 The concepts of sympathy and spectatorship, central to the doctrine of TMS, had already been put to work by Hutcheson and Hume, but Smith’s account is distinct. As spectator of an agent’s suffering we form in our imagination a copy of such ‘impression of our own senses’ as we have experienced when we have been in a situation of the kind the agent is in: “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with the agent” (Smith 1790, p. 9). Smith gives two spectacular examples of cases where the spectator has a sympathetic feeling that does not correspond to the agent’s. The first concerns the agent who has lost his reason. He is happy, unaware of his tragic situation. The spectator imagines how he himself would feel if reduced to this same situation. In this imaginative experiment, in which the spectator is operating on the edge of a contradiction, the spectator’s idea of the agent’s situation plays a large role while his idea of the agent’s actual feelings has a role only in that the agent’s happiness is itself evidence of his tragedy. The second of Smith’s examples is the spectator’s sympathy for the dead, deprived of sunshine, conversation and company. Again Smith emphasises the agent’s situation, and asks how the spectator would feel if in the agent’s situation, deprived of everything that matters to people.