacrifices to the rainbow. Sentiments not unlike these, may sometimes, upon such occasions, begin to be felt even in the breasts of the most civilized, but are presently checked by the reflection, that the things are not their proper objects. But a savage, whose notions are guided altogether by wild nature and passion, waits for no other proof that a thing is the proper object of any sentiment, than that it excites it. The reverence and gratitude, with which some of the appearances of nature inspire him, convince him that they are the proper objects of reverence and gratitude, and therefore proceed from some intelligent beings, who take pleasure in the expressions of those sentiments. With him, therefore, every object of nature, which by its beauty or greatness, its utility or hurtfulness, is considerable enough to attract his attention, and whose operations are not perfectly regular, is supposed to act by the direction of some invisible and designing power. The sea is spread out into a calm, or heaved into a storm, according to the good pleasure of Neptune. Does the earth pour forth an exuberant harvest? It is owing to the indulgence of Ceres. Does the vine yield a plentiful vintage? It flows from the bounty of Bacchus. Do either refuse their presents? It is ascribed to the displeasure of those offended deities. The tree, which now flourishes, and now decays, is inhabited by a Dryad, upon whose health or sickness its various appearances depend. The fountain, which sometimes flows in a copious, and sometimes in a scanty stream, which appears sometimes clear and limpid, and at other times muddy and disturbed, is affected in all its changes by the Naiad who dwells within it. Hence the origin of Polytheism, and of that vulgar superstition which ascribes all the irregular events of nature to the favour or displeasure of intelligent, though invisible beings, to gods, daemons, witches, genii, fairies. For it may be observed, that in all Polytheistic religions, among savages, as well as in the early ages of Heathen antiquity, it is the irregular events of nature only that are ascribed to the agency and power of their gods. Fire burns, and water refreshes; heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter5 ever apprehended to be employed in those matters. But thunder and lightning, storms and sunshine, those more irregular events, were ascribed to his favour, or his anger. Man, the only designing power with which they were acquainted, never acts but either to stop, or to alter the course, which natural events would take, if left to themselves. Those other intelligent beings, whom they imagined, but knew not, were naturally supposed to act in the same manner; not to employ themselves in supporting the ordinary course of things, which went on of its own accord, but to stop, to thwart, and to disturb it. And thus, in the first ages of the world, the lowest and most pusillanimous superstition supplied the place of philosophy.

But when law has established order and security, and subsistence ceases to be precarious, the curiosity of mankind is increased, and their fears are diminished. The leisure which they then enjoy renders them more attentive to the appearances of nature, more observant of her smallest irregularities, and more desirous to know what is the chain which links them all together.6 That some such chain subsists betwixt all her seemingly disjointed phaenomena, they are necessarily led to conceive; and that magnanimity, and cheerfulness, which all generous natures acquire who are bred in civilized societies, where they have so few occasions to feel their weakness, and so many to be conscious of their strength and security, renders them less disposed to employ, for this connecting chain, those invisible beings whom the fear and ignorance of their rude forefathers had engendered.7 Those of liberal fortunes, whose attention is not much occupied either with business or with pleasure, can fill up the void of their imagination, which is thus disengaged from the ordinary affairs of life, no other way than by attending to that train of events which passes around them. While the great objects of nature thus pass in review before them, many things occur in an order to which they have not been accustomed. Their imagination, which accompanies with ease and delight the regular progress of nature, is stopped and embarrassed by those seeming incoherences; they excite their wonder, and seem to require some chain of intermediate events, which, by connecting them with something that has gone before, may thus render the whole course of the universe consistent and of a piece. Wonder, therefore, and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature; and they pursue this study for its own sake, as an original pleasure or good in itself, without regarding its tendency to procure them the means of many other pleasures.8

Greece, and the Greek colonies in Sicily, Italy, and the Lesser Asia, were the first countries which, in these western parts of the world, arrived at a state of civilized society. It was in them, therefore, that the first philosophers, of whose doctrine we have any distinct account, appeared. Law and order seem indeed to have been established in the great monarchies of Asia and Egypt, long before they had any footing in Greece: yet, after all that has been said concerning the learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, whether there ever was in those nations any thing which deserved the name of science, or whether that despotism which is more destructive of security and leisure than anarchy itself, and which prevailed over all the East, prevented the growth of Philosophy, is a question which, for want of monuments, cannot be determined with any degree of precision.9

