Sympathy and Sensibility

On Sympathy

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40)

"We have a lively idea of everything relating to us. All human creatures are related to us by resemblance. Their persons, therefore, their interests, their passions, their pains and pleasures must strike upon us in a lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to the original one. . . If this be true in general, it must be more so of affliction and sorrow. These always have a longer and more lasting influence than any pleasure or enjoyment."

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive of it in a very lively manner."

Fellow-feeling is caused "by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or be affected by what he feels . . . [but] our sympathy with the joy or grief of another, before we are informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect . . . Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from the situation which excites it."


Sensibility, from the OED Online:
 5. a. Quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; the quality of being easily and strongly affected by emotional influences; sensitiveness. Also, with const., sensitiveness to, keen sense of something.
1799   R. Sickelmore Agnes & Leonora II. 9   Her feelings, which had been so acutely wounded..as almost to hurry sensibility to madness, now assailed her with renovated force.
6. In the 18th and early 19th c. (afterwards somewhat rarely): Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art.
1768   L. Sterne Sentimental Journey II. 182   Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!