Taste and Experience in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics: The Move toward Empiricism 9781350298705, 9781350298736, 9781350298712

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Taste and Experience in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

Also available from Bloomsbury Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, by David Carrier Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance, by Omar Rivera Philosophy, Literature and Understanding, by Jukka Mikkonen The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World, by Richard Kalina The Political Power of Visual Art, by Daniel Herwitz

Taste and Experience in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics The Move toward Empiricism Dabney Townsend

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Dabney Townsend, 2022 Dabney Townsend has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: WA1980.92 The Choice of Hercules, 1712 Matteis, Paolo de’ (1662–1728) Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-9870-5 ePDF: 978-1-3502-9871-2 eBook: 978-1-3502-9872-9 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Introduction

1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

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The Empiricist Move in Aesthetics: Locke and Shaftesbury Francis Hutcheson: The Sense of Taste Hume: The Priority of Sentiment Associationism: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley Theories of Taste Problems of Taste: The Tragic Paradox and a Standard of Taste Genius The Sublime: Baillie and Burke The Picturesque Thomas Reid and the Theory of Taste Archibald Alison: Experience and Expression Dugald Stewart: Beauty and Taste Again

23 35 47 63 77 103 117 133 153 177 189

A Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded

201

Notes

205

Bibliography

233

Index

241

vi

Introduction

Considerable attention has been paid by philosophers and intellectual historians to the development of philosophical aesthetics in the long eighteenth century in Britain. It is widely acknowledged that what we now study as aesthetics has its origins in the empiricist turn that began with Isaac Newton and John Locke and was given a voice in the writings on beauty, taste, and critical judgment beginning with the third Earl of Shaftesbury.1 The history is complex, however. Shaftesbury himself remained a Neoplatonist in many respects, even though his education was directed by John Locke. During the century, no clear line of separation exists between what we regard as a philosophy of art and a theory of taste on the one hand and criticism in the arts, particularly painting and poetry, on the other. Academic philosophy that refers to matters of taste and aesthetic judgment does not arise until late in the century, particularly in the Scottish enlightenment with Alexander Gerard,2 Thomas Reid,3 Archibald Alison,4 and Dugald Stewart.5 Important writers like David Hume,6 Edmund Burke,7 and Joseph Priestley,8 including those with university positions in moral philosophy like Francis Hutcheson,9 were working in the belles lettres tradition when they consider matters of beauty and taste. In an important sense, aesthetics as it is understood today did not exist in eighteenthcentury Britain. A. G. Baumgarten coined the word ‘aesthetics’ from the Greek adverb αισθητικοσ (aesthetikos), having to do with perceiving by the senses.10 (That meaning survives in our word for suppressing the senses, ‘anesthetic.’) Baumgarten used it to mark a distinction between sensible perception and intellectual perception. His task in his aesthetics was to locate sensible experience, and particularly feeling, in the rationalist tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff.11 Baumgarten’s strategy was to make a place for feeling both as a first step toward rational knowledge and as a legitimate, though limited, form of knowledge in its own right. Immanuel Kant adopted the word in his critical philosophy12 and shifted its usage from Baumgarten’s narrow reference to felt sensation to any form of pretheoretical sensate apprehension. Kant’s usage in turn was adopted by the Romantics where it referred to a unique kind of feeling, and eventually it is broadened again to include all theories of beauty and the arts within philosophy. Reading the Kantian and post-Kantian senses of ‘aesthetic’ back into eighteenthcentury theories of taste, beauty, and the critical problems related to poetry, painting, music, architecture, and oratory or eloquence distorts those theories, however.

2

Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

During the eighteenth century, no single term encompasses the experiences of taste, sentiment, the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque, genius, and so on. Sir William Hamilton would have preferred the coinage apolaustic as the umbrella term to refer to the philosophy of taste, the theory of the fine arts, and the science of the beautiful,13 but it is merely eccentric. We could refer just to the controversies, issues, and theories that are of interest, yet that loses the significance of their commonality. It is true that what we know as philosophical aesthetics has its origin in eighteenth-century theories, but it is equally true that those theories deserve to be considered in their own right. They must be read in the context of the empiricist revolution that was taking place along the lines laid down by Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke. Aesthetics as it emerged in the twentieth century as a separate subdiscipline in philosophy depends on what I would call an aesthetic experience thesis. Aesthetics there is understood to be about a unique kind of experience that arises from art and art-like instances in nature. Such experience is variously described as distanced, disinterested, or empathetic. Aesthetic qualities are just those qualities that produce such experiences. Aesthetic predicates are those that describe such experiences. Art is what artists produce to stimulate such experiences. The proper way to achieve aesthetic experience is to assume a unique attitude toward art and nature. Aesthetics as it is understood in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, then, is the philosophy of such experience, its language, criteria, and production. In the comparable continental, phenomenological tradition, that post-Kantian understanding is still predominant, though it is developed along lines laid down by Edmund Husserl and others.14 Unfortunately, problems have arisen for aesthetics understood in that way. A unique form of experience has proven impossible to define or describe without circularity. Aesthetic experience is what is produced by an aesthetic attitude and an aesthetic attitude is what is produced by aesthetic experience, and so on. A great deal of very acute philosophical analysis has been expended to avoid the problems raised by the aesthetic experience thesis. Those efforts are ongoing. I do not know how to resolve them. The eighteenth-century writers on taste, beauty, and the fine arts did not have those problems, however. When experience becomes central to the debates and discussions of taste and beauty that follow Locke’s lead, some of the same terms and problems that occupy the aesthetic experience thesis still arise. Taste is subjective, so a standard of taste is needed if critical judgments are to be more than expressions of opinion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so new definitions of beauty are required if beauty is to be something that can be referred to meaningfully. Some of the same terms and issues that occupy post-Kantian aesthetics can be found. Artists begin to have a status as experience-producers for an expanded art-public. Disinterestedness can be seen as advantageous in critics. But in the eighteenth century, one does not find the uniqueness thesis about a kind of experience that needs to be defined or identified nor the need to separate aesthetic experience from utility or morality that are characteristic of postKantian aesthetics. Eighteenth-century writers on beauty and taste offer nothing like a philosophical aesthetics separate from theories of taste, beauty, and critical standards, therefore, even if retrospective views of those theories find hints of it.

Introduction

3

I do not want to get involved in the contemporary problems of aesthetics. I am skeptical of where they are leading us, but that is not the issue here. I am willing to grant that there are ways of reading the eighteenth-century writers that anticipate twentieth-century and twenty-first-century aesthetics. There is no need to invent a new apolaustic discipline to replace aesthetics as our philosophical subdiscipline. But I do want to examine the empiricist shift in theories of taste and beauty independently of the aesthetic experience thesis as it was formulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I think that will allow a more accurate reading of the theories of taste, beauty, and the fine arts, and it may be that that will lead to a better way to do aesthetics as a consequence, though that will be another book. In order to acknowledge the connections of the eighteenth-century theories to aesthetics as we know it without importing post-Kantian assumptions about aesthetic experience, I will allow myself a terminological distinction without inventing a completely new term. I will speak of a ‘proto-aesthetics’ instead of aesthetics in the eighteenth-century writers. Proto-aesthetics is intended to point out the continuity as well as the discontinuity between the eighteenth-century theories and later aesthetic theories as well as the continuity within eighteenth-century theories. What Francis Hutcheson is doing in his theory of beauty as uniformity amidst variety; what David Hume is doing in trying to solve the problem of a standard of taste; what writers on genius, the sublime, and the picturesque are doing would not have been understood as a single subject at the time of their writing; but by calling what they are doing a proto-aesthetic, we can see the common issues that experiential theories share without importing aesthetic experience and distorting the theories themselves. So ‘protoaesthetic’ refers to theories of taste, beauty, the fine arts, genius, expression, the sublime, the picturesque, and more while not implying any particular theoretical basis such as uniformity, harmony, variety, association, or expression. Proto-aesthetics defines the theoretical concern common to eighteenth-century topics—beauty, taste, and particularly the understanding and criticism of the emerging fine arts—that already existed, but it assumes theories of experience in the broadly Lockean tradition rather than some metaphysical or rationalist basis. In the eighteenth century, the rise of the philosophical issues that form a protoaesthetic is a complex movement as one might expect from the broad involvement of critics (e.g., John Dryden and Joseph Addison), artists (e.g., Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth), professional philosophers (e.g., Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Gerard), connoisseurs (e.g., Richard Payne Knight), and dilettantes (e.g., Uvedale Price) of all kinds.15 The movement was intimately connected to the new empiricist philosophy of Locke and Newton, but older scholastic modes of expression often provide the conceptual framework. Writers from Joseph Addison and the third Earl of Shaftesbury onward are not concerned with a systematic treatment of the arts but with the way that the new reliance on experience changes and informs public taste, the fine arts, and criticism. Moreover, the terms of the contemporary eighteenthcentury debates are set by divisions that are different and are understood differently from our modernist understanding of the same issues. We can often detect our own interests, but the contemporary expression of them is couched in terms current to the times.

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Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

For the eighteenth-century writers whose work makes up a proto-aesthetic, morality, character, and social standing are important. Among the dominant influences are divisions between classicists and modernists, particularly as they are divided between neoclassical adherence to rules of art on the one hand and individual sentiment and feeling on the other and between commercially motivated authors and critics and the talented polite learning of the nobility and newly wealthy middle class. The central debates are about the relation of poetry to painting and music, the development of taste and judgments about it (particularly how to distinguish good and bad taste), the characteristics of beauty and its uses, and critical issues concerning rules of composition, presentation, and status. The result is a decidedly messy but rich mixture. English and Scottish literary and art criticism, belles lettres essays, and the philosophy of taste are much more important to the eighteenth-century protoaesthetics than the academic and near scholastic speculation of Baumgarten and Kant. The eighteenth-century empiricist understanding of taste remains essentially moral and is more usually about the manner and character of individuals rather than a unique way of experiencing art and nature, for example. (The metaphor of taste itself has its roots in seventeenth-century mannerist art.16) Moreover, the work of art and the conditions of its production were changing rapidly. It can be argued that the eighteenth century invented the fine arts.17 Hume, in particular, by promoting direct experience as sentiment creates a logical space for the fine arts as independent forms with their own standards and effects, particularly pleasure. Beauty becomes virtually codefinable as pleasure. With the changes in audience, means of production, and status of art and artists come the particular theoretical problems with which writers on a protoaesthetic must deal. One might do worse than pay attention to the way that eighteenthcentury writers began to think about what makes something a work of art and how one should respond to it. This book is intended to provide an exploration of that proto-aesthetic. There has been much excellent analysis of eighteenth-century aesthetics and of individual writers since Jerome Stolnitz and Monroe Beardsley helped to establish the possibility of a philosophical aesthetics and called attention to its eighteenth-century roots.18 What I hope to provide is a focus on the eighteenth century itself in Britain that will serve to inform current philosophy of art. I do not propose to offer a strict history of early modern aesthetics in Britain. For that, one may turn to the first volume of Paul Guyer’s magisterial A History of Modern Aesthetics.19 But I do aspire to a more historically nuanced synthesis than such works as George Dickie’s interesting A Century of Taste20 and a somewhat different perspective than Peter Kivy’s The Seventh Sense.21 My focus is on the philosophy of art and criticism as they are related to the empiricist tradition begun by John Locke, and my thesis is that taste and beauty should be understood as sentiment and feeling in the tradition defined by Locke, Hutcheson, and Hume. The proto-aesthetic problems follow from those initial assumptions. At the beginning of the century, ‘beauty’ was still the central term in most discussions of criticism and the arts. The classical terms and classical definitions from Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus could be presumed by most educated persons, many of whom could quote those definitions, usually in Greek or Latin. The term ‘beauty’ remains important throughout the century, but it is gradually supplanted by

Introduction

5

the new mannerist term ‘taste.’ Taste is more obviously subjective and experiential and thus lends itself to Lockean forms of empiricism. Theories of beauty are important to practicing artists such as Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses delivered as president of the Royal Society of Artists22 and to other practicing artists such as William Hogarth, whose Analysis of Beauty23 is at once practical and easily parodied. The most philosophically interesting writers look to the newer, more experientially founded theories of taste, however. The turn from theories of beauty, which are object based, to theories of taste presents new problems for philosophers, however. Taste is subjective; it is judgmental; and it is culturally open in a way that beauty was not thought to be. Persons of taste either have good or bad taste, and social status as well as intellectual correctness rest on one’s taste. Taste, in turn, suggests that there must be a sense of taste, as Francis Hutcheson held, and from the sense of taste to sentiment and then to a multiplication of associations, senses, and special forms of experience, philosophical theories can develop independently of earlier rules, practices, and standards. Those experientially based theories form what I am calling proto-aesthetic theory that is the beginning of philosophical aesthetics in the broadest sense. That, and not the classical theories of beauty that could be taken for granted in educated circles or the practical theories of beauty in the arts found in Reynolds, Hogarth, and other artists and art and literary critics, is the subject of this book. This is intended as a work in philosophy, therefore. Literary critics will approach the century differently, as will historians. I am not particularly concerned with some of the century’s intramural critical debates (such as whether contemporary artists can surpass Homer) unless they are philosophically interesting. Close reading of the individuals considered is important, but I am more concerned with understanding them rather than settling fine points of interpretation. I will try to walk a fine line between hermeneutics and history, therefore. Ultimately, my desire is to suggest what can be learned for the philosophy of art and criticism rather than historical interests, but I believe that one can do that only by being sensitive to the situation of the arts and the philosophy of the time. I begin with the philosophical foundations: Anthony Ashley Cooper (the third Earl of Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and the associationists, particularly David Hartley and Joseph Priestley (Chapters 1 through 4). Then I consider specific problems raised by the subjectivity of the empiricist approach: the nature of taste itself, sentiments of taste (especially the peculiar pleasure of tragedy), a standard of taste, genius, the sublime, and the picturesque (Chapters 5 through 9). Finally, I consider the more academic proto-aesthetic formed toward the end of the century: Thomas Reid’s alternative to Hume’s sentimentalism, Archibald Alison’s theory of expression, and Dugald Stewart’s recapitulation of Reid’s theories as they apply to taste and beauty (Chapters 10 through 12). The organization is both historical and topical, and the emphasis is on the philosophical issues rather than critical issues. The goal is to rethink the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetic both as a way of reading the century and as a move toward a different way of thinking about aesthetics.

6

1

The Empiricist Move in Aesthetics: Locke and Shaftesbury I The preeminence of Lockean epistemology in the transition from seventeenth-century rationalist and Neoplatonic treatments of beauty to eighteenth-century theories of taste is now largely the received opinion. This is a relatively recent development, however. In 1963 Jerome Stolnitz thought it necessary to urge it explicitly as an overlooked fact: I believe it [the pre-eminence of Locke’s influence on eighteenth century thought] to be true of aesthetics as well, but that fact has gone unremarked because the line of influence is not so overt as in the case of, say, political theory or epistemology. It is, rather, oblique and devious; that the influence is there at all is, even, paradoxical.1

Since then, however, it has been widely acknowledged that Locke’s influence on aesthetics is pervasive. I believe it is necessary to look more closely at how it came about and what it amounts to, however. In the larger picture, Locke’s influence is decisive because it provides the connection between the scientific paradigms of seventeenthand eighteenth-century mechanistic science and theories of art, beauty, and taste. But in detail, it is much more complex than has been acknowledged, and it is important to disentangle some of that detail. In itself, a Lockean theory of art and taste may seem a hopeless task since Locke’s own indifference to such questions is legendary. As Stolnitz notes, “Locke’s attitude towards the arts and beauty may therefore be said to fall between calculated indifference and hostility, a product of the mentality of the shopkeeper and the philosophe.”2 The only references to beauty in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are incidental. Moreover, this indifference was apparently well known even by Locke’s admirers. For example, Daniel Webb, who wrote several essays on the arts, notes, “Nature has drawn a broad line between taste and judgement; and seems to delight in bestowing these advantages with a capricious hand. … Did not Locke prefer Blackmore to Milton.”3 So, one will not find a theory of art or taste anywhere in Locke’s writings nor even the directions toward one in his practice. Nevertheless, attempting to see Locke’s influence correctly is important because if we read some early-eighteenth-century texts too directly according to Locke’s way of ideas, we are likely to be misled.

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II The place to begin is with the writer whom I take to be the progenitor of an eighteenthcentury proto-aesthetics—Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671– 1713). The influence of Shaftesbury on the formation of early modern philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, was recognized and developed by Norman Kemp Smith,4 among others. Shaftesbury recognized that sentiment, especially moral sentiment, was instrumental in the formation of character and thus of moral action. Shaftesbury is by no means the only seventeenthcentury source for what I am calling a proto-aesthetics, of course. Rationalist theorists of taste and beauty who followed Christian Wolff (e.g., A. G. Baumgarten) are basically empiricist in their rejection of earlier Aristotelian rule-based theories, but it is Shaftesbury who provides a basis for its systematic development as a discipline in philosophical discourse. Shaftesbury had close personal ties to Locke, though they were rather ambivalent. The first Earl of Shaftesbury was Locke’s political and literary patron, employer, and associate. Because of an unspecified incapacity in his son, the first Earl undertook the early upbringing of his grandson, and Locke was thus directly involved in the third Earl’s education. Thus it is true, as Shaftesbury acknowledged, that in his education, From the earliest infancy Mr. Locke governed according to his principles. … I was his more peculiar charge, being as eldest son taken by my grandfather and bred under his care, Mr. Locke having the absolute direction of my education, and to whom next my immediate parents, as I must own the highest obligation, so I have ever preserved the highest gratitude and duty.5

He goes on to call Locke his foster-father. But it is also true that Locke was so involved in the political and economic machinations of the first Earl that he can hardly be said to have been young Anthony’s mentor, and Anthony was only twelve when his grandfather died, and he was sent away to school.6 Locke continued to be important to Anthony and is sometimes referred to as his tutor, but it was the Scottish David Denoune who was his actual tutor. In a remarkable letter to General Stanhope in 1709, the now third Earl writes, Thus have I ventured to make you the greatest confidence in the world, which is that of my philosophy, even against my old tutor and governor, whose name is so established in the world, but with whom I ever concealed my differences as much as possible. For as ill a builder as he is, and as little able to treat the home points of philosophy, he is of admirable use against the rubbish of the schools in which most of us have been bred up.7

So one must tread very carefully in looking for Locke’s influence in Shaftesbury’s writings. I will not argue that Shaftesbury’s philosophy is right, nor that Shaftesbury has some fundamental insight into an eighteenth-century proto-aesthetic that has been overlooked. But I do want to argue that Shaftesbury’s position is not aesthetic at all in

The Empiricist Move in Aesthetics

9

the post-Kantian sense and that what he does advocate is much more complex and in many respects much more consistent (though still not systematic—the two are quite different) than it has been taken to be. Moreover, in view of the current tendency to question overly simple forms of empiricism, Shaftesbury’s position takes on added interest both historically and theoretically. Perhaps it is time to look at Shaftesbury again without the blinders of a commitment to Kantian aesthetics.

III Shaftesbury often expresses himself in characteristically Neoplatonic language. In the midst of his “Philosophical Rhapsody,” for example, his prose can sound like something straight out of Plotinus: Do you not see then, replied Theocles, that you have established three degrees or orders of beauty? … First, the dead forms, … which bear a fashion, and are formed, whether by man or Nature, but have no forming power, no action or intelligence. … Next, and as the second kind, the forms which form, that is which have intelligence, action, and operation. … Here therefore is double beauty. For here is both the form (the effect of mind) and mind itself. … And here you have unawares discovered that Third order of beauty, which forms not only such as we call mere forms but even forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter, and can show lifeless bodies brought into form, and fashioned by our own hands, but that which fashions even minds themselves, contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by these minds, and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty.8

Here we find a hierarchy of beauty that is as old as Western Neoplatonism. Minds are superior to inanimate matter, and Mind (singular) is superior to individual minds. That which creates is the ontological presupposition and source of that which is created. Not much later in the same dialogue, Shaftesbury equates the good and the beautiful: “I am ready enough to yield there is no real good beside the enjoyment of beauty. And I am as ready, replied Theocles, to yield there is no real enjoyment of beauty beside what is good.”9 These passages are typical of Shaftesbury’s position. Throughout his work, he moves from the physical to the mental, from the beautiful to the moral, which is the only true beauty. “Character,” “honor,” and “virtue” are the repeated objects of his inquiry, and they are more real than anything he might see or touch. One can hardly quarrel with the characterization of Shaftesbury’s work as Neoplatonist, therefore. Nevertheless, Shaftesbury is much more empirical in practice than his Neoplatonic language would lead us to believe. His practical advice often breaks with the Neoplatonic tradition in a way that is decidedly more empiricist. For example, in his treatise on the painting of the “Judgment of Hercules” (which he commissioned to be painted according to his instructions), he insists on the priority of historical time: It is evident that every master in painting, when he has made choice of the determinate date or point of time, according to which he would represent his

10

Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics history, is afterwards disbarred the taking advantage from any other action than what is immediately present, and belonging to that single instant he describes. For if he passes the present only for a moment, he may as well pass it for many years. And by this reckoning he may with as good right repeat the same figure several times over, and in one and the same picture represent Hercules in his cradle, … and the same Hercules of full age.10

What I find striking about this passage is its rejection of the early renaissance practice of doing just what Shaftesbury descries—suspending time to show a whole story by depicting multiple times in the same painting. I feel sure Shaftesbury was aware of the paintings he was rejecting; it is not clear, however, that he was aware that his reliance on historical time breaks with his Neoplatonic characterization of beauty—indeed of all forms—as timeless. Thus, while we must grant the Neoplatonic form that Shaftesbury’s thought assumes, we must not neglect to look for the specific thrust that makes Shaftesbury important. There we find serious qualifications upon the traditional Neoplatonism just noted above. The first is perhaps more negative than positive, and thus harder to establish and illustrate succinctly. Nowhere do we find Shaftesbury’s speculation on morality, art, and taste moving from the individual in the direction of contemplation or an escape from the self. Its moral objective is consistently to discover and improve the individual; the objective of art should be to discover and represent the true form instead of the fancied form or outward appearance, but that form must appear concretely in paintings such as that of Hercules. (Shaftesbury has a preference for historical painting over mere landscape or portraiture.) For example, in his notes on plastic form, we find, “This particular symmetry (viz. the figures and forms) are in the Characters; since these in poetry are included in the moral part, or manners. For manners are here properly exhibited by characters only, their opposition, contrast, foil, operation.”11 Instead of being led away from such plastic forms and weaned from the world, Shaftesbury is content to provide instruction for finding the forms within the world. In itself, this does not separate him from the Neoplatonism that his language implies, but it indicates a counter-direction at work. The moral objective is not to free oneself from dependence on the world but to correct one’s perception of it: “The great business in this (as in our lives, or in the whole of life) is to correct our tastes.”12 Our business is not to free ourselves; it is to correct ourselves so that we do not dwell solely on the outward form. By the time he wrote these notes, Shaftesbury had withdrawn from public affairs and retired to Naples in a vain attempt to restore his health. He knew he was dying. Nevertheless, his occupation was directly with things—painting, sculpture, the arts—and not just the classics, but the creation through commissions of new works. Ad hominem or not, this is the work of a peculiarly empirical Neoplatonist. Another point upon which Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism must be qualified is that of method. Shaftesbury expresses a healthy distrust for some of the introspection that characterizes much Neoplatonic thought. Withdrawal and a turn inward are not Shaftesbury’s way. Instead, he recommends expression. He writes, One would think there was nothing easier for us than to know our own minds, and understand what our main scope was; what we plainly drove at, and what we

The Empiricist Move in Aesthetics

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propose to ourselves, as our end, in every occurrence of our lives. But our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit language, that ’tis the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly. For this reason, the right method is to give them voice and accent.13

In place of meditation and withdrawal, Shaftesbury recommends a kind of soliloquy that opposes self to self. He defends “raillery,” and in the fine arts he provides a defense of, not an attack upon, critics. All of this indicates a healthy skepticism about selfexamination and recognition of the infinite possibilities of self-deception. The counter to these difficulties imposed by language and form could be called a kind of empiricism had that term not been co-opted as the opposite of “rationalism.” It is not the empiricism of Locke’s simple ideas and sense impressions nor the empiricism of continental rationalism that rejects Aristotelian science, but it depends on experience and verifiable observation nonetheless. For example, Shaftsbury is led to a version of the test of time with respect to art that is echoed later in Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and Burke’s Essay on Taste (prefixed to the second edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful).14 For this is worthy of observation that though we scarce see a man whose fancy agrees with another in the many hands and paintings, yet in general when the cabal is over, … the public always judges right, and the pieces esteemed or disesteemed after a time and a course of some years are always exactly esteemed according to their proportion of worth by these rules and studies. So that the gentleman who follows his caprice may undo himself. But he who either fixes his taste, or buys according to the universal judgment and public taste and confession of painters in works of the deceased, will never be abused or come off a sufferer when he parts with his effects.15

It is noteworthy that Shaftesbury is thinking in terms of gentlemen and their estates. Taste is a matter of standing. What distinguishes Shaftesbury’s empiricism from that of Locke, of course, is that Shaftesbury believes that there is more to be observed than mere external experience. One may observe and imitate higher or lower forms, inner or outer character: Something therefore there is in every design, or designatory work of imitation, and copy after nature (be it even in animals, fruit, or flower-pieces), which answers to the history in a truly epic or poetic work. This is in truth and strictness historical, moral, characteristic. The note or character of nature, the form, natural habit, constitution, reason of the thing, its energy, operation, place, use or effect in nature: if ill and mischievous to us, that we may record and avoid; if salutary, record and improve. This is the moral, the intelligence of the fable!16

While we may not want to call this empiricism, it is equally misleading to dismiss it as metaphysical as Stolnitz does.17 There is something testable here, particularly

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by public taste over time. Shaftesbury’s work deviates from traditional Neoplatonic writing because of its insistent concreteness and its refusal to go beyond what the work is able to present. In painting, Shaftesbury defends a classicism that arranges nature to exhibit a character or ideal, but he does not endorse the artificiality of Baroque and Mannerism styles that equate so well with Neoplatonic speculation about the heightened effect of artifice. Shaftesbury will not overtly reject the rationalists’ innate ideas, but he will test them. If Locke did not produce a disciple in his noble pupil, he still had his influence. This brings us to a final point concerning Shaftesbury’s empiricism. It is from Shaftesbury that Francis Hutcheson draws the notion of an internal sense. Perhaps this sense may clarify further the extent and limitations of Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism. However, we must be careful not to read Hutcheson’s internal sense back into Shaftesbury’s work. In “The Moralists,” Shaftesbury seems to argue for an immediate perception of Beauty: “No sooner are actions viewed, no sooner the human affections and passions discerned (and they are most of them as soon discerned as felt) than straight an inward eye distinguishes, and sees the fair and shapely, the amiable and admirable, apart from the deformed, the foul, the odious, or the despicable.”18 Earlier, there is an extended section in the “Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” where Shaftesbury also makes statements that could be interpreted as a form of internal sense. For example, The shapes, motions, colours, and proportions of these latter being presented to our eye, there necessarily results a beauty or deformity, according to the different measure, arrangement, and disposition of their several parts. … It [the mind] feels the soft and harsh, the agreeable and disagreeable in the affections; and finds a foul and fair, a harmonious and a dissonant, as really and truly here as in any musical numbers or in the outward forms or representations of sensible things. Nor can it withhold its admiration and ecstasy, its aversion and scorn, any more in what relates to one than to the other of these subjects. So that to deny the common and natural sense of a sublime and beautiful in things, will appear an affectation merely, to any only who considers duly of this affair.19

These and similar passages certainly seem to offer the foundation for an internal sense of beauty that immediately and necessarily responds to qualities in objects. We must be careful not to lose the context of Shaftesbury’s argument, however. The passage from the “Inquiry Concerning Virtue of Merit” belongs to an argument distinguishing virtue or merit from the mere goodness of which any sensible being has an awareness. Both beauty and the moral qualities of objects are “brought into the mind by reflection.”20 The primary distinction here is not one between two kinds of sense, therefore, but between reflection and the objects that reflection produces and mere sense. Shaftesbury is concerned to establish the objectivity and universality of virtue and beauty, so the reflective sense is present in all but totally corrupt (one might say “bestial”) cases. The question remains how far we are to find a true empiricism in this use of ‘sense.’ On the one hand, it is a natural and nearly universal ability of persons. On the other,

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however, there are serious qualifications. First, we need to recall that there is a long tradition within Neoplatonism for another kind of internal sense that went by the name of divine illumination. From Augustine on, this internal illumination played a central role in epistemology. It too was universal, depending (despite the word ‘divine’) not on any special grace but only on the human position in the intellectual hierarchy. By this light, the qualities of objects were assigned to the exemplars so that the objects could be recognized. Shaftesbury does not follow that path. Although he does not reject innate ideas, he also does not make use of anything like a system of exemplars. It is thus difficult to tell how much his use of this reflective sense of beauty or moral qualities owes to the earlier doctrines of an internal illumination and how much it is a kind of perception. There is a second factor to be accounted for, however. In at least one sense, Shaftesbury specifically rejects an empirical interpretation; beauty and virtue are both mental as opposed to being objects of sense. “Never can the form be of real force where it is uncontemplated, unjudged of, unexamined, and stands only as the accidental note or token of what appeases provoked sense, and satisfies the brutish part.”21 Thus while our response to beauty may be in some sense immediate and necessary, it is not simply a pleasure of sense. In theory and in practice, beauty is rational and reflective. In the notes for the painting of Hercules discussed above, Shaftesbury extends this theory into practice: “It is evident however from reason itself, as well as from history and experience, that nothing is more fatal, either to painting, architecture, or the other arts, than this false relish, which is governed rather by what immediately strikes the sense, than by what consequentially and by reflection pleases the mind, and satisfies the thought and reason.”22 If we are dealing with an empirical sense, therefore, it must be one that operates for the perception of form and order, and it is one that forms a kind of judgment and is not simply passively focused on an object. The conclusion to which we are led must be that Shaftesbury is not simply a metaphysical idealist or rationalist even though he retains much of the earlier language. On the contrary, at every point, he tests ideas by experience, and he moves in the direction of specific empirical judgments wherever possible. However, he does not adopt the essentially private form of sense datum that we have come to identify with Lockean empiricism—at least not in obvious ways—and this clearly divides him from Hutcheson. Nevertheless, Hutcheson found ample ground for his own “internal sense” theory in Shaftesbury’s writing as we shall see below, and perhaps we should acknowledge that the discontinuity is not that great. What we cannot agree to is that from Shaftesbury’s side Hutcheson’s form of empiricism would be acceptable. Shaftesbury knows that sense can be wrong even in art if it focuses on the wrong objects. Shaftesbury is empirical enough to rely on sense, but he is not naively empirical about the objects of sense. Only those objects that can pass a reflective test and satisfy reason are more than phantasms of the mind. If this links Shaftesbury to Neoplatonism or seventeenth-century metaphysical rationalism, however, it is a tenuous link that began only with experience and that will end only with the improvement of the individual. At that point, labels have become less useful and the complexity of Shaftesbury’s position can be seen.

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IV To make this clearer, we need to consider further Shaftesbury’s use of two key concepts of later eighteenth-century thought on art and morals: “taste” and “interest.” Taste had already become a central critical term in the seventeenth century as a consequence of mannerist explorations of individual style and vision in the arts. It was extended by Balthasar Gracian, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom,23 to apply to the behavior of knowledgeable members of the elite who could rely on their instinctive judgment to place them on the right side of critical decisions. In this sense, a person of taste could be counted on to recognize the quality of certain works of art that will eventually be found to have universal appeal and to avoid merely eccentric and personal judgments that would place an individual outside the critical mainstream. Shaftesbury adopts that social and judgmental sense of taste. Shaftesbury’s use of the concept of taste goes much farther in the direction of making taste a necessary ability for judgment in the arts, however. Taste determines judgment, not just as a prudential matter as it is in Gracian’s terms but as a fundamental ability that arises from the formation of character. Shaftesbury sharply distinguishes sentiment, which is the expression of taste, from reasoned principles in the scholastic, syllogistic mode. So, whenever a judgment is expressed in the arts, it is expressed as a feeling or passion that directly and immediately exhibits judgment. Human nature follows Nature itself, and Nature is passionate as well as rational. If this were all, Shaftesbury would be the subjectivist that some of his critics, most notably Bishop Berkeley in Alciphron,24 took him to be. While Shaftesbury grants a large measure of independence to taste, however, he is by no means prepared to take it as always correct. In fact, the main thrust of the essays that make up Shaftesbury’s Characteristics is that taste must be formed. The argument goes like this: we cannot escape the influence of taste; but taste itself is fanciful—subject to changes and the accidents of birth and education; if one simply follows one’s taste uncritically, there is no telling where fancy will lead one. Therefore, the most important task of philosophy is to educate taste. In turn, taste is directly related to character. To form taste is to form a character that will respond with true feelings and passions in particular cases. Someone with bad taste will have feelings about art that are morally wrong. Someone with good taste will, in contrast, have morally true feelings. So feelings or sentiments have judgmental priority, but they are themselves true or false, virtuous or corrupt. Since Shaftesbury grants the immediacy of feeling a judgmental priority over reason in both morals and taste, the truth or falsity of a feeling cannot be determined by reason alone, though Shaftesbury is certainly not opposed to a role for rational examination. Instead of reason, however, Shaftesbury appeals to a number of other techniques for the formation of a correct taste. Raillery, which is a freedom to test the limits of sentimental response by wit and ridicule, is one of them. Shaftesbury is a strong advocate of open, uninhibited writing, even on religious subjects—which, of course, accounts for some of his difficulties with the established religious authorities. Instead of relying on rewards and punishments and the authority of orthodox dogma, Shaftesbury believes that truth will survive while the absurdities of both orthodoxy and

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evangelical enthusiasm will appear too ridiculous to appeal to us when their absurdity is exposed. Similarly, in the arts, Shaftesbury is a strong defender of criticism. Authors are advised that criticism and the response of the reader are definitive.25 Again, Shaftesbury’s case is based on the belief that criticism will expose false wit and the unlikely in the arts. Critics are not authorities but testers of the limits of art. Finally, Shaftesbury, particularly in his later writings, is an advocate of a kind of naturalism in taste. The artificiality of neoclassical art is opposed to the true enthusiasm of Nature itself, especially in The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody. There, Shaftesbury is at his most effusive and enthusiastic, which contributed to his reputation for a florid, excessive style. In his reliance on sentiment and taste, therefore, Shaftesbury remains close to Locke. Locke’s reliance on experience alone, and his rejection of the rationalist forms of ideational philosophy can be seen reflected in Shaftesbury’s acknowledgment of the directness of feeling and the importance of the passions as a form of judgment. Locke, however, is concerned to reject all innate ideas and to base knowledge directly on an accumulation of experience. For Shaftesbury, that is far too haphazard. Shaftesbury does not defend innate ideas directly, but he does find the whole issue misleading. Instead of experience alone, Shaftesbury believes that there is a right and wrong that is evidenced in Nature itself and that we discover it by acknowledging not only our individual feelings and private interest but also the feelings that Nature gives us as part of a larger whole. Shaftesbury’s direct opponent, of course, is Thomas Hobbes, who was widely believed to make selfish interest the only effective passion. In contrast, Shaftesbury believed that our benevolent feelings are as self-evident as our selfish feelings, and that in practice, human nature is organized so that those feelings that arise from our being a part of a whole are stronger than any individual feeling. It is not so much disinterested feeling that Shaftesbury seeks, therefore, as the true interest of the individual as part of a species and a community. Shaftesbury is concerned with the development of good taste, therefore, not because he is a sentimentalist in the way that his followers, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, are; but because he is constantly concerned with the way in which the inner, true self or character can be brought forward and protected against internal and external distractions that threaten it. Ultimately the task of philosophy is “to teach us ourselves, keep us the selfsame persons, and so regulate our governing fancies, passions and humours, as to make us comprehensible to ourselves, and knowable by other features than those of a bare countenance.”26 The development of taste is one of the elements in moral education, therefore. Nevertheless, fancies, passions, and humors govern, even though they must be regulated by philosophy. In the notes for an essay on “Plastics” Shaftesbury catalogues the reasons why a gentleman’s taste may be misled. If his taste is “practical and empirical” it will necessarily be false because it becomes interested; he himself becomes a party to his judgment, defending a particular style or party. He will develop a fondness for one master, and finally, he will be subject to flattery and praise. Unless a gentleman has “a particular genius, idea, and hand superior to the trading artists,”27 he will be reduced to a standing, “which will prove as little advantageous to his fame and reputation as to his manners, his interest, family and estate.”28

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Aside from the overtones of class consciousness in this discussion, it is evident that taste is something that is formed by judgment. Taste remains conceptually close to an immediate sense of virtue and beauty, but taste is practical and subject to misdirection. Shaftesbury is a long way from thinking that there is no disputing about taste. On the contrary, he claims that “the great business in this (as in our lives, or in the whole of life) is ‘to correct our taste.’ For whither will not taste lead us?”29 Ultimately, the enemy of taste is fancy, which Shaftesbury generally condemns. He writes, As long as we enjoy a mind, as long as we have appetites and sense, the fancies of all kinds will be hard at work: and whether we are in company or alone they must range still and be active. They must have their field. The question is, whether they shall have it wholly to themselves, or whether they shall acknowledge some controller or manager. If none, ’tis this, I fear, which leads to madness; ’tis this, and nothing else, which can be called madness or loss of reason. For if Fancy be left judge of anything she must be judge of all. Everything is right, if anything be so, because I fancy it.30

As with everything else in this proto-aesthetic, the roots of taste are moral for Shaftesbury. An uncontrolled taste is the subject of fancy. A controlled taste grows from mastery of the self. Shaftesbury’s advice to authors leads from internal mastery to the external exercise of taste: They should add the wisdom of the heart to the task and exercise of the brain, in order to bring proportion and beauty into their works. That their composition and vein of writing may be natural and free, they should settle matters in the first place with themselves. And having gained a mastery there, they may easily, with the help of their genius and a right use of art, command their audience and establish a good taste.31

Good taste, then, is something to be established. It is subsequent to judgment, not the basis for judgment. Nevertheless, taste is necessary. It must be formed, but finally, it, not reason, is the arbiter. If we compare this limited concept of taste to the later eighteenth-century theories, certain differences are immediately evident. Later theories link taste with an immediate pleasure as its mental product, so that while there may be disagreements in taste, there cannot be, strictly speaking, a wrong taste. If I like sweets and dislike savories, this may be bad for my health, but the matter of taste is settled immediately. If I like landscapes and dislike historical paintings, that, too, is a matter of taste. It may be disapproved of on other grounds, but the judgment of taste, whether particular or general, is not subject to dispute. For Shaftesbury, the order is reversed. The internal sense of beauty or moral value can be obscured by interest and fancy so that taste is the sometimes misleading product of such internal perceptions. The internal sense—the true self—cannot be misled unless it is wholly perverted, but its external manifestation in taste can be. Taste is, therefore,

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fundamentally good taste or bad taste depending on its internal control. To favor landscapes over historical paintings (which alone have a full moral dimension for Shaftesbury) is a matter of bad taste, at least in one who has the character and capacity for more than landscape, as a gentleman should. The mental product, which is pleasure or approval, for example, follows on the judgment of taste rather than providing an indisputable ground for it. What makes Shaftesbury’s position interesting, however, and what complicates matters, is that all of the elements for later theories of taste are present. Shaftesbury does not reduce taste to character, and without the concrete expressions of taste, character and self would remain empty abstractions. While taste remains more clearly tied to moral and proto-aesthetic values and judgments than in purely sentimental theories, Shaftesbury has broken decisively with the Neoplatonic tendency to remove beauty from contact with real emotions and judgments or to subject it to rational rules. Real art—not the heightened artificiality of Renaissance Neoplatonism or the rulegoverned morality of rationalist moral or religious systems—is the object of good taste and thus of the moral person. Art itself, and not its rejection, as in the ascetic forms of Neoplatonism, is a proper subject for character. When we turn to the term ‘interest,’ matters become more complicated. ‘Interest’ is a common term, and in many contexts it carries no pejorative or special connotations. It is at times a near synonym for ‘advantage,’ and at others, it merely designates the near attachment of concern. For example, Shaftesbury writes concerning the election of 1700–1, “I being here placed with my fortune and all my interest, you may imagine I am not a little solicitous at this time of danger.”32 Interest operates on at least two levels—private and public—and it is taken for granted that it is a main and proper motive for action. Thus there is nothing in interest, per se, that one need avoid. On the other hand, Shaftesbury has as one motive the refutation of Hobbes’s claims that all actions are interested in the sense of egoistic. In part, this can be accomplished by acknowledging an empirically evident public interest: “Everyone discerns and owns a public interest and is conscious of what affects his fellowship or community.”33 But it also requires a partial rejection of interest as a proper motive for action. Thus we find the following: The raw memoir-writings and unformed pieces of modern statesmen, full of their interested and private views, will in another age be of little service to support their memory or name, since already the world begins to sicken with the kind. ’Tis the learned, the able and disinterested historian, who takes place at last. And when the signal poet or herald of fame is once heard, the inferior trumpets sink in silence and oblivion.34

‘Interested’ moves in the direction of ‘private’ and ‘self-serving,’ and it is opposed to ‘disinterested’ in the not uncommon sense of selfless and truth-seeking. Disinterestedness in the sense of a selfless truth-seeking interest can shift meaning a little further and be associated with the internal sense of beauty and moral good. A problem for any moral sense theory is how that sense can be mistaken, and the answer from Shaftesbury seems to be that in disinterested cases, it cannot:

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Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics In these vagrant characters or pictures of manners, which the mind of necessity figures to itself and carries still about with it, the heart cannot possibly remain neutral but constantly takes part one way or other. However false or corrupt it be within itself, it finds the difference, as to beauty and comeliness, between one heart and another, one turn of affection, one behavior, one sentiment and another; and accordingly, in all disinterested cases, must approve in some measure of what is natural and honest, and disapprove what is dishonest and corrupt.35

This, of course, asserts that such disinterested judgments are possible and natural against what would have been taken as Hobbes’s position. But it also makes a disinterested sense of the good or beautiful into a particularly important state since only then can “the heart” be trusted. However, this is as close as Shaftesbury comes to giving disinterestedness a special significance. It is not really proposed as any kind of test, nor does it characterize a special class of perceptions or judgments as it does in twentieth-century aesthetic and moral theory. It is much more important to Shaftesbury to determine what our true interests are. The real problem is not how one is to achieve disinterestedness but that interest is so closely allied with the passions. For example, consider the following: The same must happen in respect of anger, ambition, love, desire, and the other passions from whence I frame the different notions I have of interest. For as these passions veer, my interest veers, my steerage varies; and I make alternately, now this, now that, to be my course and harbour. The man in anger has a different happiness from the man in love. The man lately become covetous has a different notion of satisfaction from what he had before, when he was liberal. Even the man in humour has another thought of interest and advantage than the man out of humour, or in the least disturbed. The examination, therefore, of my humours, and the inquiry after my passions, must necessarily draw along with the search and scrutiny of my opinions, and the sincere consideration of my scope and end. And thus the study of human affection cannot fail of leading me towards the knowledge of human nature and of myself?36

We should note several points about this very interesting passage. First, the connection between passion and interest is close; it is not denied that interest is directly associated with what I find pleasing. The problem is that what I find pleasing at one moment may not be pleasing at the next. One might expect that the recommended moral path, then, would be to eliminate the passions and to assume a calm, disinterested attitude. Such, however, is not the case. If interest merely follows passion, then only chaos can result, to be sure. The argument goes this way: from childhood, we have learned who we are and acquired our interests through experience so that we think we know ourselves. But this presents a problem: For by the lesson of the latter school [the world], and according to the sense I acquire in converse with prime men, should I at any time ask myself what governed me? I should answer readily, My interest. “But what is interest? and how

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governed? By opinion and fancy. Is everything therefore my interest which I fancy such? or may my fancy possibly be wrong? It may. If my fancy or interest therefore be wrong, can my pursuit or aim be right? Hardly so. Can I then be supposed to hit, when I know not, in reality, so much as how to aim?”37

The conclusion to which we are being led is that the founding of interest on fancy and passion leaves us without a true knowledge of our interest. We are led to a form of reductio ad absurdum: For if that which pleases us be our good because it pleases us, anything may be our interest or good. Nothing can come amiss. That which we fondly make our happiness at one time, we may as readily unmake at another. No one can learn what real good is. Nor can any one upon this foot be said to understand his interest.38

One must drive a wedge between interest and pleasure, therefore. If interest is merely pleasure, I am led to the contradictory position that the same thing may be both pleasurable and unpleasurable. Such is the case with matters of sense, but in matters of moral value and taste, this would have the consequence that nothing could ever be wrong or ugly in itself. Not only is such relativism repugnant to Shaftesbury, but he thinks it is contradictory as well. It would make it impossible ever to discover my interest in the first place, so that the very pleasure I claim to derive from my interest would be impossible. Shaftesbury is certainly not denying that men and animals are accidentally pleased when their appetites and desires are fulfilled. But in matters of taste, expectation precedes fulfilment and in morals, interest precedes actualization, and those pleasures would be destroyed by such a view of interest. Thus, we may reinstate interest as a proper motive, provided we have a means to our true interest. This is natural: We know that every creature has a private good and interest of his own, which Nature has compelled him to seek, by all the advantages afforded him within the compass of his maker. We know that there is in reality a right and a wrong state of every creature, and that his right one is by nature forwarded and by himself affectionately sought. There being therefore in every creature a certain interest or good, there must be also a certain end to which everything in his constitution must naturally refer.39

There is no reason to think that such private interests exhaust interest, however. There is also a public interest, which we have already noted, and there are matters in which individuals have no immediate private or public interest, that is, those about which they are truly disinterested. But all three have the same foundation in the order that is here referred to as natural and that elsewhere is seen as the source of beauty as well. We are thus brought back to Shaftesbury’s passion for a kind of moral order that the self can discover for itself. Far from disinterestedness or taste being the basis for such an order, they are only possible according to Shaftesbury as a result of order. Art, soliloquy, self-expression, and the test of public criticism and experience are the only

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ways that this order can be discovered, and it is only thus that “the study of human affection cannot fail of leading me towards the knowledge of human nature and of myself.”40 Read in this way, Shaftesbury’s notion of disinterestedness cannot lead to a special form of attitude, perception, or experience. This is evident in several respects. For one, there is no separation for Shaftesbury between taste and morality. Insofar as interest is ultimately a moral category, so too must taste be interested. For another, as we have seen, Shaftesbury mounts an extended defense of criticism.41 If we accept the commonly held tension between criticism and a disinterested attitude that is characteristic of twentieth-century aesthetics, then Shaftesbury’s defense of criticism cannot be disinterested. Similar observations would hold with respect to art theory. Shaftesbury subjects both art and artist to rules and advice. As we have seen, the artist is encouraged to discover the true form and not follow mere sense and impulse; the whole essay on the “Tablature of Hercules” amounts to detailed instructions to the artist in the practice of his art. There are indeed passages in Shaftesbury that seem to anticipate some romantic doctrines. He calls the poet a second maker, for example.42 But we are dealing with a neoclassical sensibility, and it will prove impossible to extract from this very public man the private doctrines of disinterested attitudes and Romantic aesthetics. Shaftesbury’s pervasive classicism should be considered in this regard. Shaftesbury was influenced by the Cambridge Neoplatonists, particularly Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. His first publication was an introduction to the sermons of Benjamin Whichcote, who was one of the Neoplatonist divines. Unlike Locke, Shaftesbury had an extensive classical education. When he defends criticism, it is Horace’s The Art of Poetry that is his most frequent text. He is so far from thinking that rules are unimportant that he sides with Aristotle’s Poetics against the emerging claims for the freedom of genius. He particularly admires the combination of art and philosophy found in the works of Plato and cites the Phaedrus as a model. So, while Shaftesbury may be a seminal figure in the formation of a modernist, empiricist proto-aesthetics, he is himself in many ways a very traditional classicist. Shaftesbury’s classicism is evident in his earliest significant work, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, which was published in a pirated edition in 1699. While the work was considered dangerous because of its free thinking on religious subjects and its barely concealed Socinian sentiments, it also takes as its central thesis that the true interest of the individual is only discovered in relation to the good of an organic whole. The universe is conceived of as a single organism so that while individual suffering may lead to ill feelings, the only true and lasting feelings of good are those that are in accord with the good of the total organism. Benevolent feelings take priority over individual selfish feelings because only benevolent feelings are a response to the organicism that Shaftesbury believes in. The same classical influences are found in Shaftesbury’s treatment of beauty. Beauty is indeed a sentiment, but it is a sentiment produced by harmony and order. So, the apparent individualism implicit in making beauty a sentiment is offset by understanding sentiment as being produced by one’s universal, not one’s individual, nature. Number and order are fundamental as the causes of the sentiment of beauty. In that way, rules

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can be formulated along the lines of classical criticism because those rules are the rules of our emotional response just as Newtonian mechanical rules were believed to be the rules of an ordered external universe. Further, form takes precedence over individual wit, and from the priority of form, Shaftesbury derives the priority of mind as the form of true beauty: “Must not that, therefore, which means and intends for it, regulates and orders it, be the principle of beauty to it? Of necessity. And what must that be? Mind, I suppose, for what can it be else?”43 Thus, beauty is essentially a Neoplatonic higher form. This almost might be described as a paradoxical Neoplatonic sentimentalism as it becomes more evident and effusive. Sentiment is given a new weight, but it is grounded in a transcendent nature. In The Moralists, Shaftesbury treats the classical sublime of Longinus extensively, and he praises the freedom of natural beauty from the constraints of civilization. This is Shaftesbury at his most sentimental. But Shaftesbury’s sentimentalism must always be qualified by his defense of criticism and his reliance on a skeptical response to any enthusiasm, even his own. Unlike the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, which requires that one leave the body behind and become pure intelligence, Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism remains firmly this-worldly. It is grounded in sentiment, and if sentiment must be questioned, educated, and corrected if it is not to be mere feeling and fancy, it is nevertheless still very clearly one’s own. Shaftesbury never resolves this tension in his thought. Hume, of course, will abandon all of the reliance on final causes and organic deism in favor of a purely ideational form of sentimentalism. Shaftesbury never goes that far. He remains both a classicist and a modernist at the same time, therefore.

V In conclusion, Shaftesbury is perhaps a more thorough empiricist than he is given credit for being, but it is always the qualified empiricism of a classically educated, cultured, upper-class gentleman. Shaftesbury mixes two impulses, sense and a Neoplatonic mentalism. He rejects a complete reliance on sense in the Lockean form of experience alone, but relies on history and experience instead of Neoplatonic forms as the ultimate reality. A close reading must balance the two elements, the mind and senses—and for Shaftesbury, that is the role of reason. It is not too much to see Locke’s influence in all of this, or at least the same influences that motivate Locke’s own more radical departure from the Cambridge Platonists with whom he was acquainted. In the final analysis, this may be the most important aspect of Shaftesbury’s moral theory and his theory of beauty since it clearly opens the way for Hutcheson and those who follow him. But certainly it is too much to find any explicitly Lockean theory of ideas here. Shaftesbury is an empiricist and even a sentimentalist of a sort, but he cannot be turned into a nineteenth- or twentieth-century aesthetician. That is what makes him so interesting. Thus I see Shaftesbury as an important forerunner of what became aesthetics in the nineteenth century, but by no means is he limited to that role. He follows Locke into a world where beauty and taste are empirical terms. Sentiment is itself their foundation. He considers and makes use of such characteristically aesthetic concepts as disinterestedness and what might be called aesthetic experience. But he never

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separates out aesthetic experience from its moral and artistic grounds. One may have a sense of beauty, but it is not unique. It is just one more empirical element in forming character and taste, and character and taste are public as well as private, moral as well as individual. Shaftesbury initiates an experiential form of the philosophy of art, taste, and beauty, but it is at most a part of a proto-aesthetics. It should be taken seriously in its own right and not reduced to Romantic and twentieth-century aesthetics. It is a sentimental theory that values the pleasures of the imagination that Addison takes up. Its values are moral, public as well as private, and committed to humor and criticism. Shaftesbury prepares the way for Francis Hutcheson and David Hume who explicitly acknowledge his influence, but he is much more than an historical footnote in the formation of what I am describing as an independent proto-aesthetic based on experience that takes shape in the eighteenth century.

