Like Montaigne and Shaftesbury—and like his friend Adam Smith, who also wrote on this subject—Hume locates the basis of morality in “sympathy,” or fellow feeling. When someone feels an emotion, it may show in that person’s face or voice. Seeing or hearing this, I feel a kind of replay of the emotion myself, based on my own, similar experiences of feeling that way in the past. Our minds work as “mirrors to one another,” he says: a very Montaignesque way of putting it.
