"Though," he says, "you despise that picture, or that poem, or even that system of philosophy which I admire, there is little danger of our quarrelling upon that account. Neither of us can reasonably be much interested about them. They ought all of them to be matters of great indifference to us both; so that, though our opinions may be opposite, our affections may still be very nearly the same. But it is quite otherwise with regard to those objects by which either you or I are particularly affected. Though your judgments in matters of speculation, though your sentiments in matters of taste, are quite opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition;and, if I have any degree of temper, I may still find some entertainment in your conversation, even upon those very subjects. But if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none which bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine. You are confounded at my violence and passion, and I am enraged at your cold insensibility and want of feeling."Accordingly, we only regard the sentiments which we share as moral, or the contrary, when they affect another person or ourselves in a peculiar manner; when they bear no relation to either of us, no moral propriety is recognized in a mere agreement of feeling. It is obvious that this explanation, to which Brown pays no attention whatever, is satisfactory to a certain point. A plain, or a mountain, or a picture, are matters about which it is intelligible that agreement or difference should give rise to very different feelings from those produced by a case of dishonesty, excessive anger, or untruthfulness. Being objects so different in their nature, it is only natural that they should give rise to very different sentiments. Independently of all sympathy, admiration of a picture or a mountain is a very different thing from admiration of a generous action or a display of courage. The language of all men has observed the difference, and the admiration in the one case is with perfect reason called moral, to distinguish it from the admiration which arises in the other. But when Adam Smith classes "the conduct of a third person" among things which, like the beauty of a plain or the size of a mountain, need no imaginary change of situation on the part of observers to be approved of by them, he inadvertently deserts his own principle, which, if this were true, would fail to account for the approbation of actions done long ago, in times or places unrelated to the approver.
But, even if Adam Smith's explanation with regard to the difference of approbation felt where conduct is concerned from that felt in matters of taste or opinion be accepted as satisfactory, it is strange that he should not have seen the difficulty of accounting by his theory for the absence of anything like moral approbation in a number of cases where sympathy none the less strongly impels us to share and enter into the emotions of another person. For instance, if we see a man in imminent danger of his lifepursued by a bull or seeming to fall from a tight ropethough we may fully sympathize with his real or pretended fear, in neither case do we for that reason morally approve of it. In the same way, we may sympathize with or enter into any other emotion he manifests his love, his hope, or his joywithout any the more approving them or passing any judgment on them whatever. Sympathy has been well defined as "a species of involuntary imitation of the displays of feeling enacted in our presence, which is followed by the rise of the feelings themselves." (13) Thus we become affected with whatever the mental state may be that is manifested by the expressed feelings of another person; but unless his emotion already contains the element of moral approbation, or the contrary, as in a case of gratitude or resentment, the mere fact of sympathy will no more give rise to it than will sympathy with another person's fear give rise to any moral approval of it. It is evident, therefore, that sympathy does not necessarily involve approbation, and that it only involves moral approbation where the sentiments shared by sympathy belong to the class of emotions denominated moral.
What, then, is the real relation between sympathy and approbation? and to what extent is the fact, of sympathy an explanation of the fact of approbation?