{"id":3325,"date":"2013-12-11T14:48:04","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T13:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lilec.it\/romanticismo\/wp\/?page_id=3325"},"modified":"2016-11-09T18:26:23","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T17:26:23","slug":"a-sentimental-journey-through-the-body-and-other-eighteenth-century-automata","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.lilec.it\/romanticismo\/a-sentimental-journey-through-the-body-and-other-eighteenth-century-automata\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sentimental Journey through the Body and Other Eighteenth-Century Automata"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rocco Coronato<\/strong><\/h1>\n

In his paean to \u00abdear sensibility\u00bb, Sterne\u2019s Yorick envisages the \u00abeternal fountain of our feelings\u00bb as a divinity affecting both body and soul: \u00aball comes from thee, great\u2014great SENSORIUM of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation\u00bb

[sterne 2008, p. 98]. Defining sentiment and its affect on the body was however a thorny question. In a 1749 letter to Richardson, a Mrs. Balfour voiced her uneasiness in defining such an increasingly fashionable word: \u00abI am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental <\/i>man; we were a sentimental party<\/i>; I have been taking a sentimental <\/i>walk\u00bb [cit. in wilson 1931, p. 45]. In England, sentimenthadbegun to be associated with feeling in Shaftesbury\u2019s attack against Locke arguing that men had an inward eye enabling them to perceive the morally good [barker-benfield 1992]. In France, the period between 1650 and 1789 also saw a vast alteration in emotional common sense: once given access \u00abto \u00e9motion<\/i>, sentiment <\/i>\u00a0and sensibilit\u00e9<\/i> [\u2026] individuals became able […] to access previously unrecorded affective possibilities\u00bb [reddy 2000, p. 111]. Sentiments were more powerful than ideas: \u00ables id\u00e9es nous amusent, [\u2026] mais les sentimens nous dominent, ils s\u2019emparent de nous\u00bb [crousaz 1970, p. 8]. The invention of sentiment overlapped with the birth of the modern subject: \u00abAu centre du sentiment il y a le sujet sentant; et m\u00eame [\u2026] un sujet qui s\u2019origine dans la sensation, qui n\u2019est peut-etre elle-m\u00eame que l\u2019autre face du sentiment\u00bb [stewart 2010, p. 11]. Sentiment was made contagious by sympathy. According to Shaftesbury, sympathy can put people \u00abbeyond themselves\u00bb and cause \u00abtheir very looks\u00bb to \u00abbe infectious\u00bb, taking on the form of enthusiasm: \u00abSuch force has society in ill as well as in good passions: and so much stronger any affection is forbeing social and communicative\u00bb [shaftesbury 1964, P. 14]. Communication within society, argued Hume, is made possible by the fact that \u00abnature has preserv\u2019d a great resemblance among all human creatures, and that we never remark any passion or principle in others, of which, in some degree or other, we may not find a parallel in ourselves\u00bb [hume 1978, p. 316; cfr. mullan 1988, pp. 29-31]. Yorick similarly describes sympathy as a panache for the \u00abboundaries and fences\u00bb set up by nature \u00abto circumscribe the discontent of man\u00bb, among which communication: \u00abfrom the want of languages, connections, and dependencies, and from the difference in education, customs and habits, we lie under so many impediments in communicating our sensations out of our own sphere, as often amount to a total impossibility\u00bb [sterne 2008, p. 8]. Yet sympathy found an obstacle in distance: \u00abthough we always sympathize with our relations, and with those under our eye, the distress of persons remote and unknown affects us very little\u00bb [kames 1767, p. 17]. As Yorick claims while trying to dissever sentiment and physical perturbations, \u00abthere are certain combined looks of simple subtlety\u2014where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them\u2014they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infecter\u00bb [sterne 2008, p. 46]. In A Sentimental Journey<\/i>,sensibility manifests itself chiefly through the body. In the very absence of verbal communication, the casual encounters affect Yorick\u2019s body and cause emotions. Meeting the Lady in Calais, Yorick already \u00absettled the affair in my fancy, \u2018that she was of the better order of beings\u2019\u00bb [sterne 2008, p. 20]. Even without fully perceiving her face, \u00abthe drawing was instantly set about, and long before we had got to the door of the Remise, Fancy <\/i>had finished the whole head\u00bb [p. 14]. Sentiment arises at once (\u00abIn a word, I felt benevolence for her\u00bb, p. 15) and is translated into body language: \u00abthe muscles relaxed, and I beheld the same unprotected look of distress which first won me to her interest\u2014melancholy! [\u2026] [t]he pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me\u00bb [p. 16]. The Calais episode clearly bespeaks the eighteenth-century belief in a more truthful, immediate speech apart from conventional language: \u00a0 [t]he natural signs of emotion, voluntary and involuntary, being nearly the same in all men, form a universal language, which no distance of place, no difference of tribe, no diversity of tongue, can darken or render doubtful [\u2026] the external appearances of joy, grief, anger, fear, shame, and of the other passions, forming an universal language, open a direct avenue to the heart. [kames 1762, I. 127-28] \u00a0 The physicality of sentiment uncannily referred both to the body\/mind problem and the the mechanicist description of all living beings, including humankind, as automata. Descartes had avowed to study first the human body and then the soul piecemeal in order to show the union of the two parts: \u00abil faut que je vous d\u00e9crive, premi\u00e8rement, le corps \u00e0 part, puis apr\u00e8s l\u2019\u00e2me aussi \u00e0 part; et enfin, que je vous montre comment ces deux natures doivent \u00eatre jointes et unies, pour composer des hommes qui nous ressemblent\u00bb. By means of this observation, the body was finally interpreted as a machine: \u00abces fonctions suivent tout naturellement, en cette machine, de la seule disposition de ces organes, ne plus ne moins que font les mouvements d\u2019une horloge, ou autre automate, de celle de ses contrepoids et de ses roues\u00bb [descartes 1988, I.379, 479-80]. In a 1649 letter to Henry More, Descartes proposed language as the only way of distinguishing men from beasts: \u00a0 [f]or language is the one certain indication of a latent cogitation in a body, and all men use it, even the most stupid and mentally deranged, and those deprived of their tongue and vocal organs, whereas on the hand not a single brute speaks, and consequently this we may take for the true difference between man and beast. [cit. in cohen 1936, p. 53; see arikha 2006] \u00a0 Descartes\u2019s view that animals were pure machines and that the human body was nothing more than a machine branched out in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century in a mechanistic debate on the connection between the soul and the body-machine. Oddly rebutting Descartes\u2019s view only to reach a similar mechanistic result, LaMettrie, the author of L\u2019Homme machine, <\/i>claimedthat there was no essential difference between human beings and animals, implying that animals shared our intelligence to some degree and conversely that we shared their machineness: \u00a0 it was necessary that nature should use more elaborate art in making and sustaining a machine which for a whole century could mark all motions of the art and of the mind; for though one does not tell time by the pulse, it is as least the barometer of the warmth and the vivacity by which one may estimate the nature of the soul. [\u2026] The human body is a watch, a large watch constructed with such skill and ingenuity. [offray de la mettrie 1912, p. 141; see gunderson 1964, pp. 214-215; marr 2006] \u00a0 In the entry on \u00ab\u00c2me des b\u00eates\u00bb for the Encyclop\u00e9die, <\/i>the Abb\u00e9 Yvon had analogously opined that \u00abif God can make a machine that, solely by the disposition of its forces, performs all the surprising actions that we admire in a dog or a monkey, he can form other machines that imitate perfectly all the actions of men\u00bb [diderot 1751-65, 1.345-346]. Automata were the next logical step, as \u00abscholarly authors increasingly agreed that the wonder-working or \u2018thaumaturgy\u2019 which gave rise to self-moving machines fell into the category of acceptable, natural magic\u00bb [marr 2002, p. 207]. The sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries