In the seventeenth century, René Descartes famously upended age-old understandings by dividing man into mind and body. To this day we tend to think of mind in Cartesian terms: as independent of one's perception of it, corresponding in its operations to the way the world is, always consistent in its operations. Yet we now know that mind is largely unconscious, not literal but operating often with metaphor and symbol, logical only in part, and very much open to influences by values and interests. We’ve learned as well that reasoning has emotional aspects and that emotions are hardly devoid of reasoned features. And if our emotions generate some of our reasoned beliefs and if we hold some beliefs emotionally, then we must reject claims of an unbridgeable chasm between what Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, described as rational egotism or self-interest and what Adam Smith, a century later, called “sympathy.” In the words of another leading light of Smith's time, David Hume (1966:30), to understand moral behavior as something completely rational, something “exclud[ing] all sentiment,” is to miss the mark. We best “represent virtue in all her genuine and most engaging charms” by “approach[ing] her with ease, familiarity, and affection”: as a “passion” (Hume 1966:118). Morality so construed will be “more correct in its precepts,” “more persuasive in its exhortations,” than if construed as purely rational, as entirely affectless (Hume 1968:621). Tellingly, one experiences emotion as a “site” of truth, in the same way that one experiences belief. Hume was right (in part for reasons not available in his own time): the brain has “separate seats for emotions (the limbic system) and instincts (the brain stem)” but no “separate seats…for applying instincts/emotions according to…whether they are applied to the self, kin, non-kin, a familiar location, or a verbal abstraction” (Miller 1993:237). The emotion of fear, for example, is generated in the subcortex, whether fear for one's welfare in the current moment or that of the entire planet for millennia. It is more or less the same whatever its object.