SOURCE: Chapin, Chester. “Shaftesbury and the Man of Feeling.” Modern Philology 81, no. 1 (August 1983): 47-50.

In the following essay, Chapin explores the influence of Shaftesbury's ideas about benevolence on other eighteenth-century philosophers.

Referring to what he calls “the mid-eighteenth-century cult of the ‘man of feeling,’” R. S. Crane argued that this cult owed much to “the propaganda of benevolence and tender feeling carried on with increasing intensity by the anti-Puritan, anti-stoic, and anti-Hobbesian divines of the Latitudinarian school.”¹ Donald Greene has challenged this argument in the pages of this journal,² but neither Crane nor Greene has paid much attention to writers who might be said to exemplify this cult. Who were these men of feeling? Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling was published in 1771, and while proponents of Crane's thesis might argue that “divines of the Latitudinarian school” had prepared the public for the appreciative reception of Mackenzie's novel...