clarity the way in which the idea of pleasure is related at once to individual satisfaction and to that sympathy for others which is one of the roots of social existence.  He points out the need for happiness in work.  “The mind,” he writes, “acquires new vigor, enlarges its powers and faculties, and by an assiduity in honest industry both satisfies its own appetites and prevents growth of unnatural ones”; though, like his predecessor, Francis Hutcheson, he overemphasizes the delights opened by civilization to the humbler class of men.  He gives large space in his discussion to the power of will; and, indeed, one of the main advantages he ascribed to government was the compulsion it puts upon us to allow the categories of time and space a part in our calculations.  He does not, being in his own life entirely free from avarice, regard the appetite for riches as man’s main motive to existence; though no one was more urgent in his insistence that “the avidity of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is ... destructive of society” unless balanced by considerations of justice.  And what he therein intended may be gathered from the liberal notions of equality he manifested.  “Every person,” he wrote in a famous passage, “if possible ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life.  No one can doubt but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor.”  It is clear that we have moved far from the narrow confines of the old political arithmetic.  The theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of economics—­the word itself he did not know—­in a more generous perspective than at any previous time.  It would be too much to say that his grasp of its psychological foundation enabled him entirely to move from the limitations of the older concept of a national prosperity expressed only in terms of bullion to the view of economics as a social science.  But at least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein he had the secret of its true understanding. The Wealth of Nations would less easily have made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared the road for its reception.

What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political thought?  Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of political facts.  Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his predecessors.  Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching.  Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means that he was indebted to Shaftesbury.  Indeed, there is much of the sturdy commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is characteristic