Hume on Sympathy: The Minds of Men Are Mirrors

The Quote

"No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own." The sentence opens the section of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature that explains why we care what others think of us.

Context

The passage occurs in Book II of the Treatise, "Of the Passions," in the section "Of the love of fame." Hume's project in the Treatise is to build a science of human nature on the model of the natural sciences — to discover the principles that explain why we feel, think, and act as we do. The section on the love of fame asks a deceptively simple question: why do we long for the approval of others? Hume's answer is sympathy: we are so constituted that the passions of others flow into us, so that their pleasure becomes ours and their pain becomes ours. The love of fame is just sympathy turned toward the opinions of others.

Meaning

Hume's sentence makes three claims about sympathy. First, it is the most "remarkable" quality of human nature — the principle that most deserves our wonder. Second, it is a propensity: not a choice but an inclination built into us, working whether we attend to it or not. Third, it transmits feeling "by communication" — the metaphor is of contagion or transmission, as if sentiments passed from mind to mind like heat between bodies. The final clause is the most striking: the transmission works "however different from, or even contrary to our own." Sympathy does not require similarity; it operates across the widest differences, which is why human beings can be moved by the situation of strangers.

Philosophical Interpretation

Sympathy is the engine of Hume's moral philosophy. Because we sympathetically receive the pleasures and pains of others, we are naturally moved by their welfare: their joy is agreeable to us and their suffering is painful. From this foundation Hume derives the moral sentiments — approval and disapproval, praise and blame. Morality, on his account, is not imposed from outside by reason or divine command; it grows out of the natural human capacity to feel with others. The passage is therefore one of the founding texts of the moral-sentiment tradition, which runs from Hume to Adam Smith and into the modern psychology of empathy. It also anticipates the contemporary finding that human beings are wired for emotional resonance — that we catch the feelings of those around us, for better and for worse.

Legacy

The account of sympathy in the Treatise has shaped both moral philosophy and the modern science of empathy. The Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on empathy traces the concept's eighteenth-century origins directly to Hume's "sympathy." Adam Smith built his Theory of Moral Sentiments on the same foundation. And in our own time, the discovery of mirror neurons and the extensive literature on emotional contagion have given Hume's eighteenth-century insight an empirical afterlife. The sentence remains the classic statement of the fact that makes human society possible: we are not isolated minds but mirrors, reflecting and shaping one another's inner lives.

The Deeper Lesson

The passage contains Hume's most radical claim about human nature: that we are not first isolated selves who then decide to care, but connected beings who find ourselves already caring. Sympathy is not a virtue we choose; it is a propensity we discover — the way the sentiments of others enter us, as the warmth of a fire enters a room. From this single principle Hume explains an extraordinary range of phenomena: why we blush at another's shame, why we are moved by the grief of strangers, why the opinions of others matter to us at all, why we approve of the kind and condemn the cruel. The account is naturalistic: morality is not a supernatural addition to human nature but the flowering of our natural capacity to feel with others. Hume's "sympathy" is the ancestor of the modern concept of empathy, and his insight that the transmission of feeling is the root of moral life anticipates two centuries of research.

There is also a sobering implication. If sympathy transmits feeling "however different from, or even contrary to our own," then it transmits the bad as well as the good: fear spreads through crowds, anxiety through households, resentment through communities. The same mirror that lets us share joy lets us share dread. Hume's account is therefore not sentimental; it describes a power that can be used well or badly, and that we are always, whether we know it or not, using and being used by.

The Wisdom for Today

The practical wisdom of the passage follows directly from its psychology. If we are mirrors to one another, then the company we keep matters at the level of feeling, not just of opinion: we catch the moods, the anxieties, and the courage of those around us. The wisdom is to choose our mirrors deliberately — to spend time with people whose inner weather is good for ours, and to be aware of the emotional atmosphere we ourselves create for others. It is also a wisdom of care: because the sentiments of others enter us by communication, our sympathy is the natural bridge to compassion — the capacity to be moved by another's suffering is the beginning of the will to relieve it. And it is a wisdom of honesty: we should not pretend to be islands, unaffected by those around us; we are mirrors, and the honest life begins with knowing what we reflect.

Relations

This quote is the foundation of the moral-sentiment tradition explored in ethics , and it speaks directly to the contemporary question of empathy vs compassion . It belongs to Hume and his science of human nature in the Treatise.

Sources

1. "David Hume." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
2. "Empathy." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/
3. David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book II, Part I, Section XI, T 2.1.11.2. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.