While Smith’s French friends were remonstrating with him about an incidental allusion in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, his old friend, Lord Kames—­still at eighty-three as keen for metaphysical controversy as he had been with Bishop Butler sixty years before—­was preparing an elaborate attack upon the theory of the book itself, which he proposed to incorporate in a new edition of his own Principles of Morality and Religion.  Before publishing this examination of the theory, however, he sent the manuscript to Smith for perusal, and received the following reply:—­

     16th November 1778.

MY DEAR LORD—­I am much obliged to you for the kind communication of the objections you propose to make in yr. new edition to my system.  Nothing can be more perfectly friendly and polite than the terms in which you express yourself with regard to me, and I should be extremely peevish and ill-tempered if I could make the slightest opposition to their publication.  I am no doubt extremely sorry to find myself of a different opinion both from so able a judge of the subject and from so old and good a friend; but differences of this kind are inevitable, and besides, Partium contentionibus respublica crescit.  I should have been waiting on your Lordship before this time, but the remains of a cold have for these four or five days past made it inconvenient for me to go out in the evening.  Remember me to Mrs. Drummond,[297] and believe me to be, my dear Lord, your most obliged and most humble servant,

     ADAM SMITH.

Smith had most probably discussed the merits of Lord Kames’s objections with his lordship already, so that he saw no occasion to reply to them in his letter.  What Kames principally combated was the idea that sympathy with the sufferings of another originated in any way in our imagining what would be our own feelings if we were in the sufferer’s place.  He contends, on the contrary, that it is excited directly by the perception of the screams, contortions, tears, or other outward signs of the pain that is endured; and that trying to put ourselves in the sufferer’s place produces really a self-satisfaction, on account of our own immunity from his troubles, which has the effect not of awakening the feeling of pity but of moderating and diminishing it.

A second objection he raises is that if Smith’s theory were true, those in whom the power of imagination was strongest would feel the force of the moral duties most sensibly, and vice versa, which, he says, is contradicted by experience.  His last objection is that while the theory proposes to explain the origin of the moral sentiments so far as they respect other persons, it fails entirely to account for those sentiments in regard to ourselves.  Our distress on losing an only son and our gratitude for a kindly office neither need to be explained nor can they be explained by imagining ourselves to be other persons.