I know Adam Smith wrote his "Wealth of Nations", but it seems unclear whether it was a prescription that was followed or a description of what was occurring anyway.
Were people just trying to do whatever made the most money, resulting in capitalism as we understand it, or was capitalism actually an end goal of someone in power?
How do you define capitalism. There are many different ways of describing it. Depending on how you conceive of it, I might say that capitalism had existed as an "economic system" well before the early modern period. Italian merchants had long been in search of capital and often praised it as a worthwhile goal. Furthermore, we can see from the writings of men like Datini that they had some idea that a market existed and prices were controlled by supply and demand.