This paper discusses the ideas of the three 18th-century philosophers on the premise that their ideas are essential to the understanding of Wordsworth’s growth as a poet. They are Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The former two British philosophers stress the public dimension of feeling by maintaining that all human beings are related by sympathy and sympathy is essential to the formation and development of human society. It is argued in the paper that Wordsworth’s poetic intention in The Lyrical Ballads, as is expressed in “The Preface”, implicitly draws on their empiricist ideas of habit and experience, creating the close relation of feeling and action in the examples of “low and rustic life.” On the other hand, Kant’s philosophy in The Critique of Judgment seems to provide the poet with the perspectives of the subject’s transcendental freedom, with which the autonomous individuals are expected to conflate their inclination with duty. The poetic autobiography of The Prelude, discussing the “ministry of beauty and fear” upon his soul, epitomizes the birth of the modern autonomous subject equipped with such a mental competence. To conclude, Wordsworth’s aesthetic ideas, spanning the polar opposites of the empiricism and the transcendental idealism, adumbrate the structure of feeling in English Romanticism.