It is clear that Hume’s invocation of sympathy is an invention intended to bridge the gap between any set of reasons which could support unconditional adherence to general and unconditional rules and any set of reasons for action or judgment which could derive from our particular, fluctuating, circumstance-governed desires, emotions and interests. Later on Adam Smith was to invoke sympathy for precisely the same purpose. But the gap of course is logically unbridgeable, and ‘sympathy’ as used by Hume and Smith is the name of a philosophical fiction.
