66 PROLEGOMENA 



It is needful only to look around us, to see that the 

 greatest restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men 

 is fear, not of the law, but of the opinion of their 

 fellows. The conventions of honour bind men who 

 break legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while 

 people endure the extremity of physical pain rather than 

 part with life, shame drives the weakest to suicide. 



Every forward step of social progress brings men into 

 closer relations with their fellows, and increases the im- 

 portance of the pleasures and pains derived from sym- 

 pathy. We judge the acts of others by our own 

 sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sym- 

 pathies of others, every day and all day long, from 

 childhood upwards, until associations, as indissoluble as 

 those of language, are formed between certain acts and 

 the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It be- 

 comes impossible to imagine some acts without disap- 

 probation, or others without approbation of the actor, 

 whether he be one's self, or any one else. We come to 

 think in the acquired dialect of morals. An artificial 

 personality, the "man within," as Adam Smith 20 calls 

 conscience, is built up beside the natural personality. 

 He is the watchman of society, charged to restrain the 

 anti-social tendencies of the natural man within the 

 limits required by social welfare. 



the king had promoted him. . . . Yet all this availeth me 

 nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's 

 gate." What a shrewd exposure of human weakness it is! 

 [T. H. H.] 



20 "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part iii. chap 3. On 

 the influence and authority of conscience. [T. H. H.] 



Adam Smith (1723-1790), the Scotch economist, published in 

 1759 his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He is best known as the 

 author of the Wealth of Nations and the founder of the science 

 of political economy. 



