The cultures of sensibility explored in Chapter Four authorised women to write, but as the chapter shows, the concept was equally influential among male writers, and contributed in significant ways to Romantic-period aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Eighteenth-century aesthetics reflected a new interest in the body and the senses. Like Romantic nature, Romantic sensibility is presented as a story of co-becoming, in this case between body and mind rather than between mind and nature. After discussing the difficulty of defining sensibility, the chapter provides a history of eighteenth-century neurophysiology, including the ground-breaking work of Haller, the electrical experiments of Galvani, and Bonnet’s invention of psychology. Steiner then turns to Rousseau to demonstrate the transition from medical to moral sensibility, and how sympathy operated as a central principle among Edinburgh’s moral sense philosophers. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey helped spread moral sympathy across Europe, linking it with the feminisation of culture and with various reform movements, as shown in examples ranging from Chateaubriand to Jean Paul, a Danish anti-slavery narrative to the ‘Revolution debate’ in Britain. The chapter ends on an ambivalent note, using the Pygmalion motif to address the often-criticised connection between sensibility and narcissism.

In 1769, on his voyage to Holland and France, Herder kept a philosophical journal and drafted some notes in which he expressed critical views of modern European monarchies as well as of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Herder’s relationship to Montesquieu has previously been viewed through the prism of his supposed methodological divergence from Montesquieu. However, as this chapter shows, Herder’s criticisms of Montesquieu were filtered through his critical view of Catherine II of Russia’s Nakaz, or Grand Instructions, which claimed to follow Montesquieu. Herder suggested that there was a need for a ‘second Montesquieu’ which would explore in depth peoples’ distinctive ways of thought and mores. At the same time, Montesquieu’s example was to be followed in tracing the ‘civil history’ of laws, i.e. the ways in which different civil and political laws have evolved and influenced each other. The ‘relations’ in which laws stood with economic activities and social relationships were also to be specified. As Montesquieu had suggested, commerce played an increasingly important role in the modern era, whereas not every kind of commerce suited every kind of state. Herder sought to apply these principles when reflecting about the potential for reforms in Riga, Livland and Russia.

The chapter provides a study of François Hemsterhuis’ affinities with and influence on Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Both Hemsterhuis and Charles Bonnet significantly influenced Jacobi’s thought and the development of German idealism while providing the foundation for an alternative understanding of Spinoza.

The ascendancy of French political power supported literary success and scientific achievement. Investigators such as Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier gave mathematical and empirical support to modern chemistry, physics, and biology. In parallel, philosophical discourses on psychology led to a reinterpretation of Descartes’ formulation to focus on sensation. Condillac, Bonnet, and La Mettrie argued for the equation of mental operations and sensory input, with the result that they reduced psychology to sensation. Helvétius and Cabanis attempted to back off from such extremism by asserting the mediating role of a central ego, although both remained committed to sensory physiology. Biran and Comte recognized the consequences of reducing psychology to mere sensory physiology, but each worked out separate solutions. Biran rejected sensationalism as inadequate, suggesting an individual psychology based on consciousness and the will. In contrast Comte ultimately accepted sensationalism and dismissed psychology. For him, the individual person should properly be studied by physiology; the individual behaving in a group is the province of sociology. Comte, however, advocated a spirit of objective observation that was eventually useful to psychology. Thus, the successors to Descartes in France left psychology in a somewhat tenuous position, removed from recognition as a formal discipline.