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195.: To LORD KAMES - Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 6 Correspondence of Adam Smith [1740]

Edition used:

Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, vol. VI of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987).

Part of: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


195.

To LORD KAMES

  • Address: The Right Honble, The Lord Kaimes

MS., SRO GD24/1/586; Rae 341.

My Dear Lord

I am much obliged to your Lordship for the kind communication of the objections you propose to make in your new Edition1 to my System. Nothing can be more perfectly friendly and polite than the terms in which you express yourself with regard to me; and I should be extremely peevish and ill–tempered if I could make the slightest opposition to their publication. I am no doubt extremely sorry to find myself of a different opinion both from so able a judge of the subject and from so old and so good a friend.2 But differences of this kind are unavoidable;3 and besides, partium contentionibus respublica crescit. I should have been waiting on your Lordship before this time; but the remains of a cold have for these four or five days past made it inconvenient to go out in the evening. Remember me to Mrs Drummond4 and believe me to be

Your most obliged and most humble Servant.

Adam Smith

[1 ]Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, (ed. 3, 1779).

[2 ]Kames had sponsored Smith’s Edinburgh lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence, 1748–51.

[3 ]Kames resisted Smith’s moral doctrine concerning sympathy on three grounds: putting oneself in the place of a sufferer leads to self–satisfaction and diminution of pity; those with the liveliest imaginations are not the most moral of men; moral sentiments towards our own actions are not explained by sympathy.

[4 ]Agatha, dau. of James Drummond of Blair Drummond; md. Kames (Henry Home) 1741; unexpectedly became heiress to Blair Drummond 1766, and assumed the name Home Drummond; d. 1795.