 With these methodological points in mind, let’s proceed to the contents of TMS. Smith begins the book with an account of sympathy, which he describes as arising when we imagine how we would feel in the circumstances of others. (A rich discussion of Smith on sympathy can be found in Griswold 1999, ch.2; see also Fleischacker 2019, chapter 2.) This is somewhat different from Hume’s account, on which sympathy normally consists in feeling what others actually feel in their circumstances. Hume’s may be called a “contagion” account of sympathy, while Smith’s is a “projective” account (see Fleischacker 2012 and 2019). Smith’s projective account opens up the possibility that our feelings on another person’s behalf may often not match the feelings she herself has. Indeed to some extent they will never match, since imagining oneself into a set of circumstances will always lack the intensity of actually experiencing those circumstances (TMS 21–2). This difference is of great importance to Smith, since he maintains that trying to share the feelings of others as closely as possible is one of our main drives in life. We make constant efforts to adjust our feelings, as spectators, to those of the people “principally concerned” in a set of circumstances (importantly, these include people acted upon as well as agents), and to adjust our feelings as people principally concerned to a level with which sympathetic spectators can go along (110–13, 135–6). It is this process of mutual emotional adjustment that gives rise to virtue: the “awful” virtues of self-restraint, insofar as the people principally concerned keep themselves from feeling, or at least expressing, the full flood of their grief or joy, and the “amiable” virtues of compassion and humanity, insofar as the spectators strive to participate in the joys and sufferings of others (23–5).