FORMULAE OF SOCIAL PROGRESS 183 
of “selves.” Indeed in Smith we have a theological and meta- 
physical} interpretation of the principles which a hundred years 
or more later were to be established by historical and empirical 
study and interpreted in scientific terms. 
Adam Smith has been given the credit of being the founder of 
the laissez faire school of economists, and to this degree he stands 
primarily as an exponent of passive adaptation; but while he 
gives prominence to wise self-interest, especially in his political 
economy, he criticizes severely those who make this the deter- 
mining factor in social progress and raises to a prominence 
previously unknown the correlative and corrective doctrine of 
sympathy or fellow-feeling. Nor does he try to evolve the latter 
from the former, as did Helvetius, Bentham and others,? holding, 
on the contrary, that the capacity for fellow-feeling is an original 
endowment of man functioning contrary to self-interest under the 
sense of duty. 
Smith holds that etymologically sympathy includes only fel- 
low-feeling with the sufferings of another, but practically that 
it includes all kinds of fellow-feeling, and that “ our propensity to 
sympathize with joy is much stronger than our propensity to 
sympathize with sorrow.” 4 This is due to its relation to individ- 
ual pleasure and pain, based on the purpose of the Creator, and 
also on its greater social utility.® 
Sympathy is the result of imagination, —of putting one’s self in 
place of another,’— and so requires community of experience. 
This calls for a levelling process manifested especially in self- 
control on the part of those in distress.” 
Judgment of propriety concerning the action of another is 
based on imaginary self-judgment and the sentiment of approval 
resulting. ‘‘ If, upon bringing the case home to our own breast,” 
he says, “‘ we find that the sentiments which it gives occasion to 
1 Using these terms in the Comtean sense; cf. Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 
139 f., 174, 223, 232. 
2 Ibid., pp. 477 f. 
3 Tbid., pt. 3, chs. II and III, especially pp. srs f. 
4 Ibid., pp. 4, 68, 145. 
5 Ibid., Book I, Sect. 2, pp. 94 f., 310. 
§ Tbid., ch. I, pp. 178 f. 7 Tbid., pp. 25 f. 