2

Francis Hutcheson: The Sense of Taste

When we turn from the ambiguity of Shaftesbury’s incorporation of Locke’s form of empiricism to Francis Hutcheson’s more whole-hearted adoption of Locke, we are in a new world that accepted Locke and Newton as philosophical guides. Experience, which was understood as what was delivered by the senses, is all. But what, we must ask, is sense and how does it work when applied to beauty and taste?

I Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was born in Ireland and educated at Glasgow. His religious views were moderate and humanistic for the Calvinist church of his day, which made him somewhat suspect after his appointment to the faculty of Glasgow University in 1729 where he lectured on natural religion, morals, jurisprudence, and government.1 While still in Ireland, he engaged in correspondences and periodical controversies, including one with Gilbert Burnet. (His correspondence with Burnet was published in 1735.) In 1725, he published his investigation of beauty as the first part of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue.2 This was followed in 1728 by An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections.3 Together, these books provide the first systematic investigation of a proto-aesthetics along Lockean, experiential lines. Hutcheson acknowledges Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, as the primary source for his An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue “in which the Principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are explained and defended,”4 although Hutcheson’s approach to beauty is preceded by the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, which appeared in 1719 and then in English loosely translated by Thomas Nugent in 1748,5 and by Joseph Addison’s essays on the “Pleasures of the Imagination,”6 which had already laid the groundwork. Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson relied on sentiment as the ultimate evidence for the classical virtues and harmonies. Hutcheson concludes, “So propose the whole World as a Reward, or threaten the greatest Evil, to make us approve a deform’d Object, or disapprove a beautiful one; … our Sentiments of the Forms, and our Perceptions, would continue invariably the same.”7 However, Hutcheson goes much farther than Shaftesbury did in treating sentiment as independent of reflective control or education.

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For Hutcheson, persons of taste are defined by their ability to take pleasure in certain sensations. At the same time, Hutcheson’s moral scheme is teleological and utilitarian.8 That teleology carries over to the sense of beauty as well. Hutcheson enters into moral calculations and evaluations of beauty based on his confidence that our senses are guided by a higher order that makes them reliable indicators of god’s will and the natural right built into the order of things by the deity. Nevertheless, it is to John Locke, and not just Shaftesbury, that Hutcheson looks for the empiricist underpinnings of his Inquiry. The relation of Hutcheson’s work to Locke is complex, however. John Yolton observes, “Locke was the inheritor of two traditions: the one, the new science with its radically new categories, the other, the older scholastic tradition which he in part ridiculed but did not entirely reject.”9 Hutcheson is likewise the inheritor of multiple traditions. He was committed to the emerging sentimentalism of Shaftesbury, but not to Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism, and to Locke’s basing all knowledge directly on experience, but not in all respects to Locke’s understanding of ideas.

II Hutcheson begins with a description of ideas and their relation to sense that is based very closely on Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.10 There are significant differences in detail, but Hutcheson took himself to be following Locke. All knowledge on Hutcheson’s view begins with ideas provided by senses though, as we shall see, Hutcheson understands ideas differently than Locke. The external senses are distinguished by their fundamental differences in the ideas that they produce, and they correspond, except for touch, to different organs. Hutcheson differs substantially from Locke about the nature of the senses, however, and by introducing a specific sense of beauty, Hutcheson changes the terms of the discussion and founds a protoaesthetic, even though his own interest is primarily moral. (A sense of beauty is only a way into recognizing an independent moral sense that refutes the moral egoism of Thomas Hobbes.) While Locke begins with simple ideas that can be compounded, Hutcheson appealed to what he called internal or reflex senses. A concept of internal sense had classical roots—in Augustine’s writings, for example—but in that context it was a consciousness of ideal form. Locke gave the term a different meaning, using it to describe the reflective powers of the mind. For Locke, since all ideas came originally from experience, some way was required to account for the mind’s ideas of its own powers. Those ideas were gained, Locke held, by the mind’s experience through reflection of its own operations, and awareness of them constituted an internal sense. Hutcheson abandoned Locke’s doctrine of reflection and treated internal sense as an independent source of ideas on a par with external senses. At the same time, Hutcheson was careful to state that the ideas produced by internal senses were not innate, so he remained firmly within the Lockean, empiricist camp in disputes with both Scholastics and Cartesian rationalists. While internal senses depend on a causal relation to objects that also stimulate the external senses, their ideas are different and substantially independent.

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In An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, Hutcheson refers to five classes of sense: the external senses, the sense of beauty or pleasure, the public sense, the moral sense, and the sense of honor.11 One is justified in calling all of these senses by the immediacy and independence of the ideas they produce. Like the external senses, one need not know the causal source of an idea provided by an internal sense, and the power of perception of such ideas is antecedent to custom, education, or example.12 Further, the production of ideas of sense is independent of our will. The sense of beauty responds to order, harmony, and regularity, particularly as they occur in a combination of uniformity and variety; and those ideas are a source of unreflective pleasure. Hutcheson sought to place the pleasure derived from nature and art on the same empirical footing as the ideas from the five external senses (though Hutcheson objected that the analysis of even the external senses was much too careless and that limiting them to five senses obscured subtle differences within each sense). A teleological order underlies the internal senses, however. Unlike the external senses, which respond to the factual, measurable structure of the world, the pleasure of beauty is a fortunate coincidence of our sensitive nature and the teleological order provided by the deity. We could have been constituted differently, and for all we know, some other beings may take pleasure from other causes. However, we are fortunate in that our sense of beauty responds to just those principles of order, regularity, and harmony that the deity has built into the cosmos, so there is a coincidence between our moral sense, our sense of beauty, and our ordained ends. The aim of Hutcheson’s introduction of internal senses was to place discussions of beauty and art on the same footing as discussions in the sciences. During the eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton exercised tremendous influence not just as a scientist but also as a thinker who provided a model for all knowledge. Scientific investigations were having great successes. Those successes produced a widespread sense of optimism that the Newtonian model could solve all problems. Hutcheson sought the same kind of authority for beauty that experimental science found in the senses by trying to fit our experience of beauty to an internal sense. Hutcheson’s doctrine of internal sense also led him to describe the sense of beauty and the moral sense as disinterested. His principal opponent was Hobbes who was widely opposed for, it was believed, perhaps unfairly, reducing all virtue to selflove. Hutcheson advanced two arguments. First, because both beauty and virtue are perceived by senses, that perception is antecedent to any calculation or rational control. Even if on reflection we conclude that our interest is otherwise, our sense will already have responded positively to beauty and virtue. “This Love then is antecedent to the Conjunction of Interest, and is the Cause of it, not the Effect: this Love then must be disinterested.”13 Here the argument is from the order of production. A sense responds independently of our interest. Second, the ideas of beauty and virtue are produced when interest is kept out of the process. In particular, property and ownership are not required and interfere with the perception of beauty and virtue: “It is necessary to keep the Sense free from foreign Ideas of Property, and the Desire of Distinction, as much as possible. If this can be done, we may receive Pleasure from every Work of Nature or Art around us.”14 Some forms of interest interfere with pleasure. There are certainly hints in this use

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of disinterestedness of later Kantian and attitudinal theories, but Hutcheson stops short of attributing to disinterestedness a power to produce aesthetic emotion in the Kantian sense. Hutcheson meant by ‘disinterested’ ‘benevolent’ and ‘unpossessing.’ His objection to interest is to the selfishness that Hobbes believes is universal, and since Hobbes is wrong, Hutcheson believes, there must be disinterested as well as interested passions. As long as our internal senses, particularly the sense of beauty and the moral sense, are allowed to operate normally, their existence provides the evidence to refute claims that humans act only through calculation and self-love. The sense of beauty is thus a direct causal response to properties of perceptual objects. One need not be able to identify those properties to experience their effects any more than one need be able to identify the optical properties of objects in order to see them as colored. Nevertheless, even if one cannot identify the microscopic, mechanical chain of causes, one can classify perceptions. Hutcheson bridged the gap between classical and modern concepts of beauty by identifying the perceptual responses of our sense of beauty as arising from uniformity amidst variety. This retained the classical definition of beauty as harmony and perfection while shifting its ground from ideal forms to perceptual experience. Our internal sense of beauty is teleologically adapted to respond to uniformity amidst variety in objects. One can enter into comparisons on the basis of greater degrees of uniformity in cases of equal variety, and greater variety in cases of equal uniformity. At the same time, the response is still that of a sense, and it is antecedent to any knowledge of the cause. Moreover, we could have been constituted so as to respond differently. Beauty is located in the experience provided by a sense, not in the harmony and perfection of the object.

III Hutcheson was aware that experience showed a greater diversity than his theory of internal senses would account for. Most people agree on which objects are red, and those who do not can be easily identified as color-blind. But the sense of beauty provides no such uniform response. Hutcheson appealed to the association of ideas to account for the disagreements. Later in the century, association was given prominence by David Hartley and used by writers on both morals and beauty to account for the production of specifically moral and proto-aesthetic ideas and pleasures.15 For Hutcheson, however, like Locke, association was essentially negative. Left alone, the internal senses would produce ideas in accord with the way we have been made to receive them. But association corrupts the process by attaching to the ideas of sense other emotional qualities derived from our accumulated experience. So, if one has an aversion to heights from having fallen, the beauty of a precipice will be overcome by the fear associated with it. Such associations are adventitious and can be corrected by training and rational reflection. Thus, the association of ideas is always secondary, and it functions primarily to interfere with the senses themselves: “The common Effect of these Associations of Ideas is this, that they raise the Passions into an extravagant Degree, beyond the proportion of real Good in the Object.”16 Association of ideas may produce pleasure or pain, but its ideas are secondary to those provided by sense.

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While association of ideas is not productive of ideas of beauty, Hutcheson does distinguish two classes of ideas of beauty within the realm of sense. Original or absolute beauty arises from the internal sense’s response directly to some object that possesses uniformity amidst variety. So, absolute beauty is associated with the object itself even though it is the idea produced by the sense that constitutes the beauty and not the properties of the object. But, relative or comparative beauty requires more than one object. Its source is imitation or likeness. Again, Hutcheson was able to incorporate the classical theories of realism and imitation into his empiricist reconstruction of beauty. Internal sense recognizes when one thing successfully imitates another and responds to the comparative likeness. So, even if the forms of a painting are not themselves beautiful in an original or absolute way, they may still stimulate the internal sense of beauty by their successful imitation of their object. Hutcheson thought of this process as still falling within the scope of a sense because the response is immediate and independent of one’s will even though it involves comparison.

IV It seems evident, therefore, not only that Hutcheson is following Locke but also that his theory of internal sense goes substantially beyond Locke’s own limited use of internal sense. One must look more closely at how Hutcheson adopts Locke’s theory of ideas, therefore. Jerome Stolnitz locates Locke’s ideas only in the underlying structure of Hutcheson’s Inquiry: “The central theses in [Hutcheson’s] aesthetic theory are formulated and seen to have been arrived at by explicit denial of those asserted in the Essay.”17 “Yet the machinery which Hutcheson employs … he takes over from Locke.”18 Peter Kivy finds a much broader agreement: “Hutcheson accepts these distinctions of Locke’s down the line. Like Locke, he distinguishes among simple and complex ideas, ideas of primary and secondary qualities, and ideas of pleasure and pain.”19 The major difference between Locke and Hutcheson, according to Kivy, is that while Locke explicitly locates beauty as a complex idea of mixed mode,20 Hutcheson believed the idea of beauty to be a simple idea.21 Kivy then goes on to try to determine whether beauty is a primary quality, a secondary quality, or a pleasure. He opts for what he calls the heroic alternative that beauty is both a secondary quality and pleasure—a kind of Berkeleyan double-aspect phenomenon.22 If this is correct, we would have a clear line from Locke’s epistemology to Hutchesonian sense-theory and thence into the mainstream of British empiricist proto-aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, I do not think that the matter is so clear. As we have just seen, Hutcheson begins in a way that owes much to Locke. On the first page of his Inquiry, he focuses on ideas, which are raised by external objects acting on our bodies.23 Yet equally, from the beginning, Hutcheson deviates from Locke. For Locke, perception simply is having ideas that are representative of whatever they are ideas of.24 Everything turns on what ideas one has and how they are arranged. For Hutcheson, also, the ideas we have of external objects are passively received perceptions, but that does not exhaust perception. Hutcheson explains, “Since there are such different Powers of Perception, where what are commonly called the External Senses are the same; … we may justly

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use another Name for these higher and more delightful Perceptions of Beauty and Harmony, and call the Power of receiving such impressions, an Internal Sense.”25 The complications arise because of differences from Locke in what Hutcheson understands by ‘idea.’ Therefore, it is important to keep clearly in mind what ‘idea’ means here for Hutcheson. There are not two ideas, an idea supplied by the external senses and a separate idea of beauty. The idea of beauty is not different from the idea of a triangle that is beautiful in the way that Plotinus can separate the idea of unity from the ideas one has of unified objects to arrive at a separate, reified idea of oneness or in the way that contemporary philosophy might identify a concept of beauty as an idea. For Hutcheson, the triangle just is beautiful, if it is; beauty is one’s feeling or sentiment in the experience of the triangle, that is, in the idea of the triangle, not a separate idea attached to it. For Hutcheson, our perception of a triangle may be different from that of animals, and may differ from that of some humans who are not as fortunate as we are, depending on the action of an additional sense that that we, as humans, fortunately have. Thus, the idea that one has will include a perception of beauty if and only if one has the internal sense of beauty. The qualities of a triangle that are causally productive of an idea that includes a perception of beauty are, for Hutcheson, uniformity amidst variety. One may have a separate, abstract idea of those qualities, but beauty is the beauty of the triangle. It must not be confused with its causes, nor detached from the idea provided by the external senses. Hutcheson’s extension of ‘ideas’ to a different form of perception seems to follow by analogy from Locke’s insistence that ideas alone are the “stuff ” of our perceptions, but it is in fact a radical deviation from Locke. The issue is the nature of ideas. For Locke, the division of ideas is between those that are externally caused and those that are internally caused: The other fountain, from which Experience furnisheth the Understanding with Ideas, is the Perception of the Operations of our Own Minds. … This source of Ideas, every man has wholly in himself: And though it be not Sense as having nothing to do with external Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be call’d internal sense.26

Such ideas Locke calls ideas of reflection. There is no implied hierarchy of senses, as there is in Hutcheson. Ideas of reflection are just ideas generated in the mind; that is what makes them internal. For Locke, this is one-half of a potentially fourfold distinction, the other half being between simple and complex ideas. But Hutcheson loses the latter half of the distinction because his internal sense is supposed to be really a sense, and it distinguishes not other ideas that can combine in exactly the same way as ideas of sense but a whole different level of perception. Locke goes on to allow that some ideas can be acquired both by sense and reflection.27 That is impossible for Hutcheson’s internal sense, which is a different power of perception. Thus, Hutcheson drops out ideas of reflection and replaces them with ideas of internal sense. The problem with this, from a Lockean perspective, is that it asks sense to do a different job in the epistemological scheme. For Locke, sense simply supplies ideas, beginning with simple ideas and then compounding them into complex ideas. Everything else,

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including knowledge, is a matter of agreement or disagreement of ideas.28 But, for Hutcheson, the internal sense is superior, just as it is for Shaftesbury, because it implies normative judgments. In practice, the internal sense operates like a rationalist check on sensation—to such an extent that Hutcheson must insist warmly that it is not an innate idea.29 The problem, of course, is that the internal sense is not just passive; it is a power of perceiving human value. We can get an additional perspective on Hutcheson’s understanding of ideas and how he takes an internal sense to work from the letters he wrote to Gilbert Burnet at the same time (1725) as the Inquiry. The discussion with Burnet concerns a moral sense, but the problems are similar. Burnet thinks the sense itself could be wrong. Hutcheson replies that there can be nothing antecedent to moral sense without circularity: “In this circle we must run until we acknowledge the first original of our moral ideas to be from a sense or, which is to the same purpose, ’till we acknowledge that they arise from a determination by the author of nature, which necessitates our minds to approve of public affections and of consulting the good of others.”30 It is the equation in the last clause that gives the game away. Moral ideas are not separate ideas of what is moral in the sense of moral concepts or moral principles from which one can infer moral facts. They are specific ideas that the moral sense causes the mind to approve. For Hutcheson, both the moral sense and a sense of beauty are powers of perception that configure the mind to approve certain acts as benevolent or certain forms as beautiful, and on the basis of that judgment, Hutcheson can advance an elaborate teleology to show that how we judge is divinely ordained. No such derivation can arise for Lockean ideas in any of their combinations, and Locke does not expect them to. Such teleology falls outside knowledge, which is limited to what the ideas themselves contain, no matter how firmly Locke may have believed in divine guidance of human affairs and the truths of revealed religion. The real problem is that for Hutcheson, sense does not mean acquiring ideas in the same way that it does for Locke. It does mean acquiring ideas; the moral sense supports the idea of reasonable benevolence, and against Burnet, Hutcheson holds that there can be no further appeal without circularity. But, for Hutcheson, it is perfectly imaginable that a being without a moral sense could have exactly the same sense of an act and the same conceptual understanding of that act that we do without taking the act as moral or immoral. A lioness still acts like a mother to her cubs without her care for them being moral. The difference in perception would not appear to such a being as moral. Thus, Hutcheson differs from Locke, who relies on ideas of sense and reflection, all of which occur at the same level, and from Burnet who is reluctant to rely on sense at all because it will open religion to error. For Hutcheson, a sense is a necessary condition for judgment, but he makes sense do a double duty. It operates as if it were part of a faculty of reason that produces understanding, but combined with the teleological deductions it allows, Hutcheson’s internal sense also operates independently to judge reason. What makes such a sense moral belongs to the sense itself. It is not a separate judgment and does not produce a separate moral idea. The sense itself has a normative element. Thus, there is a deep ambivalence in Hutcheson’s reliance on sense and ideas. On the one hand, sense is located at the level of mental perception. Hutcheson assumes

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that sense is a mental operation. The mind is an active sensing organ that begins without innate ideas and thus must learn from experience just as Locke demanded. There could be other configurations of sense; other things than uniformity amidst variety could affect different beings as beautiful. The moral sense could be constituted differently; one cannot judge immediately one’s own moral sense.31 No justifying reason is antecedent to the moral sense or the sense of beauty because those senses are judging faculties from the beginning. This makes sense quasi-normative; the differences between moral and proto-aesthetic perceptions lie in how sense judges. On the other hand, external sense is located at the level of passive acquisition. Hutcheson assumes that both kinds of sense provide precognitive ideas on which the mind operates. There would be no moral judgment without the external sense. When one acts for the good of another, it is a specific act that the moral sense approves. When one admires a beautiful landscape, either natural or painted, it is a specific scene that one finds pleasing. But a sense of beauty is necessary for a judgment that an object is beautiful and a moral sense is necessary for moral judgment to be possible. “Had we wanted a moral sense … moral good or evil would have been unknown to us.”32 Knowledge is based on sense, which supplies data but that data must be incorporated into a sentiment for it to be felt as moral or proto-aesthetic. It is thus possible that the same data could be used to verify or falsify a particular moral or proto-aesthetic judgment depending on how one’s moral sense perceives that data. Sense as datasupplier corresponds to the position of Locke and the scientific circle he belonged to, but it does not, by itself, supply moral knowledge or knowledge of beauty. Sense as judge/reasoning power provides knowledge but qualifies pure sense with an instinctive teleological organization (though not necessarily innate ideas, as Hutcheson insists). Hutcheson’s use of sense incorporates both in a single perception. I am suggesting, then, that we have to get the questions right for reading Hutcheson, and Locke’s scheme does not supply the right framework of questions when Hutcheson turns to the beauty of art and nature and the moral good of acts of benevolence. For Locke, the key powers of judgment rest with what produces the ideas in us or with the mind’s ability to consider or not consider any idea (Will).33 A Lockean idea of beauty would be one among many ideas of a mixed mode; it is of little epistemological importance. Hutcheson moves power inward by means of an internal sense. That sense is clearly a power of the mind. The moral sense and the sense of beauty assume major epistemological importance. But they do so only by departing in significant respects from Locke’s usage of sense and ideas. The difference is evident in all of Hutcheson’s uses of ‘beauty.’ Beauty is “taken for the idea raised in us, and a sense of beauty for the power of receiving this idea.”34 Later, beauty “is pleasing some perceiving power.”35 To try to explicate this power in a strictly Lockean mode loses contact with what it does in Hutcheson’s system. Both what Locke would call primary and secondary qualities can stimulate Hutcheson’s power in us. Hutcheson has no single idea that one could identify as the idea of beauty corresponding to a Lockean idea. Uniformity amidst variety is nothing like Hogarth’s form of the sensuous line. (Of course Locke does not have a “Lockean idea” of beauty either because of Locke’s indifference to such ideas. That is the point. What is not to be found in Locke has to be supplied by Hutcheson on the basis of a different kind of

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sense.) Hutcheson’s “idea of beauty” is quite varied. Its one criterion of identity is its pleasantness. It cannot be painful.36 In us, uniformity amidst variety causes ideas to be perceived as beautiful and marked by their pleasantness just as the moral sense causes ideas to be approved and provokes pain when one acts against their claims, but that could be otherwise if we had been differently formed by nature or god. Therefore, one needs to be very careful with how one understands ideas in the philosophers who follow Locke. It is all too easy to treat ideas as concepts and from thence to raise questions about the realism or irrealism of the objects or qualities referred to by the ideas. But that is not the way ideas work in the empiricist epistemology as it was being developed by Hutcheson and those who come after him with theories of taste, beauty, and morality. For Hutcheson, when he refers to beauty, he is referring to ideas, but it is not an idea of beauty as something distinct from the idea of something that is both uniform and varied. It is just this idea of something that is uniform and varied and that one experiences as beautiful. There are not two objects, the beauty and the idea given in perception. There is not an idea of the object and an idea of its beauty. There is just an idea, which is all that can be “in the mind,” and it is an idea with certain qualitative feelings that make it an idea of beauty. In particular, it is pleasant and it is imaginative, which is to say that it depends on the particular mental power of combination called by Addison the power of the imagination. So if one says that one has an idea of beauty, what one is saying is not that there is something called beauty or some qualitative concept of beauty that one has an idea of; for Hutcheson, ideas do not refer in that way. Instead, one is saying that among the ideas that make up the mind itself there are some that are pleasant and the product of the particular power of the mind called the imagination. This usage, which I think is Hutcheson’s and later David Hume’s and Alexander Gerard’s,37 moves away from Locke’s representative theory in which ideas when they are simple, whether of primary or secondary qualities, show their cause directly. When ideas are complex, they show what the mind has produced. Complex ideas make possible concepts that the mind can refer to later because of memory. For Hutcheson, instead, ideas are directly perceptual, but they are not necessarily representative of their causes. So, Hutcheson has available additional kinds of ideas to those that concern Locke, and some of those ideas are produced by causes that are not themselves directly represented by the ideas. The idea of beauty is not about beauty, and it does not represent its cause, which can be known separately because of its uniformity and variety. Therefore, Hutcheson’s internal sense is a direct sense, but may not be representative of its external cause. The workings of an internal sense are analogous to external senses, but they are not the same. (There is no organ of internal sense except the mind, for example.) Rather, one must take into account what the analogy is supposed to accomplish and what its limits are. An internal sense is itself a perception caused by some object, but it is not a representation of an additional object, the beauty of the object. One need not know that uniformity amidst variety is the cause of one’s sensation of beauty any more than one need know the physiological or physical cause of redness. One perceives the beauty directly, not just the uniformity and variety. The causal relation is wholistic. But we are here talking specifically about perceptions that

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include felt qualities, so while they need not be known, they must be perceived ideas in some sense of idea or else the internal sense would not be internal or a sense. What makes an internal sense internal is that it is a perception that belongs to the mind’s operation. If our minds were different, so would be our perceptions. Hutcheson, unlike Locke before him and Hume after him,38 thinks that he knows what external properties—uniformity amidst variety—internal sense responds to in cases of beauty. It does not follow from this that there must be some simple idea— referred to by ‘beauty’—that is the consequence of the operation of an internal sense. In fact, the specific ideas that Hutcheson takes the internal sense to produce in these circumstances are ideas like “this elegant picture” and “this symmetrical vase” and, on the moral side, “this benevolent act,” “this loved one,” and so on. All such ideas refer to their intensional objects. They are “about” this scene, this act; and as ideas, they are themselves sentiments or feelings. That is the sense in which Hutcheson considers them ideas. More precisely, an internal sense is a way of responding to the same complex of ideas that might be regarded more neutrally if one lacked such a sense. Ideas that exhibit uniformity amidst variety cause me to feel the pleasure of their specific symmetry or elegance. If I did not have a sense of beauty, I would not feel the elegance, though the object would still exhibit a ratio of uniformity amidst variety. In the often cited passage, “Let it be observed that in the following papers the word beauty is taken for the idea raised in us, and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea,”39 “the idea” and “this idea” should be taken as definite descriptions with respect to the presence of some specific idea—the one raised in us. The phrases need not mean that there is only one idea for which the word ‘beauty’ is to be taken or as implying an equation of some concept of beauty and the particular mental perception to which it obtains. While it is possible that some of the ideas of internal sense, such as a feeling of pleasure when viewing a sunset, may be simple (e.g., it just makes me feel good without even noticing the colors), and this would not be inconsistent with Hutcheson’s language, it is simpler to accept that Hutcheson treats the ideas of internal sense as perceptions caused by what for Locke could be either simple or complex ideas depending on what is being perceived. Locke’s requirement that they must begin as simple ideas has been abandoned. The analogy of internal sense with external senses reaches farther for Hutcheson than it does for Locke, therefore. For Hutcheson, internal sense operates immediately and causally, and thus is not subject to the epistemological constraints that reflection imposes. So one need not know that uniformity amidst variety is the operative causal stimulus in cases of beauty or even be conscious of the uniformity as such. The internal sense is back on the same footing as the external senses with respect to its immediacy. But, Hutcheson thinks, one can know the cause of the sentiment of beauty on the basis of examining ideas that are felt as beautiful—something that would not be possible with a simple idea like redness. Throughout the Inquiry, Hutcheson is prepared to give an account of how uniformity amidst variety is present in the ideas that human beings, according to the internal sense that we have been given, respond to as pleasant in the way that we describe as beautiful. Uniformity amidst variety and beauty are not the same thing any more than redness is the same as the wavelength of the light that causes it. But Hutcheson’s examples all suggest that unlike the light’s wavelength,

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the complexity and uniformity of figures are part of conscious perceptual ideas that I experience as beautiful.40 The real crux here seems to be that I do not think that Hutcheson construes ‘beauty’ as a single idea at all—either simple or complex. I take Hutcheson to be speaking of beauty as a perception for which we have a word that is taken for some idea and a name that we give to some idea. But the idea is of whatever perception Hutcheson has of that particular object. The root cause of all such ideas is uniformity amidst variety, which obviously can be found in many different physical and formal structures. That makes ‘beauty’ a generic term for many different specific ideas, all of which are pleasant and all of which—according to Hutcheson, at least—have uniformity amidst variety as their proximate cause. If one tries to connect Locke’s theory of ideas to Hutcheson’s theory, it matters little whether the ideas are simple or complex as long as they are pleasant. Beauty is identified by the sentiment produced. Hutcheson has moved beyond Locke’s schema that identifies two classes of ideas—simple ones that are basic and complex ideas that depend on them—while he retains, perhaps inadvisably, some of its terminology.

V There remains one other issue about how Hutcheson understands ideas that should be noted. Locke is known for his rejection of “innate ideas” and that rejection was a matter of controversy in the early eighteenth century when Hutcheson adopted Locke’s language. In particular, Hutcheson’s way of appealing to an internal sense suggested to many (including Hume) that it was a sense that depended on some prior mental structure. For example, in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, we find Hutcheson saying, It is in vain to allege, that there is no disputing about Tastes: To every Nature there are certain Tastes assigned by the great Author of all. To the human Race there are assigned a publick Taste, a moral one, and a Taste for Honour. These Senses they cannot extirpate, more than their external Senses: They may pervert them, and weaken them by false Opinions, and foolish Associations of Ideas; but they cannot be happy but by keeping them in their natural State, and gratifying them.41

Tastes and senses here are synonyms, or, more accurately, taste is the paradigm for all senses. One’s nature is such that one will take pleasure in the product of the public taste, the moral taste, the taste for honor. This seems to make one’s taste innate, and if one is not careful about what ‘idea’ means, one would seem to have innate ideas. That would be quite different from the causal theory of perception that makes uniformity amidst variety the cause of beauty. No wonder Hume thought Hutcheson was sliding back into innate ideas, though what is most significant is that ideas have become affective states—different pleasures or tastes. One may elide uniformity amidst variety with the ideas that it causes and further elide those ideas with the response of inner sense, but whatever the appropriate

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description, beauty is nothing more than what inner sense provides. The elision and the speaking with the vulgar is not inconsistent or contradictory. That does not commit Hutcheson to innate ideas in the strong sense of the mind being furnished with principles or concepts that could operate as the basis for deductions, but it does move Hutcheson’s use of ideas in the direction of innate powers that must be educated. Hutcheson’s primary concern is with establishing a moral sense to disprove what Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville42 said about all pleasure being egoistic. Hutcheson’s choice to begin with the sense of beauty as the most obvious place to look for a proof that we have internal senses is part of his argument against reducing all pleasure to self-interest. When he turns to the other senses such as the moral sense and the sense of honor in the “Second Treatise” of the Inquiry and in the Essay on the Passions, it becomes clearer how senses really operate. They are inborn powers. We should recognize that the causal theory that allowed Hutcheson to identify uniformity amidst variety as the cause of our ideas of beauty and the pleasures of the imagination are only a special case of senses. Thus Hutcheson’s theory of beauty and its subsequent influence on theories of taste should be understood as the prolegomenon that it is. For a fuller theory of taste and beauty we must look to Hume, Gerard, and others who are prepared to give sentiment its full empiricist weight. It was left to David Hume to free sentiment from presuppositions of order and let it stand on its own. Hume pushed a reliance on sentiment to its logical conclusion. In the process, both Hume and his Scottish opponents largely abandoned Hutcheson’s strict reliance on an internal sense. Hutcheson had already begun to multiply senses. As that process continued, the analogy to perception was replaced by a metaphorical sense that is essentially linguistic rather than perceptual. Alexander Gerard and Archibald Alison are among the most prominent theorists of that continuing tradition. Hutcheson’s scheme is significant not so much for the actual results it produced as for the shift in thinking that it fixes. After Hutcheson, it is much more difficult, and eventually it becomes impossible, to take beauty to be some substantial relation built into the structure of the cosmos. Hutcheson’s conclusions are that beauty is first of all some feeling raised in us, and second that it is traceable, at least as our senses are constituted, to certain causal uniformities in our perception of objects. Thus, one’s response is the real test. That the combination of uniformity and variety is instrumental in producing the response of beauty by means of an internal sense is an empirical observation. The fact that some of Hutcheson’s empirical observations about what produces beauty are more than a little problematic is less important than the basis he offered. We are unlikely to accept the comparisons of the beauty of simple figures that Hutcheson laid down.43 He hoped to develop a kind of mechanics of beauty like Newton’s mechanics of objects. That hope proved illusory. But his insistence that the experience provided by sense forms the basis for both a theory of beauty and a moral theory fundamentally changed the basis for such theories.

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Hume: The Priority of Sentiment

Hume’s use of sentiment and its proto-aesthetic implications follow directly from the work of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Hume consistently treats all of the passions, emotions, and feelings (so called) as sentiments in the tradition of Shaftesbury; he makes sentiment the epistemic basis of a disciplined form of thinking; and as such, sentiment implies both a moral and a proto-aesthetic epistemology (though one must not forget that ‘aesthetic’ in any form is anachronistic when applied to Hume). The question for this chapter, therefore, is how Hume’s use of sentiment legitimizes it as the leading form of judgment, and how that judgment is essentially a proto-aesthetic theory of taste, as well as a moral theory. In fact, a theory of taste, which is directly sentimental, is more basic than a moral theory.

I ‘Sentiment’ is something of an omnibus word in the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury and his followers were considered sentimentalists in contrast both to their rationalist opponents and to dogmatic theologians. For Shaftesbury, sentiment is a basic form of experience. One must listen to the heart as well as the head. For his opponents, sentiment is quite different. For rationalists, it fails to offer proof; it is mere opinion. For religious dogmatists, it rejects the word of scripture and divine law in favor of personal feeling and pietism. To both, sentiment is unreliable. In addition to Shaftesbury’s Lockean usage of sentiment as experience that Hume drew on and the conservative usage of rationalists and dogmatists, there is a still looser usage that increasingly dominates in the eighteenth century. As novels such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey1 and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling became popular and had imitators, sentiment merged with sentimentality, finer feelings, and being moved to tears—the contemporary tearjerker is the final result. One editor says of The Man of Feeling that there are so many tears in it that it is hardly a dry book.2 Samuel Johnson catches only a little of this complexity in his dictionary, citing Locke: “Sentiment: 1. Thought; notion; opinion. Locke. 2. The sense considered distinctly from the language or things; a striking sentence in a composition.”3 But the philosophical sense of thought and notion in Locke and Berkeley is, of course, much more complex. There, ‘sentiment’ acquires a distinctive meaning in philosophical

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discourse. It is the ways that things are “in the mind” and “in experience.” In that sense, sentiment is a way of perceiving, and it is in that sense that Hume uses it. Interpretations of Hume that give priority to sentiment can be traced back at least to Norman Kemp Smith4 and have been widely acknowledged by a number of Hume scholars since then, most particularly by Páll Άrdall5 and Annette Baier,6 as has the connection between Hutcheson and Hume that Kemp Smith emphasized.7 However, as Donald Livingston has pointed out, that general line of argument divides reason and sentiment so that the priority of sentiment is taken to make Hume an irrationalist and a naturalist.8 In contrast, I see Hume as reversing the priority of reason and sentiment in order to save reason and in the process making the proto-aesthetics that sentiment implies fundamental. Hume’s argument is as follows: One feels what one thinks, and so feeling must be a part of thinking. So, one feels the validity of one’s thoughts rather than arriving at it by a train of reasoning. Sentiment guides reason to conclusions that are consistent with common sense instead of the absurd conclusions and empty claims made by reason alone. By giving sentiment and feeling the primary place in thinking, Hume saves reason from its rationalist and Scholastic excesses and at the same time shows that sentiment is not the irrational and naive sentimentalism that its conservative critics made it out to be in their parodies. Yet if one follows Locke and Newton into a new empiricism based on ideas, Hume recognizes that common sense equally may be offended. Every child knows that the world is real and objective, but if one has only ideas “in the mind,” as Berkeley seemed to say, then what every child knows proves illusory. So to save reason and experience themselves, that aspect of the mind—sentiment—that informs us directly of our most fundamental relations between self and world must be given a place in reasonable philosophical inquiry. That was the task of Hume’s Treatise,9 and it remained the task of Hume’s subsequent philosophical and critical writings. The result is not an irrational sentimentalism or an unreasoned naturalism but a sentiment that, through its own resources, provides a disciplined, “reasoned” mental life that is essentially social and historical. Thus, sentiment, and with it a proto-aesthetic theory, is at the foundation of Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s task, then, is to show that sentiment is the guiding form of experience that leads to knowledge and that sentiment is strong enough to be the master in the master/ slave relationship between the passions and reason.10 Hume does not abandon reason, but he radically rethinks what reason is and how it works. In doing so, he makes a place for an epistemologically significant theory of taste that legitimizes the role of taste and other proto-aesthetic feelings. It is important to recognize, however, that Hume is not fleeing from the integrity and clarity of reason to some “felt” subjectivism. He is assigning to sentiment essentially the role that earlier epistemology assigned to reason—it is the check and corrective of the mind’s potentially erratic grasp of reality. When ideas go wrong and lead one into error, they simply feel different and force one to think again. Sentiment provides the fundamental data and the checks on the mind’s errors that Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists all assigned to an independent, metaphysical, or logical reason. As a consequence, Hume must defend not only the “easy” philosophy of feeling (represented, e.g., by Dominique Bouhours11) but also his own “abstruse”

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version that is as analytical and closely observed as is the science of Newton that it seeks to emulate. In order for sentiment to play the role that it does, Hume’s psychological analysis and his logical analysis must overlap in essential ways, and this is how sentiment is able to correct erroneous thinking. For Hume, logic is not a separate subject from the psychology of sentiment. In particular, Hume thinks of both sentiments and ideas as representational12 in the sense that they refer to something, and Hume does not separate psychological representation from logical representation. This has two consequences: (i) the idea/object relation must be “adequate” representationally. Hume does not argue for this. It is, he says, “the foundation of all human knowledge.”13 (ii) It follows that logical contradiction and psychological contradiction are one and the same. “Whatever appears impossible and contradictory upon the comparison of these ideas, must be really impossible and contradictory, without any farther excuse or evasion.”14 ‘Appears’ in this context should be taken quite literally; it is not a metaphor for ‘understands’ but a mode of assessing ideas. Some ideas appear as contradictory; so they are contradictory. There is no separate logical standard apart from the appearance of the ideas. It follows that the foundation for Hume’s logic and thus of his epistemology is a psychological comparison of ideas that take place in the mind’s activity—in thinking. Ideas are the corollaries of impressions. Ideas, not impressions, must be compared, manipulated, and so on by the mind and imagination. Hume’s position is that whatever one can do with ideas must correspond to the object of those ideas since there is nothing in between, so to speak. The conclusion to which one is led by following Hume includes the converse of Hume’s own argument: representation is limited to what is psychologically available. Judgment is not external to sentiment; it is included in the sentiment. This implies that the representational aspects of thought, including one’s ideas of beauty, art, and taste, will have to be traceable to adequate ideas. In other words, Hume has available a form of ideational imitation that forms a proto-aesthetic theory if imitation is understood very broadly in terms of Hume’s own epistemology rather than in the pictorial sense that was inherent in the common eighteenth-century formula that spoke of art imitating nature. Hume is much more concrete than some of his contemporaries in requiring every idea to be essentially representational, even if it is an idea based on an impression of reflection or a fiction, but ideas are not images. They are felt representations that link the mind to the world. This representational combination means that there is no place for a separate formalist beauty in Hume’s sentimental psychology, and thus formalism about art cannot find a justification in it. Beauty of form is not distinguished from other kinds of beauty.15 The various causes of emotions of beauty—utility, pleasant sensation, other ideas—are all on the same epistemological level. We may produce a formal fiction— significant form, for example—but it will be representationally grounded in ideas that are no different in kind from others.16 For example, in persons or animals, bodily advantage produces pleasure. One feels that satisfaction in the idea of the person or animal and so finds what is represented in the idea beautiful. The same thing can be said of health.17 There is no difference in kind between that beauty and the beauty of

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a portrait or a dance. Hume does not reduce all emotion to the same qualitative level. Poetry is not the same as pushpin. The differences must rest on specific qualitative features, however. It is not a difference in kinds of emotion because such differences would require substantive kinds whose existence Hume denies. In order to rely on sentiment as he does, Hume must show how it is effective. In general, the stronger the emotion, the more significance it has. This is particularly evident in matters of taste and beauty because they are directly sentimental. One simply feels the emotion, and whatever one feels, one feels without question, whatever else may be at work or follow. In addition, the strength of a passion depends on mental stimulation, so the proto-aesthetic effect is a consequent directly of the mind’s awareness of its own activity. Hume explains, “One can consider the clouds, and heavens and trees and stones, however frequently repeated, without ever feeling any aversion. But when the fair sex, or music, or good cheer, or any thing, that naturally ought to be agreeable, becomes indifferent, it easily produces the opposite affection.”18 So something such as music that is too familiar or too easy becomes boring and disagreeable. The key point here is that the variation in the strength of the emotion makes it more or less effective as a sentiment. The principal relation between sentiment and evidence and thus of sentiment’s ability to guide reason depends on Hume’s view of belief. Belief and passion go together. “As belief is almost absolutely requisite to the exciting our passions, so the passions in their turn are very favourable to belief; and not only such facts as convey agreeable emotions, but very often such as give pain, do upon that account become more readily the objects of faith and opinion.”19 At least at the moment of effect, one believes whatever is affecting one.20 “When any affecting object is presented, it gives the alarm, and excites immediately a degree of its proper passion.”21 Hume is working out how passion, assent (belief), and justified belief are related. By making belief a matter of strength and vivacity, Hume seems to have opened the door to anything that one believes strongly enough. But his argument turns belief the other way. Without belief, we cannot feel, so if we are to feel, we must believe. And the conditions for promoting belief are just the reality-conditions that exclude lies and most fictions. Because belief must be promoted, a test of what is believable becomes the presence of a sentiment. The justification of belief requires sentiment, therefore. So, while ideas are not original impressions, ideas have their effects, and they get them by satisfying the conditions for justified belief. Vividly felt ideas become the warrants for epistemological confidence. We know that we know because of the strength of feeling that some ideas have as a result of their truth and not because of the rationalist’s dispassionate examination of ideas in isolated or abstract settings. No abstract skepticism can counter the immediate feeling that a real presence of the world offers.22 Now we can bring together the strands of Hume’s argument. Random impressions and ideas are fleeting and without influence. Those ideas that are habitual and supported by the conditions of causation are believable. Being believable, they approach the force of impressions themselves. They may be pleasurable. Sentiment, therefore, is not just random passion. It is the way that the mind knows what it believes, and what it believes is what causality and experience lead it to believe. So, if one’s system is empiricist (as

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opposed to a system based on substance or innate ideas), one must have reference to sentiment as the primary form of evidence. Hume is castigated as a skeptic when in fact he is the defender of the empiricist faith. It is just that where he finds the defense— in the immediate sentiments of the mind’s thought—is so radically empiricist that few of his contemporaries were prepared to recognize it for what it is—evidence based on the most direct form of experience. Moralists such as Hutcheson and commonsense philosophers such as Thomas Reid and Alexander Gerard fall back into a dogmatic teleology rather than accepting the full consequences of sense and common sense.

II Hume’s epistemology based on sentiment is subject to a number of objections that he must account for. In particular, the equation of sentiment specifically with taste and morality was highly objectionable to Hume’s contemporaries and continues to raise charges today that Hume is a noncognitivist whose moral theory and theory of taste cannot deal with the commonsense truth claims one wishes to uphold when one claims that an action is morally wrong or that an object is beautiful. In this respect, Hume makes no sharp distinction between moral sentiments and taste. That result was bound to be unacceptable to eighteenth-century moralists (except perhaps Bernard Mandeville who agreed that reason was subject to sentiment23). For moral theorists in the eighteenth century, taste might be relative, but morality could not be. Even in the realm of taste, absurd judgments and an antinomy of taste (there is no disputing about taste, but some judgments of taste are obviously better than others) arise if one relies on sentiment as evidence for judgments of taste or morality. The moral aspects of sentiment are Hume’s primary concern, so the essentially protoaesthetic aspect of the sentimental argument Hume is constructing can get lost easily. It is my claim, however, that sentiments of taste are more basic to Hume’s epistemology because they have a directness and emotional incorrigibility that moral sentiments lack. Proto-aesthetic sentiments themselves include taste and the agreeableness of the sentiments produced, so beauty and pleasure can become a guide to what is moral independently of reason. Utility, education, and sense all cooperate to produce the sentiments upon which one must rely for judgments, and those sentiments are either pleasurable or painful, sentiments of approbation or disapprobation. It makes little difference whether the judgment is a judgment of taste or a moral judgment in that respect. Exactly the same kinds of considerations, including pleasure, beauty, and utility, will apply. That means, of course, that while there may be specifically matters of taste or moral situations, sentiments of taste or moral sentiments are not unique kinds of sentiment. The kind of separation of aesthetics and morality from ends and existence that Kant develops has no place in Hume’s more concrete reliance on sentiment. Sentiment, therefore, makes morality possible, and taste is basic to morality. One may have disinterested sentiments of beauty (something just gives me pleasure in itself), but moral sentiment will always be bound to some real interest.24 The perceived situation carries with it a sentiment as part of the perception of it. That sentimental perception is either a judgment of taste or a moral judgment, and often, in fact, both.

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Hume does not believe that vice, once exposed, can be perceived with pleasure; moral evil (Shakespeare’s Iago or Webster’s Bosolo) may be thrilling, but they cannot be pleasant.25 The way that sentiment constitutes the subject matter for taste and morals also gives it the role of regulating judgments in those areas. The sources, the ends, and the more strongly held impressions that allow the imagination, sympathy, and reflective impressions to arise enable sentiment to play a regulative role. Thus, there simply would be neither moral judgments nor judgments of taste without the dual role of sentiment as subject and regulator. In order for sentiment to be moral, Hume requires that two conditions be satisfied: there must be a common sentiment concerning some impressions and a universal sentiment concerning actions and conduct.26 In other words, morality requires a uniformity of response both to objects, the passions themselves, and to actions. That response just is morality as Shaftesbury had already argued. For Hutcheson, morality implies a teleology and final causes. For Hume, on the contrary, it implies only that sentiment itself exhibits the contiguity and causality that give it a regulative role. It might seem that sentiments of taste lack the commonalty and universality required for them to play a regulative role because they are so variable. Yet the greater variability of taste and sentiments of beauty when compared to moral judgments do not change the fundamental sense in which sentiment is the common source of objective judgments about beauty nor the universal nature of the sentiments of approbation. One must distinguish the variability that individual response tolerates in matters of taste from the commonalty and universality that characterize an appeal to moral sentiments.27 Kant uses the universality of judgment as a transcendental principle to separate aesthetic judgments from moral and theoretical judgments. Hume, in contrast, treats universality as a link between what one can say about moral judgments and their taste counterparts. Taste and sentiment lead to action. The “easy” species of philosophy aims to persuade by making virtue appear most pleasing. It “considers man chiefly as born for action; and as influenced in his measures by taste and sentiment.”28 In this regard, poetry and the imagination can stimulate sentiment in order to promote a moral or critical action or set of actions, condemning or approving a taste or an action in the process. Sentiments thus are associated with a direct form of philosophical action—a judgment of taste. Reason itself is a form of behavior that involves sentiment, therefore. Understanding does not change that regulation; it merely makes it conscious and consistent. Hume’s system makes evident “the foundations of morals, reasoning, and criticism” in order to disclose the source of the distinctions between “truth and falsehood, vice and virtue, beauty and deformity”;29 that foundation is the same for all of the basic distinctions, both of morality and of beauty. The difference between a direct appeal to poetry and eloquence and the more reasoned appeal of Hume’s own philosophy is not the sentiments or a lack of judgments but how they are referred to. One form of philosophy is presentational; the other is reflective. Both have the same foundation. Hume’s use of sentiment as a regulative principle in morality and judgments of taste faces the difficulty that the sentiments themselves that are needed may be difficult to apprehend clearly. One can be confused about what one thinks, or perceives, or

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feels. The sentiments upon which morality is based are often confused. Hume writes, “The finer sentiments of the mind, the operations of the understanding, the various agitations of the passions, though really in themselves distinct, easily escape us, when surveyed by reflection; nor is it in our power to recal [sic] the original object, as often as we have occasion to contemplate it.”30 The problem with sentiments, therefore, is that their representations themselves may not be clearly presented. The sentiment is as distinct as the representation itself since sentiment and passion are modes or manners of presentation of impressions. But we confuse representations and that leads to confusion of sentiments. This is essentially a practical difficulty, however. It can be overcome by a more accurate philosophical science, which Hume hoped to provide. Hume’s sentimentalism is fundamentally at odds with the contemporary morality of the rationalists, who must separate perception and judgment. Alexander Baumgarten faced a similar problem. Sensible perception lacks clarity and is only “confusedly” present to the mind. For a rationalist, that is a distinction in kind. Either one must develop a new science of aesthetics (which was Baumgarten’s goal) or one must progress to the clear and distinct ideas of universal reason in order to verify moral “principles” from which actions could be deduced.31 Hume has no such limitation upon sentiment. The confusion he refers to is not built into the nature of sentiments but is a limitation on our attention to detail. It can be overcome only by a more careful appeal to sentiment itself. Sentiment is both passionate (the easy philosophy) and reasoned. Hume completes the largely affective work of Shaftesbury in bringing sentiment into moral philosophy in such a way that a person with good taste must, inevitably, be moral.