had already been busily occupied with hydraulics and pneumatics: thanks to the translations of Heron (1501, 1575), ancient Greek technology had given rise to pleasure gardens, hydraulics displays, elaborate waterworks, right to the appearance of fully mechanical automata where the art of the clockmaker combined with the effort to vividly represent a living being as a machine. Eighteenth-century\u00a0 technology created a series of biological automata peaking in the figure of the android, \u00aba completely mechanical figure which simulated a living human or animal, operating with apparently responsive action [Bedini 1964: 31]\u00bb. The period between the 1730s and the 1790s saw a dramatic upsurge in mechanical figures of people and animals, a veritable age \u00abof simulation, in which mechanicians tried earnestly the very literal way in which it construed the similarity between animal and artificial machinery\u00bb [riskin 2003a, p. 104]. In 1648 John Wilkins had already made plans for a speaking statue. A similar attempt was performed in 1700 by Denys Dodart, personal physician to Louis XIV. In 1739 Claude-Nicolas Le Cat had planned an automaton man executing the principal functions of the animal economy, circulation, respiration, and \u00abthe secretions\u00bb. In 1771 Erasmus Darwin contrived a wooden mouth with lips of soft leather; a pair of talking heads were credited to abb\u00e9 Mical in 1778. By far the most renowned applications were Jacques-Droz\u2019s automata and anatomical and physiological simulations like the Lady-musician and the Draughtsman, or Vaucansons\u2019s android Flute-player and defecating Duck. After displaying his androids in the winter of 1738 in the salle des quatre saisons<\/i> at the H\u00f4tel de Longueville in Paris, Vaucanson was later affiliated with the Paris Academy of Sciences as \u00abassociated mechanician\u00bb and went on to project the Automatic Loom in 1747. His claims to have \u00abcopied from nature\u00bb for his Defecating Duck bespoke a \u00abgrowing confidence, derived from ever-improved instruments, that experimentation could reveal nature\u2019s actual design\u00bb [Riskin 2003]; his automata were \u00abphilosophical experiments, attempts to discern which aspects of living creatures could be reproduced in machinery, and to what degree\u00bb, in a period controversially marked by \u00abprofund uncertainty about the validity of philosophical mechanism\u00bb [riskin 2003b, pp. 604, 601, 611; see de vaucanson 1742]. His description of the fluteur automate<\/i> accounted for a large part of the entry on Android <\/i>in the Encyclop\u00e9die <\/i>[diderot1751-65, 1.448-451]; his memoir was also translated in English at the time of his shows at the King\u2019s Theatre in London [cottom 1999, p. 54]. Another famous mechanism was the Automaton Chess-Player (actually hiding a human being inside its machinery) devised in 1769 by the Hungarian engineer and mechanician Farkas de Kempelen. Despite its being a mere deception \u00abmore beautiful, more surprising, more astonishing, than any to be met with, in the different accounts of mathematical recreations\u00bb [de kempelen 1784, p. 13; see standage 2002], the Chess-Player extensively toured Europe and America well into the early 1820s [sussman 1999]. In an illuminating cross-fertilisation, \u00ab[i]t was the articulation of certain differences between natural and artificial life that triggered the invention of machines that undermined those differences. But these machines in turn led people to rethink what constituted life\u00bb [riskin 2003a, p. 115]. The question of automata prompted materialists who repudiated Descartes\u2019s separation between mind and body \u00abto invoke a vital property of matter called \u2018sensibility\u2019 that [\u2026] was inherent in organic substance\u00bb, whereas the \u00abmechanicists and mechanicians of the eighteenth century described animal machinery that was sensitive and passionate. Seeing animals as machinery, they began also to see machinery as animal\u00bb [Riskin 2003a: pp. 99-100]. A 1768 passage later inserted by Diderot in Le R\u00eave de d\u2019Alembert <\/i>offered the description of a single day where an unnamed person (arguably D\u2019Alembert himself) was never seen to perform a single free act, in a sequence of monotonous, repetitive actions: \u00a0 il ne sais rien, mais rien du tout de ce