Smith added something new to the picture. He clinched in practice what Hume saw abstractly. His favorite words, active and productive, are not at all Hume’s words. Smith, though he didn’t have much of one by romantic standards, liked life. What Smith took from Hume’s demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.