III At this point a further problem arises, however. If one grants that morality and taste are both based solely on sentiment, then it would appear that the truth claims that one would like to advance are impossible. One wants to say not just that some persons have good taste and that persons with good taste are moral, which one could do on the basis of one’s own sentiments, but also that their judgments are true and remain true even after the person is gone. The truth of our judgments of taste matters, and we rely not just on living critics but also on those long dead. That is part of the test of time. In this respect, the problems for Hume’s reliance on sentiment can be traced to the limited reliable evidence that he allows. Only ideas that can be traced back to an original impression can form the basis for true judgments. This is emphasized in Hume’s arguments against substance. For example, as he says near the beginning of the Treatise, “The idea of substance must, therefore, be derived from an impression of reflection, if it really exist. But the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions; none of which can possibly represent a substance.”32 Impressions of sense and their resultant ideas are corrigible but reliable; one can correct them by better observation, an empirical procedure. The only other original source is impressions of reflection, but those are limited to passions and emotions (sentiments broadly understood), and passions and emotions seem to be incorrigible

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but limited by time and psychology. They are not evidence for anything in the world outside an individual mind. So if beauty is a sentiment, for example, and one finds something beautiful or that it appeals to one’s taste, that cannot be disputed, but it cannot be the basis for an objective truth claim that the object is beautiful. Such beauty, like substance, would be a “mere fiction.” Yet there are innumerable “things” such as justice and beauty itself that one refers to as if they have existence independently of the mind. For our reference to those things, we depend on a belief in their having some form of continued existence. Thus, the kind of truth claims that are common to what I am calling proto-aesthetic qualities or properties present a major problem for Hume’s way of analyzing those disputed objects that appeal to one’s sentiments first as impressions of reflection. Hume’s problem is not the Russellian problem of reference to nonexistent objects, nor its related problem of emotional reaction to that which does not exist (Colin Radford).33 Since he begins with impressions, there is always something to refer to if one speaks sensibly. The question is what the impressions and attendant ideas are when we do speak sensibly about beauty and matters of taste. When they cannot be traced to impressions of the external senses, they can be traced to sentiments themselves, and they sometimes lead us to posit varieties of existence beyond our immediate perception. Many eighteenth-century thinkers from Berkeley on could have recourse to the mind of god or some other form of occasionalism. That option is not available to Hume. If fictions are “mere fictions,” mistakes of language, then Hume seems to have no way to deal with the proto-aesthetic properties such as beauty when one wants to say something about them that is true beyond the immediate truth of the sentiment. That cannot be the case, however. In rejecting metaphysical illusions such as substance, Hume does not reject art, taste, or the truth of claims about beauty or morality. Even though their impressions may not be as we imagine them, we speak meaningfully about duration, time, moral virtues, and proto-aesthetic properties such as beauty. Hume cannot simply reject them as mere fictions, therefore. Time and duration may be “incomprehensible” in a strict sense—that is, they cannot be corrected by reference to their original impressions—but they are natural and Hume does not propose to replace such references by some reduction to sense impressions or error theory. Hume explains, For as the very idea of equality is that of such a particular appearance, corrected by juxtaposition or a common measure, the notion of any correction beyond what we have instruments and art to make, is a mere fiction of the mind, and useless as well as incomprehensible. But though this standard be only imaginary, the fiction however is very natural; nor is any thing more usual, than for the mind to proceed after this manner with any action, even after the reason has ceased, which first determined it to begin. This appears very conspicuously with regard to time; where, though it is evident we have no exact method of determining the proportions of parts, not even so exact as in extension, yet the various corrections of our measures, and their different degrees of exactness, have given us an obscure and implicit notion of a perfect and entire equality.34

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The impressions upon which they are based are particulars. The objective fictions are constructed on the basis of causation and contiguity which are themselves ideas based on habit and succession. Other fictional objects are based directly on sentiments. One simply feels the pleasure of an impression and thus has available an impression of reflection based on that sentimental impression. That impression is reified by association so that one speaks of a beautiful object when in fact beauty is not part of the object at all. Hume’s examples of these fictions come from the realm that is uniquely a matter of taste. A musician, finding his ear become every day more delicate, and correcting himself by reflection and attention, proceeds with the same act of the mind even when the subject fails him, and entertains a notion of a complete tierce or octave, without being able to tell whence he derives his standard. A painter forms the same fiction with regard to colours; a mechanic with regard to motion. To the one light and shade, to the other swift and slow, are imagined to be capable of an exact comparison and equality beyond the judgments of the senses.35

So some fictions are more than the mere fictions that make substance nonsense if they are the result of the way that our sentiments work, either through causation and contiguity or directly through impressions of reflection linked by association. Hume makes little use of fictions in dealing with beauty and taste, however, and he has nothing like a theory of fiction as it arises in more recent aesthetic theory. He has available a different way of approaching those problems. Instead of appealing to fictions, he appeals to one of his definitions of ‘natural,’ the distinction between what is natural and what is artificial: “Nature may also be opposed to artifice.”36 Natural properties are determined by nature itself and its principles. They can be experienced directly as impressions and ideas. They can be either primary or secondary qualities, but they are “in nature” in the sense that the impressions and ideas of them are fixed by nature. Artificial properties are determined by human actions. For example, Hume goes on to argue that justice is artificial in this sense. It requires human society. Since beauty and taste are sentiments “in the mind,” the same distinction would apply to them, although Hume, whose concern is with moral qualities, does not apply the distinction to them in this way. Instead, ideas of beauty and taste37 are experienced directly and then the distinction between whether something is really beautiful and a taste-judgment is true arises from his doctrine that belief is nothing more than a stronger feeling, a more strongly held idea. The assent that constitutes belief is strictly a matter of feeling: “Those faculties [memory and imagination] are only distinguished by the different feeling of the ideas they present.”38 So since beauty is only an idea in the mind, something is only “really” beautiful if the idea is assented to, which is to say that it is felt more strongly. Only then does one experience the beauty as the beauty of an object. Clearly, simply asserting that I feel something strongly cannot justify my claiming it has a property, beauty, or that my taste-judgment is justified or true. But beauty cannot be natural in the distinction between natural and artificial properties, so it must belong to artifice, which leads us back to fictions. Instead of limiting fictions to mere fictions,

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those that have no basis in impressions at all, we might recognize a further distinction within artifice. Hume does not follow this path explicitly, but it is implicit in his protoaesthetics when he turns to critical problems later in the Essays. Based on their strength, one can distinguish three different levels of artifice as the basis of an analysis of their sentiments.39 First, some should be dismissed altogether; these are the mere fictions such as miracles and a belief in substance. They are either not part of sensible thought at all or based on superstition or misapprehension. Miracles can be refuted by an examination of their logic. Religious superstitions are without any basis in observation. Made-up scientific entities such as phlogiston lack any foundation in experience as was demonstrated by the experiments that should have verified them but did not. In the arts, they are merely fantastic and unbelievable. They will not please a sophisticate audience or reader. Hume dismisses such fictions as harmful and foolish. Second, some artificial references are natural according to another definition of ‘natural’ that Hume offers: natural as opposed to rare or unusual.40 They continue to be assented to after their apparently objective basis is given up. It is not foolish to think of yesterday, today, and tomorrow as measurements of time, and philosophers have recognized that they are merely ways of speaking since Augustine observed that when you do not ask, I know perfectly well what time is, but as soon as you ask, I do not know. Unlike Augustine, Hume is prepared to give up eternity, but as long as one is clear, the reification of time and duration is not simply nonsense. It is a useful fiction based on common experience that is first and foremost a felt experience, hence, for example, our ability to understand forms of art such as Proustian time. Third, and finally, some forms of artifice are the only way that we have to speak of that which we experience directly. Sentiments themselves, both the sentiments of virtue and those of beauty, are realities. They each have more identifiable sentiments such as pride and eloquence that are still complex when they are referred to substantively. We would be forced into a Wittgensteinian silence if we could not make use of those forms of artifice, and that would certainly offend against Hume’s commonsense reliance on the everyday world. The eloquence of some stories depends on our experience of such artifice. We must still ask how one is to distinguish the differences between these three types of artifice on the basis of sentiment alone. Hume retreats to his commonsense argument at this point: For my part, I must own, that I find a considerable difficulty in the case [i.e. verifying belief]; and that even when I think I understand the subject perfectly, I am at a loss for terms to express my meaning. I conclude, by an induction which seems to me very evident, that an opinion or belief is nothing but an idea, that is different from a fiction, not in the nature, or the order of its parts, but in the manner of its being conceived. But when I would explain this manner, I scarce find any word that fully answers the case, but am obliged to have recourse to every one’s feeling, in order to give him a perfect notion of this operation of the mind.41 An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents

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to us;42 and this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness.43

So the bottom-line argument is just that one does not assent to mere fictions in the same way that one assents to moral sentiments or the sentiments of beauty and taste, and ultimately one does not assent at all to those that the fancy alone presents to us. This argument is not nearly as subjective as it initially sounds, however. When Hume is speaking of fictions of the first type that I have distinguished, he is ruthless and scathing in his criticism. Religious superstition famously falls into a category that involves neither “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence,”44 and so should be committed to the flames. (Fortunately, Hume limits this to books and not to the actual minds in which such fictions subsist.) Hume is not nearly so destructive with artificial forms of the second and third type, however. Certainly the fictions of the “academic philosophy” such as substance and accidence, real causes, modes, and so on are not to be countenanced in philosophy, and those philosophers who speak of them are speaking nonsense. But it is not the dangerous nonsense of the religious person, as can be discerned from the ambiguity in “A dialogue Concerning Natural Religion,” and it can be subjected to clarification when one works back to the impressions that underlie religious awe—impressions that give us sentiments of the sublime and beautiful. When one comes to the third type of artificial reference, the sentiments of taste and beauty themselves, it is really a matter of utility from Hume’s standpoint. There is no question about what one feels, and if that feeling is strong, then it may provide a motive for action. If the feeling is not strong enough, then it will not command assent, and it will not be effective in motivating moral action or critical commitment and then there is no need for artificial virtues such as justice or judgments about specific beauties of a work of art. Hume does not have a developed theory of truth with regard to judgments of taste or moral judgments. His use of fictions and artifice does allow him to account for our assent to some moral judgments as true, however. When it comes to judgments of taste, as we shall see in Chapter 6, it is enough if one is able to sort them into those that are confirmed and those that are rejected. This reasoning justifies Hume’s argument for the priority of sentiment in the realm of those essential forms of artifice, virtue, and beauty. When it comes to fine art, which depends explicitly on fictions in the sense of things not present or not true and known not to be true, Hume clearly does not expect to convince philistines who know what they like simply on the basis of strong feeling alone. Instead, he has recourse to the famed five criteria for a good critic, which, if followed, will do two things: (i) show one whose criticism is to be accepted and whose condemned, even if one does not actually experience the strong feeling at its origin (one is thus protected against appearing a philistine, even if one is one); and (ii) actually guide one to at least some degree of the feeling itself, even if one does not become a good critic. Someone who prefers Ogilby to Milton may not be sentimentally convinced and may thus remain a poetic philistine, but he should be able to refrain from expressing his ill-formed feelings if he is sensible, and if he pays attention, he actually may feel some difference.45

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Ultimately, Hume relies solely on his sentimental theory of belief and argument wherever artifice comes into play and cannot be dismissed as superstition or factual error. Fictions must be believable at the very least, and they get their believability from their foundation in impressions and ideas themselves, whether they are impressions of sense or impressions of reflections. The truth of the judgment, claim, or proposition (a very un-Humean way of putting it) that Milton is superior to Ogilby never goes beyond the sentiment that supports the fiction of an atemporal fact that justifies one’s taste. Such truth itself is a matter of sentiment, but that does not make it subjective to Hume’s way of thinking. The strength of sentiments about the truth of any judgment leads to our assent to it. That is the final argument and overrides all else. This is especially true in the proto-aesthetics of the emerging fine arts. Hume explains, After this account of the influence of belief on the passions, we shall find less difficulty in explaining its effects on the imagination, however extraordinary they may appear. It is certain we cannot take pleasure in any discourse, where our judgment gives no assent to those images which are presented to our fancy. The conversation of those, who have acquired a habit of lying, though in affairs of no moment, never gives any satisfaction; and that because those ideas they present to us, not being attended with belief, make no impression upon the mind. Poets themselves, though liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions; and where that is totally neglected, their performances, however ingenious, will never be able to afford much pleasure. In short, we may observe, that even when ideas have no manner of influence on the will and passions, truth and reality are still requisite, in order to make them entertaining to the imagination.46

Hume relies on sentiment, but he does not abandon truth, even in the fine arts. Not all fictions are mere fictions. Some are justified, even if only by their strength and vivacity. Artifice is necessary if one is to speak sensibly of beauty and taste because beauty and taste belong to the mind, not to nature.

4

Associationism: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley

I There are several other interesting lines of argument that take up the empiricist approach to beauty and taste. One is an expansion of theories of association in a positive direction. Joseph Priestley, following David Hartley’s theory of association, turns associationism from its essentially negative role in explaining why experience is not always reliable into a positive proto-aesthetic theory. Priestley was a polymath whose interests included theology, biblical studies, rhetoric, philosophy, and science. He was at various times a teacher in dissenting academies, a Unitarian minister, and an intellectual companion in the household of the Earl of Shelburne. By the 1790s, Priestley was linked with rational dissenters and radical politicians such as Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Charles James Fox, and Theophilus Lindsey, at least in the public mind.1 He eventually immigrated to western Pennsylvania to escape persecution in England. Priestley’s most extensive writings are as a Socinian defender of a broad Christianity that he linked, idiosyncratically, with a form of determinism that he called necessisarianism [sic]. He understood the natural world on mechanical, deterministic grounds but found that understanding consistent with religion stripped of its Trinitarian and miraculous elements. In that respect, he carries to an extreme the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century latitudinarian and deist belief in a divine providence that works through nature instead of independently from outside it. But Priestley was also known as a practicing scientist of his day. Among his other scientific achievements, Priestley wrote a history of the discoveries of electricity at the behest of his fellow Royal Society member, Benjamin Franklin. His most important scientific work was on the nature of “airs,” and it gives him at least a shared claim with Lavoisier to the discovery of oxygen, though Priestley never abandoned phlogiston as an explanatory principle. Priestley’s proto-aesthetic interests arose as a result of his teaching at the dissenting academy in Warrenton. In 1762, he was tutor in languages and composed a series of lectures on oratory. To Priestley, they were clearly a sideline. He explains, “We must not expect too much from the art [of oratory]; since this can do little for us in comparison of what must be the fruit of our own previous application to science. The art of oratory can only consist of rules for the proper use of those materials which must be acquired

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from various study and observation.”2 Nevertheless, he eventually published the lectures in 1777, and they were translated into German and reprinted in the nineteenth century. Robert Schofield judges, Had Priestley’s Oratory and Criticism been published when first written, it might have been as influential as his works on language and grammar. The fifteen-year delay in publication gave the lead to George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) in placing rhetoric on a psychological basis, while Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) took the lead in applying associationism to aesthetics.3

The lectures contain an extended discussion of taste and the foundations of critical judgments, which are integrated into Priestley’s more practical concerns for developing an effective style of writing and speaking. They are interesting and important because they show how someone who was committed to Hartley’s psychology, a Lockean approach to knowledge, and the practice of science would assimilate and explicate the fundamental theories of taste and beauty of the period. What I am calling a protoaesthetics was in a formative phase in the latter half of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. Priestley’s writings on beauty and taste should be considered in that light. They retain a close relation to his developing scientific concerns, and so should be seen as one indication of how a major eighteenth-century empiricist thinker bridged the gap between science and art. For that reason, Priestley’s brief excursion into the theory of taste and beauty merits attention. It is difficult to tell just how Priestley arrived at his proto-aesthetic observations, however. He acknowledges a debt to Lord Kames, but this is largely for the extensive examples that illustrate the Lectures. His expressed purpose in publishing is “partly with a view to the illustration of the association of ideas.”4 In his Memoirs, he credits David Hartley with being the major influence on his thinking: “It was a reference to Dr. Hartley’s Observations on Man, in the course of our lectures, that first brought me acquainted with that performance, which immediately engaged my closest attention, and produced the greatest, and in my opinion the most favorable effect on my general turn of thinking through life.”5 Hartley is clearly the major influence on the sections of the Lectures dealing with taste, beauty, and eloquence. However, the examples cited in the Lectures include Addison, Hutcheson, Hume, Gerard, and Montesquieu’s Essay on Taste. Priestley follows Addison in classifying the whole discussion under the category of “Pleasures of the Imagination.”6 His approach to the problem of a standard of taste reflects Hume’s essay. Yet in spite of the fact that the topics and individual formulations seem derivative, Priestley’s assimilation differs from each of his sources and seems to be very much his own. The relation to Hartley is central, so it will be useful first to clarify the way that Hartley understands associationism. Associationist psychology took a number of forms in the mid-eighteenth century. The basic empiricist scheme laid down by Locke allows two sources of ideas: sensations or sense impressions, and reflection on the operation of the mind itself. The function of reason is to recognize those ideas and monitor their combination into complex ideas so that the mind is neither deceived by

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what it apprehends nor misled by its own operations. A fundamental problem for this individualized, empirically formed mind is that minds vary so greatly. An explanation is required to account for why everyone does not know all and only true ideas. Locke introduces the association of ideas at the end of Book II of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the context of a discussion of madness and error. Association of ideas is essentially negative, something that needs to be controlled. Locke writes, Some of our Ideas have a natural Correspondence and Connection one with another: It is the Office and Excellency of our Reason to trace these, and hold them together in that Union and Correspondence which is founded in their peculiar Beings. Besides this there is another Connection of Ideas wholly owing to Chance or Custom; Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some Men’s Minds, that ’tis very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the Understanding but its Associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang always inseparable shew themselves together.7

He goes on to give several cautionary tales of the evil that can be done by association of ideas if it is not carefully watched in the education and development of the mind. The problem, of course, is that while ideas founded on experience itself are reliable and the powers of the mind, properly exercised, will produce only true complexity, association is a matter of chance and individual happenstance. Nevertheless, association of ideas is too powerful a form of explanation to be restricted to Locke’s essentially negative usage. It reappears vaguely and unsystematically as an adjunct to moral philosophy. John Gay, the cousin of the poet William Gay, appeals to the association of ideas in an essay prefixed to his publication of Archbishop William King’s essay on the origin of evil. Gay argues, “Our Approbation of Morality, and all Affections whatsoever, are finally resolvable into Reason, pointing out private Happiness, and are conversant only about things apprehended to be means tending to this end; and that whenever this end is not perceiv’d, they are to be accounted for from the Association of Ideas, and may properly be call’d Habits.”8 Thus he accounts for the passions as arising from pleasure and pain and fixed by associations. The Case is really this. We first perceive or imagine some real Good, i.e. fitness to promote our Happiness in those things which we love and approve of. Hence, we annex Pleasure to those things. Hence those things and Pleasures are so ty’d together and associated in our Minds, that one cannot present itself but the other will also occur. And the Association remains even after that which at first gave them the Connection is quite forgot, or perhaps does not exist, but the contrary.9

Thus, we can only acquire our moral principles from our own experience or learn them from others. Moreover, association connects moral ideas and pleasure as well as ideas and other ideas. Association can be a positive, if secondary, means to moral knowledge, therefore. For Gay, it is controlled by reason and a divine plan, but within those parameters, it is part of moral theology.

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From Gay’s broadening of the association of ideas to include all of the passions, it is still another step to David Hartley’s mechanical theory of the association of ideas that incorporates a Newtonian schema of vibrations and transmission of ideas.10 Hartley’s object is also moral. The second volume of his Observations on Man is titled “Observations on the Duty and Expectations of Mankind.” But Hartley introduces two major changes from the Lockean model. For Hartley, the association of ideas can actually produce ideas; the vibrations themselves can shift slightly so that new ideas are formed that do not derive directly from experience. This might be understood as merely a further complexity, but it allows the mind, through association, to combine and shift ideas so that they are more than merely a complex combination of the simple ideas provided by sense. Thus, not all ideas arise directly from experience or Locke’s reflection. And the operation is mechanical and involuntary. It is a means to an end— the production of some moral passion. Like Gay, Hartley is prepared to accept that only a directly fortunate divine plan for each individual can lead those passions to virtue. Hartley faces the likely objection to his theory squarely: The mechanical Generation of the Pleasures and Pains of the Moral Sense may by some be thought an Objection to the Reasoning here used; but it will appear otherwise, upon due Consideration. For all Things which have evident final Causes, are plainly brought about by mechanical Means; so that we may argue either way, viz. either from the mechanical Means, to the Existence of a final Cause, not yet discovered; or from the Existence of a final Cause, to that of a mechanical Means, not yet discovered.11

Such a mechanical explanation can then be regarded in either of two ways: For the deist, it is working out some predetermined goal. For the Calvinist, it requires the intervention (perhaps to the end of both salvation and damnation) of an inscrutable divine hand. While Hartley recognized Locke as the source of his psychological theories, he notes two points of disagreement with Locke: First, then, it appears to me, that all the most complex Ideas arise from Sensation; and that Reflection is not a distinct Source, as Mr. Locke makes it. Secondly, Mr. Locke ascribes Ideas to many words, which, as I have defined Idea, cannot be said to have any immediate and precise ones; but only to admit of Definitions. However, let Definitions be substituted instead of Idea, in these Cases, and then all Mr. Locke’s excellent Rules concerning Words, delivered in this Third Book, will suit the Theory of these Papers. As to the first Difference, which I think may be called an Error in Mr. Locke, it is, however, of little Consequence. We may conceive, that he called such Ideas as he could analyze up to Sensation, Ideas of Sensation; the rest Ideas of Reflection, using Reflection as a term of Art, denoting an unknown Quantity. Besides which it may be remarked, that the Words which, according to him, stand for Ideas of Reflection, are, in general, Words, that, according to the Theory of these Papers,

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have no ideas, but Definitions only. And thus the first Difference, is as it were, taken away by the Second; for if these Words have no immediate Ideas, there will be no Occasion to have recourse to Reflection as a Source of ideas; and, upon the Whole, there is no material Repugnancy between the Consequences of the Theory, and any thing advanced by Mr. Locke.12

The difference is not as inconsiderable as Hartley takes it to be. For Locke, reflection is a basic power of the understanding. It cannot function without prior input from sensation, but the mind, by reflection, is provided with ideas of its own operation that form the basis for reason. For example, not only is the mind able to compare two ideas; also, by reflection it has an idea of comparison as a power. The rational assent to the sameness of 2 + 2 and 4 depends not only on the comparison but also on the mind’s awareness of what it is doing so that it can control and rely on the process of comparison. Locke is thus able to move from his initial claim that all knowledge depends on experience to his basic rationalism about truth. For Locke, reflection is not an unknown operation that can eventually be replaced by sensation as we refine our psychology. Without reflection, the rational part of Locke’s epistemology collapses. Nor is the difference over words and definitions as minor as Hartley takes it to be. Hartley begins with a distinction between ideas and sensations that is fundamentally at odds with Locke’s scheme. For Hartley, the mind is reducible to “internal feelings,” which are divided between sensations produced by external objects and ideas. Ideas are then divided between those that resemble sensations and those that are “intellectual,” which include those produced from the vibrations themselves. Hartley distinguishes sensations from ideas: “Sensations are those internal feelings of the Mind, which arise from the impressions made by external Objects upon the several Parts of our Bodies.”13 Hartley has, in effect, introduced a theoretical level—feelings—that must be linked to ideas. Then Hartley hypothesizes that the mechanism for sensation is a vibration in the subtle matter of the brain that acts as the cause for associations. His justification for this speculative move is that it parallels Newton’s mechanical vibrations in the aether: “One may expect, that Vibrations should infer Association as their Effect, and Association point to Vibrations as its Cause. … This is the Method of Analysis and Synthesis recommended and followed by Sir Isaac Newton.”14 Hartley is clearly looking for a strictly mechanical model for the way that sensations arise and can be transmitted to other internal “feelings” that he calls ideas. The whole mechanism is an attempt to copy what Hartley takes to be Newton’s method of description. Hartley explains, If the Performance of Sensation by vibratory Motions of the medullary Particles be admitted, the Existence of a subtle elastic fluid must be admitted in consequence thereof, as the only Means that can be conceived for their Rise and free Propagation, so as to answer to the Phenomena of Sense, Motion, and ideas; and reciprocally, if the Existence of so subtle and elastic a Fluid, as the Aether described by Sir Isaac Newton, can be established upon independent Principles, it may reasonably be supposed to penetrate the Pores of the medullary Substance, how small soever they be, in the same manner as Air penetrates grosser Cavities and Pores, and, like Air, both be itself agitated by Vibrations from a Variety of Causes, and also

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With this essentially circular hypothesis in place at the beginning, Hartley is prepared to explain the differences in feelings on mechanical grounds. For example, “The intellectual Pleasures and Pains may be greater, equal, or less, than the sensible ones, according as each Person unites more or fewer, more vivid or more languid miniature Vibrations, on the Formation of his intellectual Pleasures and Pains.”16 For Hartley, these agitations amount to a language.17 This leaves room for words based on definitions, but it robs the system of its rationalism. At the same time, the theory of vibrations is never more than a hypothesis, and Hartley is prepared to consider other possibilities as long as association is retained: “As to that of Vibrations, it seems of little Importance in this part of the Work, whether it be adopted or not. If any other Law can be made the Foundation of Association, or consistent with it, it may also be made consistent with the Analysis of the intellectual Pleasures and Pains, which I shall here give.”18 Nevertheless, it is clear that Hartley not only assumes that there must be some such mechanical model; he also thinks explicitly in terms of vibrations at least as his heuristic principle throughout. Hartley’s form of association, minus some of the speculative mechanism and theological application, is taken up by Priestley who uses it as the basis both for his own version of theological explanation and for his rhetorical theories, including a theory of taste. Priestley published a condensation of Hartley’s Observations on Man in 1775 that included three introductory essays.19 Essentially, Priestley leaves out Hartley’s explanations of the mechanism of association in terms of Newtonian “vibrations,” and he deletes the defense of Christianity that Hartley built into the second part of the Observations. (The latter was not because Priestley disagreed with Hartley; he recommended Hartley’s defense to Franklin in hopes of converting him. But associationism is more basic than its uses in apologetics for Priestley.) Much of the condensation is a page-for-page transcription that reproduced the pages of Hartley’s Observations exactly.20 Nevertheless, Priestley’s approach to associationism is clearly influenced by his essentially Lockean epistemology as Hartley understood it and by his adherence to what he takes as a scientific, Newtonian model. His use of this model is simply more spare and restrained than Hartley’s. Priestley not only deletes vibrations from his edition of Hartley; he also is content to find in associationism an explanatory mechanism that works at the macro-level without committing himself to any particular detailed account at the corpuscular level. He accepts ideas that are feelings but does not rest anything on what they are in themselves. He is explicitly aware of the limitation: What sensations, or ideas, are, as they exist in the mind, or sentient principle, we have no more knowledge of, than we have of the mind or sentient principle itself. And in this ignorance of ourselves, the business of philosophy [i.e. science] will be abundantly satisfied, if we be able to point out such a probable affection of the brain,

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as will correspond to all the variety of sensations and ideas, and the affections of them, by which we are conscious. Ideas themselves, as they exist in the mind, may be as different from what they are in the brain, as that peculiar difference of texture (or rather, as that difference in the rays of light) which occasions differences of colour, is from the colours themselves, as we conceive of them.21

Priestley sees no need for Hartley to extend associationism beyond the probable evidence: “He [Hartley] also supposes that there is an intermediate elementary body between the mind and the gross body; which may exist, and be the instrument of giving pleasure or pain to the sentient principle after death. But I own I see no reason why his scheme should be burdened with such an incumbrance as this.”22 Priestley’s whole-hearted acceptance of Hartley must be placed in the context of Priestley’s own more disciplined empiricism, therefore. Priestley follows Hartley in rejecting ideas of reflection. “The ideas of succession, duration, and time, are no more than other ideas of reflection, those terms expressing actual varieties in our mental feelings, occasioned by the impression of external objects.”23 But Priestley’s rejection of reflection and acceptance of association as an alternative explanation is limited. He believes that there must be some more detailed mechanistic explanation, but his epistemological probing stops short of Locke’s comprehensive account or Hartley’s insertion of a mechanism between sensation and feeling. For Hartley, assent is a matter of associations. Clusters of words form propositions to which the mind assents by association. He writes, Rational assent then to a Proposition may be defined a Readiness to affirm it to be true, proceeding from a close Association of the Ideas suggested by the Proposition, with the Idea, or internal Feeling, belonging to the word Truth; or of the terms of the Propositions with the Word Truth. … This Assent might be called verbal; but as every Person supposes himself always to have sufficient Reason for such Readiness to affirm or deny, I rather choose to call it Rational.24

For Locke, on the other hand, assent is a primary power of the mind; one assents to the comparison of ideas itself. There is a subtle difference between the associationism that Priestley derives from Hartley and that of Locke, therefore. For Locke, the association of ideas must begin with the mind having two ideas since the mind cannot generate ideas. Then the two ideas can come together so that one is compared with the other. Rationality is essentially a principle of comparison and combination, therefore. But Priestley’s association depends more on using association to extend ideas from one to the other. The principle is analogical. An idea is close to another idea in some way, so the occurrence of the first idea allows a comparison with the second. The difference is that the second idea is, in effect, generated by the first so that one is led from A to B by association. For Locke, A and B are independent. A is compared to B or combined with B so that A and B occur together in the mind. For Priestly, following Hartley, A produces B. So, for example, Hartley and Priestley can explain the connection between a musical passage and the feeling it produces by an analogy in structure, where Locke would have to have a way of comparing two distinct ideas provided directly by experience.

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Priestley does not try to resolve his difference from Locke if he recognized it at all. He distinguishes between analytic and synthetic propositions but does not account for how we assent to the analytic except as a self-evident association.25 Association explains those empirical phenomena that interest him, and there he is able to reconcile Locke and Hartley without contradiction. Priestley endorses Hartley’s view, therefore, but his use of association remains closer to Locke’s epistemology than to Hartley’s. For example, Priestley argues, “All just knowledge results from a just view of things, and a comparing of his ideas, and that a habit of just thinking may be acquired by a course of observation and reflection duly persisted in.”26 He goes on to explain, using a standard example from Locke, By the simple principle of the association of ideas, the idea of the flame of a candle is intimately associated with the idea of the pain which it has occasioned, in so much, that ever after they are considered in the closest connection, as it were the inseparable parts of the same thing; so that whatever recalls the idea of the one recalls likewise the idea of the other, and dread of the one cannot be separated from the dread of the other.27

While Hartley would hardly object to this explanation, it is essentially Lockean. One has the idea of the flame and the idea of the pain, which is a feeling; and the two ideas are combined so that the occurrence of the one occasions the occurrence of the other. Priestley does not need vibrations to explain how one idea can resemble another by producing nearly the same vibrations. Thus Priestley can keep his whole system much closer to Locke’s epistemology than Hartley’s association would allow if Priestley attempted to adopt the mechanism of association that Hartley depends on. This relative closeness to Locke is important as we turn directly to Priestley’s theory of taste.

II Priestley’s theory of taste and the imagination arises in the context of his discussion of the rules of oratory. He has been discussing the effective forms of argumentation. His recommended models for an oration or sermon are organized on what he considers scientific lines; they work either analytically—leading the reader to assent by working from the smallest elements toward common properties—or synthetically—laying out a general plan first and then presenting the material “geometrically.” These methods are combined in the finest sermons, he believes, and Priestley is thus led to ask a theoretical question about the source of the pleasure that we take in composition and figurative language. The pleasure itself is divisible into two kinds: the “gross and sensible feelings” themselves, or “the pleasures of the imagination.”28 This is a fundamental distinction in kinds of ideas, but it is as important for what it is not as for what it is. By the end of the century, Kant and Alison both distinguish pleasure as a form of delight different from other pleasures. Priestley makes no such distinction. Pleasure is common to a class of

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ideas that are distinguished from sensation. The pleasures of the imagination are not qualitatively different from other pleasures, however. Since Priestley does not hold that there are fundamental differences between ideas of reflection and ideas of sensation, the pleasures of the imagination are qualitatively different only in the “intellectual” nature of the ideas formed by association and their greater delicacy, since they are not immediate. Priestley also differs from one of the main lines of eighteenth-century theories of beauty and taste in another respect. Francis Hutcheson makes internal sense central to his analysis of both beauty and morals, and Alexander Gerard retains internal sense as an element in his theory of taste, though he complicates its role by relying on both association and an active faculty of imagination so that “sense” is only analogically present. In this regard, Priestley’s associationism is clearer; the moral aspect largely drops out. Priestley explicitly rejects identifying the pleasurable ideas of the imagination as the product of a sense: Each of these kinds of feelings are, by some philosophers, referred to so many reflex, or internal senses, as they call these faculties of the mind by which we perceive them; whereas, according to Dr. Hartley’s theory, those sensations consist of nothing more than a congeries or combination of ideas and sensations, separately indistinguishable, but which were formerly associated either with the idea itself that excites them, or with some other idea, or circumstance, attending the introduction of them. It is this latter hypothesis that I adopt, and, by the help of it, I hope to be able to throw some new light on this curious subject.29

The ideas that provide the pleasures of imagination are distinct, therefore, only to the extent that they are no longer directly linked to their external objects. By association, they are combined anew and can be developed figuratively. It is still the case, however, that they are primarily the ideas supplied by the eye and ear since those organs supply ideas without interposing their own location. Touch, taste, and smell are associated with a body part; sight and sound can be identified with the organ only by exclusion.30 At this point, Locke has said virtually the same thing, and though Priestley emphasizes association as the means of freeing the ideas, it is basically a Lockean combination of ideas that gives us the ideas that provide the pleasures of the imagination. In rejecting “internal senses” as they are proposed first by Hutcheson and then more extensively by Gerard, Priestley returns to Locke’s way of ideas, though he substitutes association for Locke’s metaphorical internal sense that provided ideas of reflection and treats association as a positive rather than a negative way of compounding ideas. Taste can be identified in this scheme as the ability to feel sentiments.31 As such, taste is acquired and educable: “Judgment is universally acknowledged to be altogether acquired, and that taste, too, or the capacity of perceiving the pleasures of the imagination, may also be acquired, to a very great degree, is evident from the actual acquirement of a variety of similar tastes, even late in life.”32 In other words, taste is simply the capacity to have and combine ideas that produce pleasure. The principles by which taste operates will be associative, but the basic concept of taste is reduced to an operation on the simple ideas upon which Locke and Priestley base everything else.

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As such, taste does not require a special organ or faculty—an internal sense. It has no moral authority; and it is useful primarily as the adjunct of oratorical or evangelistic skills. It follows from this that for Priestley a standard of taste becomes essentially relative. Priestley believes that the only way to have a standard is to already have cultural uniformity. Outside the range of common associations and sentiments, there is no reason to expect uniformity of taste since taste reduces to the having and combining of ideas. Priestley concludes, In the mean time [prior to the formation of a universal culture], justness of taste will be determined by appealing to the general sense of those who have been the most conversant with the subject of it. A deviation from this general taste will be reckoned a fault, and a coincidence with it an excellence; and the difficulty there is in ascertaining what is this medium of opinion in connoisseurs makes the business of criticism, or the standard of judging in works of genius, so vague and undetermined as it is. Persons who have not been conversant with the subjects of taste are excluded from having any vote in this case, because their minds have not been in a proper situation for receiving the ideas and sensations which are requisite to form a just taste.33

Priestley’s taste judgments are relative, therefore, but he does not assign to taste any special moral status in the first place, so the relativity does not cut very deeply. Elsewhere, Priestley recommends the study of music, but advises that it is best not to develop too exquisite a taste since one will be pleased with many more performances if one’s taste is not too refined.34 Like Locke, Priestley has a limited experience of and interest in the arts, and he is not particularly disturbed by the consequences of the position he finds himself advocating. It is a limited, tolerant, but not particularly penetrating consequence of beginning with an undistinguished pleasure of the imagination. Priestley’s theory of taste becomes interesting when he raises the question of the source of the pleasure one takes in style and art. He answers by appealing neither to properties of objects nor to a form of experience. Instead, the exertion of the mind itself is the key, an idea that will be developed extensively by later taste-theorists. “Pleasure consists of sensations moderately vigorous. It is, therefore, capable of existing in any degree between the two extremes of perfect languor and tranquility of mind on the one hand, and actual pain and uneasiness on the other.”35 We have two sources for such pleasure. One is the exercise of the faculties themselves. If that exercise falls in the moderate range, it is experienced as pleasurable. The other source is Priestley’s own contribution to the theory. Associations transfer the pleasure we have taken in such exercise to the objects we associate with producing that exercise. “All our intellectual pleasures and pains consist of nothing but the simple pleasures and pains of sense, conmixed [sic] and combined together in infinitely various degrees and proportions, so as to be separately indistinguishable, and transferred upon foreign objects, by the principle of association.”36 Pain is an extreme sensation, as is complete passivity. Pleasure is not the opposite of pain but the feeling aroused by a moderate exertion. Beauty is an “excellence” that draws out and exercises our faculties.

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At this point, Priestley is following Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste both in his analysis and in the order of the topics. Gerard’s essay appeared in 1759, and Priestley credits Gerard on a specific point earlier,37 so he evidently had the Essay before him. At the very beginning of his Essay, Gerard proposes that the mind finds pleasure in works of moderate difficulty that it can apprehend without fatigue.38 Gerard operates with an extended faculty psychology. The exercise of any faculty, “if it be moderate, gives us pleasure.”39 Priestley also seems to be following the order of Gerard’s essay at several other points. Gerard goes from a discussion of novelty to uniformity, variety and proportion, and Priestley takes up the same topics in the same order. However, there are also fundamental differences. While Gerard is an associationist, he uses association as one principle along with teleology and mental exercise to account for the pleasure of the imagination, but Gerard also retains an internal sense, which Priestley, as a more radical and consistent associationist, rejects. So, while Priestley is obviously borrowing from Gerard, he is using Gerard’s essay for his own ends. Priestley accepts as his fundamental principle that the work should be adapted to its use so as to exercise the mind in the moderate way that will produce pleasure. On the one hand, the work must be engaging; on the other, it must not be too difficult. If the mind is too hurried, it misses the effect; if the work is too short and simple, the mind is bored. “But all compositions, and particularly those of small length, are insupportably insipid, if the writer have [sic] been so unseasonably officious, as to have left nothing to the exercise of the active faculties of his readers, and the whole excites nothing but a train of passive perceptions.”40 Priestley is sketching a very active theory of the imagination. Internal sense theories tend to be passive; the mind feels a pleasure as a result of its sensing of properties of an object. For Priestley, the mind does not perceive beauty or passively enjoy a pleasure detached from the world. Instead, it finds pleasure in the activity of its own faculties. “Very often, though we read with pleasure, we give over with disgust, and a secret dissatisfaction with ourselves. The reason is that, in mere reading of this kind, we are little more than passive. Trains of ideas pass before our minds, but no active powers of the soul are exerted.”41 In another sense, however, Priestley is still very much following Locke since it is the exertion of the mind that is productive of pleasure. No single class of ideas or form of mental operation is privileged. So while the mind must be active, the pleasure it feels is not determined by the attitude of the mind or its choice of objects. The mind can still be a slate written upon by experience, though through association, it is not blank for long. It follows from this approach to beauty and its effects that there is little difference between art and other forms of mental exercise. Priestley appeals to history and to theorems, geometry, and algebra as sources of pleasure.42 The pleasures of art arise within the context of a practical art such as oratory. Priestley differs from the developing eighteenth-century trend toward an art, fine art, that is an autonomous end in itself. For Priestley, on the contrary, such art would be passive and uninteresting. “By reading history with some further view, as a means to a further end, we make it a science. It then engages our active powers.”43 Aside from the role they play in a practical discipline such as oratory, it is difficult to see how Priestley would ever be able to single out the fine arts as in any way unique, and in fact he does not.

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Two ways of pleasing are especially associated with the arts, however. The first is by means of novelty. Novelty provides a new train of ideas that is “like its [the mind’s] entering upon a new world.”44 At the same time, it provides a secondary motive for action that supplements the more practical and important ends of the activity.45 Priestley carries through an analysis of novelty in the arts that is consistent with the basic principle of exertion of the faculties and with association. By producing either unexpected ideas or familiar ideas in unexpected situations, the mind is engaged and associations increase the effect.46 The second way that one is pleased is by means of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s analysis of the sublime appeared in 1757,47 five years before Priestley wrote the Lectures on Oratory and Criticism and twenty years before he prepared them for publication. Burke is not mentioned, however. The concept of the sublime was certainly available from discussions of Longinus and other sources, so that one cannot infer that Priestley knew of Burke’s work. Nevertheless, Priestley’s discussion of the sublime engages Burke’s positions directly. Priestley argues, “Great objects please us for the same reason that new objects do, viz. by the exercise they give to our faculties.”48 “Greatness” and “littleness” are relative, however, so they imply comparison. Moreover, it is primarily by association that corporeal magnitude is extended to other qualities that we experience as sublime. For example, Priestley explains, I might mention a great many more terms borrowed from corporeal magnitude, extension and elevation, [he has mentioned “high,” “superior,” “near,” “low,” and “distant”] applied to things which have more of those qualities; but these are sufficient to show that the perception of the sentiments, dispositions, and circumstances, to which they are applied, are attended with a consciousness of feeling, similar to that which is excited by the view of objects which have the qualities of corporeal magnitude, exertion, and elevation; that is, with the sublime.49

This is interesting for two reasons: first, Priestley uses the sublime as a specific variety of conscious feeling based on corporeal properties that the mind must comprehend with the moderate exertion productive of pleasure. Second, Priestley extends the corporeal by association to what we call taste predicates—eloquence, for example—so that in spite of his practical concerns, he is able to account for critical terms that we think of as characteristically matters of taste. The properties of the sublime cause some slight dislocation in Priestley’s scheme, however. In spite of the mental activism at the foundation of his account, the property associated with the sublime is an “awful stillness.” “The pure sublime, by strongly engaging, tends to fix the attention, and to keep the mind in a kind of awful stillness; whereas it is of the nature of every species of the pathetic to throw it into agitation.”50 It seems likely that Priestley is led to the description of the sublime as “awful” by the prevailing accounts, and that he is here having some difficulty in fitting that into his own account that depends on a moderate exertion of the faculties. However, he subordinates the sublime to the pathetic in excellence, so in the end he remains marginally consistent.

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Some of Priestley’s description of the sublime seems to follow Burke more explicitly. For example, a genius tends toward the sublime; others toward the “little and beautiful.”51 And singling out the sublime as second only to the pathetic in excellence is Burkean, though it was a widespread preference by the mid-eighteenth century. On the other hand, Priestley also seems to go out of this way to confute Burke without specifically mentioning him. In particular, Priestley distinguishes the sublime from terror, which he describes as a mixed sensation of fear and grandeur. In the pure sublime, there is no painful emotion.52 Priestley’s placing of pleasure as a moderate point between pain and languor fundamentally rejects Burke’s linking of pleasure and pain. The uniqueness of Priestley’s theory of the imagination is most clearly shown in the way that he deals with the most common eighteenth-century criteria for beauty— uniformity and variety. Priestley cites Hutcheson, but his discussion of uniformity and variety need not be directed at Hutcheson’s specific use of those terms. By the time that Priestley is writing the lectures, the terms had become common descriptions. Instead of locating them as metaphysically important properties, however, Priestley adopts a treatment of them as psychologically effective mental powers in line with his theory of association. This in itself moves him away from the mainstream, because part of the prominence of uniformity and variety depends on their retention of some links to earlier Platonic formulations in terms of unity (oneness) and harmony. However, some form of psychological understanding is common in most eighteenth-century treatments. Priestley’s goes farther than most by interpreting uniformity and variety in terms of his basic psychological thesis: “The pleasure we receive from the view of objects in which there is a visible mixture of uniformity and variety, hath, no doubt, more sources than one: however, as one of its sources is the moderate exercise which such objects give to our faculties, I shall treat of it in this place.”53 This robs uniformity and variety of any particular theoretical priority. They are simply among the effective means to exercise the intellectual faculties in a moderate way. Variety is more important than uniformity. In fact, there is some slight inconsistency in Priestley’s treatment of uniformity. He includes it, more or less routinely, in a list of pleasurable properties: “the properties of uniformity, variety, and proportion, or fitness to some useful end having been perceived in some of the objects with which pleasurable ideas and sensations have been associated, a complex pleasurable sensation will universally be annexed to the marks of uniformity, variety, and proportion, whenever they are perceived.”54 But later, when he is more carefully linking uniformity and variety to the exertion of the faculties, he concludes that “uniformity alone, however heightened, doth not affect the imagination with any sense of pleasure.”55 The latter position is clearly consistent with Priestley’s theory, and it is not hard to reconcile the two since association is enhanced by uniformity. The key link is that variety depends on comparison, since, like size in the discussion of the sublime, it is relative to other ideas. There cannot be variety without difference, nor difference without comparison, so the imaginative involvement of the mind with variety is comparative. But comparison depends on uniformity. If everything were simply different, there would be no basis for comparison. Priestley is thus able to fit uniformity and variety into his scheme, though with some twisting. His description moves away from qualities of the object and focuses on the mind and its activity. He is led in this way back into a discussion

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of simile as the fundamental form of comparison based on perceived similarity, and thence to metaphor and back to the rhetorical concerns of the lectures.

III Priestley’s approach to taste and the pleasures of the imagination is important for several reasons. First, it is thoroughly Lockean. Priestley’s use of Hartley’s associationism is qualified by his relative independence of Hartley’s explanatory and apologetic structures. While Priestley differs from Locke in the way he depends on association and the positive value he gives it, nevertheless, he is able to retain more of the direct reliance on ideas as the input that makes up “experience” than does Hartley who is dependent on speculations about vibrations and the theological commitments of his teleology or even Shaftesbury and Hutcheson who acknowledge a debt to Locke but replace simple ideas with some form of sense. Priestley depends on association only to provide the combinations of ideas that his scientism requires. When he comes to explain taste and beauty, therefore, Priestley follows the epistemological path that Locke has laid down. He looks for ideas that are simple, and he finds them to have pleasure in common. He asks which ideas are pleasurable, and he finds them to be the ones that exercise the mind. Only then does he try to accommodate the standard proto-aesthetic terminology of the day—genius, novelty, sublimity, uniformity, and variety. Like Locke, Priestley provides a psychology that is fundamentally epistemological and that steers clear of commitments that it cannot verify. Priestley is not as rationalist as Locke, but that is because he is a more limited thinker than Locke. At the points where Locke provides an explanation of how the mind is able to combine its ideas into consistent and coherent complex ideas that are rational (in the extended sense of ‘rational’ described by John Yolton),56 Priestley has recourse to a simple probabilistic induction. In a different context, Priestley replies to skepticism about scientific explanations by citing the connection of vision and the eye and of thought and the brain; then he goes on to conclude, “For my part, I know no conclusions in philosophy more certain than these, and they are not rendered at all less certain by our not being able to go a step farther, so as to know in what manner the brain, or the affections of it, can be the instrument or subject of perception.”57 This means that Priestley is in some ways more superficial than Locke, and both his own science and the understanding of taste and beauty that he derives from it never achieve great theoretical depth as a result, but it is consistent with the basic empiricism of Locke in a way that the more complex eighteenth-century theories of taste, beauty, and the pleasures of the imagination are not. Second, Priestley is important because of what we do not find in his theory. After Kant, “the aesthetic” is separated from the moral, which is a form of practical judgment, and Priestley’s theory of taste and beauty is notably independent of moral judgments in spite of his status as a clergyman and the origin of his theory of association in Gay’s development of associationism as part of a moral theory. That negative factor does not make Priestley a forerunner of Kantian aesthetic independence from “practical” moral theory, however. Instead, Priestley’s adaptation of the principle that the exertion

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of the mind’s intellectual faculties is pleasurable as a theory of taste is independent of a moral point of view simply because Priestley’s rhetorical concerns just do not raise moral issues. Priestley is obviously thinking of ordinary mental exertion in combining and comprehending ideas. It is not a different kind of pleasure from that brought about by scientific exertion, for example, nor is good taste a mark of a morally good person. As a “scientist,” Priestley’s theory of taste and beauty is practical rather than judgmental. The only mark of such experience is its objects—art, rhetoric, criticism— and the issue is what will work and give pleasure. Because it must engage the mind, this proto-aesthetic is “interested,” but the eighteenth-century debate over whether there is pleasure in the sense of a selfless benevolence does not concern Priestley, perhaps because his radical politics takes him in a different direction. Therefore, Priestley is a scientist (or a “philosopher” as he would term himself), and his approach to beauty and taste follows a path laid down by Newton as well as Locke more closely than others for whom taste remains intrinsically moral. Perhaps Priestley should not be considered a “Newtonian” in the intramural meaning that that would have had in the latter half of the eighteenth century.58 But it is not necessary here to take a position on Priestley’s exact relation to Newton’s theories. What is more important is his allegiance to what Newton represented more generally. For the circle that centered on the Royal Society, of which Priestley was a member, Newton was emblematic of the hope that mathematics and science could provide an understanding of phenomena that reach far beyond mechanics. Priestley’s own methodology is to identify facts and reject mere hypotheses while acknowledging the importance of hypotheses in the discovery of facts. Priestley’s “facts” may well function differently from a strict Newtonian science. But Priestley’s allegiance is to facts and science in a way that Newton made possible. The Lectures on Oratory are a relatively early work, and they reflect the extension of a scientific psychology based on association to literary effects. In thus extending Newton’s heritage, Priestley is clearly very much a part of the eighteenth-century hope that taste can be given a consistent foundation on the basis of scientific method.

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Theories of Taste

I Once Lockean dependence on experience replaces Neoplatonic hierarchies that lead beyond sense and rational deductions from first principles, proto-aesthetic theories based on taste must confront problems that arise from the inherently subjective nature of taste based on feeling and pleasure. Beauty becomes a feeling, an idea in the mind of the beholder, a sentiment, or an experience that is centered in the individual. It makes sense to say that beauty is in the eye or mind of the beholder rather than in the order of the cosmos. One can only experience beauty for one’s self, and a theory of taste supplants objective beauty. Taste, as a proto-aesthetic theory, arises from late Renaissance and Mannerist art in the seventeenth century that was individual rather than universal in its aims, seeking experience for its own sake.1 The subjectivity of taste presents a different set of problems than those that beauty raised, therefore. For one thing, taste is a social experience. Bad taste lowers one’s social status, and good taste elevates one’s reputation. For another, taste seems chaotic; it is the opposite of classical order. It has no rules. One is drawn into endless arguments and appeals to a je ne sais quoi. “’Tis not the je ne sais quoi to which idiots and the ignorant of the art would reduce everything.”2 But what is taste? The answer to that question led to the formulation of specific theories of taste. Initially, the focus was on the practical problem of taste as a reflection of one’s status. Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington” is a case study in what can go wrong with taste. ’Tis strange, the miser should his cares employ To gain those riches he can ne’er enjoy: Is it less strange, the prodigal should waste His wealth, to purchase what he ne’er can taste … What brought Sir Visto’s ill-got wealth to waste? Some daemon whispered, “Visto! Have a taste.” ll 1–4; 15–16

Addison addresses the same problem in “The Spectator, No. 409.” The analogy of critical taste to gustatory taste captures the similarities between the intellectual faculty and the sensitive faculty of taste. Taste is inherently empirical with all of the variations

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that sense implies. It depends on refinement to distinguish “the most concealed faults and nicest perfections in writing.”3 Addison defines it as “that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike.”4 It must be inborn because it is a sense, but it must also be cultivated; that is done by the study of authors known to be exemplars of their art and critics who define that canon. So taste is linked on the one hand to pleasure or dislike and on the other hand to cultural norms. Initially, the response to Pope, in particular, focused on that social aspect. A spate of poetic replies criticized Pope for a perceived failure to acknowledge his obligations to patrons and thus for his lack of the very taste that he had skewered in his poems.5 What remains in all of the uses of taste as an intellectual faculty is the essentially empirical nature that the metaphor grasps. Taste, good or bad, belongs to one’s experience of art and the world. It is not rule-governed in the way that classical appreciation of beauty or rationalist critical judgment was. One had to experience the object for oneself, and one’s experience defined one’s taste. The subjectivity of taste presents a series of special problems, therefore. These problems are addressed directly by Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Taste6 (1759), by Henry Home, Lord Kames, in his rhetorical theory7 (1763), and by David Hume in his essays,8 particularly “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1741).

II Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste sums up much of the theory of taste as it had developed up to its composition as an entry in a prize competition in 1759 at the urging of David Hume. Gerard places taste in the tradition of Locke, Shaftesbury, and particularly Addison. Basically, taste is a form of experience that responds to an external stimulus; it is not innate except as a faculty or power. Gerard does not adhere very closely to the Lockean model of ideas, however. Sometimes he seems to think of ideas as units of experience that begin as simple ideas and can be combined into more complex ideas. For example, he writes, “At first it [the faculty of judgment] can take in only the simplest combinations of qualities or short trains of ideas; but, by being often employed, it acquires enlargement; and is enabled to comprehend, to retain distinctly, and to compare with ease, the most complicated habitudes, and the largest and most intricate compositions of ideas.”9 This is not Locke’s composition but an act of judgment that has to correct sense and perception. Ideas appear only much later in the process of acquiring experience than does sensation. So, while Gerard clearly belongs to the Lockean tradition, because ideas are what make up the mind and the mind does not begin with innate ideas but acquires them, just as clearly, Gerard does not use ideas in the way that Locke’s “way of ideas” does. They are not just simple or complex representations of the external world. They are perceptions that require judgment. Gerard is closer to Addison in describing the way that taste works. It is a faculty essentially related to imagination:

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If we will but recollect and compare those qualities of human nature from which taste has been explained, we shall be convinced, that all its phænomena proceed, either from the general laws of sensation, or from certain operations of the imagination. Taste, therefore, though its self a species of sensation, is, in respect of its principles, justly reduced to imagination.10

Taste provides pleasure and is a pleasure of the imagination as Addison had maintained.11 Gerard goes well beyond Addison, however. Imagination itself is not just a source of pleasure but also a faculty related to both fancy and active engagement with the world, which is the source of its pleasures. Gerard explains taste itself in terms derived from Francis Hutcheson whom he cites: “Taste consists chiefly in the improvement of those principles, which are commonly called the powers of imagination, and are considered by modern philosophers as internal or reflex senses.”12 Again, however, Gerard’s actual usage of internal sense differs significantly from Hutcheson’s. For Hutcheson, an internal sense is a true sense. It replaces Locke’s ideas of reflection, which are limited to the mind’s awareness of its own powers, with a new source of ideas that are as immediate as the ideas provided by the external senses. For Gerard, therefore, internal senses are derived and subject to judgment. Internal senses require “some previous perception of the objects,”13 and perception is a complex process that requires judgment. Gerard agrees with Hutcheson in making taste a product of an internal sense, therefore, and like Hutcheson, the internal or reflex sense is not just a power to compose simple and complex ideas but an independent source of ideas as perceptions. Taste for Gerard depends on judgment to arrive at clear and distinct perceptions in a way that does not enter into Hutcheson’s moral and proto-aesthetic calculus, however. Gerard is much closer to Hutcheson when it comes to one central taste concept, imitation. Like Hutcheson, he distinguishes two forms of pleasure from imitation. The primary form depends on what is imitated. Where the imagination acquires its ideas directly from what is imitated, the pleasure is in the qualities of the object. But there is also a pleasure in the act of imitation itself. Gerard explains that “exactness and liveliness of imagination supply us with another pleasure of taste, which, as it has no peculiar name, is commonly expressed by that of beauty; and is by some termed relative or secondary, to distinguish it from the kinds above explained, which are called absolute or primary.”14 Beauty is distinguished into two kinds. Hutcheson had made the same distinction between absolute beauty and relative beauty, and like Hutcheson, Gerard uses it to retain the classical reliance on imitation as part of a theory of beauty, but now it is subordinated to taste. We are led to Gerard’s basic thesis about mental activity. “Whatever therefore usually excites these qualities [of mind which produce the reflex senses] and draws them out into act, must be a means of cultivating taste.”15 The promotion of mental activity as itself a source of pleasure becomes increasingly important in theories of taste in the course of the eighteenth century. It begins, perhaps, with Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, whom Gerard cites, but it fits best with the kind of sentimentalism that Hume advances and that Gerard makes use of. The pleasure that the mind experiences is internal to the mind itself. It is a sentiment, not just a recognition of some quality

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independent of the mind. There is a significant difference between Hume and Gerard at this point, however. Gerard writes, Taste is so deeply rooted in human nature, that none are pleased but with some degree of real excellence and beauty. … As we can form no simple idea, till its correspondent sensation has been first perceived; so, with respect to many of our ideas, we are confined to that precise degree of which we have had experience, and cannot by any means enlarge them.16

For Hume, sentiments are immediately felt and get their authority from that immediacy. So taste itself is beyond dispute. Gerard introduces perception into the process. Taste is immediate, but perception requires judgment. This allows Gerard to qualify taste. It is part of human nature, but it responds to “real excellence and beauty” that is only evident if clarified by judgment. Nevertheless, Gerard agrees with Hume that taste is a sentiment. As such, it is identified by the pleasure or pain that it produces. But Gerard does not stop with sentiments. He is a realist about taste and beauty. In spite of his citation of Hutcheson and his adoption of some degree of Hume’s sentimentalism, the problem of taste for Gerard in his Essay is still what it was for Addison, Pope, and Shaftesbury. Taste reflects the character and quality of an individual as a whole. That was the origin of taste; it was about individuals and their reputations. Gerard continues that concern, but he tries to explain the underlying epistemology of taste. The problem is whether he can do so consistently without accepting the comprehensive sentimentalism Hume had advanced. Gerard develops his own theory of taste in terms of imagination, judgment, and association, therefore. Imagination is a faculty or power that depends on sense and perception. “A man of taste places the pleasures of imagination in a higher class than other men are apt to do.”17 Imagination represents ideas that both sense and memory supply. It occupies, Gerard says, a middle rank: “It has been observed above, that those internal senses from which taste is formed, are commonly referred to the imagination, which is considered as holding a middle rank between the bodily senses, and the rational and moral faculties.”18 Imagination belongs to the senses, therefore, but is distinct from bodily senses and moral faculties. The analogy to physical taste becomes increasingly remote as Gerard tries to describe what taste really is in the fine arts. “Taste, therefore, though its self a species of sensation, is, in respect of its principles, justly reduced to imagination.”19 Gerard wants to maintain the connection to internal sense, but his way of using imagination makes it distinct. “Taste, in most of its forms at least, is a derivative and secondary power. We can trace it up to simpler principles, by pointing out the mental process that produces it, or enumerating the qualities by the combination of which it is formed. These are found, on inquiry, to be no other than certain exertions of imagination.”20 Imagination cannot be a form of sensation if it is derivative, however, and taste, therefore, no longer has the immediacy of a sense. Instead of working like a sense, imagination is a power to compose and combine ideas. Gerard explains,

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Many of the combinations of ideas which imagination produces, are representations of nothing that exists in nature; and therefore whatever is fictitious or chimerical is acknowledged to be the offspring of this faculty, and is termed imaginary. But wild and lawless as this faculty appears to be, it commonly observes certain general rules, associating chiefly ideas of such objects as are connected by the simple relations of resemblance, contrariety, or vicinity; or by the more complex ties of custom, co-existence, causation, or order.21

Association replaces even internal forms of sense in the operation of taste, therefore. Association is a positive power, not the explanation of error that it is for Hutcheson. It replaces and expands sense: Imagination does not confine itself to its own weak ideas; but often acts in conjunction with our senses, and spreads its influence on their impressions. Sensations, emotions, and affections, are, by its power, associated with others, readily introducing such as resemble them, either in their feeling or direction. Nay, they are capable of a closer union than even our ideas; for they may not only, like them, be conjoined, but also mixed and blended so perfectly together, that none of them shall be distinctly perceivable in the compound which arises from their union. Hence the effects so often mentioned, of concomitant emotions. All these are operations of imagination, which naturally proceed from its simplest exertions; and these are the principles from which the sentiments of taste arise.22

So taste depends on imagination, and imagination is a power that expands the kind and range of ideas available to the mind. Gerard is constructing a faculty psychology around imagination that makes it a source not just of pleasure, as it is for Addison, but also of a creative faculty. In that respect, nineteenth-century Romanticism can build on Gerard’s theory of taste, but that goes beyond what Gerard himself is prepared to claim for imagination. For him, it remains a kind of experience of the middle rank between sense and reason. Gerard’s appeal to association moves him away from the way in which taste operates like a sense and brings him closer to Joseph Priestley, though the similarity is one of thought rather than influence since Priestley did not publish his work on association until 1775.23 Since imagination occupies a middle position between sense proper and the moral and rational faculties, its expansion by association is the operative power of taste. Gerard explains, Association has a very great influence on taste; and every philosopher who has examined the affections with tolerable care, has remarked the great dependence which they have on association. Many of them arise from sympathy; and this principle is likewise the source of many sentiments of taste. Both our sentiments and our affections are often rendered more intense by the mixture of concomitant emotions. A strong imagination produces a vigorous and lively taste; and it is always attended with keen and ardent passions.24

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Association still belongs to the empiricist shift to experience and sense, however. “It is the nature of association, to unite different ideas so closely, that they become in a manner one,”25 but it has become a power in its own right. Association expands taste: “Custom likewise begets new associations, and enables works of taste to suggest ideas which were not originally connected with them.”26 Not only do new associations arise, but association expands the powers of taste itself: “Taste is not one simple power, but an aggregate of many, which, by the resemblance of their energies, and the analogy of their subjects, and causes, readily associate, and are combined.”27 So taste is no longer a sense, even by analogy. It is an aggregate of many powers to the point that anything that fancy and the imagination can provide can become the objects of taste. Taste, then, is itself quite varied and would be, as Gerard and Shaftesbury before him, feared, potentially wild and lawless if it were nothing more than what imagination and association provided by themselves. Gerard introduces a third element into his theory of taste by giving judgment a controlling role, therefore. Judgment is a way of forming ideas clearly and distinctly and distinguishing between ideas provided by fancy and those ideas of the imagination that are grounded in sense. Judgment is not primarily a critical faculty that distinguishes between good and bad taste, therefore. It does not tell us that Milton is better than Ogilby but what the truth of what Milton described is. “Judgment, the faculty which distinguishes things different, separates truth from falsehood, and compares together objects and their qualities. … It thus supplies materials from which fancy may produce ideas, and form combinations, that will strongly affect the mental taste.”28 At this point, Gerard is not concerned with good and bad taste themselves but with the truth of the ideas to which taste is responding. The necessity for judgment is a consequence of placing taste between sense and the moral and rational faculties. It is sense which is pleased or displeased when these things are determined: but judgment alone can determine them, and present to sense the object of its perception. … Truth and justness is the foundation of every beauty in sentiment; it imparts to it that solidity, without which it may dazzle a vulgar eye, but can never please one who looks beyond the first appearance: and to ascertain truth, to unmask falsehood, however artfully disguised, is the peculiar prerogative of judgment.29

Failures of taste are failures of perception, and judgment is necessary to correct sense if perception is to be true. The dangers of taste to Gerard are not its subjectivity from individual to individual but that individuals lack judgment and thus just do not sense the same things. That means that taste is subjective in two different ways. As a sentiment, different individuals have different tastes. One likes red wine, another white. But one may not perceive the taste of iron and leather, the other may. Hume recognizes that this presents two different problems. The first is the problem of what one likes; the other is the problem of what one perceives. Here, at least, Gerard does not.30 His concept of judgment is of an ability to arrive at a true picture of what sense provides. Taste follows then. Judgment is normative: “[Judgment] knows what ought to gratify or disgust,”31 but it does not establish the norms. It merely “knows.”

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Gerard seems to hold something like an intuitive theory of value with respect to taste, therefore. Reflex sense directly intuits the value that taste knows provided that it clearly and distinctly perceives its objects. Gerard claims, “Goodness of taste lies in its maturity and perfection. It consists in certain excellences of our original powers of judgment and imagination combined. These may be reduced to four; sensibility, refinement, correctness, and the proportion or comparative adjustment of its separate principles. All these must be in some considerable degree united, in order to form true taste.”32 Nevertheless, sense by itself is not sufficient. Taste can be improved, so culture plays a significant role. One can tell good taste by whose taste it is. “This excellence of taste supposes not only culture, but culture judiciously applied. Want of taste unavoidably springs from negligence; false taste, from injudicious cultivation.”33 The problem, of course, is that we are back to the usual taste circle. One identifies persons with good taste by their judgments, and one identifies the judgment by the taste of a person. Gerard depends on the ability to sort feelings themselves to get out of this seeming circle. He explains, Though all the sensations of taste are, in the highest degree, analogous and similar; yet each has its peculiar feeling, its specific form, by which one who has a distinct idea of it, and possesses exactness of judgment, may mark its difference from the others. It is this which bestows precision and order on our sentiments. Without it, they would be a mere confused chaos: we should, like persons in a mist, see something, but could not tell what we saw. Every good or bad quality, the works of art or genius, would be a mere je ne sai quoy.34

So his theory of taste opts for an accurate ability to distinguish feelings rather than the perception of feelings themselves. Knowledge takes precedence over sense and feeling to allow judgment to prevent the chaos of feelings themselves. The key to understanding Gerard’s theory of taste is what he means by perception. Following Thomas Reid,35 not Hume, Gerard places perception between sensation and ideas when judgment has clearly and distinctly clarified the sensation. One has a sensation; without that, there would be no ideas, so ideas are not innate. But perception is realist. One perceives qualities, not just ideas, and one’s ideas include more than mere sense. Ideas are a consequent of sensation formed by perception. “As we can form no simple idea, ’till its correspondent sensation has been first perceived; so, with respect to many of our ideas, we are confined to that precise degree of which we have had experience, and cannot by any means enlarge them.”36 When we do enlarge them, it is because we have perceived their qualities, including their value. Sensations are individual, but perceptions give one what is real, so they have a validity and extension that the sensation itself does not. What one perceives is not given by sense alone, therefore. But what extensive influence the moral sense has on taste of every kind, it will be unnecessary particularly to describe, if we only recollect the various perceptions which it conveys. To it belongs our perception of the fairness, beauty, and loveliness

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Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics of virtue; of the ugliness, deformity, and hatefulness of vice; produced by the native qualities of each considered simply. From it is derived our perception of decency, fitness and congruity in the former; of incongruity, indecency, and unfitness in the latter; which arises from implicit comparison of them with the structure and constitution of the mind. By it we perceive that virtue is obligatory, right, and due; and that vice is undue, unlawful and wrong: the perception springs from the supremacy of our approving and disapproving faculty, as our internal governor prescribing a law of life.37

Ideas come later than mere sensation; they are formed by the imagination and clarified by reason and the moral faculty. “Thus in all the operations of taste, judgment is employed; not only in presenting the subjects on which the senses exercise themselves; but also in comparing and weighing the perceptions and decrees of the sense themselves, and thence passing ultimate sentence upon the whole.”38 Taste, when it is formed in that way, should be reliable. The analogy to external sense explains internal or reflex sense in a way that makes beauty and taste themselves perceptions of real qualities. Gerard recognizes that introducing judgment and making perception more than mere sense raises the question whether taste is a sense at all. In a long note, he explains the expansion of sense to include taste: The obvious phenomena of a sense are these. It is a power which supplies us with such simple perceptions, as cannot be conveyed by any other channel to those who are destitute of that sense. It is a power which receives its perception immediately, as soon as its object is exhibited, previous to any reasoning concerning the qualities of the object, or the causes of the perception. It is a power which exerts itself independent of volition; so that, while we remain in proper circumstances, we cannot, by any act of the will, prevent our receiving certain sensations, nor alter them at pleasure; nor can we, by any means, procure these sensations, as long as we are not in the proper situation for receiving them by their peculiar organ. These are the circumstances which characterize a sense. … The powers of taste are therefore to be reckoned senses.39

We note that perception is not the same as the sense that the perception is based on, but the perception is received immediately and independently of volition. This is a very un-Lockean use of sense. Such senses are not the same as perception, and it is perception, not simple ideas that informs taste. Therefore, treating a proto-aesthetic taste as a sense requires a special justification. The reason for continuing to hold that taste is a sense is because it is pleasant and a feeling or sentiment: “We conclude, that the pleasant sentiment of beauty is the result of those simple principles which dispose us to relish moderate facility, and moderate difficulty, and to approve intelligence and design; but the sentiment of beauty arises, without our reflecting on this mixture. This sentiment is compound in its principles, but perfectly simple in its feeling.”40 Its principles are “compound.” Gerard relies on principles rather than sense itself, and principles require more than mere sentiment. They come not just from judgment,

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which is a form of perception, but also from the ability to compare and compound perceptions. Complex or compound ideas would not correspond to the simplicity of feeling. Compound principles do. Again, perception is more than just a compounding of mere sense. It is the way that Gerard arrives at principles. Perception and imagination work together. Perception gives sense principles; imagination expands perception by association. “When a number of distinct ideas are firmly and intimately connected, it [imagination] even combines them into a whole, on account of the facility with which all the group is taken in, and considers them as all together composing only one perception. This is the origin of all our complex perceptions.”41 Pleasure is the effect. Pleasure is simple and a sentiment. Imagination is a power between mere sense and perception. In order to prevent imagination from being mere fancy, it must be subject to principled judgment. Taste can be saved from subjectivity in this way. One is led finally from the middle rank of taste to its moral and reasoned control. The pleasure which attends the perceptions of this faculty [taste], strongly prompts us to exert reason in philosophical inquiries, and, with unremitted assiduity, to explore the secrets of nature, that we may obtain that pleasure. By its approbation, it confirms the deductions of reason, and, by making us feel the beauty, heightens our conviction of the truth, of its conclusions.42

Gerard is not a rationalist. Reason is not independent of sentiment, and taste is a source of pleasure, not a rational judgment. But because taste belongs to perception and not mere sense, it is subject to principles and control. In this way, Gerard finally is able to unite morality and taste, but the relation is contingent. On the one hand, “though taste and the moral sense are distinct powers, yet many actions and affections are fit to gratify both. What is virtuous and obligatory is often also beautiful or sublime. What is vicious may be, at the same time, mean, deformed, or ridiculous.”43 On the other hand, Many different causes concur in forming the characters of men. Taste is but one these causes; and not one of the most powerful. … Other causes may counteract the influence of this principle, and render the turn of the passions, dissimilar to its structure. On this account, examples of a good taste joined with gross passions, or a vicious character, are far from being sufficient to prove that taste has no connexion with morals. This heterogeneous composition may be otherwise accounted for.44

Taste is only one of the influences of moral character. Gerard places it within the context of experience, but he subordinates it to morality and “general qualities of the human mind.” An implicit teleology is at work. God designed humans to take pleasure in what is beautiful, and taste is the power to do so. But it is a limited power. Conception, which provides a theory of taste, is even later in the epistemological process than taste itself. Like Reid, Gerard does not arrive at a conceptual theory or set of principles until after perception and judgment have done their work. This is the order: “By studying works of taste, we acquire clear and distinct conceptions of

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those qualities which render them beautiful or deformed: we take in at one glance all the essential properties; and thus establish in the mind a criterion, a touchstone of excellence and depravity.”45 Such a touchstone depends on judgment and perception, not mere sense. Gerard can assert that “The law of sensation which we have in view, is this: When an object is presented to any of our senses, the mind conforms itself to its nature and appearance, feels an emotion, and is put in a frame suitable and analogous; of which we have a perception by consciousness or reflection.”46 Taste is not really subjective if it is based on perception. When the mind feels an emotion, it might stop there. If it did, it would lack taste or, since it would undoubtedly form some judgment, it would be erratic and its taste bad. The analogy is to external sense that is uncertain and confused, as if in a mist. One just does not know what one sees or hears. But taste can perceive clearly and distinctly. When it does, it is reliably informed about its objects. One knows what one tastes. The same applies to the imagination and its associations. When one perceives the objects of the imagination, the work of art, or the object of one’s affections, one can exercise taste in a reliable manner. That is the object of a theory of taste. Gerard’s theory of taste becomes a theory of realist perception, therefore. It is based directly on experience, but Gerard has a complex theory of experience that allows him to avoid the subjectivity of the Lockean theory of ideas. Taste can form character and remain moral as it was for Shaftesbury, but Gerard’s replacement of ideas themselves as the mental limits of experience with a theory of perception separates him from Hume and allies him with Reid at key points.

III Henry Home, Lord Kames, follows Gerard up to a point when he takes up the nature of taste in the context of his extended treatment of rhetoric. He is not especially concerned to develop a theory of taste itself. His approach is causal and based on ideas provided by perception. Like Gerard, however, Kames’s understanding of ideas is much looser than the ideational atomism of Locke. Kames is firmly within the Lockean empiricist camp as opposed to classical and rational rules of rhetoric, but he is not a follower of the way of ideas in a specifically Lockean way. Instead, his use of ideas is as causes: As ideas are the chief materials employ’d in thinking, reasoning, and reflecting, it is of consequence that their nature and differences be understood. It appears, now, that ideas may be distinguished into three kinds; first, Ideas or secondary perceptions, properly termed ideas of memory; second, ideas communicated by language or other signs; and, third, ideas of imagination. These ideas differ from each other in many respects; but the chief foundation of the distinction is the difference of their causes. The first kind are derived from real existences that have been objects of our senses; language is the cause of the second, or any other sign that has the same power with language; and a man’s imagination is to himself the cause of the third.47

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Objects cause ideas that are stored by memory, language, or imagination. Ideas themselves are then the causes of one’s tastes. The role of ideas may seem to suggest that Kames is looking back to Locke, but in fact he is using ideas much more generally as the material of thinking. They are divided into kinds on the basis of their place in thought rather than being simple and complex depending on how they function. There is no implication that ideas are distinct units of thought. Instead, they are the effects of real causes—of real existent objects, of language, or of the mind itself. In the older Aristotelian scheme, they would be the efficient causes of one’s passions, and Kames retains a connection to Aristotle’s rhetoric. As a rhetorician, he wants to know what causes can be counted on to produce what effects. What ideas are in themselves is not of much concern if one understands the cause-and-effect relation so that one can supply the appropriate cause to produce the desired effect. Much of Kames’s actual epistemology has to be inferred from the definitions and distinctions that are affixed to the end of His Elements of Criticism. He begins with sense, but sense becomes perception directly: Perception and sensation are commonly reckoned synonymous terms, signifying the consciousness we have of objects; but, in accurate language, they are distinguished. The consciousness we have of external objects, is termed perception. … The consciousness we have of pleasure or pain arising from external objects, is termed sensation. … The consciousness we have of internal action, such as deliberation, resolution, choice; is never termed either a perception or a sensation.48

One’s senses provide perceptions that can then be the source of pleasure. So taste is a sensual response to some stimuli. Kames retains the basic empiricist thesis: “That we cannot perceive an external object till an impression be made upon our body, is probable from reason, and is ascertained by experience. But it is not necessary that we be made sensible of the impression.”49 But he believes that the causal relation is sufficient to provide knowledge without further knowledge of the inner workings of causality. Kames specifically rejects the contention that one might have impressions and ideas without being able to infer their cause. He cites Hume50 as holding that ignoring the fact that awareness of the cause of an impression is not necessary as implying that one does not know the cause: “Yet a singular opinion that impressions are the only objects of perception, has been espoused by some philosophers of no mean rank; not attending to the foregoing peculiarity in the senses.”51 The citation doesn’t seem to apply, however. Hume does not deny that impressions have objects and must precede ideas. He denies only that what one knows is the object itself. Kames assumes that the cause–effect relation must imply a real object that is known in the impression. Hume requires only that there be an impression. Kames is really objecting to the whole theory of ideas as the limiting condition of knowledge. This was a common misreading of Hume, but it is a little strange to find Kames accepting it uncritically in this context considering his friendship with Hume. Kames’s theory of taste is directly related to the sense-impression analogy to physical taste, therefore. This allows him to infer that just as one’s physical taste is normal when

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it corresponds to the general sense of human nature, so also is one’s critical taste. The subjectivity introduced by Hume is not refuted but considered irrelevant. Kames does not deny that there are erratic tastes. The tongue can be mistaken about the cause of its sensations as can the eye. But Kames ignores the difference; the tongue is not mistaken in the same way as the eye. It is true that one need not know what causes the salty taste on the tongue just as one need not know what causes the image on the retina. But Kames believes that as long as there is a way of correcting perception, there is no problem. Whether one likes salty food can be a matter of individual preference without implying that one’s taste is defective. Taste would be defective only if one could not detect the cause as in those cases of neuralgia where there is nothing to cause the perception.

IV A more particular problem for empiricist theories of taste arises from the nature of taste itself. Taste requires delicacy, but delicacy can be negative as well as positive. Gerard and Kames depend on delicacy to explain taste. Gerard holds that delicacy and sensibility are the prerequisites for good taste, but they are not sufficient in themselves either. “But refinement and elegance of taste is chiefly owing to the acquisition of knowledge, and the improvement of judgment.”52 Gerard seems to shift between a reliance on intuition and on knowledge at this point. Delicacy and sensibility are characteristics of sense itself, but elegance and refinement are products of culture and education. For Kames, delicacy is part of the causal scheme to produces taste. It is a problem only if it does not correspond to the natural cause-and-effect relation: The eye is more uncertain about the size of a large object, than of one that is small; and in different situations the same object appears of different sizes. Delicacy of feeling therefore with respect to proportion in quantities, would be an useless quality. It is much better ordered, that there should be such a latitude with a respect to agreeable proportions, as to correspond to the uncertainty of the eye with respect to quantity.53

If one did not respond normally, there would be no taste, but if one’s taste is too sensitive, it is a useless quality. It is a source of pain: “to make the eye as delicate with respect to proportion as the ear is with respect to concord, would not only be an useless quality, but be the source of continual pain and uneasiness.”54 So Kames depends on an analogy between acuteness of physical sense and acuteness of critical sense in taste, but he sees no need to probe further. Delicacy of taste is a good thing only if it is not too delicate; then it would interfere with the proper natural relation. Hume recognizes that the problem about delicacy is deeper if taste is really a sentiment. He introduces an important distinction in “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion.” Delicacy of passion is a sensibility of temperament. So also is delicacy of taste. Both enlarge “the sphere both of our happiness and misery.”55 But they are different

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temperaments. The former is undesirable; the latter is desirable. The difference is in one’s ability to exercise control, and it is the function of taste to exercise that control: “Nothing is so proper to cure us of this delicacy of passion, as the cultivation of that higher and more refined taste.”56 In itself, Hume’s argument is simply the conventional praise of refinement, but the distinction itself is revealing. If taste is a sentiment, it must be given a greater role in life than merely one’s grosser pleasures. Delicacy of taste provides “a certain elegance of sentiment to which the rest of mankind are strangers.”57 The distinction, therefore, is not just one of sentiments but an argument for how sentiment can and should be the master. Hume typically buries such arguments within a more conventional observation, here, that too much sensitivity can be painful. What all of the mid-century theories of taste have in common is that they are trying to come to terms with the subjectivity of taste in the context of more traditional reliance on the metaphor itself. Gerard begins with a sense of taste, but he appeals to imagination and association to expand it. In the process he shifts from sensation and ideas per se to a more elaborate theory of imagination and realist perception. Kames begins with ideas, but he treats them as causes in the rhetorical tradition that is primarily concerned with producing predictable effects rather than knowledge. Hume, in his Essays, retains his basic sentimentalism and seeks to mitigate its negative consequences. Proto-aesthetic theory is taking shape, but it must deal with traditional problems on a new basis.

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Problems of Taste: The Tragic Paradox and a Standard of Taste

Two problems are evident from the different theories of taste advanced by Gerard, Kames, and Hume. First of all, as a form of sentiment, experience incorporates both critical and moral judgment. Second, taste raises epistemological problems for the fine arts. Taking pleasure in what is otherwise painful may be both immoral and paradoxical. That is the problem of tragedy. And one’s taste may be open to challenge. For better or worse, a standard of taste is required if taste is not to descend into chaos.

I If taste is a sense or feeling, then the taste for tragedy is a peculiar feeling. Tragedy seems to require one to be attracted to what is sad, to take pleasure in what is painful, and to approve of what one would never approve of otherwise. The problem of tragedy became a widely discussed critical subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Addison noted, “Terror and commiseration leave a pleasing anguish on the mind, and fix the audience in such a serious composure of thought, as is much more lasting and delightful than any little transient starts of joy and satisfaction.”1 But he goes on to object to mixing the pleasure of tragedy with a more ordinary kind of pleasure: “The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thoughts. An author might as well think of weaving the adventures of Aeneas and Hudibras into one poem, as of writing such a motley piece of mirth and sorrow.”2 If taste is a feeling of pleasure or pain, then the two are incompatible, and tragedy presents a problem. Gerard notes the difficulty. Gerard explains the pleasure of tragedy by appealing to imitation. Suspense, anxiety, terror, when produced in tragedy, by imitation of their objects and causes, and infused by sympathy, afford not only a more serious, but a much intenser and nobler satisfaction, than all the laughter and joy which farce or comedy can inspire. When thus secondarily produced, they agitate and employ the mind, and rouse and give scope to its greatest activity; while, at the same time, our implicit knowledge that the occasion is remote or fictitious, enables

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Gerard’s reliance on imitation comes in a different context than Hutcheson’s or even David Hume’s when he deals with the “unaccountable pleasure” of tragedy, however. For Gerard, imitation is part of imagination. The imagination is a power or faculty that occupies the mind to assemble complex ideas. Its activity is pleasurable because the mind finds any activity pleasurable, even when its original sensations were painful. Thus the pleasure derived from events or objects unpleasant in themselves comes from the mind’s activity as long as the events are remote or fictitious. Gerard’s solution does not get to the heart of the problem for taste if one has a taste for tragedy, however. A problem remains about the nature of the sentimental pleasure itself when it is invoked by Hume as the basis of a sentiment of taste. Even if the mental activity referred to by Gerard is pleasurable, in tragedy what is painful in itself is experienced as pleasant, which is just a contradiction. Hume’s essay, “Of Tragedy,”4 has been dealt with extensively in the literature on Hume’s own work and the subsequent critical literature on tragedy. The problem of tragedy had become a staple of critical comment by the time Hume considers it. The pleasure derived from tragedy is “unaccountable,” as Hume describes it, because by definition sorrow, pity, and fear are not in themselves pleasant. On its face, Hume’s contribution to the critical debate seems slight, almost trivial, but it illuminates his theory of sentiments as the basis for criticism and taste. Hume notes two partial solutions, both of which he agrees with up to a point. The Abbé JeanBaptiste Du Bos anticipated Gerard when he argued that the mind so abhors a lack of stimulation that it finds pleasure even in what is unpleasant,5 and Bernard Fontenelle accounted for the pleasure by pointing out that pain and pleasure are closely related, so that the “softening” of pain by awareness of the unreality of dramatic events is sufficient to make them seem pleasant.6 Hume does not dispute that both factors can have an effect, though he points out that the distinction between real and dramatic events works against both Du Bos and Fontenelle. Du Bos cannot account for the fact that real events do not usually produce the tragic effect, and Fontenelle cannot account for the fact that nevertheless sometimes real painful events as well as fictional ones do give us pleasure when they are related by an orator. Hume proposes to supplement their accounts, therefore, by pointing out the effects that eloquence itself has in producing pleasure: “This extraordinary effect proceeds from that very eloquence, with which the melancholy scene is represented.”7 On its face, this addition seems rather lame. It merely shifts the focus from the tragic events themselves to the artistry of the poet or playwright, which is just a different object of attention and that hardly solves the problem. But eloquence is more than mere rhetoric. It is the ability of a speaker “to inflame the passions, or elevate the imagination of their audience.”8 Eloquence is central to understanding the nature of the passions themselves. Hume speaks of the conversion of one sentiment into another: “The whole impulse of those passions is converted into pleasure, and swells the delight which the eloquence raises in us.”9 So Hume holds what has come to be called a “conversion theory,” and it has been the subject of much of the commentary in the recent literature on Hume’s essay.

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Among the best recent treatments of this idea is that by Alex Neill, who makes several telling points.10 Neill grants that Hume does hold a conversion theory, but he distinguishes it from the “bad” theory that would say that sorrow is converted into pleasure. He rightly notes that that would contradict Hume’s basic theory of the passions as feelings or sentiments felt directly. So the conversion achieved by eloquence cannot produce pleasurable sorrow, which is just a contradiction in terms; rather, eloquence must produce its own pleasure, which is strengthened by sorrow in the appropriate fictional cases. That accounts for Hume’s examples of how pity for the death of a child and jealousy in love work to strengthen the sympathy that one feels for the sufferer. As far as that goes, it is certainly correct, and it is preferably to Robert Yanal’s account,11 which holds that sorrow within the work is supplanted by pleasure with the whole so that conversion applies only to the whole work. Neill correctly points out that Hume does hold some form of direct conversion theory explicitly. Neill’s solution does not help the shift to eloquence, however. He continues to regard eloquence as essentially rhetorical, and if that is the case, it is not really about the tragic events depicted or the sorrow that they produce. One just has two different objects of attention, and the problem of the unaccountable pleasure remains. Hume certainly seems to rely on eloquence and the tragic emotions and thus the need for the emotions to be “converted” in some sense. I think, however, that Hume’s introduction of eloquence as part of the solution might be regarded as a more positive and significant move than just an appeal to a rhetorical effect. Eloquence and its associated qualities are instances of beauty, which is a calm passion, while pity, fear, and sorrow are direct, strong passions. The significance of Hume’s appeal to eloquence is not as an appeal to rhetorical features, therefore, but as an appeal to a set of “calm” emotions—those of beauty exemplified in this case by eloquence—that conflict with the normally dominant emotions raised by tragic events. Hume’s problem is to show how these calm emotions can supplant the normally stronger tragic emotions as the dominant emotional causes. Hume’s solution is not to shift our attention from one set of emotions, the tragic ones, to another set, those of eloquence, but to show how calm emotions can interact with strong emotions. It would have been clearer if Hume had called this “interaction” rather than “conversion,” but in context, the choice of terminology is a minor consideration. Neill also points out another problem with Hume’s essay, one that he thinks leads to a clear mistake on Hume’s part. Neill comments, “The deep problem with the account of tragic experience that Hume offers in ‘Of Tragedy,’ in a nutshell, is that it is not grounded in any sustained thought about tragedy. In fact, and despite the essay’s title, Hume does not appear in it to have been particularly interested in tragedy at all.”12 I would agree that the “problem” of tragedy is complex; there are in fact several distinct problems that are frequently blurred in the literature on tragedy. There is a moral problem—Is it morally permissible to take pleasure in what is painful or wrong?—for example, to approve of the death of Hamlet or Lear just because they are essential to the drama. There is a coherence problem—if one knows that Lear’s death is not real, why does it affect us as it does? We do not believe in the events of a tragedy, but we feel the emotion anyway. There is a psychological problem—we do not act as if we experience the emotion. And there is the catharsis problem—what happens to the

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tragic emotions (pity and fear) when they are the subject of tragic presentation? All of these problems are distinct, I think, and Hume deals with none of them. It does not follow, however, that, properly understood, this is a problem for Hume’s essay because I do not think that the essay is really ever intended to be about tragic experience itself. Hume is primarily concerned with the inductive relation between passions and their affective qualities. What Hume shows in “Of Tragedy” is that the affective qualities of passions can be accounted for in the area of the arts independently of our usual nonartistic expectations. Thus the essay is an important step in acknowledging the special relation of the fine arts to human emotions at the time in the eighteenth century when the fine arts were coming in for distinctive treatment. Neill thinks that Hume’s mistake is to conflate all of the arts into a single emotional problem, whereas, on the contrary, each different genre of art expresses different emotions differently. In short, then, a wide variety of different sorts of artwork and other artifacts have as part of their function the arousal in their audience of a mixture of attraction and aversion, positive and negative emotional response. But, Neill holds, this is a more or less vacuous characterization of those works, one which marks at most a superficial similarity between them and between the kinds of experience that they offer. The sorts of experience offered by distressing music, for instance, differ hugely from those offered by tragedy, and understanding either sort of experience simply will not be possible unless we pay close attention to the workings of tragedy and music themselves. Here, as for that matter almost everywhere in the philosophy of art, philosophical progress depends on critical footwork.13 What Neill says of the differences in emotional response to different genres is certainly true; each presents different problems and requires different analysis, and Hume is not much of a critic in that respect. But, I maintain, that is not Hume’s problem. Hume’s problem is why we treat the passions that these works raise, however different the experiences, as generically ones of approbation or pleasure. And it is characteristic of all of the examples that Hume gives from the fine arts that we value them positively when, on his theory of the relation of normative judgments and the passions, we should not do so. So Hume is dealing with the problem of emotions in the fine arts but not the problem of the particular emotions appropriate to each art. His subject is really the fine arts themselves, though the occasion that he chooses to exploit in this popular essay is the more or less established problem of tragedy. Rhetorically, Hume uses a polite form on a polite topic to insinuate a subtext of real interest to him and to us, a strategy he employs in other essays, sometimes to conceal his real intention or protect himself from social dangers.14 I think that Hume’s concern with tragedy is only an occasion, not a real concern with tragedy itself, therefore. One needs to distinguish between two levels of response in Hume’s writings on the emotions. One is “pleasure,” which is Hume’s characterization of the affective tone of some passions. The other is “approbation” or attractiveness—the response that draws us to a work rather than repelling us from it. In our vocabulary, pleasure is the less general. One would not characterize one’s response to many works of art to which we are attracted as pleasant; but Hume uses ‘pleasure’ quite generally as the broader term. So, while it is less precise than one might like, we should, I think, grant Hume a certain latitude in moving from one response to the other. The problem

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he is addressing is not strictly the one of tragic pleasure, and it is not the specific experiences of particular genres; it is the problem central to the emergence of the fine arts: What is there about these works that sets them apart and attracts a person of taste? What is converted in tragedy, and in fact in the fine arts generally, is the effect of certain passions. Sorrow does not become pleasant, because then it would simply cease to be sorrow. Sadness does not become pleasant; it is just sad when it is an idea of a dying baby. But the complex relation between normally strong passions—sorrow, grief, pity, fear—and different calm passions—beauty, virtue—is reordered. Hume has a story about how this conversion takes place. An effect of sorrow, when it is suitably incorporated into a fictional setting that involves imitation, not direct experience, is actually to strengthen the normally calm passions. In real life, sorrow, grief, pity, and fear will so predominate that their normal affective mode—which Hume denotes as pain generically—will also predominate. In the fine arts (i.e., tragedy, but also other forms of poetry as well as painting, oratory, and by extension music), eloquence, a species of beauty appropriate to the fine arts generally, is converted by the mechanics of imitation and emotional reinforcement into a stronger form of a passion. It can then play a different role and “convert” the otherwise painful passion. This is perfectly consistent with how Hume describes the calm passions elsewhere. Emotion is the only effective form of motivation. Custom modifies emotions. Passions are agitated; opposition stimulates them. Contrary passions can make the dominant one stronger. A calm passion can become strong, which is consistent with what Hume says of the negative effects of a delicacy of passion in comparison to the positive effects of a delicacy of taste. The passions to which taste responds can tame the harmful passions so that they are felt differently. In other words, Hume’s conversion theory of tragedy is simply one more version of his inductive investigation of how the passions work. Individual passions themselves are extremely diverse; Hume’s varieties of passion, most prominently pride, anger, humility, and so on as they are analyzed in Book II of the Treatise, are never more than very general characterizations because Hume is concerned not with individual psychology as such but with the modes of operation of the emotions. Even pride and humility, which he discusses in such detail in the Treatise, are important primarily as instances of the way that human nature depends on the passions and not in and of themselves. There, too, the story is one of how a calm passion can operate through a double relation of object and subject, to actually produce an impression, pride, that is different than its causal sources would lead us to expect. Particular passions are based on impressions, and as such they are individual and atomistic, not instances of some universal generic passion. The muddle that too many discussions of what is going on in “Of Tragedy” fall into arises when one loses sight of Hume’s real project, which is the mechanics of passionate response. The version of the tragic paradox that interests Hume is the one that arises because our expectations about how certain strong passions work are not met. If Hume could simply say that sorrow sometimes produces pleasure and sometimes pain, there would be no paradox. But he cannot because apart from its hedonic accompaniment, sorrow loses all generic character. Pleasant sorrow just isn’t sorrow. But the only way that we identify sorrow as a generic passion at all is the same way that we know any

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causal relation. We depend on the formation of expectations by habit, contiguity, and association. Events of type A produce passions of a certain hedonic intensity and quality with certain intentional objects. That expectation is quite strong and reliable when it comes to sorrow, grief, pity, and fear. So if someone being blinded is a certain kind of event—the loss of a useful sense as well as metaphorically a loss of the ability to “see” what is happening—then we expect it to be a painful event that produces pity and sorrow. But in the case of tragedy, as in some representative forms of painting, and by an easy extension, though one that Hume does not avail himself of, some forms of musical composition, our expectations of the connection between events and emotional character are thwarted. The expected relation between event type and passion type does not occur. So one must either explain the anomaly or the expectation will evaporate and we will be confused about what ‘sorrow’ or ‘pity’ is. Hume chooses to explain the anomaly, though it would be open to him to follow some recent theorists and simply say that there are two classes of emotions at work—real emotions and make-believe emotions. (Elsewhere, Hume does at least approach the idea that fictions play a significant role in certain kinds of passionate classification, most prominently in the feeling of self-identity.)15 In “Of Tragedy” Hume takes advantage of the existing interest and literature on tragedy to expand the topic in his own direction. Whatever else is going on in “Of Tragedy,” Hume has his own interest, even if it is concealed within the conventional topic.

II The problem of a standard of taste was an even more widespread topic of interest than the problem of tragedy in the eighteenth century, and it is more central to the problems raised by a sentimental proto-aesthetic. Initially, a standard of taste was not the issue for theories of taste. There were many essays on taste, often in poetic form,16 but their focus was on the social implications of good or bad taste. The more subjective taste becomes, however, the more important it is to be able to defend one’s taste itself. Hume recognizes the importance of a standard of taste when he turns to the topic. There he employs the same strategy of advancing simultaneously both overt and indirect forms of argument that he uses in “Of Tragedy.” In that way, he is able to expand his own proto-aesthetic sentimental interests while seemingly engaging a common topic in eighteenth-century belles lettres literature. The tendency even by the most careful readers of “Of the Standard of Taste” (and there are important essays in the literature17) is to approach Hume’s essay as about a theory of taste itself. I have argued, however, that Hume’s position on taste is implicit in his whole theory of sentiment, and I want to maintain that it is very important to read “Of the Standard of Taste” as an essay on a standard of taste and to keep clearly in view the difference between establishing a standard and taste itself. The reading of Hume’s essay that I am offering preserves a consistency with Hume’s theory of sentiment as a directly evidential form of experience. The price for that consistency is to make Hume’s position on a standard of taste rather more limited in two respects, however. First, his argument for a standard of taste does not mitigate the

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relativism implicit in his psychology of taste and sentiment. Most calls for a standard of taste assume that there must be such a standard. Hume does not. Second, in order to attain a standard for the fine arts in the face of critical relativism, Hume is unable to get beyond a culturally founded hierarchy that is elitist and potentially coercive. A standard does not arise directly from human nature. Instead, the standard of taste has to be discovered in the practice of criticism. In order to be able to make choices, one must be willing to establish standards that, however justified they are by history and our culture, could be different. Those standards are natural only in so far as they are the product of our need to judge and avoid the chaos of taste. We must surrender part of our artistic independence in order to attain a standard of taste. The only mitigation here is that in matters of critical judgment, one risks very little.18 This separates the fine arts from morals where the risks are much greater, and only optimism about the relative uniformity of human nature gives morals a more universal, and thus a more uniform, foundation. If I have to concede that even though my taste runs to Stephen King, Milton gets the critical decision,19 I still don’t have to read Milton unless I am worried about the approval of a very small group of intellectuals. In morals, if my taste runs to the kind of acts depicted by Stephen King, I am likely to have to deal with a much more extensive and coercive group. My way of reading Hume is thus likely to provide little solace to those seeking authority in the arts. I doubt that Hume would have found that very disturbing, however. There are three steps in Hume’s argument for a standard of taste. The first reiterates the sentimental basis and the problem that that raises for a standard. “Beauty” is a class term for certain sentiments. Thus it is important to note that “sentiments … differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds.”20 Sentiment is both specific and variable from individual to individual. Hume acknowledges that “There is a species of philosophy, which cuts off all hopes of success in such an attempt [to establish a standard], and represents the impossibility of ever attaining any standard of taste.”21 In fact, that species of philosophy is his own. Nevertheless, Hume offers a way out of this impasse as long as one settles for a standard that does not require absolute agreement. This is one of the places where one must keep clear the difference between an examination of taste and an examination of a standard of taste. Hutcheson approached the problem of beauty by trying to identify a referential property—uniformity amidst variety. That locates beauty in the object, even though he admits that beauty really is found only in the mind. Then the standard of taste can be established by the object as perceived as long as one perceives it accurately; that is, the standard is in the object, though perception of the object may vary. But for Hume, taste does not work that way. There is nothing in Hume’s theory of taste to provide an objective standard. Everyone ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment. Differing perceptions of beauty and deformity do not form contradictories. It is important to keep this straight, however. If one person perceives beauty and another perceives deformity, there are not two different ideas upon which a sentiment of beauty rests except in the sense that there are two different minds. If there were, then the disagreement would be merely verbal. The problem would be merely that I do not see what you see. But the problem is deeper. I do see what you see, but my sentiment experiences it as deformity; yours, as beauty.

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Nevertheless, common sense may lead one of us to what would be “thought to defend … an extravagance,”22 that is, that nothing is at stake in the comparison of beauty or deformity. The problem for one’s commonsense position if one defends such an extravagance is how one would be viewed by one’s cultural peers. It would not be an absurdity to assert an equality of eloquence between Ogilby and Milton if Milton were not established culturally as the superior. The verdict of absurdity is directed toward the eccentricity of one’s taste and rests on the widespread agreement of the judges. In close cases, the extravagance evaporates. On neither side of the issue, then, is Hume concerned directly with finding a taste that has evidential power beyond itself. He requires only a standard and that standard is distinct from taste itself. We turn now to Hume’s strategy to deal with the need for a standard when his consistent theory of sentiments seems to make one impossible. In an important essay, Jeffery Wieand noted the ambiguity of the phrase “a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”23 Does the second clause refer to a rule by which a decision is afforded, or does it refer all the way back to the standard, in which case the alternatives are a rule, or a standard that will do the job of a rule at least to provide a decision but will not be a rule itself?24 I take it that both the position of the sentence and its rhetoric dictate that it should be the latter. A standard can be a rule, but Hume does not expect to be able to give such a rule, nor should we expect it from him if we have followed his explanation of the variability of taste. But we can hope for a standard in the sense of a decision confirming one sentiment and condemning another. The key is that confirming is parallel to condemning. Those are the roles assigned to a standard. So the role of a standard of taste is satisfied by a decision between confirming and condemning sentiments. Nothing here implies that sentiments will be corrected or changed. Presumably they will remain just what they were. But our claim to have attained a just sentiment will be affirmed (we hope) by such a procedure. The argument here is about the use of universal terms of approbation—just, virtuous, beautiful. That argument cannot be settled by appeal to the sentiments because the sentiments are just what is experienced. Fenelon is pleased by the honesty of Telemachus in his telling of the tale; Homer is pleased by the lying of Odysseus in his telling. I decide in favor of Fenelon (if I do), not because I share his taste (if I do) but because his taste is confirmed by the standard that at least affords a decision. It is logically possible that I share the taste of Homer (as I do) but conclude that the decision goes to Fenelon. Given the existence of diverse tastes and the basis for that diversity that Hume has demonstrated in the opening paragraphs of this essay, Hume recognizes both the need for and the possibility of sorting different tastes according to a standard. That standard must be external, and the question of what the standard of taste is cannot itself be a matter of taste. Nor should one expect a standard of taste to do more than provide a decision. It will not guide the formation of taste itself, though some of the same considerations that establish a standard also may contribute to the modification of one’s taste. This is a point at which Peter Kivy is most helpful when he notes the tendency to a regress in Hume’s argument—in order to have a standard, one must know that something is excellent of its kind (the wine tasted by Sancho’s kinsmen) in the first

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place, but only by first knowing the standard can one identify what is excellent.25 Hume always hovers on the edge of such a regress. Kivy believes that Hume breaks the circle by pointing to the independent, empirically examinable qualities of those whose judgment is appealed to. If one starts with the critics, not the experience itself, there is no circle. On the one hand, the substance of his claim is only to provide a standard. It does not appeal directly to the qualities in dispute. A standard does not place the experience itself beyond all dispute. On the other hand, some degree of cultural and biological bias seems inescapable in that case. Hume specifically brings this up at the end of the essay when he refers to the variability of taste that depends on nationality, age, and temperament. It does not follow from those variables that one cannot apply a standard, however; it just limits that standard. In other words, a degree of regress is acceptable in a standard of taste, just as a degree of circularity need not be vicious in definitions. A standard of taste may well need a justification that it cannot attain if it is universalized, but our experience is not universal but individual, and we can push the standard far enough back so that it will work for virtually all of our experience. One cannot attain a standard of taste for all cultures and possible beings for all times. But one can arrive at decisions in a very large cultural context. Hume believed that that context could be extended to be virtually coextensive with human nature as an educated eighteenth-century elite understood it. But if it is somewhat narrower, it would still provide a standard. Hume’s problem, therefore, is to find a way to extend and generalize the experience of taste to a critical circle. It is clear enough what the standard is once it emerges. Milton is preferred to Ogilby by all of the best critics, and a taste that concurs in that decision is confirmed. But a standard must be projective in some way. Even if one cannot predict one’s taste response prior to experience, one must be able to formulate the standard in such a way that it will account for future regularities. Hume’s strategy is to examine the characteristics that will convince someone to accept the verdict of a critic, even if that verdict contradicts one’s own immediate taste, and extend those characteristics to future critics. Hume begins with delicacy. Hume gives priority to delicacy because everyone “would reduce every kind of taste or sentiment to its standard.”26 Thus delicacy can serve as a standard because “everyone” will acknowledge its relevance. The intention of the essay is “to mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment.”27 Presumably this means finding some way for reason to operate on feelings or sentiments that do not refer beyond themselves. Delicacy thus becomes the central capacity that will link taste and a standard of taste if delicacy can be given “a more accurate definition.”28 I think delicacy is supposed to perform the function for impressions of the imagination that examination of the organs has in primary impressions. One defers to another’s visual perception, for example, if it can be shown that the other person’s eyes are more acute. Similarly, Hume claims, one defers (naturally) to another’s taste if it can be shown to be more delicate. Yet delicacy is not an organ. Delicacy depends on rules in the way that external senses depend on organs, therefore. Delicacy itself is a function of internal sense (though Hume is not a “sense theorist” in the way that Hutcheson is), but its “organ” is the perception of regularities in the form of rules—at least those rules allow one to examine delicacy. Hume needs a way to make delicacy

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evident if it is to serve as a way to identify the best critics. How this can be done is the crucial question. Hume tries to unravel this question with the anecdote of Sancho’s kinsmen (in the process changing the story from the way Cervantes tells it).29 Hume presents it as a way of giving a more accurate definition of delicacy. The initial conditions of the story are important. Sancho’s claim is that his judgment is a hereditary quality. It is not acquired, so it cannot be verified by examining how it was acquired. In that respect, it is like sentiment; it just is the experience itself. The wine to be examined is already supposed to be excellent on the grounds of its age and vintage, so the judgment is not directly about the quality of the wine. And the teller of the story is Sancho—whose reputation is that of a buffoon. The gist of the story is that Sancho’s kinsmen are ridiculed for their judgment, but they have the last laugh when the key with the leather thong is found at the bottom of the wine barrel. Hume’s application of the story emphasizes both the similarity and difference between mental and bodily taste. There is something that is tasted: leather and iron; mental taste would produce correspondingly specific qualities, for example, the eloquence of a tragedy. The discovery of the key only confirms the presence of leather and iron in the wine. It does not confirm the taste of Sancho’s kinsmen directly. That is, one still does not have access to the taste itself independently of one’s own experience; one only has access to the purported cause of the taste. Those who laughed are refuted not by coming to taste the leather and iron but by the discovery of the key. Their taste, not that of Sancho’s kinsmen, is the duller. They are wrong to laugh not because their taste is wrong but because it is less delicate. This gives Hume his definition: “Where the organs are so fine, as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: This we call delicacy of taste.”30 Two things are of note: First, this is not a definition in the traditional sense. It remains analogical. There is no organ identified for internal taste, and the ingredients of taste are not specified. Literally, Sancho’s kinsmen taste leather and iron; the metaphorical taste is presumably for things like elegance. But elegance does not have a chemical composition or a natural source. Elegance is a predicate assigned to sentiments, and unlike Hutcheson, Hume denies that sentiments can always be linked to some external cause such as uniformity amidst variety. One can measure the acidity of the wine but not its elegance. So the appeal to delicacy remains somewhat mysterious. Second, they are Sancho’s kinsmen. One presumes that Hume intends that part of the laughter at them arises not just from the pretensions of their taste but from its source. These are not connoisseurs.31 Literal delicacy is established by what is at the bottom of the barrel. How is metaphorical delicacy to be established? Hume immediately answers this question, and in answering it confirms what I said above about the role of delicacy: Here then the general rules of beauty are of use; being drawn from established models, and from the observation of what pleases or displeases, when presented singly and in a high degree: and if the same qualities, in a continued composition and in a smaller degree, affect not the organs with a sensible delight or uneasiness, we exclude the person from all pretensions to this delicacy.32

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The rules, formed retrospectively, identify the qualities in question, but only by reference to the person. If I want to know what elegance is, I do not ask for its composition or source but for its models. Then delicacy is judged by the ability to find examples that conform to the models. The rules also play the role of the key: “To produce these general rules or avowed patterns of composition is like finding the key with the leathern thong.”33 “Produce” in this context does not mean formulating the rules a priori. That would make delicacy circular. It means something like being able to cite or demonstrate the application. If I claim that a particular poem is eloquent, I confirm my claim by producing—pointing out—the rule that identifies the particular eloquence. There is still a problem in Hume’s analogy, however. The laughter was not about whether the wine tasted of iron and leather, but whether it could be detected in this wine by these buffoons. Hume forms the analogy by appealing to rules as a “key” to silence the bad critic. Taste is and remains the same regardless of whether it is confirmed or not—whether by rules or discovery of the causal source. Sancho’s kinsmen would still taste iron and leather even if no key were found, and their critics do not taste either even after it is found. But Hume asks the analogy to do double duty both as definition and as confirmation. The bridge that makes this plausible is that rules can be used in the same way that discovering the key was used—it convinces bad critics that the fault lies in themselves rather than in the others. So we can see what will eventuate in a standard of taste. For a standard to operate in the absence of direct confirmation that is unavailable, a way must be found to convince someone that the fault is on one side rather than the other. Delicacy can play that role, even if it is not precisely defined. But it can do so only if independent ways of establishing who has delicate taste are found. The circularity often charged to Hume’s argument is not really present because delicacy is never appealed to directly. Sancho’s kinsmen do have delicate taste, and it is their capability that allows them to triumph. But the confirmation does not exhibit their delicacy but the key itself. In mental taste, it is a delicacy that allows one to triumph as well. But rules and the ability to exhibit precise applications of them serve as the confirmation, the “key.” Escaping a circle that would arise if delicacy were both the standard and the means of verification has been the issue all along. Thus far, Hume has been concerned to show us that delicacy can play the required role in a standard. Now he must go on to try to give us a way to tell who has delicate taste. That is the role of the criteria for a good critic: practice, freedom from prejudice, comparison, and good sense. Practice remains secondary to delicacy; its function is to improve delicacy of taste. With practice comes judgment, the fixing of “the epithets of praise and blame.”34 Hume has shifted gears at this point without quite noticing the shift. The kind of judgment he describes is based on sentiment, but since it is comparative, it is also a function of reason. Comparison even extends to making coarse beauties deformities: “a great inferiority of beauty gives pain to a person conversant in the highest excellence of the kind, and is for that reason pronounced a deformity.”35 However, at most, comparison provides a kind of negative evidence: one who does not make comparisons is, prima facie, lacking in the experience that leads to comparisons. The peasant or Indian who is pleased with everything36 is disqualified not because of

