His next remarks are on the Selfish Systems, his reply to which is the assertion of disinterested Affections. He distinguishes two modes of assigning self-interest as the sole motive of virtuous conduct. First, it may be said that in every so-called virtuous action, we see some good to self, near or remote. Secondly, it may be maintained that we become at last disinterested by the associations of our own interest. He calls in question this alleged process of association. Because a man's own cane is interesting to him, it does not follow that every other man's cane is interesting. [He here commits a mistake of fact; other men's walking canes are interesting to the interested owner of a cane. It may not follow that this interest is enough to determine self-sacrifice.] It will be inferred that Brown contends warmly for the existence of Disinterested Affection, not merely as a present, but as a primitive, fact of our constitution. He does not always keep this distinct from the Moral Sentiment; he, in fact, mixes the two sentiments together in his language, a thing almost inevitable, but yet inconsistent with the advocacy of a distinct moral sentiment. He includes among the Selfish Systems the Ethical Theory of Paley, which he reprobates in both its leading points--everlasting happiness as the motive, and the will of God as the rule. On the one point, this theory is liable to all the objections against a purely selfish system; and, on the other point, he makes the usual replies to the founding of morality on the absolute will of the Deity. Brown next criticises the system of Adam Smith. Admitting that we have the sympathetic feeling that Smith proceeds upon, he questions its adequacy to constitute the moral sentiment, on the ground that it is not a perpetual accompaniment of our actions. There must be a certain _vividness_ of feeling or of the display of feeling, or at least a sufficient cause of vivid feeling, to call the sympathy into action. In the numerous petty actions of life, there is an absence of any marked sympathy. But the essential error of Smith's system is, that it assumes the very moral feelings that it is meant to explain. If there were no antecedent moral feelings, sympathy could not afford them; it is only a mirror to reflect what is already in existence. The feelings that we sympathize with, are themselves moral feelings already; if it were not so, the reflexion of them from a thousand breasts would not give them a moral nature. Brown thinks that Adam Smith was to some extent misled by an ambiguity in the word sympathy; a word applied not merely to the participation of other men's feelings, but to the further and distinct fact of the _approbation_ of those feeling's.