and decay but to the indefinite expansion of the productive machinery necessary to satisfy them.

The case for permanence—for the prospect of a social order capable of withstanding the effects of time—no longer had to rest on divine intervention or the perfectibility of reason. It now rested more securely, if unexpectedly and ironically, on ordinary ambition, vanity, greed, and a morally misplaced respect, as Smith put it, for the "vain and empty distinctions of greatness." In the "languor of disease and the weariness of old age," the moral insignificance of worldly goods appeared in its true light, according to Smith, since neither possessions nor even the beauty and utility so universally admired in "any production of art" proved capable, under conditions of adversity, of bringing true happiness. People seldom looked at the matter in this "abstract and philosophical light," however; and "it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner," Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in a passage that alluded for the first time to the "invisible hand" that leads men and women to accumulate wealth and thus inadvertently to serve as social benefactors in their pursuit of deceptively attractive but ultimately empty possessions. "It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."

Smith's work is instructive, in the unfamiliar context of the development of progressive ideology, not only because it enables us to see what was really distinctive about that ideology—the exemption of the modern world from the judgment of time—but because it illustrates the persistence of certain reservations that qualified the optimism produced by the modern discovery of abundance. His occasional musings on the vanity of acquisition betrayed a lingering attachment to the "stoical philosophy," which sought to base "our happiness upon the most solid and secure foundation, a firm confidence in that [divine] wisdom and justice which govern the world." The only objection to stoicism, Smith noted, was that

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