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his sentiment but because of his inability to judge. The accuracy of judgments is not at issue; what one requires in a critic is “one accustomed to see, and examine, and weigh the several performances.”37 People who do not do that can be presumed to lack the requisite delicacy because if they did have it, they would naturally make such comparisons and exhibit the judgments that follow from them. The final two criteria operate somewhat differently. Freedom from prejudice is a matter of the situation of the observer. “A critic of a different age or nation … must place himself in the same situation as the audience, in order to form a true judgment of the oration.”38 What is peculiar here is the goal—a true judgment. On its face, this is puzzling since sentimental judgments are not true or false in themselves. True judgment, therefore, can only relate to comparison. If one does not take account of the situation of the intended audience, one will form comparisons that lead to judgments based only on one’s own situation. In itself, there would seem to be nothing wrong with this on Hume’s principles. But Hume finds something wrong that leads back to the foundation in sentiment. By this means, his sentiments are perverted; nor have the same beauties and blemishes the same influence upon him as if he had imposed a proper violence on his imagination, and had forgotten himself for a moment. So far his taste evidently departs from the true standard; and of consequence loses all credit and authority.39

A perverted sentiment here can only mean one that departs from the models produced by a delicacy of taste. By operating from a self-centered position, an observer is unable to perceive the beauties that produce the models and rules over time. The consequence is not for the observer’s taste itself but that it loses all credit and authority. The true standard is not the rules but the critics who give rise to the rules. Finally, good sense allows reason to play a role in identifying the reliable critic. Reason is not, Hume grants, an essential part of taste, but it is “at least requisite to the operations of this latter faculty.”40 Hume does not argue—and elsewhere specifically rejects—that one can reason oneself into a particular sentiment. If I do not like the taste of carrots, no reasoning will make them taste better, and if I do not get pleasure from eloquence, reason will not aid me there either. Instead, reason operates on prejudice, which may block the way to taste.41 In effect, I can apply my reason to my prejudices and reason myself out of them. Then, freed from prejudice, taste may operate differently and correspond more closely to the way it operates in other humans. Thus taste approaches the norm established by human nature as a result of reason. That is what good sense amounts to. “It belongs to good sense to check its [prejudice’s] influence.”42 Good sense works in another way as well. Works of art are extensive; “there is a mutual relation and correspondence of parts.”43 Reason cannot produce the sentiment, but there is a possible prior function for reason in putting the parts together and thus producing the complex ideas of the imagination to which taste responds. If all taste were for simple qualities and from simple impressions, there would be no need for good sense. Reason finds a pattern by matching means and end. The end of poetry, for example, is “to please by means of the passions and the imagination.”44 The function of

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reason is to recognize the internal relation between means and end. Once the means– end relation is recognized, taste can take over. All of this is premised on a degree of uniformity in human nature. Given that uniformity, one can see why “it seldom, or never happens, that a man of sense, who has experience in any art, cannot judge of its beauty; and it is no less rare to meet with a man who has a just taste without a sound understanding.”45 Again and again, Hume’s language is quite precise. Only a few men have an undistorted delicacy so that their sentiment becomes a standard of beauty. Others “labour under some defect, or are vitiated by some disorder; and by that means, excite a sentiment, which may be pronounced erroneous.”46 Hume does not say simply that the sentiment is erroneous. That would make no sense in his epistemological scheme. A sentiment just is; it cannot be erroneous or true. But given a sentiment, it can be pronounced erroneous. It is not necessarily the majority that rules since mass prejudice and ignorance can intervene to distort the result. Even if everyone were a Nazi and found lamp-shades made of human skin beautiful, they would not be because it is not human nature but a distorted cultural filter that promotes their taste to the majority position and seems to give it the rule. But such an eccentric taste for what otherwise would be horrible is not impossible, and only good sense can correct it. Thus Hume arrives at the famous fivefold characterization of the true judge and concludes that “the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.”47 Even though this is as frequently quoted a passage as there is in the literature of philosophical aesthetics, it is still important to observe that it is the joint verdict of the true judges that is the standard. It is not the taste of the judges, per se, no matter how delicate, that can provide a standard, because their tastes are still only their tastes.48 It is a joint verdict that arises from that taste. And there is no guarantee that such verdicts are available; only where they are is there a standard. I take this to mean that new forms, such as the novel in the eighteenth century, lack standards at first. They must await the formation of a joint verdict, and even that is subject to change. The final step in Hume’s argument adds a new dimension and completes the argument for a standard. Because a standard of taste works as it does, Hume turns at last to a moral standard to correct and limit a standard of taste. “Where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard, by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever.”49 One must not allow Hume’s obvious satisfaction in being a civilized European to obscure the limits he places on a standard of taste nor let it mislead us about the appeal to moral sentiment. Speculative systems, which for Hume include all theology and positive religion, are perversions. The lack of uniformity in such systems must fall to the strictures on prejudice. But moral sentiment must take precedence over sentiments of taste because moral sentiment issues in action and sentiments of taste do not, at least not directly.50 Hume does not argue for a disinterested sentiment. Lack of prejudice is not disinterestedness. In Hume’s thought, sentiments are innocent rather than disinterested. Within their own sphere, they are a form of private interest; in the public sphere, they are subject to moral disinterestedness. It is wrong to read a Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness back onto Hume, therefore. But Hume moves

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in the direction of disinterestedness by subordinating a standard of taste to moral sentiment just as Shaftesbury does. The taste for beauty has a utilitarian side, and it has consequences—it is productive of the very civilization that judges it, and it is beneficial to the human organism by providing innocent pleasure. But it cannot be detached from moral judgment, and it must be subordinate to that sentiment. Critics who support moral censure will find no comfort from Hume, however. Their moral judgments, like the judgment of beauty, are traceable to a taste and sentiment. Moral law will have to be freed of the same hindrances that interfere with the taste for beauty. A delicacy of taste for beauty will be paralleled by a strong moral sense, and both are subject to the dictates of good sense for a clarification of the impressions that provoke them. Bigotry, superstition, and enthusiasm are Hume’s moral enemies.51 “Of the Standard of Taste” never deviates from its adherence to sentiment as the sole origin of taste. It never pretends that that sentiment can be other than subjective and self-justifying. To look for objective qualities or rules of taste in Hume’s essay is to misread him badly in one direction. But the essay attempts to show that nevertheless a standard is possible. A standard of taste is not itself a judgment of taste, nor is it a guide to achieving good taste. This is Hume’s major advance beyond Shaftesbury who is his model even more than Hutcheson. Shaftesbury held to sentiment, but he sought to correct taste by selecting those models that would have a positive moral influence. Hume has no such illusions about the force of rules and reason. So Hume’s standard is external to taste itself. It rests on delicacy and the acknowledgment that if taste is a good thing, delicacy must be a good thing as well. But delicacy can be improved and influenced first by practice, comparison, and freedom from prejudice, which shape it, and then by good sense, which regulates it and provides it with an improved set of impressions upon which to work. So rules, models, and the true judges who provide them function as a standard of taste within the limits of age and culture, but their only function is to condemn or confirm. They are never constitutive or productive as Shaftesbury hoped that they would be when he provided instruction for a painting of Hercules. Hume shares with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson a moral limit, however. Sentiment is more basic than reason, and the pure sentiment of a proto-aesthetic is more basic than the complex sentiments of morality. But, of the two classes of sentiment produced by internal sense, moral sentiments must take precedence when it comes to judgments. Sentiments of taste, by themselves, are innocent; moral sentiments define a good nature and character. Innocent enjoyment must give way to moral duty, and if enjoyment loses its innocence (as it does, Hume believes, when it indulges in religious superstition), it must give way.

III After Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” appeared in 1757, Edmund Burke was confronted directly with the problem of the subjectivity of taste that his approach to the sublime and beautiful had avoided. Burke responded by adding an introduction on taste to his Enquiry. Burke’s approach to the problem of the subjectivity of taste begins with a definition, though he denies that that will be much help: “I mean by the

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word Taste no more than that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts.”52 He will finally conclude, however, that taste is not a distinct faculty at all.53 Instead, natural tastes are all based on the same senses and the imagination follows from sense. “It must necessarily be allowed, that the pleasures and the pains which every object excites in one man, it must raise in all mankind, whilst it operates naturally, simply, and by its proper powers only.”54 Variations are real, but they are natural facts that can be accounted for by custom and differences in knowledge or sensibility: “customs, and other causes, have made many deviations from the natural pleasures or pains which belong to the several Tastes,”55 but the natural tastes are still agreed and the metaphorical tastes that apply to works of imagination are equally agreeable. Burke’s supposition of a common natural taste that applies to both its literal application and its metaphorical application is really a priori. It ignores the difficulty that pleasures and pains themselves do not have the same basis as natural tastes. Imaginative pleasures and pains are subjective in one way; if I find something pleasant, it is pleasant to me. Natural tastes are subjective in a different way; sweet or bitter is causally associated with an object in an empirically justified way. Burke needs them to be the same if they are principles of taste that support “a judgment of the works of the imagination and the elegant arts.” So, Burke basically denies the maxim that there is no disputing about tastes on the grounds that as long as tastes are natural and not deformed: “We may dispute, and with sufficient clearness too, concerning the things which are naturally pleasing or disagreeable to the sense.”56 Everything else will depend on “habit, prejudice, and distempers.” The problematic nature of Burke’s identification of natural senses and metaphorical senses appears as soon as he begins citing examples. He takes light to be universally pleasing in relation to darkness, for example, and spring to winter,57 but it is easy to imagine the response otherwise without finding a person abnormal. Light might be painful and winter pleasing without contradiction, and even an empirical generalization about people with normal vision and temperaments would not extend to individuals as a judgment of taste. It would only be a generalization about what is natural to most humans, and even then, it would be subject to dispute when it came to the kind of taste at issue. I like cloudy days rather than bright sunny days; that is just me. The problem, of course, is that Burke shifts the kind of judgment from whether it is natural in the sense of being common to many people to natural in the sense of being causally common or general. The reason that there is no disputing about taste then is not that one cannot determine whether many people would agree (take a vote, look at the responses or the “test of time”) or whether there is a cause (check what the person is responding to; does s/he have all of the relevant information) but whether I individually find something pleasing. My pleasure is not “wrong” in those ways if it does not conform to the expectations either of an assumed human standard or an empirical standard of attention that can be determined. Of course, that is the real issue and has been ever since Locke shifted the grounds for judgment from “sufficient reason” to observation. One can observe some things and not others, and in the case of the pleasures that lead to a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts, some are not

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observable except by report or direct experience. Burke accepts Locke’s premises about what is determined by sense, but he does not draw the conclusion that Hume draws about the “impressions” themselves. Instead, Burke thinks that the senses and the imagination, which are the province of metaphorical taste, are equally common to all persons. The imagination follows from sense. It cannot produce anything on its own. “This power of the imagination is incapable of producing anything new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has received from the senses.”58 Further, “For since the imagination is only the representative of the senses, it can only be pleased or displeased with the images from the same principle on which the sense is pleased or displeased with the realities; and consequently there must be just as close an agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of men.”59 Burke cites Locke on wit as evidence that both the senses and the imagination based on them operate by comparison, which supplies judgment to the imagination. This sounds like Locke, but for Burke the subjectivity of the imagination is illusory. “So far as Taste is natural, it is nearly common to all.”60 So as long as the senses operate normally, a separate standard of taste is not needed. For Burke, then, a standard of taste is simply an empirical matter: “The critical Taste does not depend upon a superior principle in men, but upon a superior knowledge.”61 That, with differences in sensibility because of different organic abilities, is sufficient to account for differences in taste. Burke concludes, therefore, that taste is not a distinct faculty at all but the normal exercise of judgment, corrected by experience and developed over time. While Burke rests judgment on sense and experience in contradistinction to rules and rational arguments, he does not distinguish judgments of taste from other forms of judgment. The sublime and the beautiful are sentiments only because they are distinct pleasures with distinct causes. Their subjectivity is not a problem because disputes about them can be settled naturally.

IV Like Burke, Henry Home, Lord Kames, is able to escape the problem of a standard of taste when he takes it up at the end of his Elements of Criticism. He does take the problem more seriously than Burke, however. He writes, If the proverb [that there is no disputing about taste] hold true with respect to any one external sense, it must hold true with respect to all. If the pleasures of the palate disdain a comparative trial and reject all criticism, the pleasures of touch, of smell, of sound, and even of sight, must be equally privileged. At this rate, a man is not within the reach of censure, even where, insensible to beauty, grandeur, or elegance, he prefers the Saracen’s head upon a signpost before the best tablature of Raphael, or a rude Gothic tower before the finest Grecian building.62

Taste in either its gustatory sense or for the fine arts is no different from the other senses for Kames. It has a standard just because whatever causes it, even if its cause is unknown, implies a standard. Kames takes it as obvious that there are genuine

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differences in taste that deserve censure. If someone prefers Blackmore to Homer, “A man of taste must necessarily feel the reasoning to be false, however unqualified to detect the fallacy.”63 Kames must shift the ground to get around the problem, however. He makes the issue whether the taste is true or false and whether the result is the product of reasoning. Kames takes it for granted that everyone makes judgment of taste and that those judgments, even if disputed, must have some basis, therefore. The reasoning goes this way: everyone makes distinctions in matters of taste. That is universal, even if there are disagreements. So, it is natural to make taste distinctions. It follows that “what is universal must have a foundation in nature. If we can reach this foundation, the standard of taste will no longer be a secret.”64 From there, Kames moves to the observation that “This conviction of a common nature or standard, and of its perfection, is the foundation of morality; and accounts clearly for that remarkable conception we have, of a right and a wrong taste in morals. It accounts not less clearly for the conception we have of a right and a wrong taste in the fine arts.”65 So the problem has become a practical one. Find the common nature and that will be the standard. Whatever deviates from that common nature can be presumed to be a failure of taste in the fine arts just as whatever deviated from the common nature of the physical sense of taste would be unnatural. The subjective or sentimental nature of taste as an idea or impression or object of sense has disappeared and been replaced by a reliance on what is natural. It follows that the fine arts are part of nature: “Nature is in every particular consistent with herself. We are formed by nature to have a high relish for the fine arts, which are a great source of happiness, and extremely friendly to virtue. We are, at the same time, formed with an uniformity of taste, to furnish proper objects for this high relish.”66 From being formed by nature to a common standard, one can infer that there is a common sense: “Thus, upon a sense common to the species, is erected a standard of taste, which without hesitation is apply’d to the taste of every individual.”67 Common sense, here, is not Reid’s common sense that is the necessary condition for perception, however. It is only common in the more general way that everyone depends on it. So there is no contradiction if a common sense turns out to be only common to some: “In neither [morals nor taste] can we safely rely on a local or transitory taste; but on what is the most universal and the most lasting among polite nations.”68 The commonness is qualified by both a limitation to what is “most universal” and the “politeness” of where it is found. These qualifications effectively limit the generality of the appeal. One must already know whose taste one is appealing to. What one is left with is a pragmatic standard. It only applies in those cases where one knows the quality of the persons whose taste reflects the standard. In practice, there is less disagreement than it might seem. One begins with a general agreement and can rely on its basis to clarify seeming disagreements on taste. However languid and cloudy the common sense of mankind may be with respect to the fine arts, it is yet the only standard in these as well as in morals. And when the matter is attentively considered, this standard will be found less imperfect than it appears to be at first sight. In gathering the common sense of mankind upon morals, we may safely consult every individual. But with respect to the fine

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Only some are to be consulted about the common sense of mankind in the fine arts, and Kames’s description of who should be consulted is based as much on class as on qualifications. In some ways, this sounds like Hume’s reliance on the qualities of a critic, but Kames bases the qualities of the critic whose vote counts on more pragmatic considerations. We should trust those who belong to the more refined parts of society. The mixture of prudential and epistemological considerations is not really noted; Kames just looks for testimony that will guide one’s critical decisions on art so that they fit into established expectations. “Differences about objects of taste, it is true, are endless: but they generally concern trifles, or possibly matters of equal rank where the preference may be given either way with impunity.”70 The issue is simply whether one’s preferences will get one into trouble. As long as one does not stray too far from the mainstream, one’s taste will be validated. Kames concludes with an appeal to principles rather than particulars even though his rhetorical practice is to amass as many examples as possible in order to establish the best practice empirically. If, after all that is said, the standard of taste be thought not yet sufficiently ascertained, there is still one resource in which I put great confidence. What I have in view, are the principles that constitute the sensitive part of our nature. By means of these principles, common to all men, a wonderful uniformity is preserved among the emotions and feelings of different individuals; the same object making upon every person the same impression; the same in kind, at least, if not in degree. There have been aberrations, as above observed, from these principles; but soon or late they always prevail, by restoring the wanderers to the right track. The uniformity of taste here accounted for, is the very thing that in other words is termed the common sense of mankind. And this discovery leads us to means for ascertaining the common sense of mankind or the standard of taste, more unerringly than the selection above insisted on. Every doubt with relation to this standard, occasioned by the practice of different nations and different times, may be cleared by applying to the principles that ought to govern the taste of every individual. In a word, a thorough acquaintance with these principles will enable us to form the standard of taste; and to lay a foundation for this valuable branch of knowledge, is the declared purpose of the present undertaking.71

The uniformity of “the sensitive part of our nature” guarantees sufficient commonality of judgment so that one can infer principles that act as a standard. On the one hand, Kames does not claim that such a standard is anything more than an empirical fact. We are just formed so that our tastes are not too far removed from a norm. On the other hand, Kames can appeal to principles, so that mere sentiment or individual facts are no longer a threat to one’s judgment.

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The question then becomes what Kames means by principles and general principles. In the background are the neoclassical rules of art. But Kames does not try to state such rules. Nor does he offer deductions from general principles to particular tastes. His principles are empirical observations like the principle that proportion is agreeable: That we are framed by nature to relish proportion as well as regularity, is indisputable: but that agreeable proportion, like concord in sounds, is confined to certain precise measures, is not warranted by experience; on the contrary, we learn from experience, that various proportions are equally agreeable, that proportion is never tied down to precise measures but admits more and less, and that we are not sensible of disproportion ’till the difference betwixt the quantities compared become the most striking circumstance or we wish to find ourselves in agreement with others.72

Kames comes back around to Hutcheson’s qualities of beauty—uniformity, variety, proportions, and so on, but now they are principles rather than observations based on sense. So principles only provide a standard of taste when they are acknowledged and can be recognized in practice. “In a word, to this sense of a common standard must be wholly attributed the pleasure we take in those who espouse the same principles and opinions with ourselves, as well as the aversion we have at those who differ from us. In matters left indifferent by the standard, we find nothing of the same pleasure or pain.”73 A circularity creeps in. A common standard is determined by the general principle of what produces pleasure, and the pleasure arises from the existence of a common standard. We are left with the original appeal to a common nature: “A principle makes part of the common nature of man.”74 That is as far as Kames’s standard can get one. He is confident that standards exist because if they did not, one would be left in confusion. That is a purely pragmatic problem, not the problem of taste that arises from Hutcheson’s dependence on sense and Hume’s reduction of taste to sentiment.

V Gerard took up the problem of a standard of taste by adding a fourth part to the 1780 third edition of his Essay on Taste after the question of whether such a standard was possible in light of taste’s sentimental origins had been brought to prominence by Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” in 1757, by Burke’s addition of an introductory essay on a standard of taste to the 1759 edition of his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and by Kames’s concluding essay to volume Three of his Elements of Criticism in 1762. Gerard references all three when he considers whether a standard of taste is possible. He continues to treat taste as a sentiment and acknowledges its apparent subjectivity, but his allegiance to Thomas Reid’s commonsense form of realism has become clearer than it was in the first three parts of the earlier editions of his Essay on Taste. Following Reid, Gerard holds that

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since taste is a response to real qualities in works of art, there must be a distinction between correct and incorrect taste. It [Taste] may be considered either a species of sensation, or as a species of discernment. … Taste considered in the former of these lights, in respect of what we may call its direct exercise, cannot properly admit any standard. … But not withstanding this, there may be a standard of taste in respect of its reflex acts: and it is only in respect of these, that a standard should be sought for.75

The direct exercise of taste is just one’s sensitivity to physical tastes. Instead of a standard of taste there, one can rely on one’s direct perception. The problem is to find standards or criteria for correctness or truth in a form of perception that is based on sentiment because sentiment is “in the mind.” Gerard begins by acknowledging that there is a problem, but he locates it in such a way that, like Kames’s treatment, it is essentially a practical problem. Gerard’s understanding of taste itself means that it presents a deeper epistemological problem than it did for Kames, however. Taste is a sensibility, and its experience is a sentiment. It depends on delicacy, and since each individual will have different levels of delicacy, tastes must vary. “It will likewise be acknowledged without hesitation, that the perfection of taste consists in delicacy and justness, or more particularly, in sensibilities, refinements, correctness, and the due proportion of its several principles.”76 Taste in this sense differs from the external senses where human nature is more nearly uniform. When taste depends on internal or reflex senses, no such uniformity is observed. On every subject, in every point of view, the taste of one man obviously differs from that of another. … The constitution of human nature renders this variety of tastes inevitable. It must be produced both by an original inequality and dissimilitude in the powers whose combination forms taste, and by the different degrees and modes of culture which have been bestowed upon these powers.77

The problem, then, is just that people are different at the level of their tastes, so there is not sufficient uniformity to avoid disagreements. Association is basic to Gerard’s theory of taste, so in addition to the variability of internal sense itself, differences of association make each person’s taste different. All the sentiments of taste have a great dependence on association; and must derive immense variety from the endless diversity which takes place, in the strength of the associating principles, in their particular modifications and combinations, in the tracks to which they have been most accustomed, in the nature and the number of accessory ideas which they connect with the objects of taste.78

So Gerard accepts that there is a great variability in taste, and there is no obvious way of reconciling the differences. “Hence different men will excel in different sorts of taste, and be chiefly attached each to a peculiar set of subjects and qualities. This must introduce variety and dissonance into their decisions.”79 So many factors enter into

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forming taste, therefore, that it must vary and no standard can be inferred directly from internal sense. Once one moves from the regularity of external sense to the great variability of internal sense and the cultural variations produced by association, a standard of taste seems impossible. Gerard’s apparent acceptance of this conclusion is immediately qualified, however. Internal sense itself is not a simple sense, and it is not sense that provides a standard. It has principles according to which it operates, and those principles make standards possible. Gerard means by principles, here, the pragmatic considerations such as common sense as Reid understood it. Even though different persons are more or less capable in their ability to perceive accurately, one is prepared to offer arguments in the case of disagreement, and one can evaluate their ability; that provides the possibility of a standard. Once those standards are considered, they provide a way to a standard of taste even though taste itself varies. This seems to place Gerard in Hume’s camp. Tastes vary, so the way to a standard is to look at the ability of the person rather than the taste itself. Gerard cannot accept Hume’s strategy, however. Hume’s standard is a critical standard. It allows a taste to be approved or disapproved without relying on the truth of the judgment itself. Gerard, instead, requires that the judgment be acknowledged as true or false. Only true judgments can provide a standard. The difference is in how each understands sentiment. Gerard subordinates sentiment to perception. So his standard must correct the perception even if it cannot correct the sentiment. Hume’s standard can only correct the person, not the sentiment, which is just what it is. Since Hume wants to make sentiment master, he has to have other ways of arriving at a normative judgment. If I am right about the Treatise, sentiment itself becomes normative by reflecting on itself. One just feels the difference between a good and bad taste: “An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us.”80 There is no appeal beyond sentiment. Gerard corrects sentiment by reflecting on it, appealing to education and culture, and subordinating it to judgment. One can know that one’s taste is wrong because there are criteria for good taste that do not appeal to sentiment until after the criteria are invoked. Once one knows the criteria and applies them, then sentiment is acceptable. This provides an authoritative form of sentiment, but the authority rests with something other than sentiment itself, usually human nature as it is disclosed by induction. All our conclusions concerning human nature must be founded on experience: but it is not necessary, that every conclusion should be immediately deduced from experiment. A conclusion is often sufficiently established, if it be shown that it necessarily results from general qualities of the human mind, which have been ascertained by experiment and induction. This is the natural method of establishing synthetical conclusions; especially where an effect is produced by a complication of causes. This is the case in the subject of our present inquiry.81

Gerard continues to acknowledge the variability of taste because it is a sentiment and directly experienced, but he appeals beyond sentiment to a wider experience that

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provides general principles. Those principles can be used as a standard to correct, though not to change, individual tastes. As with Kames, it is not always clear what Gerard’s general principles are, however. On the one hand, he believes That all the sentiments of taste are ultimately resolvable into certain general principles, which all men possess in common; which may therefore be referred to, as a fixed standard of taste; and the want or perversion of any of which renders a man in that respect monstrous, and unfit to be reasoned with in the case. This position is just.82

But he cannot accept what he takes to be Hume’s way of arriving at general principles: “But the manner in which this author [Hume] endeavours to ascertain the general principles of taste, seems to be liable to several exceptions.”83 When Gerard attributes to Hume certain general principles of taste, he is referring to Hume’s acknowledgment that “there are certain terms in every language, which import blame, and others praise; and all men, who use the same tongue, must agree in their application of them.”84 But Hume’s point is about language, not taste itself. For Hume, general agreement does not extend to particulars. Hume is simply acknowledging a common feature of language; we agree about which words express approbation and which express disapproval.85 Gerard misunderstands Hume to be offering a general principle about taste itself. Against Hume, he argues that if sameness of senses applied to taste were a general principle, “we must maintain that the rudest and most uncultivated taste is the standard; for all sentiments which imply a refinement and enlargement of taste are evidently acquired and adventitious, not original; and consequently would be, not natural, but deviations from nature.”86 The problem is that that is not what Hume maintained. He said that there was more disagreement about particulars than in general and that some apparent disagreements are merely verbal, but he did not claim that that was based on some general principle. On the contrary, the lack of general principles of sentiment is the problem. That Gerard misunderstands Hume is beside the point. What is important is the way Gerard moves beyond sense and sentiment to general principles that are formed inductively. That induction, and not either sense or sentiment, leads Gerard to a standard based on human nature that can still acknowledge the variability of individual taste. The alternative to such a standard is either rude or monstrous. Before Gerard can offer his own conclusion about a standard, he must first deal with a simpler alternative than Hume’s reduction of taste to what he calls mere sentiment. Edmund Burke does not need general principles. He goes straight to agreement based on human nature. For Gerard, that is too simple. “The elegant author of the Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, brings the question to a quick decision, by maintaining, that the differences of taste are only apparent, and that all men, in effect, perceive nearly in the same manner.”87 If that were the case, there would be no variability such as Gerard does acknowledge. “But it cannot be meant, that the sentiments of all men concerning the individual objects of taste presented to them, are the same. … It is undeniable that their judgments are not only apparently, but really

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different.”88 Gerard has to have a way to arrive at a human nature that is, in effect, independent of sentiments of taste while granting that those sentiments imply more than just experiences based on internal sense. So what is the standard? Gerard first considers a move that parallels Hume’s appeal to critics but bases it on the way common sense appeals to critics rather than an evaluation of the critics independently of their taste. The object of criticism in that case is to arrive at a consensus, and the goal is to achieve widespread or universal approbation over time. Such universal approbation, even in principle, cannot be a standard, however. It can never be truly universal because of the differences in culture, language, or ability. Critics have an educational role because of their taste, but that does not invalidate the judgments of others, and a single individual can be right even if no one else recognizes it. Instead, the appeal to reasons implies the necessity of principles. Instead of universal or general approbation, Gerard looks for a different kind of consensus. “The judgment of the public thus derived from sentiment, from the effect which they feel that a work has upon them, from experience of its fitness or unfitness to please, is to be regarded as the general sense of mankind, and is the only test and standard of merit and demerit in the fine arts.”89 Criticism cannot contradict that commonsense judgment: “The opinions of critics, however supported by general principles and rules, is of no authority in opposition to this general sense of mankind.”90 So while criticism may help to raise a work of art to its proper standard, it cannot itself provide the standard, and approbation is always subject to correction and revision. “If, therefore, universal or even general approbation be the sole touchstone of real excellence, there is no such excellence.”91 Gerard is a realist about the qualities that affect sentiment, so any standard must get one back to the true cause. “Though general or universal approbation be assigned as the test of excellence, it really amounts to no more than the approbation of a very few.”92 Those few are not ideal critics but everyone whose sense can be generalized. There is an implicit contradiction in Gerard’s approach at this point. The causes are real qualities, but the empirical evidence is sense in the form of a feeling or sentiment. That is, one does not perceive the causes of taste directly. Gerard is caught between his realist theory of perception and the nature of taste that created the problem of a standard in the first place. The standard requires more than mere sentiment: “No work of taste is absolutely perfect: beauties and blemishes, excellencies and faults are intermixed: and sometimes both are found in a very great degree. In this case, all that can be expected from mere sentiment, is the being pleased with the former, and displeased with the latter.”93 But being pleased is not a standard. In addition to the sentiment itself and general principles derived empirically from sentiment by critics, Gerard relies on critical reasoning. “It by no means follows, that the decisions of genuine criticism are of no authority, or that general principles, properly investigated and established, may not be a surer criterion of excellence, than mere feelings of pleasure or disgust, unarranged and unexplained.”94 On one side, one has empirical evidence—the feelings and sentiments; on the other side, one has a corrective process based on “the general sense of mankind” as exhibited by public taste and critical reasoning. From this, one arrives at a standard of taste that is not solely based on mere sense.

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Again and again, Gerard appeals to general principles and the common sense of mankind: “When our judgment in a particular instance is called in question, we reckon it always allowable to support it by reasons; and our reasons are always deduced from principles more or less general; the authority of which in preference to mere sentiment, we therefore tacitly acknowledge by our using them.”95 Further, His [the critic’s] general principles and rules claim no authority in opposition to the common sense of mankind. … It may enable us to reconcile the most dissimilar sentiments, to account for the most singular, to explain which are most conformable to the real constitution of human nature. This is all that can be expected from a standard of taste; and this, general principles only can perform.96

Actually stating any general principle proves difficult, however, even though Gerard claims that they are deduced. What Gerard seems to mean, instead of some premise of a deductive or inductive argument, is the essentialist argument that “All objects which produce the same species of pleasure, however different in other respects, have some qualities in common. It is by means of these qualities, that they produce this pleasure.”97 This, of course, sounds very much like the aesthetic experience thesis central to twentieth-century aesthetic in, for example, the work of Clive Bell. And like that thesis, it is difficult to avoid circularity. One must be able to identify kinds of experience, and that is exactly what Gerard tries to do: “It is chiefly attention to the general qualities of objects which gratify taste, that enables us to perceive to what class the gratification belongs. The gratifications of taste agree in this, that they are all pleasant; they are likewise analogous in other respects: if we regard only our feelings, we cannot sufficiently distinguish them into kinds.”98 Instead of trying to identify the kinds of experience themselves, however, Gerard moves back to Hutcheson’s causes of beauty. “If the object which pleases us, possess uniformity, variety, and proportion, we are sure that it is beautiful. If it possess amplitude along with simplicity, we know that it is grand. We can thus determine, whether different works gratify taste in the same way or in different ways.”99 What has gotten lost in this shift from taste back to beauty is the problem of taste itself. Beauty can be treated as a cause and used to identify the feeling that is the effect. But taste was acknowledged to be infinitely variable and the problem was to find a standard of taste, not beauty. Gerard is led back to a common human nature. “In taste, as in the material world, the phenomena are various and mutable; but the laws of nature, from which they proceed, are universal, uniform, and fixt.”100 The standard, therefore, is human nature itself. And as a standard, that begs the question, as Gerard implicitly acknowledges: “If anything which actually pleases, cannot be accounted for from any general principle hitherto established, there must be some other real principle of human nature, yet unexplored, to which it ought to be referred.”101 Gerard has lost sight of the problem of a standard of taste where he acknowledged that the variability of taste presented a problem. Instead of going on to try to state laws of nature with respect to taste and their response to different essential qualities of the objects of taste, Gerard substitutes a different kind of general principle—a principle of mind: “We have experience every day, that moderate difficulty gives higher pleasure than facility; … in all the fine arts, it

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is the work which draws out the powers of the mind, and gives them play, that excites our admiration.”102 This mental thesis had become increasingly common toward the end of the eighteenth century, and it is developed by Archibald Alison into a theory of expression.103 Here, however, it is a way around the problem of specifying what all qualities that stimulate a taste response have in common. Trying to make mental activity into a standard of taste makes the standard mind-relative, and that was the problem in the first place. In the end, Gerard can offer only an inductive standard based on observations of what pleases. He is confident that there are underlying principles that explain the causal relations between the essential qualities of beauty and the objects of taste in the fine arts, but he cannot actually state them. He can only assert their existence: The phenomena of excellence or faultiness in any work of art, taste alone can lead us to perceive; if after this, general principles can give us assurance, whether our manner of perceiving them be right or wrong, singular or co-incident with that of others, it is all that is requisite for entitling them to be regarded as the proper and immediate standard of taste.104

But of course that is just the problem of a standard of taste in the first place. If one had such general principles, there would be no problem. Gerard believes that the principles established by means of the observations of excellence in the fine arts, guided by criticism, admit of the same certainty and precision, as those of any science. “If human imperfection allowed them to be rendered so general as to comprehend all the simple and ultimate causes of our gratifications, and human fallibility could be secure from error in the application of them, they would be sufficient for removing every difficulty, and resolving every question, concerning the merit of works of taste.”105 But humans are not perfect, so the problem of a standard of taste remains.

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7

Genius

I In addition to the particular problems posed by a sentimental theory of taste, a number of traditional problems are treated differently once taste is recognized as a sentiment. The concept of genius is one of the most important. It has a long history, perhaps reaching back to classical Greece, depending on how one understands the Greek daemon, a good or evil genius that guides every individual. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, genius was an allegorical figure, sometimes of dubious character. E. C. Knowleton sums up thus: No writer offers the same portrait of the allegorical figure Genius. After his establishment on a lofty plane by Alan of Lille, Genius steadily altered for the worse, either in power or in morality. Despite his decline in the Roman de la Rose, he still maintained respectable authority, a presence more than human, even though his supernatural nature allowed him hardly less cynicism than that expressed by the celebrated mocking chimere which adorns the parapet of the contemporary cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.1

By the mid-sixteenth century, genius functioned primarily as a literary and critical concept. Spenser, Jonson, and Milton all understood genius allegorically as a tutelary spirit that guides a poet or inhabits a place.2 These allegorical and critical uses of ‘genius,’ though influential in many areas, fall outside the scope of this chapter. It is not until the concept of genius is taken over by Kant at the end of the eighteenth century that it achieves philosophical prominence as the power to create without rules. Kant’s transformation of the concept is quite different from that of the philosophers in the Lockean tradition, however. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth-century turn to empirical theories of taste, a philosophically significant concept of genius emerges as part of theories of association and imagination. That philosophical concept is interesting in its own right as a development of empiricist proto-aesthetics, though it remains secondary to the more central concepts of sentiment and taste. It is not easy, however, to disentangle an empiricist theory of genius from the less systematic but more pervasive and still important reliance on genius in the work of critics such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Samuel Johnson and poets such as

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Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and, particularly, Edward Young, whose Conjectures on Original Composition discusses the related concept of individual originality. Young writes, “Originals are the fairest Flowers: Imitations are of quicker growth, but fainter bloom. Imitations are of two kinds; one of Nature, one of Authors: The first we call Originals, and confine the term Imitation to the second.”3 Young also treats “genius” as a power: “What, for the most part, mean we by Genius, but the Power of accomplishing great things without the means generally reputed necessary to that end?”4 Young’s point, however, is to provide a critical basis for comparing Dryden, Pope, and Addison and ranking them relative to established geniuses such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Genius tends to become a largely conventional term of approbation. As Joseph Addison notes at the beginning of The Spectator, No. 160, “There is no Character more frequently given to a Writer, than that of being a Genius.”5 The questions about original genius dealt with most frequently by poets and critics concern the roles of learning and judgment. On the one hand, truly original genius needs no guidance other than its own for the development of its intrinsic powers. On the other hand, if judgment is required, then so is received knowledge. On one side, for example, Samuel Johnson warns against the excessive claims to individual genius: Men who flatter themselves into this opinion of their own abilities, look down on all who waste their lives over books, as a race of inferior beings, condemned by nature to perpetual pupilage, and fruitlessly endeavoring to remedy their barrenness by incessant cultivation, or succor their feebleness by subsidiary strength. … It is however certain, that no estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.6

Johnson subjects genius to the discipline of learning. At the other extreme Thomas Gray celebrates “th’ unlettered muse”7 and the poet, critic, and philosopher James Beattie worries that learning would destroy originality. In “The Minstrel,” Beattie gives an account of the journey of an uneducated boy becoming a poet.8 It is a journey completely free from education. Thus, the concept of original genius, if it is more than merely a general term of approbation, is both broad and loose. In contrast to this broad critical and poetic usage, philosophers in the empiricist tradition tried to establish a concept of genius that is essentially epistemological. Their concerns about originality and the power of genius arise directly from John Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and his consequent tracing of all specific ideas to individual experience in the mind’s encounter with the world. Once one accepts Locke’s empirical basis, either in a strict version that rests all knowledge on simple ideas and complex combinations of them or on looser versions that developed from it, the supernatural aspect of the allegorical figure of genius loses any significance. Only individuals have genius, and it must depend directly on experience as all mental powers do. The question then is, What distinguishes an individual as an original genius, that is, as someone who does not depend on received knowledge, logic, or reason? The immediate answer is imagination. This was codified in Addison’s series of Spectator papers on the imagination.9 There, the imagination is variously described as a power or a faculty, but Addison does not develop a theory of a power or faculty

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in the way that the more direct followers of Locke do. Nevertheless, he is thinking in a way consistent with Locke within the scope of the more popular essays intended for the audience of the Spectator. The function of the imagination is to extend and combine ideas provided by experience. It is the adjunct of memory. Everyone depends on memory to retain ideas, and imagination is able to combine the retained ideas both as a way of making them present and as a way of detaching them from their original occasion and giving them a new occasion. Genius is a strong version of the power of imagination, therefore. The ability that everyone must have to some degree is especially active in a genius. It does not follow, however, that individual genius is inevitably a positive quality. Imagination can, quite literally, run wild. When it does, it produces chimera, hallucinations, and, in extreme cases, madness. Thus one is led back to some of the connotations of earlier uses of ‘genius’ where it is daemonic and sometimes disreputable or evil. Those connotations resurface in Romantic supernaturalism, but that is beyond the scope of this book. In addition to the attachment of genius to imagination by Addison and others, genius as a concept different from its allegorical and critical uses was influenced in Britain by the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, whose Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting appeared in 1719 and was freely translated into English from a French fifth edition by Thomas Nugent in 1748.10 Du Bos is important to the development of an empiricist proto-aesthetic because, like Locke, he stresses sense and experience as opposed to reasoned critical judgments.11 Du Bos relates genius directly to imitation and nature, which are the sources of individual experience. Imitation is the central concept. He then assigns two roles to genius. First, works of art are products by imitation of the sentiments of the artists, and genius is necessary to understand the relation between sentiment and product. But imitation is not simple copying. Because experience is the basis of everything, only those whose experience allows them to perceive objects as potential pleasure-producing objects will be artists. This leads to the second role of genius. For Du Bos, genius is necessary to discover artistic truth. “This is attainable only by such as are born great poets. For them it is, that nature has reserved the privilege of uniting the marvelous and the probable, without confounding the rights and limits of either.”12 Thus, genius is the ability both to perceive and to discriminate. Since for Du Bos the production of art is essentially choosing objects that will produce the desired sentiments, the role of genius is to perceive what can be chosen effectively: “Artists born with a genius, do not take their models from the works of their predecessors.”13 Genius is a matter of greater discrimination and skill, although skill is not the primary consideration: “’Tis by the design and the invention of ideas and images, proper for moving us, and employed in the executive part, that we distinguish the great artist from the plain workman, who frequently excels the former in execution.”14 Skill may be learned. Genius is the ability to invent; skill is secondary because “design and invention” implies only that the appropriate objects are appropriately arranged. Du Bos’s theory of imitation is naturalistic and based on experience, therefore, and genius is an extension of that naturalism. Geniuses are born, not made. “Now a person must be born with a genius, to know how to invent; but to be able to invent well, requires a long and unwearied application.”15 Genius is a natural talent revealed by

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what it produces, and there are no marks of it except its productivity. Genius learns easily from other geniuses and then follows its own course. Originality is a result of genius, therefore, but it is the limited originality of proper imitation operating within the limits of experience alone. From the standpoint of the British empiricists who read Du Bos, particularly in Nugent’s rather free translation, what is most important is that the effects of art rely on individual experience. Genius is an adjunct of such experience. It is a power to discriminate and perceive. It is dependent on what one who possesses genius chooses to imitate, but it is inventive in its presentation of its objects within the limits of individual sensibility. It is a natural talent that one is born with, but it can be developed and requires an acquired skill. Various parts of Du Bos’s theory, particularly its subjectivism, are taken up by the followers of Locke and Shaftesbury in Britain where they free it from Du Bos’s continued reliance on a concept of imitation. In particular, the issues become how originality relates to the necessity of prior experience and avoids innate ideas, the extent to which artists depend on others or are inventors of ideas, and the importance of learning and artistic skill in developing a taste. They are trying to wed Du Bos’s naturalism to the underlying epistemology provided by Locke’s theory of ideas. The leading empiricist philosophers in Britain in the eighteenth century—Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (in his character as a pupil of Locke, but not in his Neoplatonist allegiances), Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume—make relatively little explicit use of genius as a philosophical concept, though clearly it is part of their critical vocabulary. Instead of referring to genius, Shaftesbury focuses directly on sentiment. In his “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” for example, genius is limited to a tutelary role. They [authors] should add the wisdom of the heart to the task and exercise of the brain, in order to bring proportion and beauty into their works. That their composition and vein of writing may be natural and free, they should settle matters in the first place with themselves. And having gained a mastery there, they may easily, with the help of their genius and a right use of art, command their audience and establish a good taste.16

Shaftesbury refocuses both the artist and the critic on internal sentiments and taste, and genius is nothing more than a means to form sentiment itself. Shaftesbury’s most direct follower, Francis Hutcheson, is concerned primarily with establishing the existence of internal senses, particularly a sense of beauty and a moral sense, and genius is related to one’s internal sense of beauty. For example, Hutcheson writes, It is of no consequence whether we call these Ideas of Beauty and Harmony, Perceptions of the External Senses of Seeing or Hearing, or not. I should rather chuse [sic] to call our Power of perceiving these Ideas, an Internal Sense, were it only for the Convenience of distinguishing them from other Sensations of Seeing and Hearing, which men may have without Perception of Beauty or Harmony. …

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This greater Capacity of receiving such pleasant Ideas we commonly call a fine Genius or Taste.17

Genius is essentially an unanalyzed capacity of internal sense, a form of perception, therefore. It is synonymous with fine taste. As we have seen in Chapter 3, David Hume relies directly on sentiment rather than Hutcheson’s internal sense, and he develops a theory of taste and criticism based on sentiment itself. Genius plays little role in that theory. When Hume does refer to genius, his usage is essentially conventional, and it is linked to taste and the characteristics of a critic, not especially to the production of art. Hume writes of genius that “the pleasure of study consists chiefly in the action of the mind, and the exercise of the genius and understanding in the discovery or comprehension of any truth”18 and “In order to judge aright of a composition of genius, there are so many views to be taken in, so many circumstances to be compared, and such a knowledge of human nature requisite, that no man, who is not possessed of the soundest judgment, will ever make a tolerable critic in such performances.”19 So genius for Hume, as for Hutcheson, is an unanalyzed capacity of the mind. It is an adjunct to taste. Taste can be developed, but it cannot be disputed except by appeal to other evidence than taste itself. Genius is an ability or power that supplements good taste. For a more developed concept of genius, we must turn to other philosophers in the empiricist tradition.

II For the empiricist philosophers who follow Locke and pay explicit attention to genius and originality, the competing claims of experience and learning present special problems. Those problems are addressed directly by two writers on genius who tried to offer a more detailed analysis of genius than Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, or Hume and a more systematic philosophical account than Addison or Du Bos. William Duff and William Sharpe, both of whom believe that they follow Locke explicitly, take different sides on how the way of ideas applies to the concept of genius. Duff is discussed rather dismissively by Peter Kivy who describes him as “a little bit of Gerard writ large.”20 He is worth consideration, however, if only because of the way he focuses on the problem of individual genius and brings Locke explicitly into the discussion. Sharpe is a lesser figure who is even more directly dependent on what he takes to be Locke’s theory of ideas. William Duff (1732–1815) was a Scottish clergyman who studied at Marischal College, Aberdeen (MA, 1755) and therefore would have been exposed to the thought of Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid. His An Essay on Original Genius was published in 1767 before Gerard published his own An Essay on Genius in 1774, although Gerard tells us in the advertisement to his essay that “his plan was formed, the first part composed, and some progress made in the second part, so long ago as the year 1758.”21 Duff is of interest as an explicit attempt to follow Locke’s theory of ideas as it applies to the concept of genius. Duff asserts, “Philosophers have distinguished two general sources of our ideas, from which we draw all our knowledge, SENSATION and

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REFLECTION.”22 He then claims that genius is the product of three “ingredients” based on sensation and reflection: imagination, judgment, and taste. Imagination is both a necessary and in most contexts a sufficient condition. The other elements, judgment and taste, are necessary but not sufficient.23 Duff ’s primary concern in establishing this triad is to limit genius to what original experience makes available. His theory of genius depends on a straightforward faculty psychology. Each of the three “ingredients” is itself a mental faculty. Ideas are not innate; experience and observation must precede imagination, reason, and taste, but the faculty or power itself is innate or, at least, present from an early age, and, evidently, it varies from person to person. This reliance on “powers” that can be developed is not strictly Locke’s own theory, but it was the widely accepted version by the time that Duff writes. This means that genius is not a unique ability possessed by only a few. Its presence and exercise are matters of degree. Duff relies on a theory of internal sense as the mechanism by which the faculties operate, though he attributes this to a very rough translation of Cicero24 rather than to Francis Hutcheson. Duff goes on to explain why imagination and genius are primary: But as no reasoning can enable a man to form an idea of what is really an object of sensation, the most penetrating judgment can never supply the want of an exquisite sensibility of taste. In order therefore to relish and to judge of the productions of Genius and of Art, there must be an internal perceptive power, exquisitely sensible to all the impressions which such productions are capable of making on a susceptible mind.25

Thus, genius and taste are linked; genius is productive, while taste makes judgments; but all three ingredients—imagination, judgment, and taste—beginning with imagination, operate more or less automatically. They are senses, not learned. What distinguishes genius from ordinary mental capacities or powers is not what it produces but its strength. This is the point at which originality enters. A lesser person’s ideas are imitative or merely ordinary. Presumably everyone has ideas and the faculty of imagination to combine them. Ordinary people remember little and retain only conventional ideas that are neither new nor particularly interesting. A genius produces original combinations: A person who is destitute of Genius, discovers nothing new or discriminating in the objects which he surveys. … The descriptions of such a person (if he attempts to describe), must necessarily be unanimated, undistinguishing, and uninteresting; for as his imagination hath presented him no distinct or vivid idea of the scenes or objects he has contemplated, it is impossible he should be able to give a particular and picturesque representation of it to others. A Poet, on the other hand, who is possessed of original Genius, feels in the strongest manner every impression made upon the mind, by the influence of external objects on the senses, or by reflection on those ideas which are treasured up in the repository of memory, and is consequently qualified to express the vivacity and strength of his own feelings.26

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This is the essential mechanics of Duff ’s use of the theory of ideas. Genius is the ability to perceive ideas and produce representations of them; the imagination is the means to “present” ideas in a certain way. Originality is a matter of the newness of the combinations, the strength of their presentation, and the vivacity with which they are “treasured up” in the memory. The key elements are ideas and the way that they are presented. Ideas range from the mundane to the original, and only when they attain a level of strength and vivacity do they achieve originality. Originality leads Duff to contrast sentiment or feeling to some common eighteenthcentury theories of imitation in the fine arts. “Imitation indeed, of every kind, except that of nature, has a tendency to cramp the inventive powers of the mind, which, if indulged in their excursions, might discover new mines of intellectual ore, that lie hid only from those who are incapable or unwilling to dive into the recesses in which it lies buried.”27 Duff believes that if a poet feels with sufficient intensity then that will be enough to create a successful poem: “He must himself be wrought up to a high pitch of extasy [sic], if he expects to throw us into it. Indeed it is the peculiar felicity of an original Author to feel in the most exquisite degree every emotion, and to see every scene he describes.”28 Nevertheless, Duff retains a fundamental sense of art as imitation; as Du Bos argued, poets imitate what they feel, so imitation is still prominent. The fine arts are descriptions, and so one imitates or expresses what one feels rather than imitating other writers. Duff considers the fine arts as poetry, painting, eloquence, music, and architecture and ranks them according to their ability to express feelings and emotions originally. Painting, particularly portrait painting, suffers because it is limited to showing what actually exists while poetry and music allow freer uses of the imagination.29 While this may suggest later pre-Romantic theories, particularly the theory of expression in Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste,30 Duff thinks only in terms of an internal sense and the theory of ideas. The form of original genius Duff defends leads him to choose primitive simplicity over learning in the cultivation of genius, but his naturalism is naïve: “Genius naturally shoots forth in the simplicity and tranquility of uncultivated life.”31 Praise of wildness and pastoral innocence is fairly common in mid-eighteenth-century poetry, but Duff limits it to the productive powers of a genius for poetry. In other respects, civilized life is preferable to rude genius: “The effects of Literature and Criticism in the improvement of all the sciences and all the arts, excepting Poetry alone; and the advantages of a state of civilization, in augmenting and refining the pleasures of social life, are too obvious to require pointing out.”32 Duff is no Romantic. Finally, Duff shares a distaste for critics with many others in the eighteenth century. “The last cause we shall assign why original Poetic Genius appears in its utmost perfection in the uncultivated ages of society, is, its exemption from the rules and restraints of Criticism, and its want of that knowledge which is acquired from books.”33 This is hardly consistent with the role assigned to judgment earlier, but then for all of his use of the theory of ideas, Duff is not a very sophisticated thinker. His version of the theory of ideas presents him with a number of problems with which he is not equipped to deal. What makes Duff interesting is the way he sums up an explicitly Lockean approach to genius and moves it into philosophical discussion, in contrast

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to its allegorical and critical use. Duff sets out clearly what a Lockean theory of genius must look like. It is interesting to compare Duff to William Sharpe (1728–1783), who also had philosophical pretensions and sought to analyze genius as a central concept in a theory of art and criticism. Sharpe was an Anglican divine (MA, Oxon, 1749) whose A Dissertation upon Genius (1755) was not widely known.34 Nevertheless, Sharpe is worth reading, if only because of the contrast to Duff and Gerard. Like Duff, Sharpe subscribes to Locke’s theory of ideas, but they differ significantly in the way that they apply the theory to genius and especially originality. Sharpe is the stricter follower of Locke. His two primary concerns are to show that genius, like all mental operations, is an acquired power, and that originality is not a part of genius since genius must be developed based on accumulated experience. Whereas Duff and later Alexander Gerard are particularly concerned to show that the association of ideas upon which the faculty of imagination depends is unique, inventive, and original in some sense of ‘original,’ Sharpe understands the operation of genius to be a product of education, opportunity, and diligence. It is a much more mundane power and does not require an internal sense. Sharpe cites Locke explicitly35 and goes on: “The point I have in view, is, to prove, that Genius, or Taste, is not the result of simple nature, not the effect of any cause exclusive of human assistance, and the vicissitudes of life; but the effect of acquisition in general.”36 His point is to defend Locke’s theory of the mind as a tabula rasa. “First, I endeavour to prove, that Genius is not differently inborn, from the manner of the acquirement of all our ideas.”37 Basically, for Sharpe, everything arises from experience, and the blank slate of the “soul” must acquire its ideas from experience. Ideas arise from sense; reflection combines them; and comparison refines and judges the combinations. Genius, then, is the ability to make the combinations and reflect on them. That means that for Sharpe, genius is a talent that must be developed. Sharpe comes down on the side of learning and judgment as essential ingredients in genius, but he bases his view on Locke rather than the conservative reliance on the ancients and tradition that was typical of eighteenth-century belles lettres. Sharpe has a strictly empirical and developmental view in which genius is a matter of degree: “Therefore I argue, that nature herself is universally slow in her advances ’till she has received a furtherance from the help of art, and that she is less difficult in proportion, as she has this assistance, which could not be the case if the Geniuses of mankind were naturally form’d for the proficiencies and superiorities, in which they shine.”38 In contrast to those who think of genius as original, inventive, and based on imagination, therefore, for Sharpe genius is a personal accomplishment based on study and learning. Every man has his own genius that he develops. “So it is with the understanding, every man is, if not the founder, yet the refiner and polisher, of his own Genius; he can suspend or invigorate its applications at pleasure, and make it rise to importance, or let it sink into insignificancy.”39 For Sharpe, Duff ’s insertion of originality into the development of genius would be problematic because it cedes too much to an original power of the mind, which, for Sharpe, must begin as a tabula rasa.

