Epilogue

This epilogue studies William Godwin's theory of ideology, assessing his book Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1796), which identifies unfelt and active forces holding humanity back from social happiness. The virtuality of feeling for Godwin is a potential menace. The very mechanism of the human mind perpetuates a tacit politics of nonconsciousness, a politics embedded in tacitness, and “it is this circumstance that constitutes the insensible empire of prejudice.” In the interaction between felt and unfelt, perceptible and imperceptible, lie the deepest roots of oppression. The many kinds of writing surveyed in this book that use the idiom of the insensible in some ways anticipate what must look to people now like Godwin's theory of ideology. What the writers discussed in this book—from the late seventeenth century onward—have treated as natural changes wrought by the slowness of time can be seen through Godwin's eyes as entailing a political dimension: an oppressively slow mode of acquired and reinforced beliefs that humanity is desperate to overcome. Beyond that, the four areas of eighteenth-century prose treated in this book's four chapters each employs the idiom to describe what could look like the basic components of an ideology of modern Western liberalism.

Philosophy

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the peculiar combination of the unfelt emergence and motions of strongly felt feelings, which appears all over eighteenth-century writing. The usages express something deep but inexplicit about how affect was understood in the eighteenth century, how feeling, passions, the emotions, and even perception itself were seen subtly to come into existence and move people. Instead of drawing attention to itself as an especially significant, well-defined concept or idea, a word like insensibly occurs almost in passing in the period's writing. But this unstudied casualness, far from rendering its meaning insignificant, holds a key to its power. A scarcely noticed but crucial and consistent set of gestures to an affect that cannot be felt: that is the terrain this book explores. Instead of indicating a mere lack of feeling—an affective blockage, impassivity, stupefaction—insensibly unfolding processes initiate and build strong feeling or make it possible.