The work of a decade was converging, but it was specifically the juggernaut of Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn that inspired this essay. By 1973 I had read and mulled over both philosophers, but only the latter was then being debated in any intensity in America, Foucault not yet having exploded in the American consciousness in the way he would in just a few years after some of his works had been translated into English. I was mesmerized by his Nietzschean ideas, especially those he so adroitly and rhetorically applied to the long eighteenth century, or — what he facilely called — "l"age classique". At home, closer to the grindstone, I had been nervously trying to understand where all the sensibility he delineated, especially its deranged forms in madness, led. The word itself — sensibility — should have provided a clue. But I could not believe the path from nerves to sensibility to be direct or linear and worried about the byways. As I implored in note 12, in the context of literary critic Northrop Frye's aim to define this Age of Sensibility, "what is sensibility and where does it come from?"