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III Duff and Sharpe are, admittedly, minor philosophers whose primary importance is to help refocus discussion in the direction of a philosophical concept of genius along Lockean lines. The direct philosophical application of the theory of ideas to the concept of genius is clearest in Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Genius (1774), which focuses much more directly on a theory of association than the rather simplistic Lockean empiricism of Duff and Sharpe. Gerard developed a detailed theory of taste in his 1759 An Essay on Taste, supposedly written at the urging of David Hume (Chapter 5). Thus, Gerard begins with taste, and only adds genius as an extension of his theory of taste. Gerard depends on a species of induction to correct immediate sensation and avoid the subjectivity of taste. In An Essay on Genius, this reliance becomes explicit: “For this reason it requires long time, favourable opportunities, and incessant attention, to collect such a number of facts concerning any of the mental powers, as will be sufficient for deducing conclusions concerning them, by a just and regular induction.”40 He never seems to face the skeptical problems about the origin and status of ideas that haunt Hume, who acknowledges that based on taste alone, there can be no disputing about taste. As with earlier theories of taste and genius, Gerard’s theories rest on a theory of the imagination. Imagination acts to exercise the mind and is the faculty that combines reflective ideas supplied by fancy. It is freed from the need for the actual presence of external sources that limit the external senses, though its ideas must originate with external sense as they do for all eighteenth-century empiricists who follow Locke. When the imaginative exercise of the mind falls within a moderate range, it is experienced as pleasurable. If the mind’s activity is either too languid and easy or too excited and difficult, discomfort results, which is a basic critical premise established by Du Bos and utilized by Priestley. From the beginning, these were the controlling principles of Gerard’s discussion. So Gerard uses taste as a vehicle to explain the faculty of the imagination. The first thing to notice when one turns from An Essay on Taste to An Essay on Genius is that reference to internal sense largely drops out and is replaced by a simple unanalyzed faculty or power. Imagination, which is important to taste in both Essays, replaces internal sense as the key concept. In An Essay on Genius, imagination is one of four powers—sense, memory, imagination, and judgment—and imagination is the most important for genius. Gerard conceives of imagination as essentially an ability to recall, rearrange, and select among the ideas provided by sense. It depends on sense initially, then on memory and judgment. Genius as a power or faculty is the activity of imagination. Some individuals are endowed with greater powers of imagination, but the basic ability is the same for all. While Gerard refers the power of imagination to sentiment, he is not prepared to cede mental control to sentiment. For Gerard’s colleague and mentor, Thomas Reid, common sense, understood as the mind’s power to grasp reality, limits sentiment. There are simply some things that the mind, by its very nature, cannot not believe.

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Gerard is somewhat vaguer than Reid about how sentiment is limited, but judgment has an independence from what imagination produces. Thus, Genius is divided between a genius for science and a genius for the fine arts. Genius in science is limited to imagining experiments and their possible outcomes. It is projective, sometimes leaping ahead of what is already known, but ultimately, what it produces is truth. The model is Baconian induction. Experience is initially random, then ordered as the imagination conceives experiments that then produce general theories that are confirmed by further experience. A scientific genius such as Newton sees in experience what lesser observers cannot see until they are shown the way. Genius for the increasingly independent fine arts, in contrast, is unique. What would be a failure in science—eccentricity and flights of fancy independent of nature—can be a virtue in the fine arts. Thus, the role of imagination in the arts is different from its role in science. As with Du Bos, in the fine arts, what matters is the effect on an audience, and judgment is the ability to foresee that effect. Gerard believes that genius has an ability to produce imaginative combinations of words, images, or sounds that will be pleasing to audiences that could not have imagined them for themselves. One consequence of the way Gerard distinguishes genius in science and genius in the fine arts is that there are two different concepts of originality or inventiveness at work. As we saw earlier, originality is a contested concept for eighteenth-century theories of genius. Science is never original in a strong sense of creating something truly new; it begins with what it observes and proceeds by induction. So on Gerard’s view, science has only a limited originality. Newton may be a demigod, but his originality is only that of the first in line. Artists, on the other hand, have no predecessors. What they produce is one of a kind. In fact, they can be at something of a disadvantage because once something original is discovered, all subsequent forms of the same kind of work will be, to some extent, imitations. The classics got there first to the detriment of the moderns. Gerard is aware of this difference and the difficulty it raises for artists, and he tries to resolve it by finding a limited but positive sense of imitation. Like Du Bos, Gerard tries to hold on to a positive sense of imitation even as his reliance on individual experience makes it problematic. In both science and the fine arts, imitation requires accurate observation. Newton imitates nature in the sense that his perception is directly from nature. What later scientists learn from Newton, he learns from nature itself. That cannot be what artists do, however. When artists were instructed to follow nature, that did not account for the kind of originality that Gerard was prepared to grant them. What they imagine might well no longer have any natural origin. On Gerard’s theory of genius, then, imitation in the arts is not imitation of nature but imitation of what is natural. What is required is consistency and recognizable emotions. A poem might be criticized as unnatural if no one could think or believe what it describes even though it is drawn from nature, but it can be natural if it is about fantastic beings that never existed, provided that they are believable. This is not unlike Aristotle’s “A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility,”41 but Aristotle relates what is natural to universals while Gerard derives what is natural from what can be experienced in nature. The main body of Gerard’s theory of genius is about association, and this is where he goes beyond earlier theories of imagination. In fact, direct references to genius disappear

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from part II, sections II and III of An Essay on Genius where Gerard works out his basic theory of association before applying it to genius. Association is the mechanism by which imagination works. Gerard identifies three principles of association. He cites both Hume and Kames in support of his basic principles of association: “The simple principles of association may be reduced to three, resemblance, contrariety, and vicinity.”42 Whenever ideas suggest a resemblance between their objects, the mind will move easily from one to the other; the hero of one poem will suggest another, and the idea of a hero will suggest other kinds of hero. Further, Not only the prevalence of different forms of the same associating principle, is sufficient for producing very dissimilar turns of genius; but also one of these forms only operating in somewhat different manners, has force enough to mark genius with a perceptible peculiarity. An image is always connected with a subject by resemblance: but the image may be applied either in a comparison or in a metaphor; and one person is led by the turn of his imagination chiefly to the use of the one, and another person chiefly to the use of the other of these figures.43

Equally, if ideas are contrary, the same ease of movement will take place; a hero may suggest the villain. Vicinity is a little different; it is not necessarily spatial. When I read one poem, I may be led easily by association to another by the same author on the same subject even though they are quite different, so vicinity might be thought of as a mental field. One has a multiplication of the varieties of genius, therefore: “The separate principles of association being so numerous as they are, must be susceptible of an almost infinite number of combinations; and every possible combination of them constitutes a new ground of union among perceptions, which will be subservient to genius.”44 Therefore, “When differences so minute in the form of the same associating principles, can give a peculiar turn to the imagination, there must evidently be room for a prodigious variety in genius.”45 There will be as many varieties of genius as there are geniuses since all will vary, just as the concept of genius as imagination varies. To relate genius to association, one must consider the nature of the relation. To produce genius, imagination “requires a peculiar vigor of association. In order to produce it, the imagination must be comprehensive, regular, and active.”46 As just noted, Gerard’s problem is that his characterization of genius as imaginative activity quickly becomes very broad. Any one has the ability to exhibit some degree of genius, which produces as many varieties of genius as there are people who can imagine with vigor. All thought is built on an association of ideas, and all association is combining and recombining ideas in new ways. The distinctions that Gerard offers—comprehensive, regular, and active—are vague. This is a usual problem with theories of association. Associations can be random. Judgment has to be brought in to distinguish among associations, but in the case of the kind of invention needed for artistic genius, newness is just what is required. A broad sense of genius and a more specific sense are at work simultaneously. The old sense of genius that appeared in earlier critical theories as something undisciplined, even something quirky, dangerous, and mad, hovers in the background.

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Gerard has an incomplete version of the theory of ideas that he gets from Locke and Hume, and he cannot completely reconcile it with his commitments to realism about the world, which he gets from Thomas Reid.47 Reid introduces common sense as the way to make distinctions among different associations, but that does not work for genius as Gerard conceives it because genius may defy common sense. This conflict between the subjectivity of sentiment in imagination and realism about its objects, especially such objects that are beautiful, arises as soon as one introduces judgment. Judgment cannot by its own power suggest a train of ideas, but its determinations often put fancy into a new track, and enable it to extend its views. Imagination can introduce ideas only by means of their connection with some present perception from which it sets out in search of them: and this perception is in many cases no other than a decision of judgment. Every review that judgment takes of this production of genius, discovers some relation of parts.48

This is as close as Gerard comes to setting out the relation of ideas, imagination, and judgment. Ideas come from perception, the standard Lockean theory of ideas but modified by Reid’s theory of perception. Imagination is a train of ideas suggested by association. Judgment is then a reflection on the train of ideas that are produced by imagination through fancy. Judgment is a relation of ideas, therefore, and consequently part of the association of ideas. It remains unclear how the associations themselves should be judged, however. Gerard is led back to sentiment and sensibility as forms of judgment, therefore. Genius is the result of sensibility: He [an inferior poet] feels not the passion, he has not force of genius or sensibility of heart sufficient for conceiving how it would affect a person who felt it, or for entering into the sentiments which it would produce in him. The sentiments which he makes him utter, might all be very proper in a description, a discourse, or a meditation, occasioned by the view of such an object; but they are not natural to a person in whom that object produces a suitable passion.49

Genius for the fine arts is thus a higher degree of sensibility than ordinary, combined with an imitation of what is, or seems, natural. Thus, this kind of association is peculiar to the arts, while the inductive associations that drive science are controlled by reason. Gerard continues, To give a just representation of the passions, is one of the greatest efforts of genius; and it can be accomplished only by following those paths into which the passions naturally direct the thoughts. But the influence of the passions on the succession of our ideas, though thus important, relates only to one species of genius, genius for the arts.50

Compare this to Duff ’s claim that the poet must feel what he describes.51

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Consideration of sensibility leads back to one of the conditions for genius: vigor. “Genius has, in some men, great force and compass: but a vigorous construction of the associating principles is sufficient to account for it, however great it be; for if they be vigorous, any one perception may introduce a great multitude of others, and that by means of many different relations.”52 Once again, genius is a matter of degree. Everyone will have ideas and perceptions. The associating principles will apply to everyone. Genius will be distinguished by the vigor of the associations. This is not completely consistent with the need for judgment, however, because enthusiasm may threaten judgment. Judgment cannot be as subjective as sentiment alone. Gerard treats sensations and ideas as distinct, which creates a further problem. He explains, The present perception which introduces others, by means of the relations that they bear to it, may be either a sensation of an object, or only an idea of it. In whichever of these ways the object be perceived, it has the very same relations to others; and therefore in both cases it has a tendency to suggest the very same ideas. But it will not always suggest them with the same force or certainty in these two cases.53

At the same point, Reid denies the distinction between sensation and ideas because it separates idea and object. Perception just is the mind’s apprehension of an object; there is no gap between sensation and idea into which skepticism can insert a wedge, which is Reid’s objection to Hume and the Lockean way of ideas. Interestingly, Gerard seems to follow Hume rather than Reid by recognizing a distinction based on the strength of ideas. One is left with the conclusion that there is nothing unique about genius itself. Instead, genius is a basic way that the principles of association are applied. One might call genius applied imagination. Only when originality or inventiveness is at issue does a particular variety of genius single out a genius for the fine arts: Where truth is the object, the passions can produce only prejudices fit to lead away from it. But genius for the arts can never exist where the passions have not great power over the imagination, in affecting the train and associations of perceptions. An imagination easily affected by the passions, is peculiar to genius for the arts; and it is essential to it in all the forms which it can assume.54

Note, however, that taste has largely disappeared. Whereas in the Essay on Taste, judgment was called upon to discriminate between the products of genius, now the passions reign and the distinctions are categorical. Gerard’s theory of genius is interesting for several reasons, therefore. It applies a theory of association to imagination and produces a unique theory of genius in the fine arts that anticipates future Romantic theories without abandoning altogether the basic eighteenth-century theories of sentiment, imagination, and taste. Gerard’s theory of genius promotes the passions to a degree that his earlier theory of taste did not. It stands somewhere between Hume’s direct reliance on sentiment and Reid’s rejection

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of the theory of ideas in favor of a commonsense realism. As a theory of association, it is more conceptual than the mechanistic versions found in David Hartley and Joseph Priestly. But it is not consistent, sometimes echoing Hume’s dependence on sentiment and sometimes Reid’s conceptual realism. It should be viewed, I think, as a transition between the strict reliance on sentiment found in Hume’s Treatise and the Romanticism that emerged after Kant’s Third Critique. Eighteenth-century British theories of genius, based as they are on the emerging empiricist philosophy of Locke, Hutcheson, and Hume, transform the concept. They differ from the later theories of Kant and the Romantics, even though they anticipate many of the issues that occupy Kant, Schiller, and Hegel as well as the Romantic poets. In eighteenth-century Britain, genius, as Gerard recognized, is dialectically related to taste. Taste experiences and judges. Genius produces art and requires judgment. As Pope put it, “In Poets as true genius is but rare, / True Taste as seldom is the Critic’s share.”55 Taste and genius go together. The eighteenth-century British theories of genius based on imagination and association, particularly as extended from his theory of taste by Gerard, have a claim to our attention independently of the Romantic theories with which genius is most often associated. In Gerard’s Essay on Genius, genius is given an explicitly epistemological role in the specifically empiricist form of proto-aesthetic theory developed in mideighteenth-century Britain. Gerard’s theory, particularly its ambivalence about how much independence can be granted to sentiment, limits its influence, however. Archibald Alison develops an independent theory of expression that is more naturalistic and does not require genius,56 and others in the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly Dugald Stewart,57 likewise do not depend on genius as part of their theories of taste. One might say that genius is important philosophically in the mid-eighteenth century mainly because it maintains connections with more directly critical theories while giving them an empiricist, epistemological development.

8

The Sublime: Baillie and Burke

I Like genius, the sublime has a long history as a rhetorical and critical concept. Longinus’s1 On the Sublime was a standard source for virtually everyone writing on the arts and eloquence in the eighteenth century. ‘Sublime’ was a term of praise for a high style that lifted a speaker’s or a writer’s audience above the ordinary response. It was associated with both a skill and a style. As a skill, it elicited an exalted response from an audience. As a style, it was elevated, showing off the speaker’s or writer’s vocabulary and ability to use tropes that stopped just short of bombast. Above all, it was a term of praise that could be applied quite widely without too much specific attention to rules. As Samuel Monk noted in his classic study of the history of the sublime, The eighteenth century opened, then, with Longinus established, along with Aristotle and Horace, as an arbiter of critical opinion. … The word [‘sublime’] was common property among the critics, and connoted perfection, grandeur, the ultimate excellence, or any other idea of strong approbation so long as dignity was also implied. But Boileau, as all the world knew, had read in Longinus that the sublime is a quality of art that does not depend for its existence on fine words and rhetorical devices. He had insisted that it is above rhetoric, and lives really in the grandeur of a great artist’s thoughts, that it conveys emotions, that it is recognizable by its sudden overwhelming effect, and he had agreed with Longinus that it is the product of genius not of rules.2

Thus, the sublime was primarily about the quality of an artist who could achieve an effect by means of rhetorical skill. That emphasis on effect made the sublime response-oriented though its object was the mind of the artist. In the eighteenth century, the emphasis on feeling and sentiment also made the sublime a natural term of praise. In the course of the century, however, the concept itself shifted from rhetoric and style to a term that described properties and qualities of objects and the experiences of those who observed those objects. The issue became what was sublime in itself and how the effect that it caused was experienced. Experience of the sublime itself was the focus. That made it part of the emerging philosophy of art and taste that sought to explain what a person of taste

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needed to do and know. The sublime was, at least in part, an object of knowledge, and a theory of the sublime was a necessary part of the philosophy of taste, particularly the empiricist theory that Shaftesbury initiated (however indirectly and against his own Neoplatonic views). As a philosophical concept in the eighteenth-century empiricist tradition, the sublime is different from its earlier rhetorical and critical uses, therefore, and it is different again from its later development at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and in the Romanticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the German Romantics like Schiller, whose essays on the sublime3 mark a quite distinct way of understanding the sublime. The eighteenthcentury philosophy of the sublime is a transition from an older rhetorical tradition to the “modern” Romantic sublime.4 My focus will be on the specifically philosophical concept of the sublime in the eighteenth century, therefore. The concept under examination is limited to that period, although it continues to occupy a place in contemporary philosophical aesthetics.5 All of that debate falls outside of the scope of this chapter, which is limited to the sublime in the eighteenth century and within that topic to the sublime as an emerging philosophical concept that is independent of beauty and taste.

II Before turning to the most detailed and influential examination of the sublime in the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,6 it will be helpful to look at another explicit attempt to develop a theory of the sublime that came ten years before Burke’s Enquiry was first published, John Baillie’s “An Essay on the Sublime.”7 Baillie’s Essay was written probably as early as 1742, and published posthumously in 1747. Baillie himself, about whom little is known, was a physician who died while with the British army in Flanders.8 His essay is thus the work of a talented amateur, but the same could be said of Burke’s Enquiry and much of what was printed in the eighteenth century on the philosophy of art and taste outside of the Scottish universities. First, we should note that for Baillie, the sublime is a style of writing. This links him to Longinus and the rhetorical tradition but shifts the emphasis from the mind of the artist to the elevated style of the work of art and thus to the experience of the audience. Baillie objects that Longinus takes what the sublime is for granted, however, and, instead, he proposes to define it in itself. Thus, he has some claim to be shifting the focus from the sublime as a topic for criticism to a philosophical inquiry. For that task, he looks to nature rather than rhetoric: “But as the sublime in writing is no more than a description of the sublime in nature, and as it were painting to the imagination what nature herself offers to the senses, I shall begin with an inquiry into the sublime of natural objects, which I shall afterwards apply to writing.”9 The sublime is something that natural objects possess, and it is offered to the senses. Baillie, without making the point explicitly, from the very beginning locates the sublime as a relation between individual minds and objects. His attempts to define what it is in itself require both.

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Baillie’s approach does not explicitly adopt a sense theory like Hutcheson’s. Later, for Alexander Gerard, one might be said to have a sense of the sublime, but Baillie does not have such an extensive theory of the mind’s powers. The mind’s recognition of the sublime is immediate. It is a response to “immensity” and grandeur that expands the soul: “That object only can be justly called sublime, which in some degree disposes the mind to this enlargement of itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers.”10 This is simply a matter of sensation itself; one feels the sublime. Baillie then goes on to try to identify the properties that produce the sensation. He proceeds empirically. Particular cases illustrate the way that some sensations expand the mind’s grasp of reality, and Baillie tries to move inductively to general rules about what it is in natural objects that produces the sublime sensation. The first property listed is vastness, the property of great mountains and rivers and the sky itself. “Is it not, therefore, the vastness of these objects which elevates us, and shall we not by looking a little narrowly into the mind be convinced that large objects only are fitted to raise this exaltedness?”11 For Baillie, this is all a matter of sensation: “For whatever the essence of the soul may be, it is the reflections arising from sensations only which makes her acquainted with herself, and know her faculties. Vast objects occasion vast sensations, and vast sensations give the mind a higher idea of her own powers than small scenes.”12 For Baillie, vastness is a property in nature, but it is also a property of the sensation that it produces. This equation of sensation and object will be important later. In addition to vastness or magnitude, Baillie adds a degree of uniformity and novelty: “To render the sublime perfect, two things are requisite; a certain degree of uniformity, and that by long custom the objects do not become familiar to the imagination.”13 Uniformity and novelty are commonplace properties in speculation about the arts, of course. Hutcheson depended on uniformity amidst variety as the object of internal sense, and the need to keep the mind active is a common part of most discussions of the relation of the mind to art going back to Du Bos or before. But at this point, Baillie has shifted ground from the way he treated vastness as a sensation common to the object and the mind. Uniformity is a property of an object, but novelty depends on the mind; what is novel to one mind may not be to another. Both uniformity and novelty are widely acknowledged properties of the beautiful that Baillie adds to the sublime as well, so he is not drawing the distinction between the sublime and beautiful that becomes important to Burke and later to Uvedale Price.14 He defends uniformity as a requirement on the basis of the nature of ideas—vastness requires a single idea, while many small ideas compounded would not be intelligible as a single grand expansion of the mind. This does not seem to be an appeal to ideas as the object of perception, however. It is simple that ideas are distinct forms of experience. But novelty is different. If the activity of the mind and its creative powers of imagination are not engaged, the sublimity will be lost. So even something vast in itself will no longer produce the sensation of sublimity: “perhaps, it is ever true, that wherever the mind adverts to the vastness of the object, there she always feels the sublime sensation; but from long custom the object being made familiar, although before her, she does not advert to it.”15 Baillie’s defense of the very common requirement of novelty

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is thoroughly sensationalist, therefore, without being particularly committed to any specific theory of sensation or perception. Sensation is simply how the mind works. Baillie is basing the experience of sublimity on the kind of mental activity required of the mind rather than some perceptual property or distinct sense. Minds that dissect destroy the experience of sublimity; those that imagine greatness feel the sublimity. Sublimity, therefore, while it can be identified with properties in objects, belongs to the sensations of the mind (or soul) itself. “There is no affirming, that an object, although truly grand, will equally affect all minds; some are naturally fitted to consider things in the most enlarged views; others as naturally dissect great objects themselves, and by a diminutive genius render what is truly magnificent, little, and mean.”16 We might note that a normative element has entered without apparently being specifically accounted for. Little objects are not simply small; they are “mean.” Baillie does not stray too far from the rhetorical tradition where ‘sublime’ is a term of praise. Baillie began by objecting that Longinus took for granted what the sublime was. He proposed to remedy this by defining the sublime. Therefore, when Baillie turns from natural objects that produce sensations of vastness or greatness to the sensations themselves, he begins not with what the sublime feels like, which most other writers on the sublime attempt to describe, but with language, particularly the problem of definition. It is equally incumbent upon the philosopher and critic to prevent names from being confounded, and to refer each thing to its proper class, if such there be; therefore when I treat of the sublime, I treat of a certain order of things, which from a similitude either in themselves, or their effects, are arranged under one head, and constitute a class or species.17

He does not question that there is a proper class of sublime “passions.” The problem is how they are to be identified, and that is a problem of definition. In fact, Baillie never offers a definition, however. His implicit problem, of course, is the subjectivity of the passions. Baillie confidently reasons inductively; he says it is from cause to effect: “as no affection can subsist without its proper object, the cause or motive of the affection; we must argue from the cause to the effect, and judge and determine of the passion merely from a consideration of its object.”18 In fact, he reasons from effect to cause. To get an intersubjective class of passions, he looks at what commonly produces sublime effects. Moreover, his list of sublime affections—heroism, desire for fame or conquest, benevolence, and so on—depends on the established use of language. Those words just are the ones applied to sublime affections. Baillie is implicitly aware of the difficulty. Great power is sublime, but only when it exhibits a certain kind of power—the sublime kind! “Thus our idea of power is more or less sublime, as the power itself is more or less extended.”19 He continues, “From all of this, I think I may fairly conclude, that the sublime of power is from its object being vast and immense,” which just takes us around in a circle.20 Baillie does not resolve the conflict he has introduced because he does not pay attention to the difference between the objective properties that he accepts as sublime and the subjective experience that leads him to call them sublime. Instead, he reasons that the object produces an

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affection corresponding to its own greatness without troubling to consider how the subjectivity of the affection might produce a conflict if everyone does not share the affection. Caligula’s power is contemptible but god’s is not unless, of course, one finds that a god who condemns whole tribes to destruction contemptible. Baillie’s sublime is bound to convention. It has no room for the sublimity of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes or Marlowe’s defiant Tamburlane. Or does it? Baillie appeals to association to resolve the differences between sublimity, virtue, and love. It is not that something great but of questionable effect is not sublime in itself but that the associations with what is virtuous or benevolent affect the passion produced. This is a common move from Locke on to account for how something that should be perceived in one way is in fact perceived in another. The appeal to association in this case means that the class definition insisted on must be qualified by how something is perceived. An object is not really sublime in itself in the way that a circle is round in itself. It is only sublime when the affection or passion produced is sublime in association with other affective responses. Baillie cannot really get out of the subjective situation that he accepts when he moves from the greatness of an object to the greatness of the passion it produces. Nevertheless, Baillie is consistent in distinguishing the sublime from other passions with which it may be associated. Passions affect each other. “Hence it frequently happens that the sublime affections are blended with those of a quite contrary nature.”21 Exactly what this “blending” involves is not clear. Hume has a similar problem when he writes of passions being “converted.” In this case, Baillie is keeping the passions distinct; he does not lump together all strong passions as Burke tends to do. Baillie is more specific than Burke. Not only is beauty not sublime, with which Burke would agree, but neither are virtue or love or terror or dread, all of which have a more generalized “greatness” for Burke. Baillie may be inconsistent in some of his inductive reasoning and the way that he glosses over the subjectivity of the passions, but he remains closer to the objects that he classifies as sublime than those who treat it as a natural kind. To avoid too evident a contradiction, he simply allows that there may be other passions that are associated with the sublime and may go by that name: “From these associations there arises different kinds of sublime.”22 So Baillie distinguishes passions and allows them to interact by association. Baillie is (1) a sensationalist in his empiricism; (2) but an objectivist/realist with regard to properties; and (3) he is a psychologist with regard to the passions and affections themselves. His sensationalism means that there is nothing other than sensation upon which the mind (or in his vocabulary the soul) can reason. So his essay is about what one feels at its base. Nevertheless, he is a realist about the properties that produce the sublime affections. Some things in nature really are great or vast in the way required to produce a specific response that one can classify as sublime. So he looks for a definitive property or set of properties that cause a sublime response and he finds it in the vastness or infinity felt when the mind is expanded beyond itself. That response is itself distinctive. He does not reduce the sublime to any other response though he allows for linguistic confusion and associative expansion. His psychology limits his theory to what can be experienced. There is nothing of the Platonism of Shaftesbury or the teleology of Hutcheson. Baillie simply does not worry much about the ontology

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of the sublime. In that respect his theory has little of the categorical assertiveness of Burke’s essay on the sublime that was published some ten years later. He produces a fairly simple psychology of sublime response that does not try to resolve the apparent contradictions between pleasure in what is painful or terrifying that occupy more extensive theories of the sublime. Baillie provides a single characteristic that defines the sublime, extends it to the arts generally, and rests it on the evidence of the mind’s response. Because his evidence is sensationalist and subjective, he can only resolve problems by appealing directly to what is experienced. That leaves him open to skeptical attacks in the same way that Hume’s sentimental theory of taste is. But since Baillie does not draw any extensive conclusions about taste or the metaphysics of the sublime, the inconsistencies in his theory do not seem particularly troubling. If his essay is short and relatively slight, it is all the more typical of what is developing in the empiricist approach to problems of a proto-aesthetic.

III One of the most widely read and highly regarded essays on the sublime with claims to philosophical interest, both in the eighteenth century and today, is certainly Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.23 It presents a number of problems for the study of eighteenth-century empiricist philosophy, however. First, the history of its composition is somewhat uncertain. It was published in 1757 after Burke arrived in England, but he tells us that its composition goes back to his student days at Trinity College, Dublin, so it is in many ways a juvenile work that shows the unevenness of its development. Second, along with the rather odd A Vindication of Natural Society,24 published in 1756, the Enquiry is part of an attempt by Burke to establish a literary career before he found his more natural place as a politician and political writer.25 His primary purpose in both works is to make a name for himself and secure patronage. Philosophical consistency is secondary to his desire to insert himself into the controversies of the day and secure an audience. This can be seen in a number of places where he places himself in opposition to traditional theories of beauty. That in no way invalidates his arguments, but it warns us that they should be read in light of Burke’s own agenda. Finally, Burke’s education and upbringing in a Irish Catholic family, though one that conformed to the established church on his father’s side, reveals itself in his continued, perhaps unconscious, adoption of Aristotelian and nominalist modes of thought and expression. Aquinas, Ockham, and Duns Scotus are somewhere in the background, though well hidden. All of this makes reading Burke’s Enquiry a rather complex hermeneutical task. I will not try to resolve these issues nor enter directly into controversies about them. My purpose is to read Burke as a contributor to the development of an empiricist proto-aesthetics, and I will try to restrict myself to that issue as much as possible without distorting Burke’s philosophy. Burke’s Enquiry proceeds along two parallel lines: its introspective psychology focuses on the sublime and the beautiful, and it is a “philosophical enquiry” that, he

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tells us in the preface to the first edition, has as its purpose to remove the “confusion of ideas” surrounding the concepts of the sublime and beautiful by “a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions.”26 The concept of the sublime is explicitly taken from Longinus, and beauty is the traditional concept of beauty found, for example, in Shaftesbury. The question is how Burke’s use of introspection and his commitment to the existence of laws of nature work when applied to these traditional proto-aesthetic concepts. Burke’s introspective psychology begins with a threefold distinction: pleasure and pain are simple emotions, undefinable and independent;27 to them he adds a state of indifference that is different from either.28 Burke’s use of ‘emotions’ and ‘ideas’ should not be taken to imply too much. In the eighteenth century, no clear distinction between psychology and philosophy existed, so whatever belongs to the mind (or sometimes the soul) is an idea, an emotion, and a passion. In some contexts, ideas and emotions are distinct mental events that can be referred to as if they are independent entities. In other contexts, they are mental events that exist in the mind alone. Then they are ‘passions’ that are felt rather than cognized. Burke usually implies all three without intending some kind of epistemological or ontological theory. Emotions, ideas, and passions clearly are not distinct ideas in the way that Locke had established but the psychological accompaniment of ideas used more broadly to describe mental events. The important thing for Burke is to distinguish two large classes of ideas in the broadest sense of ‘idea’—ideas related to self-preservation and ideas regarding society.29 From the first, he derives the sublime;30 from the second, via a concentration on the society of the sexes, he derives beauty.31 The mechanism by which one has experiences of the sublime and beautiful is either direct experience of passions with their characteristic pleasures and pains or a kind of substitution that Burke calls sympathy. “For sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.”32 To sympathy, Burke adds imitation, which has its own pleasures33 and ambition, which works teleologically to produce the improvement that imitation cannot produce.34 We have a straightforward psychological scheme: classes of ideas produce pleasure or pain. Beauty and sublimity are the ideas corresponding to the appropriate classes of ideas and are thus the passions that one experiences directly and immediately. They are pleasant or painful. But beauty and sublimity are not just random passions that are pleasant or painful in the way that something sweet is pleasant and being pricked by something sharp is painful. They are classes of passions and thus must have some characteristics that allow them to be grouped into classes. Baillie made that point against Longinus, and Burke proceeds along the same lines. That is what leads Burke to a “philosophical” enquiry and not just the psychology of stimulating pleasures and pains. The difficulty, of course, is that the subjectivity of the passions works against clear identification of sublimity and beauty apart from emotive descriptions. Hume takes up that challenge, but Burke is not Hume. Burke focuses on psychological descriptions

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as the grounds for the class distinctions that he needs. In particular, the sublime is related to self-preservation, and its dominant passions are terror or fear, which are always painful. For Burke, a proto-aesthetic concept such as the sublime rests directly on emotional qualities broadly described as terror,35 although terror is really a class term that includes such emotions as astonishment, admiration, reverence, and awe.36 As was the case with Baillie, however, a confusion enters because Burke reverses the causal order; the sublime produces the emotion, so the emotion cannot be used to identify the sublime without circularity. Baillie had the same difficulty when he tried to construct a definition of ‘sublime.’ As long as Burke is simply describing the sublime, that is not a problem, but when one is trying to say what the sublime is in itself, the connections break down. Specific passions are not obviously terrible unless they are already known as sublime. Burke is aware that there are problems. He introduces a stipulative distinction: ‘Delight’ is “the feeling which results from the ceasing or diminution of pain.”37 With that distinction in mind (which Burke acknowledges is artificial), he can offer a kind of definition of the sublime: To draw the whole of what has been said into a few distinct points. The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions.38

Burke comes close to introducing a unique emotion, delight, similar to “distanced” emotion as it was understood in twentieth-century aesthetics, therefore.39 Its effectiveness depends on being able to identify that “delight” just as “aesthetic experience” depends on being able to identify uniquely what is aesthetic. That is not Burke’s concern, however. As long as one recognizes some passions as sublime in one’s own experience and agrees with the empirical observations about what causes those experiences, Burke’s psychology remains persuasive even if his philosophical enquiry becomes increasingly confused. The real problem with relying on ‘delight’ is that not only is the distinction artificial, but it is also misleading because delight hardly describes a sensation related to pain or danger at all. Burke is arguing with an unidentified opponent who relates pain and pleasure as if that were the main issue when in fact only the peculiar cases of pleasurable pain are really at issue. (This is one of the points where Burke is trying to stir up controversy to advance his own ambition.) As noted above, one object of Burke’s Enquiry is to enter the existing debates in a way that will establish his literary reputation. Discussions about how one can be attracted to what is in itself painful or enjoy tragedy on the stage were one such debate, and it offers Burke a way to advance his theory of the sublime.40 Tragedy is pleasurable or “delightful” in Burke’s terms, but it presents us with events and stimulates emotions that are in themselves painful. Its effect is due to our sympathetic participation in the

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pains and misfortunes of others,41 but we are insulated from the events themselves. The examples are most often from literary tragedy, but the effect is continuous with real events. Burke gives a striking example: Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. I believe that this notion of our having a simple pain in the reality, yet a delight in the representation, arises from hence, that we do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no means chuse to do, from what we should be eager enough to see if it was once done.42

The problem itself was commonly debated. Among the solutions considered was the need to keep the mind active, even by its attention to something painful, and that the fact that one does not actually experience the pain.43 Burke’s solution draws on both. The imitation cannot compete with the reality, and one is “delighted” because one is not the one being executed. The example itself is striking, which serves Burke’s purpose as an aspiring author. Yet it is also confusing. Why should one take delight in the pain of another, even if that person is a criminal. Burke the psychologist should have been puzzled. The real point is that there is no clear line between reality and fiction as far as the ideas that produce the sublime are concerned: “It is thus in real calamities. In imitated distresses the only difference is the pleasure resulting from the effects of imitation; … But then I imagine we shall be much mistaken if we attribute any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to a consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representations no realities.”44 The problem I see here is that since there is no distinction between fiction and reality, Burke is never confronted with the need to distinguish ideas in a way that links them to their objects. Everything in the sublime rests on the ideas that one has, not on the ideas that the object in question “should” produce, so Burke is implicitly committed to a radical subjectivism without any way of distinguishing the passions and their sources. John Boulton claims that Burke is an early advocate of the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction,45 but this is misleading because there is no basis in the ideas of the sublime for such a distinction. Reality and art are all the same emotionally for Burke. From the standpoint of Lockean epistemology, Burke is failing here to compare the ideas themselves; he rests the distinction on the emotional qualities that those ideas carry—pleasure (or its secondary manifestation— delight), pain, and indifference. The primary emotional qualities of the sublime, as Burke argued earlier,46 are derived from the emotions of self-preservation, and pain belongs to that class: Having thus run through the causes of the sublime with reference to all the senses, my first observation, will be found very nearly true; that the sublime is an idea

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belonging to self-preservation. That it is therefore one of the most affecting we have. That its strongest emotion is an emotion of distress, and that no pleasure from a positive cause belongs to it.47

Having established both the source of the sublime in ideas of self-preservation exhibited in terror and fear and provided a way of distinguishing actual pain and pleasure from their attenuated forms in delight, Burke is free to illustrate them in detail. Burke goes through a whole catalogue of causes for the observed effect—privation, vastness, infinity, and so on. One, in particular, raised questions among his contemporaries and deserves more attention. According to Burke, obscurity enhances terror, and “It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little.”48 This goes directly against the prevailing neoclassical and rationalist search for clarity. It also reveals how Burke is thinking of the relation between ideas and the proto-aesthetic concepts and qualities. I think Burke should be taken quite literally here. The ideas themselves are obscure rather than clear and distinct, and in the deep background is the Thomist identification of beauty with claritas. If beauty is clarity and the sublime is its antithesis, then Burke is led to identify obscurity as a source of the sublime. Yet obscurity has little of fear or terror or pain about it, as his contemporaries were quick to point out. Burke’s confusion arises because he is thinking of ideas as psychological experiences, not of the clarity or obscurity of the ideas themselves, so when he strays into the rational nature of the ideas themselves his example seems odd. Psychologically, it is not that one has certain ideas and confuses them but that the ideas that one has seem obscure. So one has ideas, and if they are of certain types, then the associated emotional qualities will be “sublime.” This is the heart of Burke’s sensationalism. The sublime is the principal object of Burke’s enquiry. It is a strong emotion and is amenable to a psychological enquiry. When Burke turns to beauty, he enters into an extended refutation of the classical claims that beauty is caused by fitness, proportion, or perfection. His targets are obviously the classical definitions such as the golden section or the Platonic appeal to fitness. Instead of those properties, Burke offers qualities such as smoothness, variation, and smallness that are perceptual qualities rather than measurable or relational qualities. He claims that “indeed a little consideration will make it appear that it is not measure, but manner, that creates all the beauty which belongs to shape.”49 In rejecting proportion as a cause of beauty, Burke comes close to an empiricist, sentimental position in spite of his claim that beauty is a quality of objects. Properties that must be felt rather than objective, measurable properties constitute beauty. Nevertheless, Burke is clearly thinking of beauty as belonging to the object, not the mind, at this point. The problem is that his list of qualities sounds very much like the same kind of qualities that he is rejecting. What he says of the diversity of proportions could be said just as well of smallness. Generalizing qualities as natural kinds makes beauty depend on each kind rather than on any specific quality. Counterexamples are as relevant to smallness as they are to fitness. A beautiful horse is totally unlike a beautiful woman. The difference is supposed to be that “In beauty, as I said, the effect is previous to any knowledge of the use.”50 What has happened is that

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Burke has moved from definition to description. In that respect the list he provides is scarcely more successful than the list of proportions that he refutes by counterexamples, but it has a sentimental basis rather than the classical basis in proportion. Burke’s arguments against the classical theories of beauty are largely negative, therefore. Beauty is not proportion, uniformity, and so on. Instead, Burke’s positive treatment of beauty is parallel to his theory of the sublime. Where the sublime arises from emotions of self-preservation, beauty arises from emotions of society and particularly of love. These emotions are not so strong. So one gets a different set of qualities—small, smooth, delicate objects, and milder colors. On the whole, the qualities of beauty, as they are merely sensible qualities, are the following. First to be comparatively small. Secondly, to be smooth. Thirdly, to have a variety in the direction of the parts; but fourthly, to have those parts not angular, but melted as it were into each other. Fifthly, to be of a delicate frame, without any remarkable appearance of strength. Sixthly, to have its colors clear and bright; but not very strong and glaring. Seventhly, or if it should have any glaring colour, to have it diversified with others.51

Couple this with Burke’s rejection of the more common claims that beauty depends on proportion, fitness, and perfection, and we seem to have a typical, if somewhat eccentric, attempt to supply qualities that will produce beauty. Burke indeed does say that “beauty is, for the greater part, some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses.”52 But this is somewhat misleading if we keep the parallel with the sublime in mind. The sublime is the name for a subclass of emotions, and the larger class itself is defined by self-preservation. Beauty is also a name for a subclass of emotions, and the class is defined by those that are social, and particularly those that are sexually attractive. So the claim that beauty is a quality in bodies that act mechanically is only an empirical generalization based on the introspectively observed emotions that bind the sexes and society together. Burke is not giving a causal picture like Hutcheson or Hogarth but a natural law in what he takes to be a Newtonian mode. The problem is that he is not very Newtonian in the way that he collects the data or thinks about it. On the one hand, Burke is trying to follow Locke and Newton. He is not defining beauty so much as describing it. But he really remains Aristotelian in his arguments— that is, he classifies according to certain established categories. The organization of the Enquiry is significant. It begins in part One with the formal cause of proto-aesthetic emotions: pain and pleasure. Within that formal cause, Burke traces the efficient causes (sympathy, imitation, ambition); the material causes (beauty and sublimity); and the final causes (self-preservation and societal preservation). In parts Two and Three, he deals with the material causes of these proto-aesthetic emotions themselves. These can be illustrated by examples of felt experience. They are sensationalist and empirical, but it is a psychological empiricism that does not reach the level of epistemological theory begun by Locke and developed by Hutcheson and Hume. In part Four, Burke turns to the efficient cause of the sublime and beauty. This is where he singles out his own versions of qualities themselves. “By beauty I mean, that

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quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.”53 Beauty is specifically a quality in bodies, while the sublime is a passion. Beauty is used figuratively, while the sublime is a feeling or perception. Beauty is explained causally, while the sublime is experienced directly. The sublime is described by a set of adjectives—dark, solemn, magnificent, and so on—that apply directly to the experience and the qualities that produce the experience are only inferred. Thus in spite of the apparent reliance on ideas and their combination in the mind, Burke’s own organization betrays an essentially Aristotelian methodology of his analysis. I think that this must be taken seriously. Consider, for example, Burke’s analysis of “darkness” where he specifically sets out to disagree with Locke (part of his agenda to establish his own reputation as a writer). Burke writes, “It is very hard to imagine, that the effect of an idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all countries, as darkness, could possibly have been owing to a set of idle stories, or to any cause of a nature so trivial, and of an operation so precarious.”54 Burke is objecting to Locke’s claim that the fear of the dark arises only from association—that is, that, according to Locke, there is nothing in the idea of “dark” that signifies danger or produces fear, but that only as we come to have other experiences in which we are placed in danger by darkness do we feel fear along with the idea of “dark.” In Locke, what is significant is not so much the associationist mechanism as the claim that no idea has a particular emotion as its concomitant idea independently of experience. Locke’s primary example is fire; only through experience do fire and pain come together. But Burke needs for the emotional effect to accompany the idea in itself because he does not push ideas as far back epistemologically as Locke does. Burke is really trying to categorize emotions, not trace them to their ideational roots, and his technique is to look for class relations. Since darkness is universally terrible (if it really is, which is doubtful), Burke feels justified in linking darkness and terror. The problem with this from the standpoint of Locke’s system is that one does not know that the ideas are universal except by experience. Burke must assume that the idea of dark is the same everywhere. He looks for a mechanical explanation in the increased tension in the eye.55 But he already “knows” what the effect is before he looks for the cause. Locke tries to give a hypothetical path from simple idea to complex idea and thence to the emotional end state that we experience. Locke does not need a mechanical account, and he has explicitly abandoned the Aristotelian scheme of causes in favor of a simpler empiricist scheme based directly on ideas accumulated through experience, although he clearly believes that some kind of microphysical account is available and desirable. The goal of science as practiced by Newton and Boyle is to produce explanations of what one experiences directly. Burke, in contrast, begins with the end state and tries to infer how it is caused. He does need the unexperienced microstructure, which he speculates about at some length. Burke is trying to be scientific, but his science is much more that of Aristotle in Lockean dress than it is that of Newton and Boyle. Burke’s Enquiry is interesting as a proto-aesthetic philosophical theory because he does not subscribe to neoclassical critical values. He separates pleasure, pain, and indifference as three states. Either pleasure or pain is preferable to indifference. He rejects the more common classical qualities of beauty and the sublime and argues for a

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strongly emotional reading that makes pain and terror proto-aesthetic qualities. Burke follows a radically introspective method, and he thus emphasizes the interiority of the criteria for the sublime and beautiful. All of this is based directly on sensations. But it is not based on Locke’s ideas. Burke’s emotions and sensations are felt qualities that turn out to belong to universal categories. Nevertheless, one can see clearly the influence of Locke and more particularly of Newton and the scientific model he represents in Burke’s analysis. For example, Burke’s definition of beauty makes it a secondary quality: “The appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of heat or cold.”56 So beauty is a secondary quality like heat or cold, and ‘idea’ may or may not be a Lockean idea or just an effect understood as a secondary quality. I believe that the various uses of ‘idea’ and their apparent reference to Locke are superficial, but in terms of what it tells us about the models that were becoming predominant, and about the ways that Burke was thinking and that he would be read, it is nevertheless significant. Burke is still able to hold on to the universal qualities of his analysis while taking advantage of distinctions like those between primary and secondary qualities that had entered philosophical discussion. That is why in spite of the similarities between his descriptions of the sublime and the emotions evoked by the later Gothic and Romantic writers and artists, it would be a mistake to take Burke as a Romantic writer himself. Blake is quite right to feel Burke to be unsympathetic.57 Burke’s conclusion is a qualified skepticism, therefore. “When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth. All we do after, is but a faint struggle, that shews we are in an element which does not belong to us.”58 This is a limited form of empiricism. It is limited to sensible qualities, but it is based on our ignorance of anything more rather than the belief that there is nothing more. The conclusion is important, however. Burke has succeeded in distinguishing the sublime and the beautiful. Henceforth, the sublime is to be treated as something in its own right distinct from the beautiful. Neither the sublime nor the beautiful can be separated from its affective state, but both causes and effects are different. Burke concludes, On a review of all that has been said of the effects, as well as the causes of both; it will appear, that the sublime and beautiful are built on principles very different, and that their affections are as different: the great has terror for its basis; which, when it is modified, causes that emotion in the mind, which I have called astonishment; the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure, and excites in the soul that feeling, which is called love.59

It would misunderstand Burke’s analysis of the sublime to look for counterexamples such as the beauty in paintings that are sublime or the frightening emotions that accompany some forms of love of country. Burke began by dividing the field of his Enquiry into two parts, self-preservation and social emotions, and then fits specific emotions or passions to that schema— pain, fear, and terror, and the like on one side; pleasure on the other. All of this would be merely curious if it were not also significant for the kind of evidence and reasoning

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called forth. While the schema itself owes much to Burke’s Aristotelian education, he translates it into sensations and emotions or passions. In the process, he moves away from a classical theory of the sublime. In fact, Burke intentionally looks for points of disagreement with the way that beauty has been classically defined. The classical ideals of proportion, harmony, and pleasingness are rejected in favor of emotions themselves—fear or delight. That would seem to make Burke a Lockean/ Humean kind of empiricist. But his psychology continues to betray different roots. His version of inductive generalization, while it owes something to Bacon, never gets to a proto-aesthetic theory in the way that Hutcheson or Hume, who are looking for the truth of their theories, does. What Burke gives us are examples chosen to illustrate his observations, which remain ad hoc. This is particularly clear in the final sections of part Four where speculation about hidden causes takes over. Burke may owe something to “scientists” such as Hartley and Priestley, but he is making it up as he goes along. Part Five of the Enquiry is quite different from the analysis in the first four parts. It can be thought of as examining the final causes of the sublime and beautiful, but instead of following the speculations about underlying causes at the end of part Four, it turns to the effects as they are expressed in words. What Burke arrives at is something that sounds rather like medieval nominalism. Locke’s theory of language as the representation of ideas is rejected in favor of a nominalism of use: “words like ‘virtue,’ ‘honour,’ and ‘persuasion’ do not derive from any representation raised in the mind of the things for which they stand. As compositions, they are not real essences, and hardly cause, I think, any real ideas.”60 This is not meaning as use, however, but meaning as adjectival description. Words embody the associations that the specific emotions that preceded them have created. Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil; or which we hear applied to other interesting things or events; and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasion.61

Rather than the meaning of words being their use, the initial nominalism probably means more than the meaning of words is a conventional way of referring to occasions. Burke is caught between Locke’s view of language as the representation of ideas and his own scholastic form of mental recall combined with the associationism that is so widely appealed to in the mid-eighteenth century. In conclusion, Burke’s Enquiry is, I think, a mixture of a number of different strands of mid-eighteenth-century speculation. It is empirical and empiricist, but it lacks the underlying systematic epistemology of empiricist epistemology that Locke, Hutcheson, Hume, and others were working out. Sometimes it looks back to Aristotelian forms of rationalism. Sometimes it uses a simpler form of empirical psychology based on Burke’s own observations and preferences. And sometimes it is just Burke trying to become famous. It makes two important positive contributions to the development of

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eighteenth-century proto-aesthetics. (1) The sublime is established as a quality in its own right, distinct from the beautiful. (2) Emotional qualities such as terror, fear, awe, and astonishment become the language of that proto-aesthetics. The multiplication of effects that will include the picturesque and multiple “senses” such as a sense of humor has begun. After Burke, it is easier to understand the appeals to sentiment made by other philosophers.62

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The Picturesque

I A number of problems develop in relating an empiricist proto-aesthetics in the eighteenth century to nature and the growing taste for natural beauty and scenic touring. ‘Nature’ itself is a widely used term that is often nothing more than a tag for a personified contrast to ‘art’ understood as the production of something artificial. At the same time, natural scenery entered into and continued increasingly to occupy both the visual and literary arts. Landscape painting, genre pieces, pastoral poetry, and a poetry meant specifically to evoke nature (e.g., Thomson’s The Seasons1) competed for the attention of an expanding art world. The change implies a corresponding theoretical change. What justifies the appreciation of natural scenery and the environment in art? How does the emerging empiricist theory of taste in eighteenth-century Britain account for the increasing prominence of nature and environmentally directed sensibility evidenced in landscape gardening, tour guides, and travel literature? One central issue concerns the picturesque, which was the most direct and increasingly the most self-aware approach to nature in the eighteenth century. The finding and describing of picturesqueness became something of a cottage industry in the latter part of the century when the Rev. William Gilpin’s descriptive tours popularized the quest for picturesque scenery. As Ann Bermingham observes, “picturesque touring was suited to the pockets and moral sensibilities of the middle classes. … As a Picturesque tourist, one shared in a sensibility or, as the Picturesque was so often called, a ‘cult.’ For in aestheticising the view the Picturesque ultimately validated the good taste of the viewer.”2 Uvedale Price joins Gilpin in arguing for the picturesque as a third category in addition to Edmund Burke’s sublime and beautiful, and Richard Payne Knight also is prominent in attempting to integrate the picturesque into received theories of beauty and taste. Gilpin and Price are by no means the first to make use of ‘picturesque’ as a term linking art and nature, however. In its basic sense of ‘looking like a picture’ or ‘being suitable for painting,’ the picturesque was a common term much earlier in the eighteenth century. As John Dixon Hunt notes, “By Pope’s time picturesque or what was proper for a painting involved a cluster of endeavors, theories, and techniques which drew the arts into community.”3

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Hunt goes on to point out how different this earlier use of ‘picturesque’ was from the later subjective and affective approaches of Gilpin and Price. The retreat from an academic picturesque, where the decorum of subject and setting, parts and whole, was primary and where learned verbal/visual references to literary and historical sources as well as to a repertoire of expressive gesture were expected, may be traced in the work of both the landscape designer “Capability” Brown and the painter Richard Wilson. Their work highlights and helps to explain the movement from a learned and universally translatable picturesque to one much more hospitable to the language of forms and to the vague, the local, the sentimental, and the subjective, all of which characterize the new picturesque of Gilpin and Price.4

So one moves from a neoclassical, academic, and literally explicated picturesque to a passive and subjectively sentimental picturesque by the end of the century. Those who use the term most in a self-consciously theoretical way—most prominently Gilpin, Price, and Knight—are concerned primarily with their own emotional responses, and, for the latter two, the way that they will form their own country estates. The interest of one of the leading designers of landscape gardens, Humphrey Repton, is even more practical, though he is drawn into theoretical debates.5 Gilpin and Price seize on Burke’s references to smoothness and size but do not fully understand the underlying philosophical psychology from which Burke derives his categories. So while Burke begins with basic premises about the relation of pleasure to a fundamental individual desire for self-preservation and to social human desires exhibited in sexual passion, Price sees only a set of categories identified in terms of their ability to produce pleasurable effects. Since the picturesque arises from some forms of nature, Price concludes that the effects of that relation must be a different category. Gilpin’s usage is even more unsystematic.6 Knight’s basic objection to both Burke and Price is simply that the picturesque is a form of pleasure, so it must be a form of beauty. Yet, the incorporation of natural scenery and the environment into the protoaesthetic framework that results in the formation of the concept of the picturesque can tell us a great deal about how the basic categories of beauty, sublimity, and taste are understood. These categories in turn formulate the accepted environmental protoaesthetic assumptions that are dominant until the serious rethinking of environmental aesthetics that has taken place in the second half of the twentieth century.7 But in order to see how the concept of picturesqueness contributes to changes in proto-aesthetic theory, we must look more closely at how the implicit theory of the picturesque really works.

