A subtler doctrine, and one much closer to the facts of human nature, is that of Adam Smith (1723–1790). He has observed how large a part sympathy plays in our ordinary affairs. If I am near a person when he is moved by any feeling, that feeling tends to jump across and to become mine also. Such identification of myself and him gives pleasure to us both. We all have experienced how sympathy heightens enjoyment and diminishes distress. In sympathy two sets of feelings become so nearly identified that the result can be called neither egoistic nor altruistic. Now I do not propose in these lectures to combat or defend any of these theories. No one of them seems to me to be without weight, all deserve consideration, and something like the operation of each I trace in people around me. The one with which I am in largest agreement is the last, where Adam Smith would identify the two moral aims. But all the theories are vitiated by a false start, which in these lectures I wish to avoid. Each of them looks upon man in his original estate as a self-centred being, a distinct ego. By degrees this single person discovers other persons about him and learns that he must have relations with them. The relations may be altruistic or egoistic, but they are subsequent and supplemental. In himself he is separate and detached. Now, I hold that this conception is altogether erroneous. There is no such solitary person. One person is no person. The smallest known unit of personality is three, father, mother, child. None of us came into the world in separateness, nor have separately remained here. Relations have encompassed us from birth. Through them we are what we are, social beings, members of a whole. While it is true that the ties of parentage loosen as the child matures, these drop away only because others, now more formative, take him in charge. Before we have a separate consciousness we know ourselves as members of a family, of a state, of the community of human kind. We never stand alone.