Jane Shaw, Gresham College's Professor of Divinity, opens the academic year by asking why empathy matters now, as figures like Elon Musk dismiss it as weakness. She traces the word's origin to Vernon Lee, who coined 'empathy' around 1914 while distinguishing it from sympathy through her Florence gallery studies of mimicry and aesthetic response. From there Shaw moves through Adam Smith's moral sentiments, the rise of the novel, and Martha Nussbaum's argument that democracy depends on narrative imagination. Examples range widely: a museum guard's memoir, Baldwin's Invisible Man sculpture, James Graham's play Punch and its link to restorative justice, Arlie Hochschild's fieldwork in Louisiana, and readings of Murdoch, Pater, Solnit, and Zadie Smith. The lecture closes by weighing the current backlash against empathy, voiced by thinkers like Paul Bloom, against Shaw's case that cultivating moral imagination through art and literature remains necessary for democratic life. It runs as the opening lecture of Gresham College's new academic year.