person on whom it would serve some good purpose to bestow a copy of the Treatise; and we have here evidently the first introduction to each other’s notice of two friends, of whom it can be said there was no third person writing the English language during the same period who has had so much influence upon the opinions of mankind as either of these two men.” {p-xi}
Hume’s influence upon Adam Smith was great. Even in the ring of the phraseology of the Wealth of Nations I sometimes fancy I can hear Hume. Anyway, the book referred to in the above letter as sent to Smith, Mr. Haldane considers as “in all probability” the determining factor in making Smith abandon his original intention of entering the Church. “Whether Hume could have been but for Smith we cannot now say; but we know that, but for Hume, Smith could never have been.”5 While agreeing that “but for Hume Smith could never have been,” I see no reason to question that Hume could have been without Smith. Hume had within him what may here be called the divine light, and it had to come out. That is why, “in poverty and riches, in health and sickness, in laborious obscurity and amidst the blaze of fame,” his ruling passion—a passion for literature—never abated. No man can strike out for himself an original line and stick to it like this, “through thick and thin,” unless he have assurance of the truth of that that is in him. Hume had this assurance. True, he sought fame—and he achieved fame; not for its own sake—that is inconceivable in so great a thinker, a thinker with such a true notion of the relation of things—but for the sake of the truths he had to promulgate; for the higher his eminence the wider and more attentive would be his audience. Of course, he sought fame, and he found gratification in it. It was not the gratification of vanity, however, that writers on Hume usually interpret it as; it was the gratification arising from the knowledge that one has hit the mark—that one has not laboured in vain. The petty vanity ascribed to Hume would not have {p-xii} suffered him as “the parent of the first elucidations of political economy to see his own offspring eclipsed, and to see it with pride”—his