In his famous work, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ (1776), Adam Smith founds this prosperity purely upon the entirely free and intelligent activity of egoism. About the part to be played by ethics in economic questions he says nothing. Economic development he leaves to be determined by its own internal laws, and is confident that, if these are left a free course, the result will be favourable. Adam Smith, the moral philosopher, is also, because he is endowed with a rationalistic optimism, the founder of the _laissez-faire_ form of economic [pg 083] doctrine, that of the Manchester school, as it is called. He led industry and commerce in their struggle for liberation from the petty and injurious tutelage of authority. To-day, when economic life among all peoples is again delivered over to the most short-sighted ideas of authorities who never think in terms of economics, we can measure the greatness of his performance. Like Adam Smith, Bentham also is an adherent of the principle of freedom in economic life. At the same time he has an ethical conception of society, and demands from it that in a spirit of progress it shall help to level out as far as possible the differences between rich and poor. What, then, do Hume and Adam Smith mean for ethics? They introduce into the treatment of them the element of empirical psychology. They believe that through the value they give to the significance of sympathy they are giving a natural foundation to utilitarianism, though in reality this psychology begins to correct it and to undermine its position. There hovers before the mind of utilitarianism the great conception that ethics are a result of reflexion. It thinks to make men moral by keeping their attention fixed on the deep nature of ethics and the necessity of the ends at which it aims. This conception draws its life from the conviction that thought has been given complete control over the will. The absolute rationality of the ethical is the foundation on which it builds, and if it is not to get quite bewildered about its own nature, it cannot allow itself to recognize as presuppositions of the ethical, facts which are given it by psychology and cannot be verified independently. With Hume and Adam Smith, who trace ethics back to something given in human nature which resembles instinct, there crops up the problem how ethics can be something natural, and at the same time something subordinate to thought, for that they are subordinate to thought has to be assumed even by the champions of this psychological utilitarianism. If they were nothing but the exercise of an instinct, they would not be capable of widening and [pg 084] deepening, nor could they be imparted to all and sundry with convincing force. Yet how is it conceivable that thought influences the sympathetic instinct? What have the two in common that the work of one can be carried further by the other?