ABSTRACT
In 1838, John Stuart Mill published an essay on Jeremy Bentham in the London and Westminster Review. Two years later he published a complementary essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. According to Mill, they were 'the two great seminal minds of England in their age'. The shape of the nineteenth-century English culture was framed by these two thinkers and what they sought to represent, sense and sensibility. Mill's affinity with George Eliot's 'religion of humanity', which according to Maurice Cowling describes the essence of his entire moral philosophy, finds an explicit statement in his Essays on Religion. A century before Mill voiced his concerns, it was apparent to many that the countervailing demands of sense and sensibility represented the greatest intellectual challenge of the Enlightenment. And no one worked harder to address this challenge than Adam Smith, whose treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments was intended to provide the foundations for precisely such a balanced and comprehensive public philosophy.
