MORALITY OF THE 18th CENTURY’S MAN OF FEELING – A VIRTUE OR A VICE?
Morality of the 18th Century's Man of Feeling – the Virtue or Vice?

Summary/Abstract: A detailed and objective presentation of feeling in the context of a capitalist society whose main preoccupation is commercial transactions, Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling leaves room for interpretation in terms of the main moral values guiding the individual in the late 18th century. Interpreted within the limits of the close interdependency established between literature and historical background, Harley’s conduct, as depicted in the novel, seems to reflect the powerful contradictions between the individual’s mental representation and attitudes and the ideological system, the patterns of value and mental structures featuring the European society at the time. By revealing his mental and psychological structures as such, Harley becomes, a hypostasis of the human condition which should be looked for somewhere in between the two contradictory viewpoints in vogue at that time: a determinism caused by the existence of the divine providence opposed to the causal sequence of innate feelings, that is somewhere between virtue or vice.

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