ABSTRACT
Horrid sympathy is exactly contrary, identification with something quite different from the self, and therefore a much more deviant feeling. Sympathy was a word that grew enormously in range and significance during the eighteenth century, acquiring most of the layers of meaning we now assign it. In the great romances of the early modern period sympathy is at the heart of the action. In Orlando Furioso it causes the love between Angelica and Medoro that drives the hero of the poem mad with jealousy. So much for the literary history of sympathy. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Civil War had soured Thomas Hobbes's view of humanity. Hume's Treatise Concerning Human Nature was the first systematic treatment of this state of affairs. Adam Smith's influential Theory of Moral Sentiments rejected both positions: sympathy was not an instinct nor was it necessarily in the first place a moral sensation.