qu\u2019il a fait, et je vois que machine pure, simple, et passive [\u2026] loin d\u2019avoir \u00e9t\u00e9 libre, il n\u2019a pas m\u00eame produit un seul acte expr\u00e8s de sa volont\u00e9: il a pense, il a senti, mais il n\u2019a pas agi plus librement qu\u2019un corps inerte, qu\u2019un automate de bois, qui aurait ex\u00e9cut\u00e9 les m\u00eames choses que lui. [diderot 1964, pp. 264-265; see vartanian 1981] \u00a0 In its paradoxical union with the body, Sterne\u2019s demands a similar mechanistic description. While depicting the bliss obtained \u00ab[w]hen man is at peace with man\u00bb, Yorick pays testimony to the corporeal mutations effected by sentiment and evokes the contemporary French debate on mechanicism: \u00a0 I felt a suffusion of a finer kind upon my cheek [\u2026] I felt every vessel in my frame dilate\u2014the arteries beat all chearily together, and every power which sustained life, perform\u2019d it with so little friction, that \u2019twould have confounded the most physical precieuse <\/i>in France: with all her materialism, she could scarce have called me a machine\u2014. [sterne 2008, p. 4] \u00a0 Sympathy bends the body into a pliant machine to be studied and distinguished into its parts and functions like an automaton. On judging his servant\u2019s humble behaviour, Yorick admits to being \u00abapt to be taken with all kinds of people at first sight\u00bb; sympathy ensues presently: \u00abthe genuine look and air of the fellow determined the matter at once in his favour\u00bb [p. 26]. \u00abImpulses\u00bb these might well be [p. 27], but then Yorick confesses to a similar transiency of moods concerning love, \u00abhaving been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another: whilst this interregnum lasts, I always perceive my heart locked up\u00bb [pp. 28-29]. On meeting the Monk in Calais, Yorick likens the fluidity of sentiment to the flux of tides: \u00abthere is no regular reasoning upon the ebbs and flows of our humours; they may depend upon the same causes, for ought I know, which influence the tides themselves\u2014\u00bb [p. 4]. In its mechanistic respondence to sentiment, the body follows closely the spread of the invisible emotions. During the protracted temptation aroused by the fille de chambre, <\/i>the cogency of blood nearly elides sentiment from view: \u00abthere is a sort of a pleasing half guilty blush, where the blood is more in fault than the man\u2014\u2019tis sent impetuous from the heart, and virtue flies after it\u2014not to call it back, but to make the sensation of it more delicious to the nerves\u2014\u2019tis associated\u00bb [p. 77]. But the immediate association between body and soul provided by sentiment ushers in other mechanistic images: \u00abI felt something at first within me which was not in strict unison with the lesson of virtue I had given her the night before [\u2026] If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece\u2014must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?\u00bb [pp. 77-78]. The conclusion is attuned to a musical image: \u00abit was touching a cold key with a flat third to it, upon the close of a piece of musick, which had call\u2019d forth my affections\u00bb [p. 79]. Pondering the universal ties of brotherhood uncannily evokes a\u00a0 mechanical image. On meeting the fille de chambre, <\/i>Yorickopines that \u00ab\u2019[t]is sweet to feel by what fine-spun threads our affections are drawn together. [\u2026] I feel the conviction of consanguinity so strongly, that I could not help turning half round to look in her face, and see if I could trace out any thing in it of a family likeness\u2014Tut! Said I, are we not all relations?\u00bb [p. 56]. The mechanistic account of sentiment is adamant even in less ennobling passions, for instance the flattery shrewdly used by \u00aba tall figure of a philosophic serious, adust look\u00bb mechanically repeating his motions in a Paris street: \u00ab[he] pass\u2019d and repass\u2019d sedately along the street, making a turn of about sixty paces on each side of the gate of the hotel […] asking charity\u00bb, making \u00aba dozen turns backwards and forwards\u00bb [p. 79]. Such a close observation modulates into a homage to the corporeal workings of flattery: \u00abDelicious essence! How refreshing art thou to nature! How strongly are all its powers and all its weaknesses on thy side! How sweetly dost thou mix with the blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous passages to the heart!