The Greek colonies having been settled amid nations either altogether barbarous, or altogether unwarlike, over whom, therefore, they soon acquired a very great authority, seem, upon that account, to have arrived at a considerable degree of empire and opulence before any state in the parent country had surmounted that extreme poverty, which, by leaving no room for any evident distinction of ranks, is necessarily attended with the confusion and misrule which flows from a want of all regular subordination.10 The Greek islands being secure from the invasion of land armies, or from naval forces, which were in those days but little known, seem, upon that account too, to have got before the continent in all sorts of civility and improvement. The first philosophers, therefore, as well as the first poets, seem all to have been natives, either of their colonies, or of their islands. It was from thence that Homer, Archilochus, Stesichorus, Simonides, Sappho, Anacreon, derived their birth. Thales and Pythagoras, the founders of the two earliest sects of philosophy, arose, the one in an Asiatic colony, the other in an island; and neither of them established his school in the mother country.11

What was the particular system of either of those two philosophers, or whether their doctrine was so methodized as to deserve the name of a system, the imperfection, as well as the uncertainty of all the traditions that have come down to us concerning them, makes it impossible to determine. The school of Pythagoras, however, seems to have advanced further in the study of the connecting principles of nature, than that of the Ionian philosopher. The accounts which are given of Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, the successors of Thales, represent the doctrines of those sages as full of the most inextricable confusion. Something, however, that approaches to a composed and orderly system, may be traced in what is delivered down to us concerning the doctrine of Empedocles, of Archytas, of Timaeus, and of Ocellus the Lucanian, the most renowned philosophers of the Italian school.12 The opinions of the two last coincide pretty much; the one, with those of Plato; the other, with those of Aristotle; nor do those of the two first seem to have been very different, of whom the one was the author of the doctrine of the Four Elements, the other the inventor of the Categories;13 who, therefore, may be regarded as the founders, the one, of the ancient Physics; the other, of the ancient Dialectic; and, how closely these were connected, will appear hereafter.14 It was in the school of Socrates, however, from Plato and Aristotle, that Philosophy first received that form, which introduced her, if one may say so, to the general acquaintance of the world. It is from them, therefore, that we shall begin to give her history in any detail. Whatever was valuable in the former systems, which was at all consistent with their general principles, they seem to have consolidated into their own. From the Ionian Philosophy, I have not been able to discover that they derived any thing. From the Pythagorean school, both Plato and Aristotle seem to have derived the fundamental principles of almost all their doctrines. Plato, too, appears to have borrowed something from two other sects of philosophers, whose extreme obscurity seems to have prevented them from acquiring themselves any extensive reputation: the one was that of Cratylus and Heraclitus; the other was that of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno.15 To pretend to rescue the system of any of those antesocratic sages, from that oblivion which at present covers them all, would be a vain and useless attempt. What seems, however, to have been borrowed from them, shall sometimes be marked as we go along.

There was still another school of philosophy, earlier than Plato, from which, however, he was so far from borrowing any thing, that he seems to have bent the whole force of his reason to discredit and expose its principles.16 This was the Philosophy of Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras,17 which accordingly seems to have submitted to his eloquence, to have lain dormant, and to have been almost forgotten for some generations, till it was afterwards more successfully revived by Epicurus.

[1 ][Cf. IV.21 below, where Smith connects a breakdown of law, order, and security with the neglect of natural science.]

[2 ]Recherche de la vérité, V.11. [TMS III.4.3 cites the same phrase from Malebranche, as did Smith’s teacher, Francis Hutcheson, in Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, II.4.]

[3 ][Cf. TMS II.iii.1.1: ‘We are angry, for a moment, even at the stone that hurts us. A child beats it . . . ’]

[4 ][Cf. LJ(A) ii.119, LJ(B) 188 (ed. Cannan, 141).]

[5 ][For comment on this phrase and its connection with Smith’s later use of ‘invisible hand’, see A. L. Macfie, ‘The Invisible Hand of Jupiter’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxxii (1971), 595–9.]

