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I certainly am not going to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Smith was
committed to an evolving view of human nature, and, for the stronger
claim, that this evolution was driven by changing stages. This requires a very long
treatment. BUT...the very next paragraph (2) of the passage that
Chass cites from Book I, Chapter II, starts as follows: "Whether this propensity be one of
those original principles in human nature, of which no further account can be given; or,
whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of
reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire." This passage, first,
implies that Smith thought it likely that one can at least imagine human nature (at one
point in the perhaps mythical past even prior to the division of labor) without this
propensity; the more "probable" view is, in fact, one in which some now stable
propensities of human nature require the previous development of some faculties. This is
entirely compatible with and, in fact, I am inclined to say it is explained by the picture
that Smith presents in his (published) essay on The First Formation of Languages, where
the capacity for abstraction/reason and language, themselves, are slow cultural/societal
achievements and not fixed givens of human nature. Moreover, the sentence from WN I.II.2
quoted above also makes clear that, in WN, Smith is deliberately bracketing questions
about the fixed or unfixed nature of human nature. For the purposes of the inquiry at hand
(whatever those may be), Smith thinks he can take some elements/propensities of human
nature as given. But this does not mean that he believes them to be unchanging. He has
explicitly said, that he thinks it is more "probable" that this is not the case. So, one
should be careful to quote later passages from WN as affirming certain rigid views about
human nature; in context, Smith may be committed to those views, but we should never
forget that rigid picture of human nature serves the (political, philosophic, scientific,
economic, etc.) purposes of the Inquiry. V. Brown and C. Griswold offer very important
remarks about the rhetorical structure of WN.
 
Yours, 
Eric Schliesser 
 
 
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