s indeed he did
everywhere he went, and of all the friends he met in France there was
none in whose society he took more pleasure, or for whose mind and
character he formed a profounder admiration, than that great thinker
and statesman. If his conversation with Morellet ran mainly on
political and economic subjects, it would most probably run even more
largely on such subjects with Turgot, for they were both at the moment
busy writing their most important works on those subjects. Turgot's
_Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ was written in 1766, though it
was only published three years later in the _Ephemerides du Citoyen_;
and it cannot, I think, be doubted that the ideas and theories with
which his mind was then boiling must have been the subject of
discussion again and again in the course of his numerous conversations
with Smith. So also if Smith brought out various points in the work he
was undertaking for discussion with Morellet, he may reasonably be
inferred to have done the same with Morellet's greater friend Turgot,
and all this would have been greatly to their mutual advantage. No
vestiges of their intercourse, however, remain, though some critics
profess to see its results writ very large on the face of their
writings.

Professor Thorold Rogers thinks the influences of Turgot's reasoning
on Smith's mind to be easily perceptible to any reader of the
_Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ and of the _Wealth of Nations_.
Dupont de Nemours once went so far as to say that whatever was true in
Smith was borrowed from Turgot, and whatever was not borrowed
from Turgot was not true; but he afterwards retracted that
absurdly-sweeping allegation, and confessed that he had made it before
he was able to read English; while Leon Say thinks Turgot owed much of
his philosophy to Smith, and Smith owed much of his economics to
Turgot.[164] Questions of literary obligation are often difficult to
settle. Two contemporary thinkers, dealing with the same subject under
the same general influences and tendencies of the time, may think
nearly alike even without any manner of personal intercommunication,
and the idea of natural liberty of trade, in which the main
resemblance between the writers in the present case is supposed to
occur, was already in the ground, and sprouting up here and there
before either of them wrote at all. Smith's position on that subject,
moreover, is so much more solid, balanced, and moderate than Turgot's,