There ran thus through the political economy of both Adam Smith and the Physiocrates, though much more extensively andsystematically in the former, a combination of the experience philosophy, of inductive investigation, with a priori speculationderived from the Nature hypothesis. Hence, while on one hand the inductive method preserved the great Scotchman fromgrave errors into which not a few of his English followers in the mother-country of inductive philosophy have been led bythe a priori method, on the other hand the bias given by preconceived ideas was so strong in the case of Smith himself, as tocause him to see in all his inductions proofs of a complete code of nature of a beneficent order of nature flowing fromindividual liberty and the natural desires and dispositions of men. Like the Physiocrates, he blended the so-called `evidence,'or self-evidence, of the law of nature in itself, with the evidence of phenomena carefully collated and sifted. The truth is, thatSmith wrote before the physical sciences had developed canons of induction, and he thought an induction complete when hehad obtained an immense number of instances, and a theory proved when it seemed to fit every observed case. Throughouthistory, and over Europe, he saw nothing but disorder and misery from such human legislation as the world had known,wherever it went beyond protecting personal liberty and property; he saw on all sides a mass of poverty traceable to Stateinterference; the only sources of whatever wealth and prosperity existed were the natural motives to industry, and the naturalpowers of production of individual men, and he leaped to the conclusion that nothing was requisite but to leave Nature toitself, that complete harmony existed between individual and public interests, and that the natural conduct of mankindsecured not only the greatest abundance, but an equal distribution of wealth. He thought he found in phenomena positiveproof of the Law of Nature, and of the character of its enactments. We find here the explanation of the seemingcontradiction which Adam Smith's combination of the theory of natural Law with the inductive historical method gives toMr. Maine's proposition `that the book of Montesquieu, with all its defects, still proceeded on that Historical Method, beforewhich the Law of Nature has never maintained its footing for an instant.' It is incontrovertible that historical investigationconvicts the Nature hypothesis of reproducing a mere fiction of ancient philosophy; nevertheless Adam Smith, partly underthe bias given by the theory itself, partly because the method of interrogating Nature itself was new, and the canons ofinduction unsettled, conceived that the method of Montesquieu proved the truth of the theory of Nature; in short, thatnature, when interrogated, confirmed his anticipations of Nature.
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