Mutual Sympathy And Social Bonds

Edinburgh Festival 2026

In the third century BC the concept of sympathy, from the Greek sympatheia - syn (with/together) and pathos (feeling, suffering) - wasn’t originally associated with emotional connection. Instead the stoics of the time believed the universe acted as one living organism held together by a ‘breath’ (pneuma) which ran through everything. It was why tides were influenced by the moon and, they claimed, why astrology and divination influenced people.

It was half a millennium later in the second century AD before the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius narrowed the concept of sympathy to the human scale, arguing that because we’re all threads of the same fabric, harming another person is really harming ourselves.

That view persisted until the eighteenth century when Smith, Hume and other Scottish philosophers advanced the idea yet further.

Hume got to print first with ‘the minds of men are mirrors to one another.’

Smith wrote, ‘Nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary.’

Today, we would call this empathy.

When a child is injured we are immediately jolted with the desire to help. And observing a group laughing can lift our mood without actually knowing the joke that initiated their outburst; pleasure needing no other reward than being shared.

While it is clear Smith and Hume met and discussed the concept it was Smith that made the link to how this very human trait builds the structures of society. In some respects he reversed the original idea. Instead of the cosmos influencing society, with human behaviour an inevitable outcome, he felt it is empathy towards each other that regulates how society functions.

In short it is our innate human nature that forges society rather than treating it as a byproduct of reason, religion or some cosmic hand.