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Politeness, in Hume’s philosophy, is not only a social dissimulation of pride and an artificial virtue required by life in society: it allows an intensification of sympathy between men. Although based on a convention, like the virtue of justice, its exercise is so obviously desirable that the artifice takes on the character of spontaneity and pleasure. Thus, even if Hume’s thought eludes the humanist idealization of a sociability that is both virtuous and natural, it also stands out from the Augustinian or Mandevillian tradition by the role it ascribed to sympathy, and by the ethical value which it grants to justified pride, to the practice of conversation, and to facility in the exercise of sociability.