It would not have been a big step further to explain this sympathy as a form of the egoistic need of happiness, more or less through the assumption that in order to be really happy a man must see happiness all round him. But Hume does not use such roads as that. He does not aim at constructive thought but at stating facts, and it is enough for him that direct sympathy with other men be proved to be a principle inherent in human nature. We have to stop somewhere or other, he says in one place, in our search for causes. In every science there are certain general principles beyond which there is no more general principle still for us to discover. Among the elements which are effective in developing moral feeling, Hume attributes great importance to the love of fame. This keeps us considering ourselves in the light in which we wish to appear in the eyes of others, for the effort to secure the respect of others is a potent educator in virtue. On this point he thinks like Frederick the Great, from whom comes the sentence: “The love of fame [pg 082] is innate in noble souls; you have only to arouse it and urge it on, and men who till then merely vegetated, will seem to you, when explained by this happy instinct, to be changed into demi-gods.”_(_21_)_ Adam Smith wishes to trace out the idea of sympathy in all its manifestations, and in doing so he discovers that our capacity for sympathy covers more than participation in the weal or woe of others. It brings us, he says, to a community of thought with those who are doing something. We feel ourselves directly attracted or repelled by the actions of others and the motives at the back of them. Our ethics are the product of these sympathetic experiences. We come in time to take care that an impartial third party can justify and sympathise with the mainspring and the tendency of our actions. Innate sympathy not only with the actions but also with the experience of others is thus the beneficent regulator of the behaviour of men to one another. This feeling God has implanted in human nature that it may keep men faithful to work for the common good. How far this somewhat artificial extension of the notion of sympathy through the doctrine of the impartial third party really means a step forward beyond Hume we may leave undiscussed.