In most instances of disagreement, the present edition incorporates the decisions of the Glasgow editors for the compelling reasons set forth in their notes.

The textual apparatus to the present edition includes a set of biographical notes and a set of textual notes. Historical information can be found in the biographical notes. The textual notes are of four types: definitions of words; citations of authors directly referenced or indirectly appropriated by Smith; references to key prior interventions in selected philosophical debates in which Smith is a participant; and references to parallel passages elsewhere in his corpus. Some notes also indicate the key changes that Smith made to the sixth edition; these do not, however, aspire to replicate the labors of the Glasgow Edition’s editors, and readers interested in tracking these changes are encouraged to consult their thorough documentation of such. In preparing my own notes I have relied chiefly on sources with which Smith was demonstrably familiar on the evidence supplied by the catalogues of his library compiled by James Bonar and Hiroshi Mizuta, and by references elsewhere in his corpus; hence my recurrence to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language , Hume’s History of England, and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, among other sources ancient and modern that seem to have been prominent in Smith’s mind during the long period in which he composed and revised his work. In all instances notes are meant to be explicatory rather than interpretative.

All readers of Smith owe a tremendous debt to the excellent annotations of several previous editions. In addition to those of Raphael and Macfie, these include those to be found in the editions of Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2002), of Walther Eckstein (Leipzig, 1926; reissued Felix Meiner, 2004), and of Michaël Biziou, Claude Gautier, and Jean-François Pradeau (Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Their notes have proven to be the inevitable and indispensible foundation for many of my own, and I wish particularly to record my great appreciation for and reliance on the careful work of Eckstein as well as Raphael and Macfie in documenting Smith’s changes across editions, for Haakonssen’s and the French editors’ references to parallel passages in Smith’s corpus and especially his jurisprudence lectures, and for the French editors’ comprehensive efforts at documenting Smith’s eighteenth-century philosophical context. To spare readers from having to witness the pedantic quarrels of editor with editor, I have not registered my own agreements and disagreements with their annotations in individual notes, but these agreements, as well as those several instances where I have added to or felt compelled to depart from their judgments, will be evident to any who compare my annotations to theirs. I’m also pleased to record here my debts to Igor Borba, Patty Rodda, Ethan Bercot, and Alan Kellner for their invaluable assistance, and to Leon Montes, Eric Schliesser, and Doug Den Uyl for their many helpful comments.

Preparing this edition has taught me a great deal, and only further increased my admiration for and interest in Smith. Readers of this work are always very welcome to contact me if I can be of any assistance in contributing to their own study of his work: [email protected].

RYAN PATRICK HANLEY

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Facsimile title page of the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments

ADVERTISEMENT

Since the first publication of THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS, which was so long ago as the beginning of the year 1759, several corrections, and a good many illustrations of the doctrines contained in it, have occurred to me. But the various occupations in which the different accidents of my life necessarily involved me, have till now prevented me from revising this work with the care and attention which I always intended.1 The reader will find the principal alterations which I have made in this New Edition, in the last Chapter of the third Section of Part First; and in the four first Chapters of Part Third. Part Sixth, as it stands in this New Edition, is altogether new. In Part Seventh, I have brought together the greater part of the different passages concerning the Stoical Philosophy, which, in the former Editions, had been scattered about in different parts of the work. I have likewise endeavoured to explain more fully, and examine more distinctly, some of the doctrines of that famous sect. In the fourth and last Section of the same Part, I have thrown together a few additional observations concerning the duty and principle of veracity. There are, besides, in other parts of the work, a few other alterations and corrections of no great moment.

In the last paragraph of the first Edition of the present work, I said, that I should in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. In the Enquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I have partly executed this promise; at least so far as concerns police, revenue, and arms. What remains, the theory of jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing, by the same occupations which had till now prevented me from revising the present work.2 Though my very advanced age leaves me, I acknowledge, very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction; yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute every thing which it announced.3

PART I.

OF THE PROPRIETY OF ACTION.

CONSISTING OF THREE SECTIONS.

SECTION I.

OF THE SENSE OF PROPRIETY.

CHAPTER I.

Of Sympathy.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.1

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack,2 as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.3 By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.