\u00bb [p. 91]. Good nature is based on the body and affects it, argues Yorick at the Paris shop by physically testing the woman\u2019s body as evidence: \u00a0 Any one may do a casual act of good nature, but a continuation of them shews it is a part of the temperature; and certainly, added I, if it is the same blood which comes from the heart, which descends to the extremes (touching her wrist) I am sure you must have one of the best pulses of any woman in the world\u2014Feel it, said she, holding out her arm. So laying down my hat, I took hold of her fingers in one hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery [p. 44] \u00a0 The stronger the sentiment evoked by sympathy, the more cogent its rendition as a mechanical effect. Even animals, the dialectical term of comparison to the man-machine in the body\/mind problem, are characterized as automata. At first Yorick mistakes the voice of the starling in the cage for that of a child, \u00abwhich complained \u2018it could not get out\u2019\u00bb. Repetition increasingly estranges the animal into a sort of automaton, with \u00abthe same words repeated twice over\u00bb [p. 59]. As a result, the violent outburst of sentiment overlaps with the recognition of the inherent mechanisation of the scene: \u00a0 \u2018I fear, poor creature!\u2019 said I, I cannot set thee at liberty\u2014\u2018No\u2019, said the starling\u2014\u2018I can\u2019t get out\u2014I can\u2019t get out,\u2019 \u2026 I vow, I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; nor do I remember an incident in my life, where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly call\u2019d home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted [pp. 59-60]. \u00a0 The brute prompts Yorick into universal sympathy and bodily commotion: \u00abthe bird in his cage pursued me into my room; I sat down close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I begun to figure to myself the miseries of confinement [\u2026 ] But here my heart began to bleed\u00bb [p. 61]. Sentiment constantly calls for its opposite, the mechanisation of life, for instance through the physical or mnestic contact with an object. Mons. Dessein\u2019s getting rid of the Desobligeant <\/i>prompts a short debate on sensations and an ultimate comparison with a mechanism: \u00abMon Dieu! <\/i>Said Mons. Dessein\u2014I have no interest\u2014Except the interest, said I, which men of a certain turn of mind take, Mons. Dessein, in their own sensation\u2014I\u2019m persuaded, to a man who feels for others as well as for himself, every rainy night, disguise it as you will, must cast a damp upon your spirits\u2014You suffer, Mons. Dessein, as much as the machine\u2014\u00bb [p. 12]. The very sight of \u00abanother old tatter\u2019d Desobligeant <\/i>[\u2026] stirr\u2019d up a disagreeable sensation within me now; and I thought \u2019twas a churlish beast into whose heart the idea could first enter, to construct such a machine\u00bb [p. 21]. The physical gesture of rubbing the horn box upon the sleeve of the Monk\u2019s tunick elicits a later coalescing of person and object in Yorick\u2019s memory, as overwhelming sentiment sets the body in motion: \u00abupon pulling out his little horn box, as I sat by his grave, and plucking up a nettle or two at the head of it, which had no business to grow there, they all struck together so forcibly upon my affections, that I burst into a flood of tears\u2014but I am as weak as a woman; and I beg the world not to smile, but pity me\u00bb [p. 18]. When in the throes of sentiment, the sentimental traveller is paradoxically induced to both experience his own body and sensing its proximity to a mechanism. Sympathy, bodily communication, the very motions of sentiment, all demand an unflagging work of corporeal and mechanistic translation. While at the Op\u00e9ra comique, <\/i>Yorick mechanically abridges the gap between fellow sufferers from the strength of sentiment: \u00a0 There is no secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand<\/i>, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go translatingall the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to. [pp. 47-48] \u00a0 Yorick mechanically gauges and measures all passers-by: \u00a0 I measuredevery body I saw walking in the streets by it\u2014Melancholy