Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/306

Rh, and sympathy is thus a passion which, unlike our more elementary appetites and desires, has its roots in thought, and is brought about through the intermediation of an idea. This circumstance has, I think, been overlooked by Adam Smith.

30. If Adam Smith erred in regarding sympathy as an affection of as original and elementary a character as our appetites and some of our desires, Hobbes erred, on the other side, in regarding it as forming no part of man's original nature at all, but as a secondary and derivative formation springing out of fear, which made men combine into societies for mutual aid and protection against other societies which might be disposed to do them harm. Hobbes denies that man has by nature any sympathy with his fellows. He holds that all our original passions and instincts are unsocial, or, indeed, antisocial; and in entertaining this opinion, Hobbes, I think, is so far right. He is right thus far, that prior to the dawn of self-consciousness, all our principles of action, our appetites, affections, and desires, are unsocial; they aim merely at the attainment of our own personal pleasure, and at the avoidance of our own personal pain. But after the dawn of self-consciousness, the social affections are developed, sympathy comes into existence, and this sympathy is as truly a part of our nature as any of our other affections are; the only difference between it and those which are more primitive being this, that it (sympathy, namely) exists only after