[In his "Essay Concerning Virtue and Merit," the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury wants to insist on the one hand that] `worth and virtue depend on . . . a use of reason . . . .' On the other hand Shaftesbury is so eager to establish this sense of right and wrong as a "natural" sense that he sometimes speaks of it as existing prior to and independently of the faculty of reason. `Sense of right and wrong therefore being as natural to us as natural affection itself, and being a first principle in our constitution and make, there is no speculative opinion, persuasion, or belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it. That which is of original and pure nature, nothing beside contrary habit and custom (a second nature)<1> is able to displace. . . .' [Shaftesbury] does not quite call moral sense innate, but insists that it comes from nature: `if you dislike the word innate, let us change it, if you will, for instinct, and call instinct that which Nature teaches, exclusive of art, culture, or discipline.' (Whitney here quoting The Moralists, on Primitivism pp. 31-32)
[D]uring the century [there developed] a somewhat specialized off-shoot from the ethics of sentiment in the doctrine of sensibility. I am here using sensibility in its somewhat restricted eighteenth-century sense of extreme delicacy and keenness of feeling and ultra-refinement of sensitiveness to beauty both natural and moral. . . . [T]he notion of sensibility that one meets in eighteenth-century popular novels ad nauseam, was given its characteristic form by Shaftesbury and . . . the ethics of taste. Shaftesbury's eloquent passages on the cultivation of a taste for beauty laid the foundation of the popular vogue . . . ; and it added at the same time a distinct flavor of aristocratic exclusiveness. Sensibility, it was thought, could only be achieved by a mind already highly refined which gave assiduous attention to all that was beautiful and lovely and excluded all that was ugly. This exclusiveness is well illustrated by Hannah More's poem, `Sensibility': `Let not the vulgar read this pensive strain, / Their jests the tender anguish wou'd profane.'<2> (pp. 99-100)
The possessor of sensibility was likely to consider himself a rare exception among men, and to deplore--and treasure--his special affliction. One frequently meets such exclamations as the following: `Sensibility, thou source of human woes, thou aggrandiser of evils, had I not been possessed of thee, how calmly might my days have passed! Yet I would not part with thee for worlds. . . .' Mary Wollstonecraft's definition of sensibility . . . is typical: `To give the shortest definition of sensibility, replied the sage [in her tale, "The Cave of Fancy," Posthumous Works 1798], I should say that it is the result of acute senses, finely fashioned nerves, which vibrate at the slightest touch, and convey such clear intelligence to the brain, that it does not require to be arranged by the judgment. Such persons instantly enter into the characters of others, and instinctively discern what will give pain to every human being; their own feelings are so varied that they seem to contain in themselves, not only all the passions of the species, but their various modifications. Exquisite pain and pleasure is their portion; nature wears for them a different aspect than is displayed to common mortals.' (p. 101)
<1>"Prejudice," "tradition," the "mixed system of opinion and sentiment" (HO p. 7 bottom) is "second nature" to Burke; see James Chandler, "Burke Blamed and Praised," in Wordsworth's Second Nature.
<2>While people like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays do not mean "the common people" when they use the word vulgar--both of them speak of the "high and low vulgar," vulgar aristocrats and vulgar peasants--their usage is revolutionary. Whitney points out that Hannah More probably does refer "the common people" in this passage: "it is worthy of notice that in her Tales for the Common People and in her Stories for Persons in the Middle Ranks she never once treats the theme of sensibility" (p. 100).