The first chapter takes up the work of the philosopher Adam Smith, establishing a historical frame for the genre of sentimental fiction, while also illustrating the ways philosophical sentimentalism shares its novelistic counterpart’s preoccupation with eyes and seeing. It reads Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) alongside George Berkeley’s An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709). Noting that Smith structures sympathy as a visual encounter, it argues that he depicts the eye as a tool of impartiality in an attempt to compensate for the emotional and imaginative processes that underlie his moral system. However, despite Smith’s best efforts to describe the way that seeing and feeling might attain objectivity, there are moments when his conception of sight is informed by older, classical theories of vision, ones that acknowledge a much closer physical and affective connection between observer and observed. In the end, he cannot really get around the fact that we feel, and are touched, by what we see.