It is by the imagination only

From Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the first chapter of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith lays out his rational for what would later be developed by psychologists into what is known as the Theory of Mind, i.e. the capacity of humans to reflect on the condition of others by mirroring their circumstances to our own imagination. A neurological base for supporting this theory was eventually established back in the early 1990's by researcher Giacomo Rizzolati.

What caught my eye was this passage by Smith in Chapter II where he is giving a series of examples of our ability to sympathetically experience that which is occurring to others. Here he points out that sympathetic experience is very powerful, allowing us to experience through another that which is worn out for us. The example which he uses is that of reading.

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty; we enter into the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of exciting in us; we consider all the ideas which it presents rather in the light in which they appear to him, than in that in which they appear to ourselves, and we are amused by sympathy with his amusement which thus enlivens our own. On the contrary, we should be vexed if he did not seem to be entertained with it, and we could no longer take any pleasure in reading it to him.

This is a situation perfectly familiar to any parent reading to a child. We know precisely what Smith is talking about. The Little Engine That Could may have long ago left the station as a mainstay of our reading or even our particular interest in the narrative twists of the tale but we look forward to experiencing again that love of the book through our child and are vexed if our gift of a much loved story does not strike a similar note with our child.

Part of that vexation is of course disappointment that they won't love what you loved, part of that vexation is that we ourselves cannot re-experience the engagement with the story through our child. And finally, part of the vexation is that this is the first intimation that our child is not us. They do have their own interests, foibles, and enthusiasms and while they may be more or less in alignment with our own characteristics, they are not perfectly aligned. The child we seek to raise by our best lights will follow their own path causing great pain and great joy along the way. What we see in them at six months will be different from what we see at six years, much less sixteen years or twenty-six.

Smith identifies imagination as being the principle engine for our capacity to empathize with the conditions of others.

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.

Here he makes indirectly the case for enthusiastic reading. Our capacity to function well is contingent upon our sympathy for others. That sympathy is generated by our imagination. There are other ways to cultivate imagination but certainly one of the easiest and most easily accessible is by reading. By voluminous reading we expand our horizons and are called upon and assisted by gifted authors to imagine ourselves into other lives and circumstances. The more practice we have of this through reading, the better able we are to empathize with others in real life.