Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (review)

Many currents flowed in the river of Enlightenment thought. Riskin deserves praise for identifying a notable intellectual stream that has not been well recognized to date. In this erudite and eloquent volume, she draws attention to the ways in which late Enlightenment thinkers developed sensibility—how they took from the world of feeling and emotion, added sentiment to reason, and so forged a distinctive epistemology, scientific methodology, and an identifiable cultural current at the end of the Old Regime.

Riskin identifies an important reformulation of John Locke's sensationalist psychology that developed in France at mid-century. The earlier notion that sensations mechanically engendered ideas gave way to a physiologically more acute (and anti-Cartesian) view that sensations produced varied reactions and so tied sentient creatures to the world not just through raw sensation but through affective responses as well. In her insightful and evocative case studies, Riskin shows how eighteenth-century thinkers brought "sentimental empiricism" to bear in a variety of scientific contexts. The six loosely linked studies collected herein deal with restoring sight to the blind, Benjamin Franklin versus Jean-Antoine Nollet on electricity, the Physiocrats, a legal case involving Maximillen Robespierre and a lightning rod, Mesmerism, and debates about chemical nomenclature.

The historical importance of sensibility derives from its epistemological consequences (the notion that knowledge is a matter of reason and sentiments), from its impact on contemporary moral theory, and from its historiographical implications leading to a better understanding of the period. The work at hand is persuasive on all three grounds. But if the "Age of Sensibility" and "sentimental empiricism" were treated simply as themes and not sweeping claims about the nature of the late Enlightenment and the Revolution, much less the science of the age, this volume could be lauded without reservation. As it is, however, Riskin's attempt to recast the traditional Age of Reason wholly as an Age of Sensibility goes too far, given the evident diversity of Enlightenment thought and the nominal importance of reason (and sentiment) to the people involved (7). Her claim falls into the same trap as does calling the eighteenth century the Age of Reason. At the least, missing is an extended, systematic and detailed argument to make the case, unfortunately leaving readers to put together the main argument for themselves.

Riskin may well be right underneath it all, that "sensibility" was indeed a leitmotif of the age and of contemporary science, but the presentation begs other questions. For one, the community of "sentimental empiricists" is never fully identified. Denis Diderot and George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon are mentioned repeatedly as exemplars, but nowhere is this nominal group considered sociologically or as a whole. Then, individuals seem to jump from one camp to another. Franklin, for example, is the "sentimental empiricist" par excellence in the chapters on lightning and the Leyden jar, but an opponent in the chapter on Franz Mesmer. The admittedly "protean" concept of "sentimental empiricism" itself is entirely diffuse (21, 190). At some points, it means simply that feeling and emotion cannot be factored out epistemologically in doing science; at other points, it seems to border on Rousseauean sentimentality, privileging passion and intuition over reason and experiment and acceding to the "ultimate authority of feeling" (209). Along these lines, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mentioned en passant, but the relationship between "sentimental empiricism" and Rousseau's thought and romanticism needs to be spelled out. Similarly, what was empirical about "sentimental empiricists"? Were they rationalists, after all, in pursuit of rational understanding of nature and society, as the historiography traditionally depicts Enlightenment philosophers? Finally, Riskin emphasizes a "teleological" dimension to her "sentimental empiricism," which she characterizes as "Aristotelian" (72), but the language of ends and means used throughout this narrative suggests that the connection between "sentimental...