Humanists and Enlighteners were thus drawn to an old idea: that the best foundation for this human, moral world lies in our spontaneous tendency to respond to one another with fellow feeling: “sympathy,” or empathy, or the sense of interrelatedness expressed by ren or ubuntu. It is what Condorcet called “a delicate and generous sensibility which nature has implanted in the hearts of all and whose flowering waits only upon the favourable influence of enlightenment and freedom.”
