Mary Wollstonecraft, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I am both, and I do not find the two in contention, because the standard in each book is the same. In the pamphlet against Burke I called sensibility the manie of the day, the virtue that is to cover a multitude of vices while justice is left to mourn in silence.1 What I attacked was feeling set up as a substitute for judgment, the sentiment that weeps at a queen's misfortune and has no tears for the poor, and I said so of his ladies who retail his exclamations in theatrical attitudes.
But I did not ask for a cold heart. The man I called truly sublime is he who acts from principle and governs the inferior springs of activity without slackening their vigour, whose feelings give vital heat to his resolves but never hurry him into feverish eccentricities.2 That is no rationalist's portrait of a creature without passion. Heat is wanted; it must be governed.
The same distinction runs through what I wrote of Rousseau. I charged him with debauching his imagination, with seeking solitude merely to indulge his feelings, and with painting what he felt so warmly that his readers, in proportion to the strength of their fancy, imagine their understanding convinced when they only sympathize with a poetic writer.
We feel, I said, whilst dreaming that we reason, and erroneous conclusions are left in the mind.3 I quarrelled with his sensibility because it made woman the slave of love, and I asked my contemporaries to strengthen their minds by reflection till their heads become a balance for their hearts.4 A balance. I did not say the heart should be weighed out of the scale.
Now the other half. I hold that the senses and the imagination give a form to the character in childhood and youth, and that the understanding, as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility, till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulse of the heart, rests on a rock against which the storms of passion vainly beat.5
Observe the order. Sensibility supplies the early matter and the first fair purposes; reason confirms them and gives them a foundation that does not shift with the weather of the blood. The same holds for religion. Religion that consists only in warming the affections and exalting the imagination is the poetical part; it may afford pleasure without rendering the individual a more moral being.
It must be founded on reason and drawn from self-knowledge and a rational opinion of the attributes of God, or it produces airy castles and reveries in place of duty.6 So the question as you put it sets two characters against each other that I never meant to separate. If you wish to call a woman a romantic because she believes the heart is the source of exertion, I will not quarrel with the word, only with the idea that such a heart can be trusted to rule itself.
If you wish to call her a rationalist because she will not suffer feeling to usurp the throne of the understanding, I accept that too. What I refuse is the notion that to honour reason is to despise the affections, or that to prize the affections is to excuse their tyranny. Passion with a governor is the source of every great exertion; passion without one is how Rousseau came to live between ecstasy and misery, and how a woman educated to feel and never to think is made fit for nothing but to be loved and then forsaken.
Sensibility as the age practises it is a disease: a cultivated quickness of feeling that substitutes for judgment, that weeps at fiction and is cold to the poor, and that makes women of fashion and men of letters alike incapable of virtue because incapable of thought. But the imagination is the faculty by which the mind rises above the senses toward God, the passions are the spring of every exertion, and a reason that has never felt is as sterile as a feeling that has never thought.7
The Letters from Sweden say what the Vindication could not yet say: that the heart, governed, is the source of moral energy, and that grief and the sublime are the understanding's teachers.891011
Sensibility is the _manie_ of the day, and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain.A Vindication of the Rights of Men
truly sublime is the character that acts from principle, and governs the inferior springs of activity without slackening their vigour; whose feelings give vital heat to his resolves, but never hurry him into feverish eccentricities.A Vindication of the Rights of Men
they imagine that their understanding is convinced, when they only sympathize with a poetic writer... and thus making us feel, whilst dreaming that we reason, erroneous conclusions are left in the mind.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection, till our heads become a balance for our heartsA Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The senses and the imagination give a form to the character, during childhood and youth; and the understanding as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility--till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulse of the heart, morality is made to rest on a rock against which the storms of passion vainly beat.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The religion which consists in warming the affections, and exalting the imagination, is only the poetical part, and may afford the individual pleasure without rendering it a more moral being.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
There appears to be something analogous in the mind. The senses and the imagination give a form to the character, during childhood and youth; and the understanding as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility--till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulse of the heart, morality is made to rest on a rock against which the storms of passion vainly beat.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Even the Ladies, Sir, may repeat your sprightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations. Sensibility is the *manie* of the day, and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain.A Vindication of the Rights of Men
It dips, we know not why, granting it to be an infallible instinct, and, though supposed always to point to truth, its pole-star, the point is always shifting, and seldom stands due north.A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Besides, as the mind is cultivated, and taste gains ground, the passions become stronger, and rest on something more stable than the casual sympathies of the moment. Health and idleness will always account for promiscuous amours; and in some degree I term every person idle, the exercise of whose mind does not bear some proportion to that of the body.Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
But even this numerous class is exceeded, by witlings, who, anxious to appear to have wit and taste, do not allow their understandings or feelings any liberty; for, instead of cultivating their faculties and reflecting on their operations, they are busy collecting prejudices; and are predetermined to admire what the suffrage of time announces as excellent, not to store up a fund of amusement for themselves, but to…Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols
The apparent reversal between 1792 and 1796 that organises the modern scholarship; the texts show a development with a constant principle, the government of feeling by reason.