When a literary historian talks of the literature of sensibility, he refers to a particular cultural phenomenon of the eighteenth century, where the background was the moral and the social situation.This phenomenon develop as a reaction to seventeenth-century Stoicism (which emphasized reason and the unemotional will as the sole motives virtue),and even more importantly, as a reaction against Thomas Hobbes's theory that man is innately selfish, and that the mainsprings of his behavior are self-interest and a drive for power and status.