* Adam Smith makes the pithy observation that the man who
sympathises with a woman in childbed, cannot be said to put
himself in her place. ("The Theory of the Moral Sentiments,"
Part vii. sec. iii. chap. i.) Perhaps there is more humour than
force in the example; and, in spite of this and other
observations of the same tenor, I think that the one defect of
the remarkable work in which it occurs is that it lays too much
stress on conscious substitution, too little on purely reflex
sympathy.
** Esther v. 9-13. ". . . but when Haman saw Mordecai in the
king's gate, that he stood not up, nor moved for him, he was
full of indignation against Mordecai. . . . And Haman told them
of the glory of his riches . . . and all the things wherein the
king had promoted him . . . Yet all this availeth me nothing,
so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate."
What a shrewd exposure of human weakness it is!
It is needful only to look around us, to see that the greatest restrainer of the anti-social tendencies of men is fear, not of the law, but of the opinion of their fellows. The conventions of honour bind men who break legal, moral, and religious bonds; and, while people endure the extremity of physical pain rather than part with life, shame drives the weakest to suicide.
Every forward step of social progress brings
men into closer relations with their fellows, and increases the importance of the pleasures and pains derived from sympathy. We judge the acts of others by our own sympathies, and we judge our own acts by the sympathies of others, every day and all day long, from childhood upwards, until associations, as indissoluble as those of language, are formed between certain acts and the feelings of approbation or disapprobation. It becomes impossible to imagine some acts without disapprobation, or others without approbation of the actor, whether he be one's self, or any one else. We come to think in the acquired dialect of morals. An artificial personality, the "man within," as Adam Smith* calls conscience, is built up beside the natural personality. He is the watchman of society, charged to restrain the anti-social tendencies of the natural man within the limits required by social welfare.
* "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part iii. chap. 3. On the
Influence and Authority of Conscience.
XI.
I have termed this evolution of the feelings out of which the primitive bonds of human society are so largely forged, into the organized and personified sympathy we call conscience, the ethical process.* So far as it tends to