 Grouchy is enthusiastic about Smith’s views—she agrees with him that moral sentiments and judgments can be derived from sympathy and that we need to develop our rational abilities in order to render this capacity useful. But she takes issue with certain aspects of those views. In particular, she feels that he has not dug sufficiently deep in order to understand what sympathy is. He has noted “its existence, and its principal effects”, but not gone back to “its first cause, showing how it must belong to all sensible beings capable of reflection” (Letter I, p.3). This first cause she traces back to infanthood, and to the very physical relationship of a baby with its nurse. Grouchy does not talk about mothers there. She is careful to distinguish between the physical relationship, skin on skin, feeding, and the moral one, the duty a mother may have to nurture her children, and the duties of the children to love and respect their mother. In that she differs from Manon Roland and Mary Wollstonecraft who thought that an infant needed to be fed by his own mother in order to flourish morally. What Grouchy is looking for is a physical trigger to the sensations of pleasure and pain that will eventually give rise to sentiments of sympathy, and this trigger has to be common to all human beings in order to account for the ubiquitous presence of sympathy in human societies. Every baby that survives to an age where they may develop sentiments will have been fed by another human, and there will have been no previous universal experience suited to stimulate the sensations that can lead to these sentiments. Grouchy not only traces sympathy back to its origins, but her account is distinctly naturalistic. This cashes out in her description of the growth of sympathy and the birth of morality.