 What is distinctive of David Hume and Adam Smith is that although they occasionally use the term ‘moral sense’, they do not take it to be a primitive, innate capacity, but rather aim to explain its workings in terms of more basic mechanisms, in particular what they call ‘sympathy’. In contemporary use, the term is often used for a kind of concern for another. But Hume, Smith, and Sophie de Grouchy (1798), in different ways, used it for sharing what another feels. The contemporary term for this kind of mechanism is empathy (for the distinction between sympathy and empathy, see Darwall 1998; Sober and Wilson 1998; Fleischacker 2019). This section will nevertheless use the older term, since what the classical sentimentalists talk about isn’t always quite ‘empathy’ either.