Reason and Sentiment: 1700–1770

Abstract

The eighteenth century is often called the age of reason or enlightenment. Yet such generalisations, useful though they can be, always oversimplify and therefore distort. And the eighteenth century, as soon as we take more than a cursory look at it, proves to be an age of sentiment as well as of reason. Reason, enthroned by Descartes, lived side by side with its apparent opposite, sentiment, which was at first evident as the religious expression of a minority.