II Uvedale Price is an important figure in the development of the concept of the picturesque, but he is a relative latecomer. He is responding to Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which he largely accepts, but

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by the time of Price’s Essays on the Picturesque (1794–1805; 2nd ed., 1810), a great deal had changed in philosophical discussion of the experience of art, beauty, and nature. Theories of association had largely superseded the earlier discussions of taste and beauty. Price’s theoretical contributions belong with the earlier theories, and Price seems largely unaware of the theories of expression of Archibald Alison, for example, that were offering alternatives. Instead, Price accepts Burke’s critique of theories of beauty such as Hutcheson’s formula of uniformity amidst variety and his sensationalist arguments for direct but distinct experience of either the sublime or beautiful. He then seeks to correct Burke by arguing that the picturesque is a third category distinct from the beautiful and sublime. In addition, Price was engaged in a polemical battle with the “improvers” of estates such as his own at Foxley and that of his friend (at the time), Richard Payne Knight, who owned a nearby estate called Downton Castle. Further, Price believed that the study of paintings was the best way to come to an appreciation of the picturesque and that, conversely, appreciation of picturesque nature was the best way to understand and appreciate painting. Price’s professed theoretical aim, however, is merely to supplement Burke, most explicitly with regard to the rapidly developing interest in the new field of landscape gardening and estate “improvement” as it related to wealthy middleclass landowners such as himself who had both the time and money to devote to the improvement of their country estates. Price begins by accepting Burke’s theory of the beautiful and sublime. The beautiful is small, delicate, and emotionally pleasant. The sublime is vast, awesome, terrible, and emotionally painful, though Burke deals with the problem of something that is painful being attractive by introducing an artificial distinction that he calls delight, which is the same emotion as the sublime without the actual threat of harm. Price is not concerned with that problem. Instead, he introduces the picturesque as a third emotional quality distinct from the beautiful and the sublime, though it may be mixed with the beautiful because both are pleasant experiences while the sublime is painful and terrible, which the picturesque never is. Price’s acceptance of Burke’s basic description of the beautiful and sublime and the distinction he makes from it is set out in the “preface” to the 1796 first edition of his Essays on the Picturesque: The two characters which Mr. Burke has so ably discussed, had, it is true, great need of investigation; but they did not want to be recommended to our attention. What is really sublime or beautiful, must always attract and command it; but the picturesque is much less obvious, less generally attractive, and had been totally neglected and despised by professed improvers: my business therefore was to draw forth, and to dwell upon those less observed beauties.8

So Price’s professed aim is merely to supplement Burke by adding a third, distinct category of experience, the picturesque, to Burke’s established categories of the beautiful and the sublime. Price shares with Burke the assumption that all three categories are essentially categories of experience, though both also assume a causal relation to qualities that belong to perceptual objects. The experiences of all three are themselves both

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immediate and pleasant or, in the case of the sublime, delightful in Burke’s special use of that word. For example, with respect to paintings, From the ideas which we are well justified in forming to ourselves of those paintings [the paintings by Zeuxis and Apelles], it seems probable that the delight they produced was immediate and universal; that to see and feel their charms, it did not require any knowledge of pictures, or any habit of examining them (however such knowledge might enhance and refine the pleasure) but only the common sensibility which all must experience, when such objects present themselves in real life.9

So the distinctiveness of the picturesque that Price defends is not based on education or reasoning. It is simply felt. Two things follow for Price. First, the distinctness of the picturesque depends on the qualities of variety and intricacy. Variety is “that great and universal source of pleasure, … the power of which is independent of beauty, but without which even beauty itself soon ceases to please”; intricacy, which depends on curiosity, is “a quality which, though distinct from variety, is so connected and blended with it, that the one can hardly exist without the other.”10 The connection of intricacy and variety to picturesqueness is somewhat obscure, however. It is mainly a matter of contrast with the more established experiences of beauty and sublimity. Since Price accepts Burke’s identification of beauty with smoothness, the contrast with the picturesque suggests that which is not smooth but is nevertheless experienced as pleasing in the same way that the experience of beauty is pleasing. Both are emotionally similar experiences. Sublimity, in contrast, is vast and without boundaries, while intricacy requires boundaries. But these contrasts are by no means definitive. Part of the problem is that the experience of picturesqueness is simply harder to define because it is more personal and eccentric. Price observes that “by its variety, its intricacy, its partial concealments, it excites that active curiosity which gives play to the mind, loosening those iron bonds, with which astonishment chains up its faculties.”11 That leaves a great deal of room, however; what seems to be at work is a shift away from the causal link to qualities such as smoothness or vastness to mental activity. Variety and the need to occupy the mind are standard elements in eighteenthcentury mental psychology. Price concludes “that where an object, or a set of objects are without smoothness or grandeur, but from their intricacy, their sudden and irregular deviations, their variety of forms, tints, and lights and shadows, are interesting to a cultivated eye, they are simply picturesque.”12 The motivation for the introduction of intricacy is closely related to Price’s polemic against “improvers,” however. As a principle of landscape gardening, Price felt that beauty was in danger of becoming boring and insipid, which leads him to argue vehemently against the “improvers” of landscapes who smooth out all of the irregularities of nature. The picturesque, in contrast, is a distinct emotional quality based on roughness and irregularity. In nature, it is found in wildness. Second, the picturesque has a complex relation to painting, from which it traditionally derived its name. Price observes,

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There are few words, whose meaning has been less accurately determined than that of the word picturesque. In general, I believe, it is applied to every object, and every kind of scenery, which has been, or might be represented with good effect in painting; just as the word beautiful (when we speak of visible nature) is applied to every object, and every kind of scenery, that in any way give pleasure to the eye; and these seem to be the significations of both words, taken in their most extended and popular sense.13

Instead of that imprecise and popular sense, he hopes “to shew … that the picturesque has a character not less separate and distinct than either the sublime or the beautiful, nor less independent of the art of painting.”14 Painters experience nature in a certain way that their pictures capture. Others, who lack the painterly skills, experience the same emotions and learn to view nature by learning to see pictures. Painters have the advantage of their skill: If there were no other means of seeing with the eyes of painters, than by acquiring the practical skill of their hands, the generality of mankind must of course give up the point; but luckily, we may gain no little insight into their method of considering nature, and no inconsiderable share of their relish for her beauties, by an easier process by studying their works.15

But skill by itself would be insufficient: “Whoever studies art alone, will have a narrow pedantic manner of considering all objects, and of referring them solely to the minute and practical purposes of that art, whatever it be, to which his attention has been particularly directed.”16 What is necessary is the experience of the emotion. The picturesque is a distinct emotional quality, so it is not limited to pictures and the painterly way of seeing. While picturesqueness is fundamentally a quality of sight, Price believes that any perception of intricacy and variety shares the same emotional quality, so there can be a picturesqueness of music, for example: The qualities which make objects picturesque, are not only as distinct as those which make them beautiful or sublime, but are equally extended to all our sensations by whatever organs they are received; and that music (though it appears like a solecism) may be as truly picturesque, according to the general principles of picturesqueness, as it may be beautiful or sublime, according to those of beauty or sublimity.17

Price is referring not to program music about nature but to the power of music itself to stimulate intricate emotions. To this extent, picturesqueness joins the continuing expansion of “senses” that began with Hutcheson’s sense of beauty and is found, for example, in Gerard’s essays on taste and genius. As the term continues to imply, however, the study of pictures is advantageous for two reasons: it educates the eye and taste, and it provides an experience to those who are not themselves painters. Price argues,

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We are therefore to profit by the experience contained in pictures, but not to content ourselves with that experience only. … These are the reasons for studying copies of nature, though the original is before us, that we may not lose the benefit of what is of such great moment in all art and sciences, the accumulated experience of past ages; and, with respect to the art of improving, we may look upon pictures as a set of experiments of the different ways in which trees, buildings, water, etc. may be disposed, grouped, and accompanied in the most beautiful and striking manner, and in every style, from the most simple and rural to the grandest and most ornamental: many of these objects, that are scarcely marked as they lie scattered over the face of nature, when brought together in the compass of a small space of canvas, are forcibly impressed upon the eye, which by that means learns how to separate, to select, and combine.18

Experience itself is the source of pleasure in the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque, therefore, but all experiences are not equal. One must have taste as well. Price harks back to the discussions of a standard of taste that Burke and Hume had considered and that was a major topic of discussion in the numerous mid-century essays on taste.19 Price’s approach to taste is more general, however, than that of Burke or Hume. For Price, a standard is merely a way of avoiding deviance in one’s appropriation of experience. In that respect, the study of painting, in particular, is a way to improve one’s taste. In the preface, Price specifically cites painters in this regard: Were it, indeed, possible that a painter of great and general excellence could at once bestow on such a man, not his power of imitating, but of distinguishing and feeling the effects and combinations of form, colour, and light, and shadow, it would hardly be too much to assert that a new appearance of things, a new world would suddenly be opened to him.20

One must not base one’s taste on painting alone, however; the enhancement of experience moves in both directions. One can look at nature merely with a view to making pictures or look at pictures with a view to the improvement of one’s ideas of nature. “The former often does contract the taste when pursued too closely, the latter, I believe as generally refines and enlarges it.”21 Price implicitly revises the old maxim that art should imitate nature. Instead, art, particularly painting, teaches one to see nature and improve one’s taste. Nevertheless, one should note that Price’s theory of a distinct quality of picturesqueness remains consistent with the sentimentalism of Hutcheson, Hume, and Gerard. Qualities of nature and of pictures produce emotions that are causally related to the specific qualities of intricacy and variety in objects. Beauty and picturesqueness are related and may be “mixed” because both are pleasant. They are distinct because they have different causes. So Price’s theory is perceptual and causal. This might suggest that Price is describing what, more or less at the same time, will be identified as an “aesthetic” emotion by followers of Kant on the continent. I think that that is a mistake, however. The distinctly aesthetic qualities that Kant describes have to be free of conceptual and

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causal definition. Their whole purpose is to free the experience of beauty from the experience of what is merely pleasant or attractive. Kantian ‘delight’ is wholly different from Burke’s concept of delight as nonthreatening experience. The ensuing theories of distinct aesthetic qualities that are independent of knowledge and concepts that arose in Romanticism and in twentieth-century theories of aesthetic experience, whether those theories are truly Kantian or not, are very different from Burke’s theory of beauty that Price endorses and from Price’s own characterization of picturesqueness as the perceptual consequence of intricacy and variety. Price identifies the picturesque as a causal consequence of features of an object that one learns to experience. It is perfectly possible to experience nature and pictures in other ways than as picturesque. But when one does learn to experience either one as picturesque, what one has is simply an experience that is emotionally pleasant and, perhaps, informative. One sees nature as it should be without the interposition of improvers who make it insipid and boring. The conclusion to which one is led by Price’s arguments should be that Price is very much in the tradition of earlier philosopher-critics in the generally Lockean empirical approach to art and taste. Properly educated, one will have experiences that are of a certain identifiable class. But, following Burke, Price’s additional class, picturesqueness, is directly related to one’s own experience. The class cannot be derived from principles, rules, or any a priori conditions that one could learn independently of experience. As a proto-aesthetic theory, Price is trying to form what he would consider a scientific theory of landscape gardening and of its effects that others will be able to follow in their own practice. That is a distinct enterprise from the prescriptive practices of his predecessors, but it is a long way from the aesthetics of Kant or even his contemporary, Archibald Alison, with whom Price seems to have been unacquainted. Price clearly identifies with Burke rather than the Scots of the 1790s. What Price is thematizing, therefore, is an extension of the proto-aesthetic already at work in earlier theories of taste and beauty without going too deeply into the underlying empiricist premises. Instead, he works directly from examples that provide the experiences that he is interested in. Price observes that “when general principles are put crudely without examples, they not only are dry, but obscure, and make no impression.”22 Much of his essay on the picturesque and his related responses to Humphrey Repton, William Gilpin, and Richard Payne Knight are taken up with his own theories of landscape gardening, his objections to the practice of everyone from William Kent23 onward, and his comments, sometimes interesting but often tedious, on those painters who, as a connoisseur and collector, he particularly likes. Extracting even a proto-aesthetic theory from this mass of amateur criticism is difficult, but Price gives the picturesque a distinct character that it lacked before his essays, and it is an important part of the shift from classical theories of beauty to the experiential, sentimental characterization of art.

III If Uvedale Price is a somewhat latecomer to the empiricist theories of art and its effects with his separation of the picturesque from beauty and the sublime, his friend and

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neighbor, Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824), is even more so. Knight quotes or refers to most of the major critics and philosophers from the previous half century, but aside from a dismissive reference to German Romanticism, the issues that lead him to a consideration of the picturesque are those of Burke and Hume. Knight belonged to a circle of wealthy, educated amateur critics, collectors, and antiquarians in the latter part of the eighteenth century and into the first decades of the nineteenth century. Knight and Price shared an interest in how to “improve” their estates along the lines of the developing interest in landscape gardening. They eventually fell out (only to be reconciled late in life24) because of Knight’s acerbic criticism of Price’s Burkean-inspired theories of the picturesque. Knight’s estate, Downton Castle, upon which he exercised his own theories of the picturesque, has been described as “an exceptionally important house in three ways: in its contrast between exterior and interior, in the deliberate asymmetry of its plan, and in the sources from which Knight drew his inspiration for its appearance,”25 but it has also been called “gimcrack.”26 Knight was a leading figure in the Society of Dilettanti, where he sponsored the young George, Fourth Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860). Knight’s first publication, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1787), brought him considerable notoriety because of its sexual explicitness and its linking of Christianity with sexuality and other ancient religions. His judgment concerning the Elgin Marbles as of little artistic value and his recommendation against their purchase by the government makes his taste suspect to many. He was an active collector and controversialist throughout his life. He was also an acute philosophical critic, however, especially of Burke. My concern here will be limited to his philosophical arguments in his long didactic poem, “The Landscape” (1795), addressed to Price and to his engagement in proto-aesthetic philosophical controversies, particularly those that arose from Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which Knight addressed in An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805). Knight’s didactic poem, “The Landscape,”27 with its extensive explanatory notes, is intended to reinforce Price’s objections to the landscape gardening theories of Humphrey Repton and particularly Lancelot “Capability” Brown and the theory of the picturesque advanced by William Gilpin. On these points, Knight is in essential agreement with his friend, Price. It is now, I believe, generally admitted, that the system of picturesque improvement, employed by the late Mr. Brown and his followers, is the very reverse of picturesque; all subjects for painting instantly disappearing as they advance; whence an ingenious professor [Repton], who has long practised under the title of Landscape Gardener, has suddenly changed his ground; and taking advantage of a supposed distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful, confessed that his art was never intended to produce landscapes, but some kind of neat, simple, and elegant effects, or non-descript beauties, which have not yet been named or classed.28

Both Price and Knight appreciate the wildness and naturalness that belong to the picturesque and are at war with the kind of improvements advocated and practiced by Brown. Knight comments, “I have had the misfortune to see many of his [Repton’s]

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performances designed and executed exactly after Mr. Brown’s receipt, without any attention to the natural, or artificial character of the country, or the style of the place.”29 Knight’s purpose is more rhetorical and polemical than Price’s, however; Price is primarily concerned to vindicate Burke and to establish that the picturesque is a distinct quality of what is seen and a distinct form of experience. Knight just does not like what Repton does when he follows Brown’s style. See yon fantastic band, With charts, pedometers, and rules in hand, Advance triumphant, and alike lay waste The forms of nature, and the works of taste! To improve, adorn, and polish, they profess; But shave the goddess, whom they come to dress; Level each broken bank and shaggy mound, And fashion all to one unvaried round; One even round, that ever gently flows, Nor forms abrupt, nor broken colours knows; But, wrapt all o’er in everlasting green, Makes one dull, vapid, smooth, unvaried scene.30

Both Price and Knight are careful to make clear that they are not opposed to enhancing the comfort and appearance of a house, but they are unwilling to do so at the expense of picturesque qualities that require that variety and intricacy be preserved. Study but methodizes and corrects What observation previously collects: Train’d by experience, nurtured by retreat, Reason makes theory and practice meet.31

So, Knight’s poem is a defense of “picturesque beauty” but of limited theoretical application. Such beauty is essentially a matter of sensibility for all of the aspects of nature, educated by painting in particular and freed from rules. Knight’s later entrance into the debates about the picturesque comes in his long An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805). Had this essay come thirty or forty years earlier, it would have a considerable claim to consideration as a contribution to the literature not only of the picturesque but also to the theory of an eighteenthcentury proto-aesthetic. As it is, it is more of a synopsis of the previous theories and criticisms of taste, combined with an often acerbic wit and polemic against Burke and his followers and extended critical comments and examples intended to exhibit Knight’s own taste. That aspect earned Knight the enmity of his former friend, Price. Price’s central argument, as we have seen, is that the picturesque is wholly distinct. He thus rejects the notion of picturesque beauty as a misleading combination of two distinct forms of experience; though because both the picturesque and beautiful are pleasant, they may cooperate in a way that separates them from the sublime. Nevertheless, they should not be confused. Price explains, “there is nothing more

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ill-judged, or more likely to create confusion, if we at all agree with Mr. Burke in his idea of beauty, than the mode which prevails of joining together two words of a different, and in some respects of an opposite meaning, and calling the character by the title of Picturesque Beauty.” He goes on to acknowledge, however, that “I by no means object to the expression itself; I only object to it as a general term for the character, and as comprehending every kind of scenery, and every set of objects which look well in a picture.”32 In fact, Price does speak frequently of picturesque beauty when he is thinking of the kind of pleasure offered by paintings and nature. Knight takes issue with Price over this fundamental point. He writes, “The great fundamental error, which prevails throughout the otherwise able and elegant Essays on the Picturesque, is seeking for distinctions in external objects, which only exist in the modes and habits of viewing and considering them.”33 For Knight, experience trumps theory. They [colors, tones, flavors] are therefore more properly beautiful, according to the strictest meaning of the word beauty, when applied to that which is pleasing to the sense only; and not, as it usually is, to that which is alike pleasing to the senses, the intellect and the imagination, according to which comprehensive signification of the word, many objects, that we call picturesque, certainly are not beautiful; since they may be devoid of symmetry, neatness, cleanness, etc.; all of which are necessary to constitute that kind of beauty, which addresses itself to the understanding and the fancy.34

Therefore, for Knight, Price’s distinction is a debate about words. “The word Beauty is a general term of approbation, of the most vague and extensive meaning, applied indiscriminately to almost every thing that is pleasing, either to the sense, the imagination, or the understanding; whatever the nature of it be, whether a material substance, a moral excellence, or an intellectual theorem.”35 He continues, “It is in vain, therefore, for individuals to dispute about their propriety or impropriety [i.e. the different words in different languages for beauty]; for, after all, the ultimate criterion must be common use.”36 Trying to form hard-and-fast distinctions between what is called beautiful, picturesque, or sublime is what we would call a category mistake (though Knight does not have that vocabulary available). It leads back to a reliance on rules and a sameness of practice, which is what both he and Price object to in “improvers.” Instead, Knight appeals directly to sentiment: “Such ever has, and ever will be the difference between the works of artists of genius, who consult their feelings, and those of plodding mechanics, who look only to their rules.”37 Critics should judge by feeling but fail when they depend on rules: Critics have done nearly the same in taste, as casuists have in morals; both having attempted to direct by rules, and limit by definitions, matters, which depend entirely on feeling and sentiment; and which are therefore so various and extensive; and diversified by such nice and infinitely graduated shades of difference, that they elude all the subtilties of logic, or intricacies of calculation.38

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He does not accuse Price of following rules. That is one of the errors of Brown and Repton. But he does accuse him of losing sight of the real basis for his otherwise justified appreciation of the picturesque. Ultimately, therefore, the basis for all judgments and distinctions is taste, not what we might call real distinctions in nature. Let no one imagine that he solves the question [of extremes of taste] by saying, that there have been errors in taste, as there have been in religion and philosophy: for the cases are totally different; religion and philosophy being matters of belief, reason, and opinion; but taste being a matter of feeling, so that whatever was really and considerately thought to be ornamental must have been previously felt to be so: and though opinions may, by argument or demonstrations, be proved to be wrong, how shall an individual pretend to prove the feelings of a whole age or nation wrong, when the only just criterion which can apply to ascertain the rectitude of his own, is their congruity with those of the generality of his species.39

Knight is ridiculing women’s fashions in this passage, but the point would be the same if it were art or literature. It is not that there are no standards of taste but that one must seek them elsewhere than in belief, reason, or even opinion. Knight asks, Is there then no real and permanent principle of beauty? No certain or definable combinations of forms, lines or colours, that are in themselves gratifying to the mind, or pleasing to the organs of sensation? … yet there are certain standards of excellence, which every generation of civilized man, subsequent to their first production, has uniformly recognized in theory, how variously soever they have departed from them in practice.40

This is a very general version of the test of time appealed to often, but that too does not yield a standard of taste. Joshua Reynolds, according to Knight, valued Michelangelo over Rembrandt, but his collection and practice demonstrated just the opposite: “His feeling was just, though his judgment was wrong.”41 So Knight is left a skeptic “concerning any real and permanent principles of taste.”42 In this respect, Knight is specifically following Hume: “We can neither weigh nor measure the results of feeling or sentiment; and can only judge where they are just and natural, or corrupt and artificial, by comparing them with the general laws of nature.”43 Knight agrees that “we judge of the future by the past, and form opinions of things, which we do not know, by things which we do.”44 Knight’s sentimentalism stops short of Humean skepticism, however. He simply has recourse to a kind of naturalism; everyone agrees in calling sweet things sweet and bitter things bitter even if tastes may deviate. Instead of Hume’s epistemological defense of our impressions and ideas, Knight shifts his grounds to a rather vague and inconsistent form of Thomas Reid’s realism and theory of perception. He follows Reid in organizing his analysis of sensation according to the senses of taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight, but whereas Reid develops a theory of perception,45 Knight simply uses the senses as an organizing principle to assert that “neither the sensations, nor the ideas imprinted by them, have

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any resemblance to the objects, or the qualities of objects, which have produced them; but that the connection between them, howsoever spontaneous and immediate it may seem, is merely habitual, and the result of experience and observation,”46 which is closer to Hume’s theory of causation as habit and expectation than to Reid’s perceptual realism. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are all present in Knight’s epistemology, but none is adopted consistently. Instead, Knight seems to have some version of Reid’s theory of vision in mind, but he settles for a modest conclusion. Pictures “by some impressions or irritations upon the optic nerves, the modes which must be forever unknown to us, are conveyed to the mind.”47 He also appeals to the theory of association in an equally vague manner. For example, he writes of hearing, “To this natural and instinctive effect of the different modulations of tone is owing, in great measure, the effect of what we call expression in music: at least of what may properly be called sentimental expression; since it excites sentiments merely; whereas another kind of expression excites ideas also: but this depends upon the principle of association.”48 For Knight, all of this discussion of the senses is a way of buttressing his own critical judgments of art and artists. Knight’s primary target is still Burke, particularly Burke’s claims about fear, terror, darkness, and obscurity as causes of the sublime. Since for Knight, the sublime is an emotion that must be felt, it must either be real or not felt. Knight explains, For terror is not a problem or syllogism, that can, in itself, be true or false; but a passion, which is either felt or not; and which, if not felt does not exist. Terror, therefore, if felt at all, must be real terror; and consequently the person, who feels it, must, at the time of feeling it, suppose the cause, which excites it, to be real and adequate; that is, real danger to himself, or some one else; otherwise, what he feels cannot be called terror, or anything of the kind.49

He concludes that Burke’s theory of the sublime is ridiculous, therefore. “This notion of pain and terror being the cause of the sublime, appears, indeed, to me, to be, in every respect, so strange and unphilosophical, that were it not for the great name [Burke], under which it has been imposed on the world, I should feel shame in seriously controverting it.”50 From Knight’s naïve realism about emotions, it follows that something if it does not excite some degree of fear, the sense of danger, as it is called, is mere perception or knowledge, not either a sentiment, sensation, or passion. … Fear, therefore, which is humiliating and depressive in one degree, must be proportionally so in another; and consequently, in every degree, the opposite of the sublime.51

He goes on: Nonsense can no more be sublime, than darkness or vacuity can be ponderous or elastic; and to controvert either position is, in some measure, to participate in its extravagance: nor should I presume to do it, did I not every day see the fatal

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effects of this seducing author’s theories, on the taste of the public; not only in England, but on the continent, particularly in Germany, where nonsense seems to have become the order of the day.52

Knight is nothing if not scathing in his opinions of what was emerging as Romanticism. Knight cast his net widely. He cites Daniel Webb and Archibald Alison. Of Webb, I know, indeed that there are critics, who have pretended to discover refinements of melody in the most rugged anomalies of Milton, and, of course, a total want of it in the polished elegance of Pope: but, to such critics, I have nothing to say. If they are serious and sincere, they are as extraordinary anomalies as any of those which they admire, and afford ample illustration of the proverb, that there is no disputing concerning tastes.53

And of Milton, he approves of Alison’s judgment, echoing Samuel Johnson, that Paradise Lost fails “to exhilarate and exalt the spirit. … The first and most essential merit of poetry is to be pleasing … rather than to overawe and depress by gloomy grandeur and sour morality.”54 Such judgments go along with his evaluation of the Elgin Marbles. Yet if Knight is verbose, superficial, and supercilious, there is much of interest in his essay. In particular, his sentimentalism is explicit. After Hume, Knight makes clear the consequences of a thorough-going sentimental form of empiricism. One also hears anticipations of later theories of aesthetic experience and emotion. For example, while he ridicules Burke’s theory of the sublime as caused by fear and terror (anticipating, perhaps, questions about how it is possible to fear fictions), he recognizes the possibility of something that sounds very much like aesthetic distance: There are some men whom the actual sense of danger does not impress with fear; and who can, therefore, enjoy the awful sublimity of a storm at sea, even when the vessel, in which they sail, is in immediate peril of being wrecked: but to such persons the storm is not terrible; and the moment that it becomes so; that is, the moment when they feel the actual pressure of fear, all sympathy with the cause that produces it, and, consequently, all relish for the sublimity of it, is at an end.55

And something like an aesthetic attitude appears: It is true that persons of poetical minds, or accustomed to enjoy descriptions of this kind, learn to feel a relish for the circumstances in nature, which give rise to them; in the same manner as persons conversant with painting learn to relish things in nature, which are the proper subjects of that art; which otherwise they would not have noticed. Both see nature through the medium of art; though the peculiarities of the respective arts direct their attention to different qualities: for as painting addresses itself principally to the senses and imagination, its objects are chiefly beauties; while poetry, addressing itself wholly to the imagination and passions, seeks chiefly for energies.56

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But these are only hints or foreshadowing. For all of his reliance on feeling and sentiment, Knight is still a realist about emotions and attitudes. He has no patience with sentimentalism as such. He can be scathing and dismissive: That fluttering and fidgety curiosity;—that trembling irritability of habit, which cannot stoop to the tameness of reality, or the insipidity of common life; but is always interesting in itself in the more animated and brilliant events of fiction is often mistaken for real tenderness and sensibility of temper; and attributed in what, in the cant language of the times, is called a good heart; whereas it properly belongs to a deranged head.57

Fiction is fiction; reality is reality. When they conflict, reality must be preferred. “The only moral good, that appears to result from either poetry, music, painting, or sculpture, arises from their influence in civilizing and softening mankind, by substituting intellectual pleasures, to sensual pleasures; and turning the mind from violent and sanguinary, to mild and peaceful pursuits.”58 Thus speaks the country squire, no matter how much he belonged to the dilettanti or titillated with images of Priapus.

IV Picturesque taste and the theory of the picturesque found in the work of Price and Knight contribute directly to two important proto-aesthetic developments in the late eighteenth century: (i) the increasing autonomy of the fine arts independently of a moral taste and (ii) the replacement of a theory of taste itself by a theory of expression. From the beginning of interest in picturesqueness, there are tensions in the relation between the viewer and nature as source of sentimental experience. First of all, as soon as one begins to deal with the actual subject matter of nature, as opposed to imaginary landscapes, practical concerns intrude. Addison notes the difficulty: It might, indeed, be of ill Consequence to the Publick, as well as unprofitable to private Persons, to alienate so much Ground from Pasturage, and the Plow, in many Parts of a Country that is so well peopled, and cultivated to a far greater Advantage. But why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden by frequent Plantations, that may turn as much Profit, as the Pleasure of the Owner? … A Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.59

In fact, not just tourists and wealthy aristocrats but the practical concerns of rising country squires such as Price and Knight shape the picturesque and have a significant influence on its theoretical structure. We should not forget that for the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetics being described in this book, taste and moral experience are closely related both in their effects and their causes. Hutcheson prefaces his treatment of a moral sense with a sense of beauty, for example, because he assumes that one leads inevitably to the other. Character and taste are bound together. A taste for the picturesque and its

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separation from beauty and the sublime, however, plays a major role in bringing about a corresponding separation from the moral that allows the experience of art to stand alone. And thereby hangs the tale; the price for the autonomy of the fine arts is an isolation from the very nature that it seeks to contemplate in picturesque art, an experience that cannot be sustained without social and economic consequences that undermine the institutional basis of the experience of art itself. Of course, to the advocates of the picturesque in the eighteenth century, virtue is still united to one’s perception of nature. This link is especially important to someone like William Gilpin who must justify his enthusiasm within his own ecclesiastical circle. Thus Gilpin links the gardens at Stowe to improvement in character: When I sit ravished at an Oratorio, or stand astonished before the Cartoons, or enjoy myself in these happy Walks, I can feel my Mind expand itself, my Notions enlarge, and my Heart better disposed either for a religious Thought, or a benevolent Action: In a word, I cannot help imagining a Taste for these exalted Pleasures contributes towards making me a better Man.60

To Gilpin, a taste for the picturesque should be moral; but there are many difficulties in maintaining that connection. Not the least of these is simply the subject matter itself. Picturesque painting places the artist at a distance from the view as a detached observer or peoples the scene with socially marginal characters. John Barrell observes that the painter George Moreland’s use of such figures presumes a limitation that neutralizes what is shown: “When we grant an artist a license to paint such subjects as these, it is on the clear understanding that art is art only, and can function as a relief from moral pressures, but not as a challenge to morality.”61 Picturesque subject matter—smugglers, banditti, decay, and ruin—is only acceptable if it is suitably insulated from the actual world of the viewer. In this sense, the picturesque requires a dissociation from the actual consequences and realities of what appears. Literally, the picturesque depends on providing views and scenes to a spectator from some privileged vantage point. For example, the view from the house at Rousham is carefully staged, including a purpose-built ruin as an eye-catcher on the horizon. John Dixon Hunt draws a parallel to stage sets. “Not only were gardens organized in perspectival views like stage sets, but like those in the theater their scenes were unthinkable except as stages for human action.”62 Poetry and painting present scenes of a significant human action. A garden, too, is a scene that includes human action. Yet the actors must also be spectators. In other words, from the parallel of poetry to painting in the classical versions of picturesque theory, one moves to an application to gardens and scenes in nature that can be shaped into pictures. But implicitly, one must also be the viewer of the action, so that a detachment is required. Thus the picturesque comes to define a relation to nature that is increasingly detached. An important aspect of this detachment is its separation from ordinary life. The picturesque contributes directly to this separation of art from ordinary experience. If one follows Hunt’s description of the evolution from the French to the English garden,63 one might also note that the garden, and the valuation of nature in general, moves from one that is centered on human habitation (or loss) to one that

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essentially excludes the human. Initially, the garden is a natural allegory, as Bacon illustrated: “God Almightie first Planted a Garden. And indeed, it is the Purest of Humane pleasures.”64 It was God’s creation in the beginning. The association of a garden, then, with a great house or palace implied both a connection and a reference to the fall, since only those who are specially favored are admitted to this restored paradise.65 Above all, however, the garden had practical, human uses. It was occupied and lived in. Gradually, that human association is replaced by a garden that imitates an uninhabited or wild nature. Only strange and outcast figures—banditti and gypsies—occupy a Salvator Rosa landscape, and the more mythological scenes of Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine are equally distanced from the life of humans. Landowners hired hermits to complete their garden views. The experience of art as something distinct and autonomous replaces the union of human and moral qualities in gardens and thence in the experience of art. Later Romanticism is only one version of this divorce of the human from the actual everyday forms of nature. Burke’s sublime anticipates it. At some point, then, the picturesque becomes something independent of virtue and morality. Various attempts to hold together the moral and aesthetic view continue. Richard Payne Knight goes so far as to attribute civilization itself to good taste.66 But such exaggerated claims are obviously trying to overcome what is seen as a problem. Initially, good morals and good taste were understood in the same terms. For Shaftesbury, taste is a product of character and rank. Both taste and moral responses are equally matters of experience and sentiment that exemplifies the character of a person. For Hutcheson, both are equally matters of sense, guided by a fortunate teleology. But for the picturesque eye, the landscape is only conformable to a visual picture if one does not take into account what is actually going on in the picture. Gilpin and Knight desperately try to have taste produce character, implicitly reversing Shaftesbury’s order. This is evident not only in the preference for decay and a nostalgic fixation on the past but also in the way that that preference is realized. It does not matter whether the past is real or not. All that matters is how it looks. Just as distance and detachment become an implicit part of the picturesque, an explicit rejection of utility as a part of a picturesque sensibility significantly shifts sentiment from the kind of explanation that Hume gives of beauty as a felt experience toward the detached point of view of a spectator. For Hume, for example, utility plays a major explanatory role in accounting for the emotional qualities of beauty. Hume claims that “Most of the works of art are esteem’d beautiful, in proportion to their fitness for the use of man,” and he goes on to attribute the same origin to our sentiments in morals.67 In contrast, Price’s taste as he illustrated in his plans for his estate at Foxley abandons any notion of utility. Price considers neither the convenience nor usefulness of roads, for example. Obstacles “will force the wheels into sudden and intricate turns, at the same time those obstacles themselves, either wholly or partially concealing the former ones, add to that variety and intricacy.”68 He gives no thought to the problems such roads raise for transportation. What matters for the appreciator of picturesque experience is their appearance in a scene, real or painted. In general, one of the most striking features of the developing eighteenth-century treatment of the picturesque is its abstraction from the utility of the setting. The approach is always in

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terms of looking from some point of view, viewing, wandering, or traveling through. This was a contentious eighteenth-century issue with the enclosure acts and deserted villages.69 The viewer is a tourist or a detached landowner, even in those instances when husbandry and the picturesque are combined and the owner is very “interested” in the results. A related issue is the attitude toward luxury and excess expressed by seekers after the picturesque. The appeal of luxury and extravagant expense are moral problems, especially for the sentimentalists. Gilpin has his picturesque guide at Stowe, Callophilus, challenged by Polypthon who argues for a more practical use of the money expended on the gardens by Lord Cobham.70 Bernard Mandeville had gone so far as to suggest that even vice could be economically beneficial. But ornamentation and expense are necessary conditions for the picturesque as it develops. The whole picturesque relation to the environment assumes an excess beyond what is needed for human well-being, which is pushed into the background. The aesthetics of disinterestedness and an aesthetic attitude have to await Kant and his followers and Romanticism for a full development, but the picturesque way of viewing nature and the environment provides a bridge. As the picturesque becomes more and more divorced from practical and moral considerations, it is subject to the same kind of constant change that threatens taste because of its subjectivity, however. This leads Price to consider the need for a standard in picturesque gardening. He would like to appeal to a test of time, but he notes the intrinsic difficulty that natural scenes do not remain stable. Had the art of improving been cultivated for as long a time, and upon as settled principles, as that of painting, and were there extant various works of genius, which, like those of the other arts, had stood the test of ages (though from the great change which the growth and decay of trees must produce in the original design of the artist, this is hardly possible) there would not be the same necessity of referring and comparing the works of reality to those of imitation; but as the case stands at present, the only models that approach to perfection, the only fixed and unchanging selections from the works of nature, united with those of art, are in the pictures and designs of the most eminent masters.71

By studying pictures, one has access to a version of landscape that remains fixed because it has been detached from its original subject matter. Nature itself is a bit too unruly if left to grow by itself. Price’s argument parallels Hume’s appeal to time and rules in “Of the Standard of Taste.” Hume argued that only an emergent set of models derived from the sensibility of qualified judges allows taste to appeal to a standard. Price similarly establishes emergent models. Painters are successful through the manipulation of the same elements—principally color, light and shadow, and composition—that are available to the improver. Painting is validated over time. Improvements cannot directly undergo such evaluation, but if painting is regarded as a kind of experiment in design, then what succeeds in painting will also validate some forms of improvement and reject others. The picturesque is the best model.

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In addition to introducing distance and detachment, both physically and emotionally, and thus separating taste from moral and practical concerns and the variability of time, the picturesque leads to a way of identifying expressive qualities in nature. The proto-aesthetics of the late eighteenth century makes use of a wide range of expressive properties identified with natural properties. Spring is fresh, streams are happy or laughing, rapid motion is powerful, and so on. We take most of these expressive properties for granted as conventional. But they pose questions of identification and justification. Theories of expression account for them by a complex of imagination and association of ideas that depends on a view of ideas of beauty and of the expression of the mind’s powers itself that were central to eighteenth-century theories of taste and beauty as forms of experience. How then are the needed associations established? The theory of the picturesque provides one important element in linking nature to the expression of qualities and accounting for how particular associations are established. Picturesqueness expands the qualities that allow some theories to identify expressive categories themselves in experience. As we have seen, the picturesque, in particular, and the whole assimilation of nature to art in the latter half of the eighteenth century completely recast and replace the earlier view of nature as an idealization of confused ideas present in natural scenes. The allegorical impetus that showed nature to be a moral book is replaced by a nature that expresses emotions and qualities from the sublime to the beautiful. Burke, who is so important as an influence on Price and Knight as theorists of the picturesque, still tries to find the pattern in essentially Aristotelian terms of formal, efficient, and final causes. His major innovation was to reassert the importance of a social psychology in addition to the individual psychology based on love and desire. The sublime dwarfs the individual and provides an experience of vastness and absorption—a religious awe—that goes beyond a single individual. Yet it remains an emotion felt by an individual as either painful or pleasurable. Price’s addition of the picturesque to Burke’s sublime and beautiful changes how those categories themselves are understood. They are expressions of some natural category of feeling and not just sentimental responses with no order of their own. Burke provides Price, Gilpin, and Knight (by way of argument and contrast) grounds for transforming natural qualities into expressive qualities. The failure of earlier attempts by artists like Reynolds and Hogarth to provide a causal account linking particular natural qualities to particular emotional responses—small, curvilinear forms to beauty, and so on—is corrected by a different kind of psychological explanation based on the association of ideas. The activity of the mind itself provides the connection. Beauty is an objectification of the mind’s own experience. The picturesque is the most important form of this objectification because it reestablishes the link to nature and natural qualities that is in danger of being lost in the subjective shift to individual psychology. That connection must be reestablished because it is so important to the actual practice of poets and painters, and, for a time, it finds its strongest support and elucidation in the practice of landscape gardeners, picturesque tourists, and the landed owners of estates like Price and Knight. The culmination of this psychological move is the assignment of qualities to natural sensory ideas. This takes the form of a theory of expression that identifies experiences of nature

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as expressive of proto-aesthetic qualities. Uvedale Price follows Burke and writes as if beauty and the picturesque were the result of certain efficient causes, but his taste responds independently of that external, objectivist approach. His derivation of the picturesque as a separate category depends on the expressive qualities that painting and poetry have by this time associated with nature and that he has explained in treating the appreciation of painting as a form of education of the eye and the appreciation of nature as a means to a painterly vision. The picturesque, in effect, assimilates the reality of nature to a proto-aesthetic vision by distancing actual nature from the point of view of the observer. It drives a wedge between the artist and the reality of nature, a separation that is justified only by appeals to the value of art and the picturesque experience itself. The picturesque as it developed through the eighteenth century is a basic way of making an expressive connection with nature concrete, therefore. It treats a physical environment as the stuff for an expression of psychological qualities by carefully arranging and controlling the associations that sensory experience produces. The mind is guided to the correct associations by education in the arts, particularly landscape painting and pastoral poetry, and these associations are physically presented by the arrangement of the landscape itself. Thus Price’s attacks on the “insipidity” of Brown are motivated by the limited associations that the repetitive practice of Brown and his followers use. Mr. Brown was bred a gardener, and having nothing of the mind or the eye of a painter, he formed his style (or rather his plan) upon the model of a parterre, and transferred its minute beauties, its little clumps, knots, and patches of flowers, the oval belt that surrounds it, and all its twists and cincum crancums, to the great scale of nature.72

According to Price, Brown fails on three counts: he lacks breeding (here speaks the squire); he lacks art and consequently the taste predicates that picturesque art provides; and he lacks a proper sense of the scale required for the picturesque. Price comes around to what amounts to an expressive theory of his own. That is, certain expressive properties account for the effect of smoothness and others for the effect of roughness. “One principal effect of smoothness, and to which perhaps it owes its so general power of pleasing, is, that it gives an appearance of quiet and repose to all objects; roughness, on the contrary, a spirit and animation. These seem to me likewise the most prevailing effects of the beautiful and the picturesque.”73 But he does not explain further. One is left to suppose that the associations that link the expressive adjectives with the physical properties are natural. Knight, who depends explicitly on association, recognizes that this would be a problem because of the diversity of taste. A further problem is that Price immediately infers that smoothness is not only a sufficient condition for beauty but a necessary one as well—“where there is a want of smoothness there is a want of repose, and consequently of beauty”74—which would not follow. In general, then, Price’s arguments themselves do not establish the picturesque as an expressive proto-aesthetic. His reasoning is too diffuse and superficial for that. But his combination of experience and application shows most clearly where the picturesque has led by the end of the eighteenth century.

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The formulation of the picturesque exemplified in the work of Price and Knight leads to a much more important and coherent way of understanding nature in a protoaesthetic theory, therefore. Instead of the alternatives of neoclassical imitation on the one hand and sentimental effect on the other, the picturesque leads (conceptually, though not necessarily as a matter of conscious influence) to the formulation by the end of the eighteenth century of theories of natural expressiveness. Two things emerge from the eighteenth-century development of the picturesque: First, the culmination of the move toward the separation of the practical, utilitarian, and convenient from the contemplative and visual effects that are regarded as valuable, especially in the case of the environment and the use of nature in landscape painting and gardening; and second, the identification of expressive features of natural objects as the product of imagination and specifically as expressive of the mind itself, and the assignment of them to an associative theory of the mind.75 Without the transformation of nature by the picturesque theory of sensory appropriation of one’s environment, the link between experience and sensory qualities that is central to the expressivism of the end of the century would be impossible.

10

Thomas Reid and the Theory of Taste

By the end of the eighteenth century, philosophical theories of beauty and taste had moved away from the epistemological concerns of Locke and those he influenced. On the one hand, the empiricists had triumphed. The questions were no longer whether beauty and taste are Platonic realities or innate qualities that can be discovered by rational investigation. The questions have become what kinds of experience and what senses inform criticism. The fine arts and natural scenery are the objects of beauty, and taste is an artworld problem that demands standards because of its inherent subjectivity. The century began with the need to find the philosophical grounds for a theory of beauty that was not Platonic or Neoplatonic and criticism became increasingly philosophically aware. Proto-aesthetic philosophers turned to taste as the natural focus of a subjective form of experience. In the course of the century, philosophical writers, largely outside the universities, provided that theory and it was taken up by artists, critics, connoisseurs, and dilettantes. In one sense, however, the end of the century comes full circle. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume depended on experience and sentiment for both moral theory and a theory of taste. But they worked in the belles lettres tradition. Hutcheson held an academic position, but his moral theory and his theory of beauty were suspect in Calvinist Glasgow. (For his academic audience he wrote a Latin compendium of moral theory.) As a theorist of beauty and a moral philosopher, he practiced a different form of writing. Shaftesbury and Hume were not academics; they wrote for what they hoped was a different audience of the educated elites. Only Gerard of the essayists who followed them belonged to a university circle, and his Essay on Taste and Essay on Genius were not strictly academic works. But Thomas Reid was an academic writing for an academic audience, as was Dugald Stewart. Archibald Alison belonged to their circle. They challenge what by the end of the century was the received version of the basis for a theory of taste and beauty. So they return to epistemological fundamentals. After the expansion of senses and debates over standards of taste, Reid, Alison, and Stewart raise again the question, “Just what is beauty or taste?” Their answer is more directly a philosophy of mind and points more directly toward what we might consider aesthetics than the proto-aesthetics that I have been explicating. They are less interested in the fine arts than in the psychology of the audience and artist. In that way, they anticipate Romanticism and idealism. We should consider their theories in their own right, however. They are not footnotes to the nineteenth-century

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aesthetic theories that come after them but independent investigations that provide a response to the sentimental theories that follow Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume.

I Thomas Reid offers an alternative epistemology to the theories based on sentiment that began with Locke while remaining clearly in the empiricist line of theory. His impact in his own day and immediately following is reflected in the edition of his works edited by Sir William Hamilton and in the memoir composed by Dugald Stewart. Reid was recognized as the most important advocate of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, and he had a significant influence on continental philosophy and education, particularly in France. Yet the judgment of his contemporaries and immediate successors was not altogether kind, and it largely won out over his academic admirers. Reid’s own editor, Sir William Hamilton, can be devastating in his notes. (Hamilton himself has attracted the ire of subsequent generations. Hilary Putnam calls him “pompous, vain, and extraordinarily obtuse.”1 But I confess that I often find his notes on target, especially when he is pointing out Reid’s less than accurate reading of Hume.) Kant’s judgment had seemed likely to be the final one. Lumping Reid together not only with his friends but with one of his leading critics, Kant concludes, But Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood. It is positively painful to see how utterly his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and lastly Priestley, missed the point of the problem; for while they were ever taking for granted that which he doubted, and demonstrating with zeal and often with impudence that which he never thought of doubting, they so misconstrued his valuable suggestion that everything remained in its old condition, as if nothing had happened.2

When it comes to an assessment of Hume versus Reid, Kant likely still would be judged correct by most philosophers.3 Reid himself can be infuriating to one who comes to him from reading Hume or Locke. Reid has an agenda—to defeat skepticism—and is maddeningly dogmatic and inconsistent in the ways he attacks what he understands to be the theory of ideas. There is also a deep strain of Calvinist piety that allows Reid to repeatedly turn aside arguments by an appeal to God or the “Nature that He has given us.” If we cannot know or understand everything that we want to know or understand, that is because our nature is what it is. (This is the strain that appeals to Nicholas Wolterstorff.) Reid is no Calvinist extremist, however. His correspondence complains of the gloomy outlook of the clergy after his removal from Aberdeen to Glasgow.4 But I cannot help thinking that Hume did in fact include Reid when he complained in a letter to Hugh Blair, “I wish that the Parsons would confine themselves to their old occupation of worrying one another, and leave Philosophers to argue with temper, moderation, and good manners”5—in spite of qualifications concerning Reid and attempts by Reid’s defenders to dissociate him from Oswald and Beattie. In short, one has to bring a

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considerable patience to a reading of Thomas Reid if one is not to conclude that he is simply an academic with a rather annoying taste for distortion and ridicule of those with whom he disagrees. But the claims for Reid are sufficiently strong and Reid’s philosophy is sufficiently complex and challenging to make it worth the effort to try to understand it if we are to understand the final stages of the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetic that is our subject. With that in mind, I turn directly to Reid.

