A contradiction lurks at the core of ideals of enlightenment. The resolution to generate new knowledge is often incompatible with a simultaneous desire to share this knowledge with an ever-expanding pool of readers. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers took up Francis Bacon's seventeenth-century rallying cry to advance learning across fields of study, the commitment to this Baconian project often ran at cross-purposes with the Addisonian wish, articulated on the pages of the early eighteenth-century Spectator papers, to illuminate the minds of the widest possible readership. Francis Bacon himself encouraged limiting the publication of and access to knowledge. The discordance between these two goals was only rarely voiced straightforwardly in the eighteenth century, but nonetheless their dissonance came to define the development of the republic of letters.

In one of the few trenchant treatments of enlightenment's dilemma, physician, playwright, poet, and novelist Oliver Goldsmith explains,