Summary. The two passions of pity and malice are explained in a way differently from the desire for happiness or misery of another we have when we love or hate someone. These are basic, irreducible responses, while pity and malice are based on the more fundamental principle of sympathy. We pity a person when we have a sympathetic feeling corresponding to the person’s pain. Sympathy is entirely a production of the imagination, which rules out accounts of pity based on a rational assessment of the positions of ourselves and the other person. Some apparent counter-examples to this explanation are then considered, and each is explained away by appeal to some feature of the imagination.

1. Love and hatred bring with them desire for the happiness or misery of others, respectively, by “an arbitrary and original instinct implanted in our nature.” This desire may at times be “counterfeited,” in which case it arises from “secondary principles.” We can have concern for the misery of others, pity, or a joy in the misery of others, malice in cases where there is no relation of friendship (love) or enmity (hatred) to give rise to it. This occurs in cases where the other person is a perfect stranger or someone toward whose welfare one is otherwise indifferent. Malice should not be mistaken for revenge, which is based on “harm or injury.” Pity and malice arise from “original affections, which are vary’d by some particular turn of thought and imagination.”

2. The original affection is that of sympathy. [See Part II, Section 11 for the initial account of sympathy.] The fact that another person resembles us in being a person triggers a principle of association which enlivens the idea of that person. So the ideas we have of other persons, as well as of “their interests, their passions, their pains and pleasures” will be lively enough to produce an emotion similar to the one they have. The reason is that “a lively idea is easily converted into an impression.” The ideas of the “affliction and sorrow” of another person are quite lively in themselves, so they are even more readily converted into an impression.

3. The author advances an argument for his view that the kinds of emotion of which pity and malice are cases are based on sympathy, which “wou’d be consider’d as certain, either in natural philosophy or common life.” Sympathy is used to explain our reaction to tragic plays, where we have the emotions of “grief, terror, indignation, and other affections” which are represented by the author as being in the characters. These several passions are produced either by a single principle, sympathy, or by separate principles applying to each emotion individually. It would be “highly unreasonable” to adopt the second kind of explanation, as each one of the emotions is generated by the same process. “They are all first present in the mind of one person, and afterwards appear in the mind of another; and as the manner of their appearance, first as an idea, then as an impression, is in every case the same, the transition must arise from the same principle,” i.e., sympathy.

4. Another argument is based on the fact that pity arises primarily when we are in the near presence of the pitied person. Contiguity is a principle of the association governing the imagination, so this fact “is a proof, that [pity is] derived from the imagination.” Women and children are most guided by imagination, and they are the most subject to this emotion. “The same infirmity, which makes them faint at the sight of a naked sword, tho’ in the hands of their best friend, makes them pity extremely those, whom they find in any grief and affliction.” These and other observations “easy to produce” refute competing explanations of pity, which is supposed to be derived “from I know not what subtile reflections on the instability of fortune, and our being liable to the same miseries we behold.” In other words, pity arises from the imagination, not from reason.

5. Having given his argument for the superiority of his explanation of pity, the author turns his attention to a “pretty remarkable phænomenon of this passion.” This phenomenon threatens to undermine the theory by allowing pity to arise where sympathy does not arise in the normal way. First, as mentioned in paragraph 2, in general, the degree of the sympathetic feeling depends on the degree of feeling found in the other person, so that affliction and sorrow, which are intense passions, give rise to intense feelings of sympathy. However, there are cases in which the degree of the sympathetic feeling increases with the weakness of the original passion, and others where there is no original passion at all. The author gives three examples. The first is that of a successful person. We take greater pleasure in the success of that person the more indifferent he seems to be to his success, and hence the less pleasure he seems to receive from it. The second is of a person who falls into “what is commonly esteem’d a great misfortune.” This is a person “of merit,” who is not unduly bothered by his condition. We overlook his greatness of mind and its probable consequences, focusing instead on the misery that people in that condition ordinarily feel. “We find from experience, that such a degree of passion is usually connected with such a misfortune; and tho’ there be an exception in the present case, yet the imagination is affected by the general rule, and makes us conceive a lively idea of the passion, or rather feel the passion itself, in the same manner, as if the person were really actuated by it.” So the explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in our forming general rules about the effects of situation on people: where a situation is typically associated with feeling, we sympathize with that imagined feeling. The third example is supposed to confirm this observation. We blush for people who act inappropriately, even though they feel no shame themselves. “All this proceeds from sympathy; but ’tis of a partial kind, and views its objects only on one side, without considering the other, which has a contrary effect, and wou’d entirely destroy that emotion, which arises from the first appearance.”

6. The principle given in the last paragraph does not yet explain the first case, “wherein an indifference and insensibility under misfortune encreases our concern for the misfortunate, even tho’ the indifference proceed not from any virtue and magnanimity.” Two further examples are given to illustrate the kind of case at issue here: the murder of someone in his sleep and the kidnapping of an infant prince. In both cases, “he is the more worthy of compassion the less sensible he is of his miserable condition.” To explain this, the author enriches his description of the case. There is a contrast between the feeling normally induced by this kind of bad situation and the feeling of security and indifference that the person actually has. “A contrast of any kind never fails to affect the imagination, especially when presented by the subject; and ’tis on the imagination that pity entirely depends.”

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