This element of sympathy is most fully recognised in the instructive analysis of ethical sentiment by the late George Grote. At the same time, Grote does not, like Adam Smith, for instance, attempt to evolve the material characteristics of approbation and disapprobation from this source. The mere putting of one's self in the place of a spectator--or in that of the patient--instead of that of the agent, is only a formal change, which will modify our judgments or feelings without accounting for their actual content. But a uniform formal element in all ethical sentiment is, according to Grote, a man's "constant habit of viewing and judging of circumstances around him," both from the point of view of the agent and from that of the patient.[63] This twofold position is occupied by every individual. He is an agent, and in that position his own interests and feelings are separate from, and often at variance with, those of others. But he is also a patient in respect of the actions of others, and in that position his interests and his feelings are commonly in unison with those of the majority. Hence a man is led constantly to adopt ideally the point of view which is not actually his own at the time, so that "the idea of the judgment which others will form becomes constantly and indissolubly associated with the idea of action in the mind of every agent." In every community, certain actions are visited with the admiration, esteem, and protection of the society; certain other actions with the opposite feelings and results: so that there arises "an association in my mind of a certain line of conduct on the part both of myself and of any other individual agent, with a certain sentiment resulting from such conduct, and excited by it, in the minds of the general public around us. It is a sentiment of _regulated social reciprocity_ as between the agent and the society amongst which he lives." And this sentiment, when enforced by a sanction, constitutes the complete form of ethical sentiment. As a complete explanation of the moral sentiments and judgments of men, this theory does not seem to be above criticism. It requires not only an association between every personal action and the feelings--sympathetically imagined by the agent--with which the action will be regarded by others, but it also implies that this association has become so inseparable that the feeling appears as an individual or personal one, distinguished by the subject from other sentiments which he has on consciously imagining himself in the position of others. But it is referred to here as illustrating what we find in Mill, and, in a different way, in Professor Bain, that the first real step towards the utilitarian standard is to make the individual pass somehow or other to a standpoint outside his own nature. In Mill this is done mainly by the assertion of the social nature of man, in Grote by showing how a moral sentiment may be arrived at by the combined action of sympathy and association.