The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [263]
2 Smith may have in mind the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which elicited a notorious exchange between Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire himself mentions a Chinese earthquake of 1699 that claimed the lives of 400,000, far eclipsing those of Lima and Lisbon; see his preface to his Poem upon the Destruction of Lisbon and his Essai sur les moeurs 195.
3 A similar example is used in Hume, Treatise 2.3.3.6.
4 The category of “the honourable and noble” here invoked plays a central role in several other passages in TMS; see, e.g., 3.2-3, 7.2.1, 7.2.4. The category is perhaps best regarded as Smith’s rendering of the perfect moral beauty and worthiness that is suggested in Greek by to kalon (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 3.7; 1115b12-13) and in Latin by honestum (Cicero, De finibus 2.44-50). In identifying this category with conscience Smith may also have in mind Hutcheson’s identification of conscience with “the sense of what is right and honourable” (Short Introduction 1.2.7); though see also Shaftesbury, Inquiry Concerning Virtue 2.2.1; and the opening of Butler, Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue.
5 The remainder of this paragraph and the whole of the next paragraph were additions to the sixth edition of 1790.
6 While common to speak of “Stoic maxims,” Smith’s discussions of such maxims is likely to have been indebted to the collection of “Maxims of the Stoics” assembled and annotated by Thomas Gataker and included in Hutcheson’s translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (see also the notes to 7.2, p. 476). Gataker’s efforts to harmonize Stoic and Christian ethics on the grounds of their shared emphases on active beneficence, indifference to the things of this world, and belief in providence, influenced Hutcheson’s presentation of the Meditations and thereby much Scottish thinking on Stoicism.
7 Smith quotes from The Seasons, Winter, l. 322-28, which focuses on the indifference of the wealthy and powerful to the sufferings of others. In referring to Pascal, Smith likely has in mind Pascal’s Pensées, which treat several of the leading themes of 3.3 at length, including vanity, restlessness, and happiness.
8 For the Stoic concept of the “citizen of the world,” see, e.g., Epictetus, Discourses 1.9.1; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.44.
9 From Epictetus, Enchiridion 26.
10 The remainder of this chapter was an addition to the sixth edition of 1790.
11 Exodus 20:12. The obligations of children to parents were a prominent component of the inquiries of natural lawyers and other “moralists”; see, e.g., Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen 2.3.9, 2.3.12; Hutcheson, Short Introduction 3.2.4; and Smith’s own comments at Jurisprudence A 3.78-87.
12 See also Smith’s more elaborate discussion of Stoicism in 7.2.1 (p. 318). Here he makes his own intervention in the Quarrel in advocating modern sentimentalism over ancient Stoicism as a source of instruction in manners. For related critiques of Stoic apathy as an extension of selfishness, see, e.g., Hutcheson, Essay with Illustrations 1.4.5; and Hume, “The Stoic.”
13 From Gray, “Epitaph on Mrs Clerke” (1758).
14 See 1.2.1 (p. 35).
15 Smith returns to this theme in several places; see, e.g., 1.3.3 (p. 73); Rhetoric 1.107-110, 2.90-91; and Jurisprudence B 12-13.
16 paroxysm: “a fit; periodical exacerbation of a disease” (Johnson).
17 Smith elaborates on these points in 7.2.1 (p. 318).
18 The story of Lauzun’s spider-training was well known in the eighteenth century; among authors known to Smith, see, e.g., Helvétius, De l’esprit 4.10; William Eden, Principles of Penal Law 6; and Kames, Sketches of the History of Man 2.1. Most accounts, including these, use the anecdote to illustrate malevolence, calling attention to the jailer’s squashing of the spider and the grief Lauzun consequently suffered.
19 See Plutarch, Lives, “Pyrrhus” 14.
20 The maxim reappears in several eighteenth-century texts known to Smith; see most prominently Addison, Spectator 25.
21 Robertson includes