r friend, Hume--all the
problems proposed by his predecessors, but, further (in his _Theory of
Moral Sentiments_, 1759, published while he was professor at Glasgow),
combines the various attempts at their solution, not by eclectic
co-ordination but by working them over for himself, and arranges them on a
uniform principle, thus accomplishing a work which has not yet received
due recognition beyond the limits of his native land. He reached this
comprehensive moral principle by recognizing the full bearing of a thought
which Hume had incidentally expressed, that moral judgment depends on
participation in the feelings of the agent, and by following out with fine
psychological observation this sympathy of men into its first and last
manifestations. In this way a twofold kind of morality was revealed to him:
mere propriety of behavior and real merit in action. On the one hand, that
is, the sympathy of the spectator--as Hume has one-sidedly emphasized--is
directed to the utility of the consequences (or to the "merit") of the
action, and, on the other, to the fitness of the motives (or their
"propriety"). An action is proper when the impartial spectator is able to
sympathize with its motive, and meritorious if he can sympathize also with
its end or effect; _i.e._, if, in the first case, the feelings are suitable
to their objects (neither too strong nor too weak), and, in the second
case, the consequences of the act are advantageous to others. Merit =
propriety + utility. The main conclusion is this: Sympathy is that by
means of which virtue is recognized and approved, as well as that which is
approved as virtue; it is _ratio cognoscendi_ as well as _ratio essendi_,
the criterion as well as the source of morality. Thus Smith endeavors to
solve the two principal problems of English ethics--the criterion and the
origin of virtue--with a common answer.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Farrer's _Adam Smith_, English Philosophers Series,
1880.--TR.]

[Footnote 2: The epoch-making work, with which he called economic science
into existence, _The Wealth of Nations_\ appeared in 1776. Cf. Wilhelm
Hassbach, _Untersuchungen ueber Adam Smith_, Leipsic, 1891.]

"Sympathy" denotes primarily nothing more than the innate and purely formal
power of imitating to a certain degree the feelings of others. From this
modest germ is developed by a progressive growth the wide-spreading tree of
morality: moral judgment, the moral imperative with its religious sanctio