thought is ultimately, and at bottom, the lever which raises man up into the position in which we now find him existing. It is the root out of which spring all the blessings of civilisation. Take this away, and it would resolve human society into a commonwealth, or, I should rather say, an anarchy, of kangaroos or ourang-outangs.
29. The doctrine which I have just propounded in regard to the relation between self-consciousness and sympathy may enable us to modify Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments, which has been already under our review; and to render that theory, if not impregnable, at any rate more complete than it now is. Adam Smith, as you are aware, explains our moral sentiments by means of the principle of sympathy. Our faculty of moral estimation, our power of passing moral judgments either on ourselves or on others, is resolved by him into our power of sympathy, and is indeed nothing but the operation of this principle. But in working out this system Adam Smith seems to have thought that sympathy is a native and original affection of the human heart, just as hunger and thirst are natural affections of the human organism. He seems to have thought that people felt sympathy for others just as naturally as they felt their own pleasures and their own pains. This opinion I regard as incorrect. I hold that we have originally, or in the first instance, no sympathies with other people in the way in which we have origi-
