At the end of the eighteenth century, the fashion for cultivation of sensibility that had emerged could be thought of as a middle way, mediating between the competing rationalisms of writers such as Burke and Paine. Even at the time, however, the movement was viewed with uneasiness and even suspicion. Johnson, for example, deprecated the cult when it seemed to pass into glorification of feeling:

Some years later a striking example of the interplay between reason and sensibility was offered by the relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. In her early days Wollstonecraft was a strong advocate of rationality. When she wrote her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, the need that they should be taught to use their minds was uppermost. Yet Godwin regarded her as the very embodiment of sensibility, so that in his Memoir he invited contrast with his own cast of mind – about which he was explicit: