The greater part of the two years which followed the publica tion of the Wealth of Nations Smith spent in London, enjoying the society of Gibbon, Burke, Reynolds and Topham Beauclerk, etc., but on being appointed commissioner of customs in Scot land, he went to live at Edinburgh with his mother and his cousin, Jane Douglas. Much of his income is believed to have been spent in secret charities, and he kept a simple table at which, "without the formality of an invitation, he was always happy to receive his friends." "His Sunday suppers," says M'Culloch, "were long celebrated at Edinburgh." One of his favourite places of resort in these years was a club of which Dr. Hutton, Dr. Black, Dr. Adam Ferguson, John Clerk the naval tactician, Robert Adam the architect, as well as Smith himself, were original mem bers, and to which Dugald Stewart, Professor Playfair and other eminent men were afterwards admitted. Another source of enjoy ment was his small but excellent library. In 1787 he was elected lord rector of the university of Glasgow, and in the same year he probably visited London. From the death of his mother in and that of Miss Douglas in 1788, his health declined, and after a painful illness he died on July 17, 1790.
In accordance with his wishes the majority of his manuscripts were destroyed. Of the pieces preserved by his desire the most valuable is his tract on the history of astronomy, which he himself described as a "fragment of a great work." Among the papers destroyed were probably, as Stewart suggests, the lectures on natural religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow, and also the lectures on rhetoric which he delivered at Edinburgh in 1748. To the latter Hugh Blair seems to refer when, in his work on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783 ), he acknowledges his obligations to a manuscript treatise on rhetoric by Smith, part of which its author had shown to him many years before, and which he hoped that Smith would give to the public. Smith had promised at the end of his Theory of Moral Sentiments a treatise on jurisprudence from the historical point of view.
As a moral philosopher Smith cannot be said to have won much acceptance for his fundamental doctrine, which is, that all our moral sentiments arise from sympathy, "which leads us to enter into the situations of other men and to partake with them in the passions which those situations have a tendency to excite." It is on the Wealth of Nations that Smith's fame rests. But it must at once be said that it is contrary to fact to represent him, as some have done, as the creator of political economy. The subject of social wealth had always in some degree, and increas ingly in recent times, engaged attention, and its study had even indisputably assumed a systematic character. From being an assemblage of fragmentary disquisitions on particular questions of national interest it had taken the form, notably in Turgot's Re flexions, of an organized body of doctrine. Smith took up the science when it was already considerably advanced; and it was this very circumstance which enabled him, by the production of a classical treatise, to render most of his predecessors obsolete.
Even those who do not fall into the error of making Smith the creator of the science often separate him too broadly from Quesnay and his followers, and represent the history of modern economics as consisting of the successive rise and reign of three doctrines—the mercantile, the physiocratic and the Smithian.
The last two are, it is true, at variance in some even important respects, but if we regard them as historical forces, they must be considered as working towards identical ends. They both urged society towards the abolition of the previously prevailing indus trial policy of European governments; and their arguments against that policy rested essentially on the same grounds.
There has been much discussion on the question—What is the scientific method followed by Smith in his great work? By some it is considered to have been purely deductive, a view which Buckle has perhaps carried to the greatest extreme. That the inductive spirit exercised no influence on Scottish philosophers is certainly not true. What may justly be said of Smith is that the deductive bent was not the predominant character of his mind, nor did his great excellence lie in the "dialectic skill" which Buckle ascribes to him. What strikes us most in his book is his wide and keen observation of social facts, and his perpetual tend ency to dwell on these and elicit their significance, instead of drawing conclusions from abstract principles.
Some have represented Smith's work as of so loose a texture and so defective in arrangement that it may be justly described as consisting of a series of monographs ; but this is an exaggera tion. The book, it is true, is not framed on a rigid mould, nor is there any parade of systematic divisions and subdivisions. But, as a body of exposition, it has the real unity which results from a mode of thinking homogeneous throughout.