There has been much discussion on the question --What is the scientific method followed by Smith in his great work?Bysome it is considered to have been purely deductive,a view which Buckle has perhaps carried to the greatest extreme.Heasserts that in Scotland the inductive method was unknown,that the inductive philosophy exercised no influence on Scottishthinkers;and,though Smith spent some of the most important years of his youth in England,where the inductive methodwas supreme,and though he was widely read in general philosophical literature,he yet thinks he adopted the deductivemethod because it we habitually followed in Scotland,--and this though Buckle maintains that it is the only appropriate,oreven possible,method in political economy,which surely would have been a sufficient reason for choosing it.That theinductive spirit exercised no influence on Scottish philosophers is certainly not true;as will be presently shown,Montesquieu,whose method is essentially inductive,was in Smith's time studied with quite peculiar care and regarded withspecial veneration by Smith's fellow-countrymen.As to Smith himself,what may justly be said of him is that the deductivebent was certainly not the predominant character of his mind,nor did his great excellence lie in the "dialectic skill"whichBuckle ascribes to him.What strikes us most in his book is his wide and keen observation of social facts,and his perpetualtendency to dwell on these and elicit their significance,instead of drawing conclusions from abstract principles by elaboratechains of reasoning.It is this habit of his mind which gives us,in reading him,so strong and abiding a sense of being incontact with the realities of life.
That Smith does,however,largely employ the deductive method is certain;and that method is quite legitimate when thepremises from which the deduction sets out are known universal facts of human nature and properties of external objects.
Whether this mode of proceeding will carry us far may indeed well be doubted;but its soundness cannot be disputed.Butthere is another vicious species of deduction which,as Cliffe Leslie has shown,seriously tainted the philosophy of Smith --in which the premises are not facts ascertained by observation,but the same a priori assumptions,half theological halfmetaphysical,respecting a supposed harmonious and beneficent natural order of things which we found in the physiocrats,and which,as we saw,were embodied in the name of that sect.In his view,Nature has made provision for social well-beingby the principle of the human constitution which prompts every man to better his condition:the individual aims only at hisprivate gain,but in doing so is "led by an invisible hand"to promote the public good,which was no part of his intention;human institutions,by interfering with the action of this principle in the name of the public interest,defeat their own end;but,when all systems of preference or restraint are taken away,"the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishesitself of its own accord."This theory is,of course,not explicitly presented by Smith as a foundation of his economicdoctrines,but it is really the secret substratum on which they rest.Yet,whilst such latent postulates warped his view ofthings,they did not entirely determine his method.His native bent towards the study of things as they are preserved himfrom extravagances into which many of his followers have fallen.But besides this,as Leslie has pointed out,the influence ofMontesquieu tended to counterbalance the theoretic prepossessions produced by the doctrine of the jus naturae .That greatthinker,though he could not,at his period,understand the historical method which is truly appropriate to sociologicalinquiry,yet founded his conclusions on induction.It is true,as Comte has remarked,that his accumulation of facts,borrowed from the most different states of civilisation,and not subjected to philosophic criticism,necessarily remained onthe whole sterile,or at least could not essentially advance the study of society much beyond the point at which he found it.
His merit,as we have before mentioned,lay in the recognition of the subjection of all social phenomena to natural laws,notin the discovery of those laws.But this limitation was overlooked by the philosophers of the time of Smith,who were muchattracted by the system he followed of tracing social facts to the special circumstances,physical or moral,of thecommunities in which they were observed.Leslie has shown that Lord Kaimes,Dalrymple,and Millar --contemporaries ofSmith,and the last his pupil --were influenced by Montesquieu;and he might have added the more eminent name ofFerguson,whose respect and admiration for the great Frenchman are expressed in striking terms in his History of CivilSociety .(22)We are even informed that Smith himself in his later years was occupied in preparing a commentary on the Espirit des Lois .(23)he was thus affected by two different and incongruous systems of thought --one setting out from animaginary code of nature intended for the benefit of man,and leading to an optimistic view of the economic constitutionfounded on enlightened self-interest;the other following inductive processes,and seeking to explain the several states inwhich human societies are found existing,as results of circumstances or institutions which have been in actual operation.
