Life of Adam Smith. John Rae

for 1790 alleges that in this Glasgow period Smith lived in such constant apprehension of being robbed of his ideas that, if he saw any of his students take notes of his lectures, he would instantly stop him and say, "I hate scribblers." But this is directly contradicted by the account of Professor John Millar, who, as we have seen, was a student in Smith's classes himself, and who expressly states both that the permission to take notes was freely given by Smith to his students, and that the privilege was the occasion of frequent abuse. "From the permission given to students of taking notes," says Millar, "many observations and opinions contained in these lectures (the lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres) have either been detailed in separate dissertations or engrossed in general collections which have since been given to the public." In those days manuscript copies of a popular professor's lectures, transcribed from his students' notebooks, were often kept for sale in the booksellers' shops. Blair's lectures on rhetoric, for example, were for years in general circulation in this intermediate state, and it was the publication of his criticism on Addison, taken from one of the unauthorised transcripts, in Kippis's Biographia Britannica, that at length instigated Blair to give his lectures to the press himself. A professor was thus always liable to have his unpublished thought appropriated by another author without any acknowledgment at all, or published in such an imperfect form that he would hardly care to acknowledge it himself. If Smith, therefore, exhibited a jealousy over his rights to his own thought, as has been suggested, Millar's observation shows him to have had at any rate frequent cause; but neither at that time of his life nor any other was he animated by an undue or unreasonable jealousy of this sort such as he has sometimes been accused of; and if in 1755 he took occasion to resent with "honest and indignant warmth" a violation of his rights, there must have been some special provocation.

      Mr. James Bonar suggests that this manifesto of 1755 was directed against Adam Ferguson, but that is not probable. Ferguson's name, it is true, will readily occur in such a connection, because Dr. Carlyle tells us that when he published his History of Civil Society in 1767 Smith accused him of having borrowed some of his ideas without owning them, and that Ferguson replied that he had borrowed nothing from Smith, but much from some French source unnamed where Smith had been before him. But, however this may have been in 1767, it is unlikely that Ferguson was the occasion of offence in 1755. Up till that year he was generally living abroad with the regiment of which he was chaplain, and it is not probable that he had begun his History before his return to Scotland, or that he had time between his return and the composition of Smith's manifesto to do or project anything to occasion such a remonstrance. Then he is found on the friendliest footing with Smith in the years immediately following the manifesto, and Stewart's allusion to the circumstances implies a graver breach than could be healed so summarily. Besides, had Ferguson been the cause of offence, Stewart would have probably avoided the subject altogether in a paper to the Royal Society, of which Ferguson was still an active member.

      FOOTNOTES:

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      [27] Thomson's Life of Cullen, i. 605.

      [28] Thomson's Life of Cullen, i. 606.

[29] Bisset's Burke, i. 32.

[30] Prior's Burke, p. 38.

[31] Outlines of the Philosophy of Education, p. 23.

[32] Prior's Life of Burke, Bohn's ed. p. 38.

[33] Burton's Life of Hume, ii. 55.

[34] Caldwell Papers, i. 170.

[35] Hamilton's Reid, p. 40.

[36] Brougham's Life and Times, i. 78.

[37] Chamberlayne's Angliæ Notitia for 1750.

[38] Smith's copy of this book seems to have gone out of existence like the others, for his cousin and heir, David Douglas, wrote Lord Buchan in January 1792 that he had searched for it in Smith's library without any success, and that though a catalogue of the library had since then been made out, Lockhart's Memoirs was not contained in it. Douglas's letter is in the Edinburgh University Library.

[39] Book II. chap. x.

[40] Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, p. 12.

[41] Stewart's Works, x. 12.

[42] Richardson's Life of Arthur. See Arthur's Discourses, p. 510.

[43] Richardson's Life of Arthur. See Arthur's Discourses, p. 508.

[44] Stewart's Works, x. 12.

[45] Sinclair's Old Times and Distant Places, p. 9.

[46] Hamilton's Reid, p. 43.

[47] M'Cosh, Scottish Philosophy, p. 66.

[48] Boswell's Correspondence with Erskine, p. 26.

[49] Currie's Memoirs of James Currie, M.D., ii. 317.

[50] Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, i. 462, 463.

[51] Steuart's Works, vi. 379.

[52] Ibid. vi. 378.

[53] Dr. Cleland's account of Glasgow in New Statistical Account of Scotland, vi. 139.

[54] Stewart's Works, ed. Hamilton; x. 68.

CHAPTER VI

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      THE