"How is it that such an extraordinary man (in the best sense), whose intellect was so wide-ranging and who was just as much artist and organizer as he was scholar, could at the same time be so blind to moral-political postulates (which even in the narrower domain of economics are more important in the long run than clever monetary formulae) without which human society cannot exist? To fully appreciate the kind of man and the kind of philosophy we are here concerned with, it is useful to compare Keynes with Adam Smith. In the depth and extent of their influence at least, the two men were strikingly similar. Moreover, both Smith and Keynes had interests which extended far beyond the confines of economics. But whereas Smith left us, in addition to his magnum opus on the Wealth of Nations (1776) a book on the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) which exposes the full moral-philosophical foundations of his much-misconstrued economic doctrines, Keynes has left us, in addition to his economic works, a monograph on the theory of probability (A Treatise on Probability, 1921). For Smith, whose book on the Wealth of Nations was planned as a segment of a giant opus on the cultural history of mankind, economics was viewed as an organic part of the larger whole of the intellectual, moral, and historical life of society; for Keynes, economics was part of a mathematical-mechanical universe. The one man was a representative of the humanist spirit of the 18th century; the other a representative of the geometric spirit of the 20th century; a deistic moralist was the one, an exponent of positivistic scientism the other."