Long held to be a given, the opposition between scientific experimentation and sensibilty during the century of the Enlightenment has now been called into question in Jessica Riskin's new book, which attempts to investigate a subject which had been abandoned and forgotten by the middle of the 19th century. She demonstrates that far from being separate, the cold production of scientific facts and the culture of sensibility were inextricably linked during the Enlightenment, in particular in France which represented the most important scene for this tension. As the reader learns in her strong and clear introduction, references to this association between empiricism and sensibility are commonplace-from the physiologist Charles Bonnet to the Ideologues, and including the materialist Helvetius, the Baron d'Holbach, and of course Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But this central component of Enlightenment thought was not limited to philosophical reflection-rather it was solidly inscribed within the literary culture of the time, in particular among English novelists such as Richardson, and one could easily find echoes of this in French pre-romantic literature.
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