[6 ][Cf. Hume, who says of a republic: ‘From law arises security: from security curiosity: and from curiosity knowledge.’ ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Green and Grose, i.180.]

[7 ][For Smith’s views on the relation between scientific and religious explanation, cf. WN V.i.f.24: ‘Superstition first attempted to satisfy this curiosity by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods. Philosophy afterwards endeavoured to account for them, from more familiar causes . . . ’ But also Ancient Physics, 9, below: ‘as ignorance begot superstition, science gave birth to the first theism that arose among those nations, who were not enlightened by divine Revelation.’]

[8 ]This explanation of the origin of philosophy is commonly attributed to Plato. The locus classicus is ‘The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher’ (Theaetetus, 155 D), but the context suggests ‘puzzlement’ rather than the conventional sense. [For the complete thought of Smith’s sentence cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 982b 11–24.]

[9 ]With the knowledge then available Smith’s cautious statement could hardly have been improved upon. Modern research, based on authentic documents (papyrus, steles, etc.), reveals the high sophistication of Egyptian and especially ‘Babylonian’ mathematics, astronomy, and medicine sensu lato. The debt of Greece to these forerunners becomes progressively apparent; nevertheless, the Greek innovation of rigour and abstraction introduced a new dimension.

[10 ][Smith comments extensively on the proposition that ‘Civil government supposes a certain subordination’ in WN V.i.b.3 ff. (‘Part II, Of the Expence of Justice’). On the social utility of the ‘distinction of ranks’ cf. TMS I.iii.2.3, VI.ii.1.20, VI.iii.30.]

[11 ][Cf. WN IV.vii.b.4 (‘Causes of the Prosperity of new Colonies’): ‘The schools of the two oldest Greek philosophers, those of Thales and Pythagoras, were established, it is remarkable, not in antient Greece, but the one in an Asiatick, the other in an Italian colony.’ Smith elaborates the point in LRBL ii.117–19 (ed. Lothian, 132–3), stating that Thales taught in Miletus, Pythagoras in Italy, and Empedocles in Sicily, before ‘the Persian expedition’ brought commerce and the arts to the mainland of Greece.]

[12 ]The work on natural philosophy by ‘Ocellus the Lucanian’ is now (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1970) regarded as supposititious and as dating from c. 150 b.c., i.e. post–Aristotelian. [See R. Mondolfo’s note in his Italian translation of E. Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy, ii.384–5.

As regards Timaeus, Smith is making two assumptions usual at that time. (1) He takes Plato’s dialogue figure Timaeus to be a historical person. On this, see F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology (1937), 2–3. (2) He does not doubt the genuineness of the surviving treatise, ascribed to Timaeus, ‘On the World–Soul’. But see A. E. Taylor, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (1928), Appendix II, 655–64, and other literature there cited.

The ‘Italian School’ refers to the Pythagoreans at Croton in Southern Italy. It is mentioned again in Ancient Physics, 3 ff.]

[13 ][Here again Smith’s judgement is based on a too ready acceptance of pseudonymous writings. Some genuine fragments of works by Archytas of Tarentum have been preserved; but the logical works acribed to him, with such titles as On general propositions, On opposites, are now commonly regarded as productions of much later neo–Pythagoreans. Admittedly, Simplicius and other ancient commentators on Aristotle’s Categories accepted them as genuine. E. Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen, ed. 4, vol. iii b, 114–26; Diels–Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. 6, i.439.]

[14 ][Ancient Logics, 1.]

[15 ][Cratylus was a pupil of Heracleitus. For his influence on Plato, see Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 987a32 ff., and Sir David Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, vol. i, xlvii. In these remarks, Smith greatly underrates the influence of Parmenides upon his immediate successors and upon Plato.]

[16 ][This statement is too sweeping. It is likely that Plato knew something of the system of Leucippus (see F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (1935), 231); but when he attacks materialism, as at Sophist, 246 A–D, and Laws, X, 889 B ff., it is in quite general terms. Protagoras is criticized specifically by Plato, but see next note.]

[17 ]The inclusion of Protagoras, the Sophist, in the ‘school’ of the atomists is unwarranted.