The English moral science of the century is brought to a conclusion by Adam Smith[1] (1723-90), the celebrated founder of political economy.[2] Smith not only takes into consideration—­like his greater 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 sanction, and ethical character.  Accordingly we may distinguish different stages in the development of sympathy—­the psychological stage of mere fellow-feeling, the aesthetic stage of moral appreciation, the imperative stage of moral precepts, which further on are construed as