Eighteenth Century Collection Online Demo

The theory of moral sentiments: By Adam Smith, ...

The man whose sympathy keeps time to my grief, cannot but admit the reasonable|ness of my sorrow. He who admires the same poem, or the same picture, and ad|mires them exactly as I do, must surely al|low the justness of my admiration. He who laughs at the same joke, and laughs along with me, cannot well deny the propriety of my laughter. On the con|trary, the person who, upon these diffe|rent occasions, either feels no such emo|tion as that which I feel, or feels none that bears any proportion to mine, cannot avoid disapproving my sentiments on account of their dissonance with his own. If my animosity goes beyond what the indig|nation of my friend can correspond to; if my grief exceeds what his most tender compassion can go along with; if my ad|miration is either too high or too low to tally with his own; if I laugh loud and heartily at what he only smiles, or, on the contrary, only smile when he laughs loud and heartily; in all these cases, as soon as he comes from considering the ob|ject, to observe how I am affected by it, according as there is more or less dispropor|tion between his sentiments and mine, I
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Title
The theory of moral sentiments: By Adam Smith, ...
Author
Smith, Adam, 1723-1790.
Canvas
Page 23
Publication
London :: printed for A. Millar; and A. Kincaid and J. Bell, in Edinburgh,
1759.

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https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/k111361.0001.001
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"The theory of moral sentiments: By Adam Smith, ..." In the digital collection Eighteenth Century Collection Online Demo. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/k111361.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 12, 2025.
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