It is difficult to read Adam Smith's account of the identification of sympathy and approbation, without feeling that throughout his argument there is an unconscious play upon words, and that an equivocal use of the word "sympathy" lends all its speciousness to the theory he expounds. The first meaning of the word sympathy is fellow-feeling, or the participation of another person's emotion, in which sense we may be said to sympathize with another person's hope or fear; the second meaning contains the idea of approval or praise, in which sense we may be said to sympathize with another person's gratitude or resentment. Adam Smith begins by using the word sympathy in its first and primary sense, as meaning participation in another person's feelings, and then proceeds to use it in its secondary and less proper sense, in which the idea of approbation is involved. But the sympathy in the one case is totally different from the sympathy in the other. In the one case a mere state of feeling is intended, in the other a judgment of reason. To share another person's feeling belongs only to our sensibility; to approve of it as proper, good, and right, implies the exercise of our intelligence. To employ the word "sympathy" in its latter use (as it is sometimes employed in popular parlance) is simply to employ it as a synonym for "approbation;" so that sympathy, instead of being really the source of approbation, is only another word for that approbation itself. To say that we approve of another person's sentiments when we sympathize with them is, therefore, nothing more than saying that we approve of them when we approve of them a purely tautological proposition.
It cannot therefore be said that Adam Smith's attempt to trace the feeling of moral approbation to emotions of sympathy is altogether successful, incontestable as is the truth of his appli- cation of it to many of the phenomena of life and conduct. Yet although sympathy is not the only factor in moral approbation, it is one that enters very widely into the growth of our moral perceptions. It plays, for instance, an important part in evolving in us that sense of right and wrong which is generally known as Conscience or the Moral Faculty. It is one of the elements, just as self-love is another, in that ever-forming chain of association which goes to distinguish one set of actions as good from another set of actions as bad. Our observation in others of the same outward symptoms which we know in our own case to attend joy or grief, pleasure or pain, leads us by the mere force of the remembrance of our own pleasures and pains, and independently of any control of our will, to enter into those of other people, and to promote as much as we can the one and prevent the other.
Sympathy accordingly is the source of all disinterested motives in action, of our readiness to give up pleasures and incur pains for the sake of others;and Adam Smith was so far right, that he established, by reference to this force of our sympathetic emotions, the reality of a disinterested element as the foundation of our benevolent affections. In the same way, self-love is the source of all the prudential side of morality; and to the general formation of our moral sentiments, all our other emotions, such as anger, fear, love, contribute together with sympathy, in lesser perhaps but considerable degree. None of them taken singly would suffice to account for moral approbation.
Although any action that hurts another person may so affect our natural sympathy as to give rise to the feeling of disapprobation involved in sympathetic resentment, and although an action that is injurious to ourselves may also be regarded with similar feelings of dislike, the constant pressure of authority, exercised as it is by domestic education, by government, by law, and by punishment, must first be brought to bear on such actions before the feeling of moral disapprobation can arise with regard to them. The association of the pain of punishment with certain actions, and the association of the absence of such pain (a negative pleasure) with certain others, enforces the natural dictates of our sympathetic or selfish emotions, and impresses on them the character of morality, of obligation, and of duty.
The association is so close and constant, that in course of time the feeling of the approbation or disapprobation of certain actions becomes perfectly independent of the various means, necessary at first to enforce or to prevent them; just as in many other cases our likes and dislikes become free of the associations which first permanently fixed them.