Page:The Theory of Moral Sentiments.pdf/13

Sect. I. in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourelves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at lat to affect us, and we then tremble and hudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or ditres of any kind excites the mot exceive orrow, o to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites ome degree of the ame emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulnes of the conception.

That this is the ource of our fellow-feeling for the miery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the ufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demontrated by many obvious obervations, if it hould not be thought ufficiently evident by itelf. When we ee a troke aimed and jut ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another perOn, we naturally hrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in ome meaure, and are hurt by it as well as the ufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the lack rope, naturally writhe and twit and balance their own bodies, as they ee him do, and as they feel that they themelves mut do if in his ituation. Perons of delicate fibres and a weak contitution of the body, complain that in looking on the ores and ulcers which are expoed by beggers in the treets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneay enation in the correpondent part of their own bodies. The horror which they Rh