It seeks for the laws regulating the general system.As it is the aim of the other to explain plausibly, its aim is to investigate strictly.What, consequently, are to the one ultimate principles, are to the other collections of facts, the causes of which are to be inquired into.When, therefore, this philosophy applied itself to the consideration of the phenomena of motion, it pronounced the whole antecedent system factitious and foreign to its objects, and commencing their investigation sagaciously and diligently anew, it discovered the real and simple laws regulating the various series of these events.(128)To which of those opposite sects does Adam Smith belong? and on which of these two modes are the principles guiding his speculations framed?
To me it appears that his philosophy is that of explanation and system, and that his speculations are not to be considered as inductive investigations and expositions of the real principles.guiding the successions of phenomena, but as successful efforts to arrange with regularity, according to common and preconceived notions, a multiplicity of known facts.
My reasons for this opinion are drawn, 1st.from the object at which his philosophy aims: 2d.from the methods which he adopts to attain it:
3d.from the consequences which have resulted from his labors.I shall arrange the proofs for the justice of this conclusion, which I purpose submitting to the reader, according to these three heads; contrasting in each the spirit and consequences of his speculative principles with those of the inductive philosophy.
I.According to Adam Smith "Wonder, 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 connexions that unite the various appearances of nature; (129) -- philosophical systems are to be considered as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature." -- "A philosophical system is an imaginary machine invented to connect together in the fancy, those different movements and effects, which are already in reality performed." (130)It is needless to say that this account of the object of philosophy is quite opposite to that given in the Novum Organum.The passages already quoted may show this and many others might be adduced.It is throughout the endeavor of the founder of the experimental philosophy to hold out truth itself, and the benefits to be derived from it as its object, to show that this we can never reach by any effort of the mere reasoning and imaginative faculties, or in any other manner than through patient induction, (131) and that that framing of systems explanatory of things already known is foreign to its purposes.(132)II.Philosophy being thus., according to Adam Smith, an art addressing itself to please the imagination, it gains its end by searching for some common and familiar observation, and making it serve as the means of connecting any series of interesting events, to the consideration of which curiosity may direct the attention."In the mean time it will serve to confirm what has gone before and to throw light upon what is to come after, that we observe, in general, that no system, how well soever in other respects supported, has even been able to gain any general credit on the world, whose connecting principles were not such as were familiar to all mankind." (133) It is by this circumstance that he judges of the merit of all philosophical systems, and the superiority of Sir Isaac Newton over Des Cartes, consists, according to him, in his discovering that he could join together the movements of the planets by so familiar a principle of connexion as that of gravity, which completely removed all the difficulties the imagination had hitherto felt in attending to them.(134)No doctrine, certainly, can be more opposed to the spirit of the philosophy of Bacon than this.It is this propensity to generalize immediately from a few familiar notions, that he all along represents as the vice of the antecedent system-builders, and the error which his followers have to guard against."There have been, and can be," he says, "but two modes of searching after truth.The one commencing the chain of reasoning with some familiar conception of things, flies from them immediately to general axioms, and from these, and their assumed incontrovertible truth, judges of all particulars.
