ADAAf SMITH. 207 founder of political economy.* Smith not only takes into consideration — like his greater friend, Hume — all the prob- lems proposed by his predecessors, but, further (in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, published while he was professor at Glasgow), combines the various attempts at their solution, not by eclectic co-ordination but by working them over for himself, and arranges them on a uniform principle, thus accomplishing a work which has not yet received due recog- nition beyond the limits of his native land. He reached this comprehensive moral principle by recognizing the full bearing of a thought which Hume had incidentally expressed, that moral judgment depends on participation in the feelings of the agent, and by following out with fine psychological observation this sympathy of men into its first and last manifestations. In this way a twofold kind of morality was revealed to him : mere propriety of behavior and real merit in action. On the one hand, that is, the sympathy of the spectator — as Hume has one-sidedly emphasized — is directed to the utility of the consequences (or to the " merit ") of the action, and, on the other, to the fitness of the motives (or their " propriety "). An action is proper when the impartial spectator is able to sympathize with its motive, and meritorious if he can sympathize also with its end or effect ; /. <?., if, in the first case, the feelings are suitable to their objects (neither too strong nor too weak), and, in the second case, the consequences of the act are advanta- geous to others. Merit = propriety -f utility. The main conclusion is this: Sympathy is that by means of which virtue is recognized and approved, as well as that which is approved as virtue ; it is ratio cognoscendi as well as ratio essendi, the criterion as well as the source of moral- ity. Thus Smith endeavors to solve the two principal problems of English ethics — the criterion and the origin of virtue — with a common answer. "Sympathy " denotes primarily nothing more than the innate and purely formal power of imitating to a certain degree the feelings of others. From this modest germ is
- The epoch-making work, with which he called economic science into exist-
ence, The Wealth of Nations, appeared in 1776. Cf. Wilhelm Hasshncli. Unttrsuchungen Uber Adam Smith, Leipsic, 1891.