application! especially where the size was extremely little\u2014the face extremely dark\u2014the eyes quick\u2014the nose long\u2014the teeth white\u2014the jaw prominent\u2014to see so many miserables, by force of accidents driven out of their own proper class into the very verge of another, which it gives me pain to write down\u2014every third man a pigmy! [p. 49] \u00a0 The underlying mechanistic imagery is explicitly expressed when Yorick generalises on the human flair for understanding, a distinctly sentimental, sympathy-related activity that is modulated on a mechanistic image: \u00abman has a certain compass, as well as an instrument; and […] the social and other calls have occasion by turns for every key in him; so that if you begin a note too high o too low, there must be a want either in the upper or under part, to fill up the system of harmony\u00bb [p. 75]. Nowhere is the mechanistic account of sentiment more evident than in the episode of Maria. Yorick furnishes a detailed portrait of her physical appearance by means of a list of different, instantaneous actions of unmistakable automatic garb: \u00a0 the tears trickled down her cheeks. I sat down close by her; and Maria let her wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.\u2014I then steep\u2019d it in my own\u2014and then in hers\u2014and then in mine\u2014and then I wiped hers again\u2014and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. I am positive I have a soul; nor cann the books with which materialistshave pester\u2019d the world ever convince me of the contrary. [p. 95] \u00a0 Apparently Yorick is making his case against materialism. The continuation of the scene, however, unveils its mechanicist penchant. As Maria plays her evening song upon her pipe, the sentimental traveller, in face of sheer, nearly mechanical repetition, is moved to the acme of sentiment and his body is consequently set in motion: \u00abNature melted within me, as I utter\u2019d this\u00bb. The conclusion revamps the imagery of musical automata: \u00abI touch\u2019d upon the string on which hung all her sorrows\u2014she look\u2019d with wistful disorder for some time in my face; and then, without saying any thing, took her pipe, and play\u2019d her service to the Virgin\u2014The string I had touch\u2019d ceased to vibrate\u2014in a moment or two Maria returned to herself\u2014let her pipe fall\u2014and rose up\u00bb [pp. 96-97]. It has been suggested that Sterne conflated the suggestive and the sentimental \u00abby interposing a body – the body of the narrator- whose sentimental whims sanction its erotic encounters\u00bb [mullan 1988, p. 189]. Yet the body is more clearly seen and felt when shaken up by sentiment and thus compared by contrast to a mechanism. Yorick promises \u00aba quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which rise out of her, which make us love each other\u2014and the world, better than we do\u00bb [sterne 2008, p. 71].\u00a0 In the uneasy union between body and mind, this journey still needs the contrastive backdrop of mechanism and automata in order to feel the music of human experience and sympathy, a set of individual and social, physical and emotional tools that will pave the way for the Romantic triumph of sensibility.<\/p>\n
\n

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    Rocco Coronato In his paean to \u00abdear sensibility\u00bb, Sterne\u2019s Yorick envisages the \u00abeternal fountain of our feelings\u00bb as a divinity affecting both body and soul: \u00aball comes from thee, great\u2014great SENSORIUM of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Sentimental Journey through the Body and Other Eighteenth-Century Automata - Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lilec.it\/romanticismo\/a-sentimental-journey-through-the-body-and-other-eighteenth-century-automata\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"it_IT\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Sentimental Journey through the Body and Other Eighteenth-Century Automata - Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rocco Coronato In his paean to \u00abdear sensibility\u00bb, Sterne\u2019s Yorick envisages the \u00abeternal fountain of our feelings\u00bb as a divinity affecting both body and soul: \u00aball comes from thee, great\u2014great SENSORIUM of the world! 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