II In spite of reservations expressed by some, Reid’s theory of perception is still the best place to begin to try to determine what Reid holds positively if we are interested in his proto-aesthetic philosophy.6 His own theory grows out of his polemical rejection of the way of ideas. From Descartes to Hume, in spite of all of their internal differences, a view of perception as an impression of the world on a mind had achieved dominance. In Hume’s language, impressions and ideas are the mental correlates of the external world, and the impressions and ideas are the immediate objects of perception. The actual physical objects are only mediately present of necessity just because they are physical and not mental. So what one perceives is not the world but impressions and ideas of the world, and it is the task of the philosopher, as opposed to the vulgar, to find the justification, if there be any, for taking what one perceives to be really what there is. It is this picture of ideas that Reid rejects. Reid takes the basic argument that he opposes to be this: (i) We can know the external world only by the senses; (ii) to know the external world by the senses requires that the sensations resemble or are images in the mind of the external world; (iii) but Berkeley and Hume have shown there is no resemblance between sensations in the mind and the external world. (iv) Therefore, we have only sensations and ideas; the external world is either hidden or unreal. Reid believes that Hume’s version of this theory of perception is consistent and the inevitable consequence of interposing ideas between external objects and the mind’s grasp of objects. The result must be skepticism. So Reid offers an alternative construction that he believes is at once more direct and more limited. In brief, it goes like this: there is indeed a causal chain that leads from objects to the physical impressions that affect the mind. We know this causal chain in the same way we know any other scientific fact, that is, by induction from observation. But sensation is itself immediate and mental. As Reid says, “This is common to all sensations, that, as they cannot exist but in being perceived, so they cannot be perceived but they must exist. I could as easily doubt of my own existence, as of the existence of my sensations.”7 Sensation is quite distinct from physical impressions, but sensations are not ideas or perceptions. What sensation offers is an unmediated presence of the external attributes or qualities of objects. To get to perception, then, one must already have mentally some conceptual apparatus. The combination of conception, supplied by the mind as an active faculty, and belief, supplied by the immediate and unquestionable presence of sensation, gives perception. Each perception carries with it its own justification because it could not come into being without the belief in the existence of that which

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is conceived. So one does not perceive some immediate mental object that must be mediately related to external objects. Perception itself is a perception of the object, not of an impression or idea. It is especially important to note that for Reid, perception is of attributes or qualities, both primary and secondary, that are united in the belief in the existence of their objects. One may be confused about the total object, but not about the existence of the particular attributes. What I take to be a red book may in fact be a red box, but the existence of a rectangular red object is as certain as anything can be. Reid’s examples include perceptions of a wall provided by leaning one’s head against it.8 Touch gives a perception of the hardness of the wall. It is not an idea of hardness but the quality of the hardness of the wall itself that is perceived, and that hardness is believed to be the wall’s, not the mind’s. All conceptions must begin with such existentially grounded occurrences.9 Only subsequently can one identify a bare conception or mere apprehension detached from the belief in the objective existence of something. Bare conceptions are derived, therefore. The fundamental perceptual states are complex, the result of an active, not a passive mind; and they are existentially self-evident and thus immune to the skeptical doubts that Reid attributes to any version of the theory of ideas. This sketch, of course, is only a very simple version of a complex process with many problems of its own. Some of the complexity and problems become immediately evident. The key argument comes in Section IV of An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Reid writes, “For it is acknowledged by all, that sensation must go before memory and imagination; and hence it necessarily follows that apprehension, acompanied [sic] by belief and knowledge, must go before simple apprehension, at least in the matters we are now speaking of.”10 This is Reid’s basic claim, from which he never departs. We must start with knowledge, or we could never begin at all—that is, we would all be skeptics. But there are several things wrong with this argument. First, it jumps from belief to knowledge. Even if it is true that we begin with a complex apprehension that includes belief, it does not follow that that belief is true or justified. Reid slips knowledge in, and that is one of the senses that he gives to ‘common sense.’ If challenged, he has several different answers: a philosophical dogmatic answer—these are principles that can be neither defended nor argued about; a theological dogmatic answer—God has so ordered things; and another version of common sense—what cannot not be believed must be taken to be true. But none of these answers by itself allays our suspicion that too much has been included. All of our perceptions are not accurate, and we would like to know how to sort them. There is a second problem with this basic argument also. As Reid’s own analogy that follows immediately actually shows, he is in danger of confusing the order of knowing and the order of being. He cites chemical compounds, which only appear as compounds and then must be analyzed into their elements as a parallel to the relation of apprehension and simple apprehension.11 But that analogy would actually show that while we only know by analysis, the process of formation is from simple to compound. Nature works from the simple to the complex. Applied to the mind, that would mean that while our knowledge of the content of our minds must begin with complex apprehension, the mind’s interior workings, like chemical compounds, presume a

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mental chemistry that is not directly apprehended. This idea of mental chemistry is a fairly common one in eighteenth-century discussions of the mind.12 Reid seems to both accept it and reject it at the same time. He accepts it by treating apprehension as complex, but he rejects it by claiming that the complex apprehension is itself unanalyzably epistemic and that matter cannot be conceived to produce thought. Yet perception, on Reid’s account, must be subject to analysis since it is fundamentally based on the conceptual apprehension of both primary and secondary qualities. Reid argues as follows: “If the qualities of body were known to us only by sensations that resemble them, then colour, and sound, and heat could be no qualities of body; but these are real qualities of body; and therefore, the qualities of body are not known only by means of sensations that resemble them.”13 That leaves two alternatives for Reid: (i) the qualities of bodies are known by sensations that do not resemble them, or (ii) the qualities of bodies are not known by sensation at all but by some other means (innate principles). Reid seems in An Inquiry into the Human Mind to opt for the first, but he can give only a sketchy account of how sensations that do not resemble qualities of bodies can “suggest” those qualities—it comes down to original principles of our being and natural signs.14 In other places, he seems to entertain the possibility that these original principles are given by nature and thus that we might know qualities of bodies independently of the senses. In either case, Reid is concerned to deny that the relation between sensation and perception is inferential since that would return him to the Berkeley/Hume problem as he understands it. One point to consider here is what Reid expects to get from the rejection of inferences in our perception of external objects, particularly when those external objects are other minds. It seems obvious, quite independently of any particular version of the theory of ideas, that the standards for knowing that X is a real object and that it has a mind (if it does) can be problematic. Reid does not want to deny that one can be mistaken, for example. What I took to be another person could be one of Descartes’s animal automatons that lack souls or even a holographic automaton such as the doctor in one of the Star Trek variations. Then there is neither a real object nor another mind as there appears to be. If I wander onto that version of the Enterprise, I might inadvertently find myself talking to what is not even a machine and believing that it is a person. Nothing in Reid’s metaphysics and epistemology makes that impossible. What Reid does want to deny is that the route from sensation to perception is inferential. It is, he argues, immediate in the sense that nothing intervenes between sensation and perception, and perception implies both a concept of the object and a belief in its existence. Moreover, to ask for justification of the perception is not just foolish, it is philosophically unmotivated because whatever theory I try to develop will depend on the same immediate conception plus belief that the sensations utilize. The only recourse that one has in the case of possible error is inductive correction, therefore, in which case the sensation just utilizes a different conception plus belief—I perceive a holographic image rather than a sentient doctor. So the point of Reid’s epistemological theory is to short-circuit some kinds of philosophical questioning. He does not make this very clear because he is so vehemently opposed to some of the other consequences of skepticism, particularly its theological consequences. Reid believes that Hume is neither a Christian nor even a pious unbeliever. He is a dangerous man,

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though one whose intellect Reid recognized and whose intellectual approval Reid sought at one point. But polemic aside, Reid is offering a radically new account of perceptual knowledge. Reid continues to rely directly on experience, but he moves experience away from the theory of ideas. Our experience is not of ideas but of objects, including mental objects such as the mind itself. This reading of Reid’s way of arguing is consistent with two tendencies that Reid exhibits but does not make an explicit part of his philosophy. The first is a tendency to escape into obscurantism. At crucial points, Reid simply denies that there is anything more to be said. In his view this is not skepticism because it does not doubt what has been perceived. It is simply that all questioning must stop in the face of a certain level of belief. The second tendency is to a limited occasionalism. Since immediacy is just the inescapable conception plus belief of perception, and one cannot get behind that to any necessary law or representative sensation, it follows that God could arrange perception differently. There is no necessary connection between thing and sensation nor sensation and perception. “Since there is no necessary connection between these two things [color and position] suggested by this material impression, it might, if it had so pleased our Creator, have suggested one of them without the other.”15 Further, “No man can shew it to be impossible to the Supreme Being to have given us the power of perceiving external objects without such organs.”16 If that is the case, then from one occasion to the next, God, at least potentially, must be in control. That we can rely on commonsense induction—the expectation that experience is reliable—is itself nothing more than another form of our limited human epistemology. Other beings that did not depend on sensation as we do might have other expectations. The problem that Reid has with the limitations of experience is about existence, therefore, and it goes all the way back to Locke’s reliance on ideas. Locke claimed that one can compare ideas, even ideas of existence. One knows the difference between something that exists and something that does not exist only by comparing the ideas themselves. Reid does not believe that such comparison of ideas is possible. Reid’s attack on Locke’s claims about the comparison of ideas is somewhat muddled with respect to existence claims, however. Reid argues, (i) I believe that a present sensation exists and a past sensation does not exist. (ii) According to Locke, I compare the idea of a sensation with the ideas of past and present existence. (iii) This idea agrees with the idea of present existence and disagrees with the idea of past existence. (iv) At another time, the same idea agrees with the idea of past existence and disagrees with the idea of present existence. So the same idea both agrees and disagrees with past existence. Never mind that one would first have to sort out the indexical nature of the ideas. It is enough to see that Reid attributes to Locke an idea of existence that he nowhere claims. Locke’s claim about the comparison of ideas amounts only to the claim that what I believe about X is compared to other ideas that I believe. If I have experience of horses, then I believe my memory of a horse, unless it conflicts with other ideas that I remember. But absent experience of unicorns, I do not believe in them. I have an idea of a unicorn (composed from descriptions and representations), but compared to my ideas of horses and ibexes, my unicorn ideas do not agree because they are not experientially like my ideas of horses and ibexes. Nowhere in this is there a comparison to an idea of existence. Locke undoubtedly has difficulty with existential claims that

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cannot be fully accounted for by the agreement and disagreement of ideas. But Reid’s simple refutation on the basis of changes between past and present, sensation and memory, ignores what Locke means by comparison and agreement. The underlying issue that these problems about existence and belief brings out is that Reid needs to extend his account of perception to include both memory and imagination because he denies that the object of perception is an idea or sensation, but when he does, temporal existence creates problems for his commonsense view of perception. If perception is only present perception, then the elimination of an intermediary mental idea has a considerable plausibility. Nothing intervenes between the object of my perception and the perception itself, and if perception includes belief, then whatever I believe is what I believe. It makes no sense to say that I believe that there is a clock on the wall here and now and yet that belief does not include a belief in the existence of the clock. But that is merely a fact about the way that belief works. I cannot both believe P and know that P is not the case, so pragmatically, my belief that P implies my belief in the existence of the object of P (i.e., If I believe P, then I must believe that the object of P exists), even though I undoubtedly believe many things that are not the case. If I am wrong, then both my belief that P and my belief about the reference of P are false. Reid means more. He claims that perception is perception of the object itself; therefore perception implies the existence of its object even if it is not a present event and consequently objects are as directly known in memory and imagination as they are in the present. That claim is much harder to sustain because neither the past nor the future exists in the same way that the present does, as Reid readily acknowledges. Reid claims that the object of memory is the thing, not an idea of it: “Memory appears to me to have things that are past, and not present ideas, for its object.”17 He understands that claim to imply that “that very sensation which I had yesterday, and which has now no more existence, is the immediate object of my memory.”18 But if sensations cannot be perceived because perception is always conception plus belief and not an impression or sensation itself, then how is the sensation itself the immediate object of memory and yet nonexistent? Somehow, Reid equivocates on sensation. On the one hand, it is a Berkeleyan perception: to be is to be perceived. On the other hand, sensation by itself is nonrepresentational and implies no object. If sensation were representational, Reid would just have Hume’s impressions by another name. Only perception is representational and objective. So when one moves to memory, it is unclear how the sensation itself can be the object. If the object is not a mental representation of some sort, I would seem to have to actually reexperience the smell of a rose in my memory as present sensations, something that I clearly do not have to do and that Reid denies. What seems to be really going on for Reid is that he wants sensation to be both independent of its cause and related to it. He understands resemblance very narrowly. A resembles B if and only if A is like B both ontologically (both are either mental or physical) and epistemologically (both are either immediately or inferentially known). So sensation does not include resemblance because it is ontologically different (sensation is mental; resemblance is physical). Reid does not allow that a resemblance might be a consistent mapping or modeling of two ontologically and epistemologically

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disparate things. So sensation cannot be like the rose, but at the same time, if there are no intermediate objects of the same ontological type (ideas, images), then Reid has a problem with what the object of memory is. It would seem that when I remember the smell of a rose, I would have only the sensation as object, and that that sensation must be an immediate rose-smell. But memory lacks the immediacy that perception requires in order to have existential warrant. Perhaps that is why Reid so often has recourse to a kind of argumentum ignorantium: “I believe that no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations: they are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.”19 Reid is usually categorized as a realist as opposed to the “ideationalism” of Berkeley and Hume. ‘Realism’ is a tricky term, however. Reid is considered a direct realist because of his antiskeptical stance with regard to the external world, the self, and mental substance. That follows from his basic claim that perception presents its objects directly rather than by means of some other mental entities and that philosophical first principles are true and can be known to be true directly. Reid’s basic realist argument, repeated in different variations as it applies to different subjects but with essentially the same moves, depends on the assertion of principles that in themselves cannot be challenged. Reid writes, There are, therefore, common principles, which are the foundation of all reasoning and of all science. Such common principles seldom admit of direct proof, nor do they need it. Men need not to be taught them; for they are such as all men of common understanding know; or such, at least, as they give a ready assent to, as soon as they are proposed and understood.20

So such principles are known naturally and assented to as soon as they are understood. Of the self and the intentionality of thought, for example, Reid simply claims, “That every act or operation, therefore, supposes an agent, that every quality supposes a subject, are things which I do not attempt to prove, but take for granted.”21 But these claims are not just dogmatic assertions (though they are that). They follow from the basic perceptual argument that links perception and belief via conceptions. Reid, in effect, reverses the import of Berkeley’s claim that “To be is to be perceived.” For Reid, to be perceived is to be. That something is perceived imposes its existence on us. Only subsequently can one detach the existence claim and retreat to a simple apprehension or bare conception. So realism, in that sense, is a condition of perception. As soon as one acknowledges some perception either by using language or by simply living practically, one accepts realism. Reid’s frequent ridicule of skepticism as not just practically but also theoretically absurd rests on his claim that the most basic perceptual acts of the mind already have acknowledged first principles as he understands them. In one sense, then, Reid is quite a strong realist. He applies his basic argument to the mind, to the external world, to time, to beauty, to ethical properties, and especially to the self. Only on mathematical entities might one find an antirealist Reid. In another sense, however, it is misleading to call Reid a realist. In philosophical terms he himself still recognized and made use of, he is a conceptualist rather than either a nominalist or a realist. Reid holds that only individuals exist, but knowledge of their existence

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as individuals is dependent on their instantiation under concepts. “Our conceptions, therefore, appear to be of three kinds. They are either the conceptions of individual things, the creatures of God; or they are conceptions of the meaning of general words; or they are the creatures of our own imagination.”22 Further, “Everything that really exists is an individual. Universals are neither acts of the mind, nor images in the mind.”23 So it makes no sense to Reid to try to speak of unconceptualized individuals. As a result, Reid’s first principles appear dogmatic. To classify Reid as a realist, therefore, is to ignore the depth of his commitment to a mind–body dualism that denies any relation of similarity or resemblance between the mental and physical worlds. For Reid, that dualism is so complete that any attempt to connect the two via “ideas” must be regarded with disdain approaching ridicule. That fact is the real motive for Reid’s rejection of all appeals to ideas as mental representations or resemblances of physical objects. What is mental cannot resemble what is physical. If impressions and ideas are mental, as they clearly are for Berkeley and Hume, then they cannot be images or resemblances of things according to Reid. Reid credits Hume with recognizing that impossibility and thus classifies Hume as a skeptic. As Reid describes it, the steps in perception are (i) an object must be in contact, directly or indirectly, with an organ; (ii) an impression is formed on the organ; (iii) that impression must be made on nerves and then on the brain; (iv) the impression is followed by sensation; (v) sensation is followed by perception.24 Between impression and sensation, there is an unbridgeable epistemological gap: “But how are the sensations of the mind produced by impressions upon the body? Of this we are absolutely ignorant, having no means of knowing how the body acts upon the mind, or the mind upon the body.”25 Reid’s objection to the theory of ideas is, at bottom, that ideas illegitimately claim to be both mind and body (by being images or representations) at once. So if Reid is a realist, it is a funny sort of realism that keeps mind and body so separate that only original principles of our nature can be inserted into the gap, and those principles must rest on common sense in the more technical meaning of that which one cannot not believe. It should be clear, therefore, that Reid’s repeated recourse to what he calls first principles is motivated by several underlying arguments, all of which lead back to his theory of perception. The role of first principles is twofold. They provide the starting point for all reasoning, though that reasoning need not be deductive inference. For Reid, it is more often a form of Baconian induction. And they provide the ultimate warrant for existence claims and thus for the belief necessary for perception. Since they are first principles, Reid claims that they cannot themselves be warranted. They can, however, be explicated in a limited way. Reid writes, There are ways by which the evidence of first principles may be made more apparent when they are brought into dispute; but they require to be handled in a way peculiar to themselves. Their evidence is not demonstrative, but intuitive. They require not proof, but to be placed in a proper point of view.26

This “placing” is not itself inferential or perceptual. It is intuitive and depends on Reid’s continued adherence to a faculty psychology.

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Reid catalogues a number of first principles that he depends on, though the listing should not be taken as exhaustive. A first principle is just anything that is intuitively essential to perception. Among the first principles are (1) the testimony of thinking, remembering, reasoning: “Every man finds himself under a necessity of believing what consciousness testifies, and everything that hath this testimony is to be taken as a first principle”; (2) Memory—remembrance is next to present consciousness in certainty; (3) Reflection (our attention to internal objects)— This reflection is a kind of intuition, it gives a like conviction with regard to internal objects, or things in the mind, as the faculty of seeing gives with regard to objects of sight. A man must, therefore, be convinced beyond possibility of doubt, of everything with regard to the operations of his own mind, which he clearly and distinctly discerns by attentive reflection;

(4) The existence and identity of the self: “Every man has an immediate and irresistible conviction, not only of his present existence, but of his continued existence and identity, as far back as he can remember”; (5) The intentionality of thought: “Such qualities necessarily suppose a subject.” … “That every act or operation, therefore, supposes an agent, that every quality supposes a subject, are things which I do not attempt to prove, but take for granted”; (6) The authority of common sense as expressed in language: “We shall have frequent occasion to argue from the sense of mankind expressed in the structure of language”; and (7) The authority of sense, memory, and human testimony (of sober and reasonable men).27 All of these principles are taken to be sufficient reasons for belief. Now it is obvious that many specific instances of error and misapplication could arise. Reid cannot mean that one is never mistaken in what one remembers or that one is never deceived. First principles do not function as specific guarantees of specific propositions. They guarantee the reliability of the faculties, not the infallibility of specific judgments. (Reid does hold that judgment is always implied in sensation.) First principles function for Reid in the way that the proofs for the existence of God function for Descartes (whose reliance on such proofs Reid criticizes because the very faculties that are to be guaranteed are required for the proofs). But since Reid rejects all forms of the theory of ideas, including Cartesian rationalism, he does not view first principles as guarantees of certainty but as themselves the unquestionable foundation for consciousness itself. The first five principles listed can be formulated as a general claim that refutes a form of skepticism and enforces a form of realism. The last two are different. They specify the evidential qualities that one depends on. Reid’s recourse to first principles takes various forms, including a claim that they are “axioms” like the axioms of Newton, but at bottom they are claims for the reliability of our perceptual faculties. Reid’s invoking of first principles can be frustrating. They certainly suggest some form of teleological foundation, whether it is God or nature. The most difficult point to understand, however, is the extent to which Reid’s reliance on concepts and first principles implies innate ideas (as Hume thought). As we saw above, ‘innate idea’ is itself ambiguous. The rejection of innate ideas was, of course, a point of contention

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even before Locke and his critics made it prominent. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one held a theory of innate ideas as fully formulated internal propositions. Even the kind of innateness associated with the slave boy of Plato’s Meno is more explicit than what was at issue between Locke and his critics. As John Yolton has argued, in the seventeenth century, two forms of innateness theory were utilized: The naive form claimed that God wrote into or impressed upon the soul or mind at birth certain ideas and precepts (or a developed conscience capable of deciding what is right and wrong, independent of custom or learning) for the guidance of life and the foundation of morality, even though we do not become aware of these innate principles (or of the conscience) until maturity.28

But that naïve form was modified into a dispositional theory: The tendency to modify the naive form into a dispositional doctrine of innate knowledge was implicit as early as 1611 in William Sclater. Under this tendency the theory claimed not that men are born with completed ideas and principles of morality, but only that such knowledge was implicit in the soul and merely required experience to elicit awareness of it.29

Neither form of innateness requires conceptualization to precede sensation in Reid’s sense, but neither form as Yolton describes it would conflict with many forms of empiricist naturalism either. If what Yolton describes is all that is meant by innateness, then it certainly seems that Reid does hold something like that thesis. In fact, much of what William Wollaston objected to in the theory of innate ideas in 1722 sounds very much as if it might have been directed at Reid some sixty-odd years later: They, who contenting themselves with superficial and transient views deduce the difference between good and evil from the common sense of mankind, and certain principles that are born with us, put the matter upon a very infirm foot. For it is much to be suspected there are no such innate maxims as they pretend, but that the impressions of education are mistaken for them: and besides that, the sentiments of mankind are not so uniform and constant, as that we may safely trust such an important distinction upon them.30

The real issue becomes how much can be attributed to experience alone and whether the mind is passive or active. For Reid, it must be active, and for that to be the case, the mind must be equipped with concepts that belong to the mind from the beginning and do not have to be impressed passively by experience. But concepts, as Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued, need not be understood as conceptions under which particulars are categorized. Wolterstorff explains, When Reid speaks, say, of having a conception of a cat, he never means what we mean when we say that we have a concept of cat. He almost always means what he himself says he will mean, namely, an apprehension of some particular

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cat. The exceptions are those cases in which he means, instead, some belief about some particular cat. … Reid uses “conception” to cover three very different types of apprehension: nominative apprehension, conceptual apprehension (i.e., apprehension by means of a singular concept), and presentational apprehension (i.e., apprehension by acquaintance).31

If that is correct, Reid can still maintain that he is not using innate ideas in the way that Descartes and the rationalists used them without going all the way over to the empiricism of Locke and Hume. The strongest version of common sense is that it is what must be accepted observationally, including testimony, and thus that induction proceeds from empirical witness. The alternative, more problematic version is that it is what everyone believes. The latter, to which Reid often turns polemically, raises the obvious skeptical challenge that it is, at best, a very changeable agreement, but Reid should be granted the stronger version if one reads charitably. Reid has two polemical targets—the materialism of Hobbes and what he takes to be the necessary skepticism of the theory of ideas. Against Hobbes, Hartley, and the mechanical philosophy, Reid maintains a dualism of mind and body. “There appears to be a vast interval between body and mind; and whether there be any intermediate nature that connects them together, we know not.”32 Matter cannot think. Against Hartley’s speculations and “hypotheses,” Reid objects, “There is indeed nothing more ridiculous than to imagine that any motion or modification of matter should produce thought.”33 Against the skepticism of the theory of ideas, Reid claims, as we have seen in some detail, that no resemblance can exist between ideas and objects. If we have knowledge of objects, as common sense assures us that we do, it must be that perception is realist. Reid’s own beliefs are, therefore, essentially conservative. It is not just that his doctrine of conceptions and notions suggests the very innate ideas that Locke sought to oppose. Reid’s arguments are often very reminiscent of earlier ways of arguing. Consider, for example, the following: “We cannot possibly know at all the things themselves by the Ideas, unless we know certainly those Ideas are Right Resemblances of them. But we can never know … that their Ideas are Right Resemblances of the Things; therefore we cannot possibly know at all the Things by their Ideas.”34 Aside from the syllogistic form, one might take this for Reid himself. In fact it is from John Sergeant’s attack on Locke published in 1697. One can find many similar parallels in the earlier literature. (We noted William Wollaston’s comment on innateness, for example.) The conclusion should not be that Reid is not doing more than his predecessors or that he is dependent on them, though Reid’s teacher, George Turnbull, and his friend, Lord Kames, are possible intermediate sources for many of the arguments that Reid advances. Reid is clearer, less scholastic, and more independent than his predecessors and contemporaries. But much of what Reid argues against materialism and skepticism is concerned with issues that were being debated a hundred years before. He is not anticipating our concerns but looking back to those of his Calvinist, Protestant forbearers. In addition to being a founder of a school of “commonsense” philosophy and a realist in at least a qualified way, Reid’s form of innateness leads him to be categorized as a naturalist by a number of scholars. Scottish naturalism at the end of the eighteenth

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century is definable as the view that one must already have a natural knowledge before reasoning and inference can come into play. H. O. Mounce explains, The essence of Scottish naturalism is that our knowledge has its source not in our experience or reasoning but in our relations to a world which transcends both our knowledge and ourselves. … [For Scottish naturalists] our ideas or beliefs cannot simply be the product of sense experience since without ideas or beliefs our sense experience is blind. … We could never have known an independent world were it not given to us in natural belief. For it is the condition of all our knowledge. It is naturalism in this sense which Reid opposes to the empiricism, as he sees it, of Hume’s philosophy.35

Or as Mounce puts it succinctly, “Our knowledge has its source in nature, not in our selves.”36 It is contrasted to “the way of ideas” and to empiricism in the Lockean tradition because it denies that experience can even begin to function unless nature has already provided us with direct access to the world. In addition, there is another side to Scottish naturalism. David Fate Norton calls it teleological realism or providential naturalism: Teleological Realism is the view that from the instinctive nature of our perceptions, and our instinctive belief in them, we can infer that the objects or qualities believed in are in fact real, and that we can make this inference because we are well designed by a benevolent Nature or Deity. Or, alternatively, Teleological Realism is a form of naturalism which claims that those things that our God-given faculties cause us necessarily to believe are by this very necessity guaranteed to exist. It is, in short, what I have earlier called “Providential Naturalism.”37

Reid is not so clearly a providential naturalist as his teacher Turnbull or as his friend, Henry Home, Lord Kames. Reid appeals to God and Nature not as explanations but as the alternative to explanation when it is unavailable, and Reid criticizes directly Descartes’s use of arguments for God’s not being a deceiver as hopelessly circular. It is not just Hume’s empiricism but Hume’s form of naturalism that offends Reid. Reid keeps his two sources of knowledge rigorously separate. Our knowledge of the external world is directly given and inductively extended. Our knowledge of our own minds is directly given as well, but it is not subject to induction. Therefore for everything that is mental, including morality and taste, we are directly dependent on God and Nature. This latter dependence allows Reid to remain a confirmed Calvinist as well as a Baconian.

III We can now turn to Reid’s theory of taste based on his commonsense realism and his Scottish naturalism.38 By identifying taste as a first principle and removing first principles from any need for defense, Reid implicitly separates taste from moral

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judgment, which has different principles and is a different operation of the mind altogether. Thus, Reid creates a space for an independent proto-aesthetic sensibility and intuition. For Reid, however, an almost paradoxical motive is behind his defense of the independence of taste from reasoning. His arguments about the place of taste in our mental operations are a conservative and largely incidental consequence of his move back to antiskeptical common sense and antirational and antiempiricist forms of justification that had their first appearance in the reactions to Locke’s use of the theory of ideas. For Reid, taste is indeed the quintessential form of commonsense judgment— one that needs no further justification because it is immediately assented to by one’s mind. Reid’s line of argument quickly turns aside to “the nature of our constitution” or subordinates taste to the active powers of the mind and thus to a moral hierarchy, however. A theory of taste is less important in itself. But if one conceives of taste as the way that the arts enter into public discourse on the basis of natural and acquired forms of expression, much of Reid’s theory may have an importance that he himself did not give it. Reid’s theory of taste itself is directly related to his theory of perception and his defense of a direct form of access to the qualities and attributes of objects. Taste belongs to those powers of the human understanding whose principles are known directly without any need for further justification by experience, association, or reason. Reid lists taste among the powers of the mind: I shall not, therefore, attempt a complete enumeration of the powers of the human understanding. I shall only mention those which I propose to explain; and they are the following: 1St, the powers we have by means of our external senses. 2ndly, Memory. 3dly, Conception. 4thly, The powers of resolving and analysing complex objects, and compounding those that are more simple. 5thly, Judging. 6thly, Reasoning. 7thly, Taste. 8thly, Moral Perception; and last of all, Consciousness.39

Taste makes its first appearance in this list as a power of understanding along with reasoning and moral perception. As powers, these are quite diverse. External senses, according to Reid, require no inference. Reasoning obviously does. Taste seems distinct from judging, but also incorporates it, so some of these powers would seem to overlap in interesting ways. What is of more moment, however, is that all of these powers depend directly or indirectly on what Reid calls first principles. Thus, there are first principles of taste. Reid’s first principles are propositions such as, “Everything of which I am conscious exists.” From that principle one may infer, more or less directly, that a quality such as sweetness that I experience directly also exists as a sweet object, an existent attribute, or quality. I may be mistaken about the chemical makeup of sugar but not about the existence of a sweetness in something that I taste. Moreover, sweetness is not just in the mind; it is a quality that exists, and that, for Reid, means it exists in something that is sweet. Proto-aesthetic taste, as a power of the mind, must have such first principles: “A fine taste may be improved by reasoning and experience; but if the first principles of it were not planted in our minds by nature, it could never be acquired.”40 Reid does not

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actually state what the first principles of taste would be, however. Because taste operates on the analogy of the external sense of taste, it might be presumed to have a similar first principle, and Reid does seem to take that for granted. But Reid does not presume that all propositions are divided into just two classes, either self-evident or merely probable, as his empiricist and rationalist opponents did. Some can be apprehended but await other evidence or argument. These produce judgments—that is, propositions to which assent is given correctly or incorrectly because the proposition itself is either true or false—but they are not immediately evident, and until they become so they are simply apprehended. First principles are not analytic, therefore; they support contingent judgments. One might expect from the analogy of taste and the usual appeals to an internal sense that judgments of taste would belong to these contingent judgments. But judgments of taste are not like that. They function like sensation in that to be conscious of them is to know them, but they belong to perception in that, according to Reid’s theory of perception, they require a conception of an object and a belief in its existence. So Reid locates them in a different category, those that have the light of truth in themselves. The first principles of taste are axioms, and in strong opposition to most theories of taste in the eighteenth century, which take for granted that judgments of taste are subjective, axioms produce necessary truths. Reid writes, I think there are axioms, even in matters of taste. Notwithstanding the variety found among men, in taste, there are, I apprehend, some common principles, even in matters of this kind. I never heard of any man who thought it a beauty in a human face to want a nose, or an eye, or to have the mouth on one side. No work of taste can be either relished or understood by those who do not agree with the author in the principles of taste. The fundamental rules of poetry and music, and painting, and dramatic action and eloquence, have been always the same, and will be so to the end of the world.41

What an axiom of taste would be is not clear, however. Reid’s example of the beautiful face is not a principle, and he cites examples of works of art—Homer, Shakespeare— rather than principles such as the neoclassical rules of composition or rhetoric. He may have had in mind rules such as Aristotle’s rules for tragedy. But these are hardly axioms like the axioms of mathematics. His principles of taste, although in themselves necessary, result in contingent judgments. Reid’s analysis of contingency defines it in such a way that even though something may have always been a certain way (e.g., the earth circling the sun), it might not be. Contingent propositions refer to states of affairs that have a beginning and an end. On Reid’s analysis, any work of fine art would be a created object that has a beginning and an end, so it should be contingent even if it has always obeyed the same rules. But Reid concludes that both taste and morals are real judgments that depend on principles that precede experience and so must be judged necessarily. He writes, “And, if it be true that there is judgment in our determinations of taste and of morals, it must be granted that what is true or false in morals, or in matters of taste, is necessarily so. For this reason, I have ranked the first principles of morals and of taste under the class of necessary

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truths.”42 Reid wants to deny that with regard to either taste or morals we only acquire our principles through experience or social contract, but his own treatment of first principles still allows that priority. He places moral and proto-aesthetic principles prior to any experience. A form of innate moral and taste principles must be at work, therefore. As we have seen above, the issue of innateness in Reid’s philosophy is complex. He does not use the term often, and he does not hold that well-formed propositions are somehow innately given. Reid’s rejection of what he takes to be any form of theory of ideas makes innate ideas suspect on the same grounds that all ideas, understood as the immediate object of our mental operations, are suspect, therefore. That Reid ultimately depends on innate first principles in morals cannot be doubted, however: “As virtue is the business of all men, the first principles of it are written in their hearts, in characters so legible that no man can pretend ignorance of them, or of his obligation to practice them.”43 The analogy with taste would seem to be exact, so the first principles of taste should conform to what Reid posited as axioms. The crucial axiom of Reid’s theory of taste is that excellence always produces positive judgments of taste. Reid writes, In objects that please the taste, we always judge that there is some real excellence, some superiority to those that do not please. In some cases, that superior excellence is distinctly perceived, and can be pointed out; in other cases, we have only a general notion of some excellence which we cannot describe. Beauties of the former kind may be compared to the primary qualities perceived by the external senses; those of the latter kind, to the secondary.44

The problem, of course, is to say, without circularity, what excellence in a perceptual object consists in. Beauty depends on a prior perception or conception: “It is impossible to perceive the beauty of an object without perceiving the object, or, at least, of conceiving it,”45 but at this point, Reid has gotten himself into the usual paradox about beauty. He acknowledges that it depends on some perception, but he cannot say what that perception must include. Since perception is of qualities or attributes, the fact that one perceives the object directly according to Reid does not help him to identify the attributes that constitute the excellence of the object. All we have is an immediate conviction. “There is an immediate conviction and belief of the existence of the quality perceived, whether it be colour, or sound, or figure; and the same thing holds in the perception of beauty or deformity.”46 But whereas he can easily specify the primary and secondary qualities that one immediately perceives in the case of color, sound, and figure, beauty and deformity are left unanalyzed and unidentified. “By the objects of taste, I mean those qualities or attributes of things which are, by Nature, adapted to please a good taste,”47 and a good taste is one that is pleased with those objects that possess those primary or secondary qualities that are excellent of their kind, so we have the usual taste circle. Reid’s theory of taste depends, therefore, not on inferences and experience but on his theory of natural signs that are known, if not innately, at least by something very much like innate conceptions. Reid describes three classes of natural signs. The first is natural

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connections that are discovered by experience. Baconian rules and induction produce natural signs in this class.48 The second class is those natural signs that we respond to directly without having to await maturity or experience. Reid’s examples include smiles; he continues, “The principles of all the fine arts, and of what we call a fine taste, may be resolved into connections of this kind.”49 A third class of natural signs is made up of directly perceived primary qualities. Hardness, for example, needs neither prior experience nor association to produce the conception of something hard. The location of taste in the second class of natural signs is important: “It may be observed, that, as the first class of natural signs I have mentioned is the foundation of true philosophy, and the second the foundation of the fine arts, or of taste—so the last is the foundation of common sense—a part of human nature which hath never been explained.”50 Taste is not part of the rule structure that one learns from “true philosophy,” which is Reid’s shorthand for induction without hypotheses, and it is not based on a primary quality that is known directly. It belongs to those natural signs whose effects are immediate and self-evident but whose causes can be inferred in only a few cases. “He that understands perfectly the use of natural signs, must be the best judge in all the expressive arts.”51 The causes of which taste is the effect are “occult qualities” that produce their effects by a kind of magic. While primary qualities are “manifest,” secondary qualities, of which the natural signs are our means of access, are not. Reid explains, The second class consists of occult qualities, which may be subdivided into various kinds: as, first, the secondary qualities; secondly, the disorders we feel in our own bodies; and, thirdly, all the qualities which we call powers of bodies, whether mechanical, chemical, medical, animal, or vegetable; or if there be any other powers not comprehended under these heads. Of all these the existence is manifest to sense, but the nature is occult; and here the philosopher has an ample field.52

Reid does not mean that these qualities are not known or that we do not believe them to exist in objects. They are known. We know them immediately, and we believe in their existence. But, unlike the primary qualities, secondary qualities do not allow inference to the causes to which our sensations and perceptions are effects. Science, on Reid’s model of Baconian induction without appeal to conjecture or hypothesis, can say something about these occult qualities. But our judgment, including judgments of taste, does not await science and has little need of it. Reid’s discussion of the qualities that support taste is directed, therefore, at exhibiting the qualities rather than explaining them. He limits himself to the traditional categories: novelty, grandeur or the sublime, and beauty. Reid takes novelty over from Addison, but he does not have anything novel to say about it, and it is questionable whether it really fits his discussion. For Reid, novelty is simply psychological unfamiliarity. That is novel that one has not experienced before. Since novelty depends on prior experience, something cannot continue to be novel for very long. “When novelty is altogether separated from the conception of worth and utility, it makes but a slight impression upon a truly correct taste. … But things that have nothing to recommend them but novelty, are fit only to entertain children, or those who are distressed from a vacuity of thought.”53 In contrast, the status of novelty for

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Addison does not depend solely on the psychology of the new. Something can be novel because it is first or new in the Neoplatonic sense of bringing into the world a concrete form. It is new in the way that a newborn baby is new. It is not the first baby to exist. Novelty makes more sense that way in the fine arts because it remains novel. A statue by Praxitiles remains new no matter how often one sees his work; later imitators are not new in the same way, even if we are unfamiliar with their actual productions. When Reid turns to grandeur, his analysis is quite brief. What is of interest is not the psychological characterization of grandeur as a form of admiration based on excellence with strong overtones of divine wisdom and awe but two moves that Reid makes to locate grandeur. Reid rejects the identification of grandeur with feeling. For the theory of ideas, including Hume’s theory, according to Reid, “It was then a very natural progress to conceive, that beauty, harmony, and grandeur, the objects of taste, as well as right and wrong, the objects of the moral faculty, are nothing but feelings of the mind.”54 Instead, Reid insists, “The object has its excellence from its own constitution, and not from ours.”55 So “excellence” must be in the object. This is primarily because “The true sublime cannot be produced solely by art in the composition; it must take its rise from grandeur in the subject, and a corresponding emotion raised in the mind of the speaker.”56 Grandeur must belong to the object, since it is a secondary quality of something even though it is in the mind of the speaker. The true significance of Reid’s treatment of grandeur lies in the way he gets around the difficulty in identifying the occult quality that produces it. For Reid, a second axiom of taste is that qualities of mind alone produce the effects of taste. Upon the whole, I humbly apprehend that true grandeur is such a degree of excellence as is fit to raise an enthusiastical admiration; that this grandeur is found, originally and properly, in qualities of mind; that it is discerned, in objects of sense, only by reflection, as the light we perceive in the moon and planets is truly the light of the sun; and that those who look for grandeur in mere matter, seek the living among the dead.57

In other words, to defend the view that grandeur or the sublime is not simply a feeling, Reid looks for a different kind of object and finds it in the mind itself. The argument goes like this: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

One has a feeling of admiration for some excellence in an object. That feeling is not itself the object. It must be a natural sign of some attribute of the object. The object, in this case, must itself be mental since the quality perceived is an excellence and its natural sign is a feeling, which is mental. (One can, of course, have feelings for inanimate objects, but those feelings are about the object, not signs of the object.) (v) Therefore, what we call grandeur (or beauty) must be a quality of the mind. Thus, Reid’s theory of taste supports the two central tenets of his philosophy—the independence of the mind from matter or the body, and the objectivity of properties,

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qualities, or attributes as they are directly perceived by the mind. Taste responds to an important set of attributes because it responds to the qualities of the mind itself as those qualities are exhibited in other minds, viewed as objects of perception, and in the products of other minds, incorporated into the fine arts. Archibald Alison develops the expressive possibilities of this thesis,58 but he does so on the basis of imagination and association. Reid, in contrast, locates the qualities both in objects and in an innate response that is either natural or developed from natural dispositions. Beauty is more difficult to fit into Reid’s scheme than grandeur because it is so diverse and presents so many problems for description. Reid acknowledges the difficulty: “I am indeed unable to conceive any quality in all the different things that are called beautiful, that is the same in them all.”59 But he goes on to claim that All the objects we call beautiful agree in two things, which seem to concur in our sense of beauty. First, When they are perceived, or even imagined, they produce a certain agreeable emotion or feeling in the mind; and, secondly, This agreeable emotion is accompanied with an opinion or belief of their having some perfection or excellence belonging to them.60

This does not get us very far. The first is just the common identification of beauty and pleasure. The second is the commonsense identification of qualities and existence. Only by appeal to taste as a form of perception, and not just as a sensation, is Reid able to describe beauty at all. He offers a distinction between instinctive and rational taste that parallels Hutcheson’s distinction between original or absolute beauty and relative beauty: “As the sense of beauty may be distinguished into instinctive and rational; so I think beauty itself may be distinguished into original and derived.”61 Original beauty is perceived in the qualities of objects; derived beauty depends on an analogy with other excellences. And this derived beauty leads back to the qualities of mind as its source: “The beauty of good breeding, therefore, is not originally in the external behavior in which it consists, but is derived from the qualities of mind which it expresses. And though there may be good breeding without the amiable qualities of mind, its beauty is still derived from what it naturally expresses.”62 “Expression,” here, is Reid’s way of accounting for the intersubjective perception of mental states. Ultimately, it is theological, because Reid holds that God can cause perceptions in any way that he chooses. Two conclusions follow, and they are not wholly consistent. The first is that the qualities of mind that form taste are subordinate to moral principles. “I apprehend, therefore, that it is in the moral and intellectual perfections of mind, and in its active powers, that beauty originally dwells; and that from this as the fountain, all the beauty which we perceive in the visible world is derived.”63 That conclusion accepts the traditional subordination of taste to moral excellence and conflicts with Reid’s identification of taste as a separate principle that is immediately evident. The second conclusion is a strong version of the mental qualities thesis: Thus, the beauties of mind, though invisible in themselves, are perceived in the objects of sense, on which their image is impressed. … If we consider, on the other

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hand, the qualities in sensible objects to which we ascribe beauty, I apprehend we shall find in all of them some relation to mind, and the greatest in those that are most beautiful.64

These qualities can be perceived formally. They are immediately evident in the way that Reid’s earlier analysis of judgment required. “The proper arrangement of colour, and of light and shade, is one of the chief beauties of painting; but this beauty is greatest, when that arrangement gives the most distinct, the most natural, and the most agreeable image of that which the painter intended to represent.”65 Reid is clearly guided by his own independent theory of expression. “But the beauty arising from regularity and variety, must always yield to that which arises from the fitness of the form for the end intended.”66 Regularity and variety are signs of design. In the final analysis, however, Reid is not comfortable with this naturalistic formalism and he reverts to a moral thesis: Our moral and rational powers justly claim dominion over the whole man. Even taste is not exempted from their authority; it must be subject to that authority in every case wherein we pretend to reason or dispute about matters of taste; it is the voice of reason that our love or our admiration ought to be proportioned to the merit of the object. When it is not grounded on real worth, it must be the effect of constitution, or of some habit, or causal association. … When affection is not carried away by some natural or acquired bias, it naturally is and ought to be led by the judgment.67

Nevertheless, Reid’s analysis of beauty as a quality that exhibits an excellence in its object implicitly separates beauty as a quality of mind and as an expression of an intellectual power from the active power of the mind that provides the principles of morals. The basic outlines of Reid’s theory of taste are clear. Taste is a form of perception that is based on its own first principles, which need no justification. Those first principles are based on the excellence of the object. Beauty and grandeur are the attributes that serve as natural signs for that excellence. Beauty and grandeur are themselves signaled by natural signs felt as pleasurable: “Every species of beauty is beheld with pleasure, and every species of deformity with disgust; and we shall find all that we call beautiful, to be something estimable or useful in itself, or a sign of something that is estimable or useful.”68 Since beauty and grandeur are not merely feelings but actual attributes of objects that are excellences of it, the objects must be such that they are themselves mental qualities. So, beauty and grandeur are only qualities of mind: “I apprehend, therefore, that it is in the moral and intellectual perfections of mind, and in its active powers, that beauty originally dwells; and that from this as the fountain, all the beauty which we perceive in the visible world is derived.”69 Much of this theory would be equally acceptable to all eighteenth-century theories of taste. That taste is immediate and otherwise inexplicable was commonplace from the late seventeenth century on. It was based on a je ne sais quoi. That beauty was linked to pleasure was equally commonplace. The neoclassical didactic formula that art instructs by pleasing incorporates it. Reid does differ in insisting that beauty and grandeur are secondary

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qualities that are in the object and not just in the mind, but in this he takes himself to be defending common sense. Reid breaks new ground by defending taste as a direct expression of qualities of mind rather than some indirect or symbolic association. He is not alone in this move, but his claim is quite different from the usual formula that appears in other essays on taste. For example, Alexander Gerard argues, We have experience every day, that moderate difficulty gives higher pleasure than facility; … in all the fine arts, it is the work which draws out the powers of the mind, and gives them play, that excites our admiration. … Beauty addresses itself to more mental principles than novelty; and it will be universally acknowledged to be a greater excellence.70

But Gerard’s argument is the common one about the pleasure that results from the use of the mind. An active mind is pleasant; an inactive mind is unpleasant. Reid’s claim is quite different. He claims that beauty is a property of a mind. His affinities are with a much earlier form of Platonism advocated by the Cambridge Platonists, but he bases his claim on his theory of perception rather than on their metaphysics. We are now getting closer to the significance of Reid’s theory of taste for the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetics of experience. One of the problems with taste is that to be a person of taste is to be a certain sort of superior individual who has finer moral feelings, and inevitably, that means that taste becomes conservative and elitist, resistant to the new in art. The sense theorists, especially Hutcheson and Gerard, do not really change that moral judgment. Even if taste is independent, it is morally relevant. Gerard, for example, claims, A vigorous taste, not only is affected with every minutest object, directly presented to it; but imparts also a peculiar sensibility to all the other powers of the soul. Refinement of taste makes a man susceptible of delicate feelings on every occasion; and these increase the acuteness of the moral sense, and render all its perceptions stronger and more exquisite.71

Having a sense of taste is a form of moral endowment that the superior are given and that one has a responsibility to cultivate. Reid abandons that connection between taste and morality. His very Calvinism and occasionalism about perception lead him to separate taste from moral judgment more completely. Reid’s theory might be characterized as an exhibition theory—taste is an exhibiting of certain complex properties. If Reid were able to settle on whether those properties are natural or social, he would have a theory of taste that might suggest a kind of historicized cultural exhibition. But Reid is not in a position to do that. His theory itself is conservative, closer to the kind of idealized Platonism of the Cambridge Platonists with whom he is in dispute. His own theological commitments and his antiskeptical polemics lead him to vehemently reject that Platonism, but his own alternative is still a theory of beauty as an objective property of mind that can be exhibited in one’s taste. It is distinct from his opponents not ontologically or epistemologically but theologically.

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God, or Nature, or our own constitution simply has occult powers that are exhibited in tasteful judgments of real excellences in objects. The Platonists are wrong because they think that one perceives beauty independently of the hidden acts of God. The skeptics are wrong because they believe that one’s perception of beauty needs some justification independently of itself. Reid maintains the immediacy and independence of taste against those opponents. But he does so by working back toward simple observation rather than forward toward some moral connection with taste or some kind of social constructivism of the kind represented by Hume’s joint verdict of true judges. Given Reid’s larger commitments, nothing else would make sense. The real interest in his theory of taste, however, is in its hints of a way to break with Hume’s sentimental theory of taste without introducing a Kantian disinterestedness. Reid’s approach has received some attention, principally from Peter Kivy, who edited unpublished lectures on the fine arts72 and who has commented perceptively on Reid’s approach to taste in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.73 Kivy describes two theories of taste: one that is a “false trail” that is directed at aesthetic propositions74 and the other that develops a moral analogy and moves in the direction of a criteriological theory of truth: Reid is knocking at the door, here, of that third kind of truth—neither empirical nor analytic—which the Wittgensteinian would call criteriological. … This, I suggest, is the position Reid came very near to bringing forth some two hundred years before its time. I would like to underscore very near to, however, to emphasize that he never really got there. … What Reid needed was a connection stronger than contingency and weaker than strict logical entailment. He had to settle for a strange alliance of the “sign” notion and the notion of “innateness.” The intended offspring was, of course, meant to be a hybrid; that it turned out to be something of a sterile monstrosity as well was due, unfortunately, to the incompatibility of the only two available parents.75

These points are well taken. However, I have presented a somewhat different perspective. I think Reid’s theory of taste is more consistent than this and that its perceptual and moral analogies can be read in a somewhat different way. I find its significance, therefore, in its implicit separation of morality and taste in a way that does not depend on disinterestedness. Like Kivy, however, I would underscore that this is not a position that I believe Reid would have accepted if all of its implications were worked out. One distinction needs to be kept in mind. Reid discusses the fine arts from two perspectives. One is affective. Kivy holds that this commits Reid to an expression theory of art. I have suggested that perhaps “exhibition” would be more accurate than “expression,” because what Reid really holds is that beauty is exhibited and acts as a natural sign for properties of the mind itself. Given Reid’s strong commitment to a mind–body dualism, it is all the more important to him that his theory of perception has a way of conceptualizing properties of the mind. The other perspective concerns matters of judgment. This is Reid’s theory of taste, and it takes priority over any concern with the arts, though what Reid has to say about how art works obviously has

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bearing on our judgments of taste. Clearly, however, taste is not limited to judgments about the fine arts. A person of taste will judge correctly in all instances of beauty and grandeur, and these are by no means limited to the fine arts or even to art more broadly conceived, such as picturesque theories of natural landscapes. In this respect, Reid is still very much committed to the view that taste is a matter of character. I do not think these two perspectives can be fully reconciled, and the reading that I have provided is not intended to gloss over the extent to which Reid is defending a somewhat Shaftesburyan Platonism about art without Shaftesbury’s sentimentalism about taste. I claim only that a careful reading of Reid on taste is interesting for what it tells us about how the late-eighteenth-century writers on taste were moving beyond the strictly experiential understanding of taste.

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Archibald Alison: Experience and Expression

I There are two good reasons for finding Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste1 important to an understanding of the proto-aesthetic theories in the empiricism of the eighteenth century. First, Alison published his essays in 1790, the same year as Kant’s Third Critique. While Kant’s aesthetic should be understood in the light of the first two Critiques and thus belongs to a unique epistemological tradition, Alison is working in a direct line of development from earlier British theories of taste. He cites, in particular, Hutcheson, Burke, Hogarth, and he had a close relationship with Thomas Reid.2 As part of the Scottish Enlightenment his work is dedicated to Dugald Stewart and he has affinities with the Scottish or prudential naturalism described in the last chapter. Alison owes major debts to David Hartley and Joseph Priestley for the fundamentals of associationism and particularly to Reid for the basic idea of expression and the real existence of mental qualities. At the same time, Alison depends on felt sentiment directly in much the same way as earlier empiricists. Alison gives an interesting and innovative development to those key ideas, however. Apparently independently of Kant, imagination allows him to identify expressive qualities as the ground of taste. His theory of association, however, remains much more closely related to the epistemology of Locke and Hume as it is modified by Priestley than it is to Reid’s realism and naturalism. Thus Alison shows us one possible outcome of the eighteenthcentury proto-aesthetic theories before they are reshaped into nineteenth-century Romanticism. Second, Alison is an early proponent of a theory of expression. While Alison undoubtedly owes much to Reid in this area, his development of a theory of expression is more clearly in line with the problems set out by Hutcheson and Hume than Reid’s theory of taste, which is polemically opposed to the way of ideas. Alison’s theory of expression is also significantly different from Kant’s, and it is not based fundamentally on ‘disinterestedness.’ This claim is controversial, of course. Jerome Stolnitz finds disinterestedness to be fundamental to Alison.3 I would not claim that Alison never makes use of some form of disinterestedness, but I will argue that it is not the basis for his theory of expression. The centrality of expression, even more than the theories of association for which he is most widely known, marks Alison’s

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work as different from the theories of taste and beauty to which he continues to refer, but expression and association are a direct consequence of Alison trying to meet difficulties that those earlier theories encountered. Thus Alison is of interest as an independent, non-Kantian source for a neo-Romantic theory of expression that follows.

II Alison’s own avowed purpose is to show that taste is not a simple emotion but a complex emotion that depends on association and imagination. He sets out to refute two theories: first, that taste is a product of an internal sense; and second, that the emotion of taste is a simple emotion based on a single principle of mind such as utility, order, and so on. The former position Alison ascribes to Hogarth4 and Reynolds5 on the grounds that they look for objects that the arts of taste—painting, sculpture, architecture, and music—can imitate in order to stimulate the internal sense. We might add to Alison’s list Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Gerard, who explicitly defend the existence of such a sense (though the extent to which Gerard is a sense-theorist needs qualification). The alternative—a common law of mind—Alison ascribes to Hume. Edmund Burke, whose ideas of size, delicacy, or greatness appeal to a principle of emotional magnitude, might also fit this category, although Alison seems to be thinking here primarily of moral or teleological principles. The alternative for which Alison argues requires that for a simple emotion to become an emotion of taste, it must become part of a complex that is formed by powers of the mind—association and imagination—that make the complex expressive of qualities of mind. So, rather than a single sense that responds to the imitation of an object or a single principle of mind that can act in all cases, Alison has a theory that shows many complicated interactions and depends on expression. Alison has two typical ways of arguing against the positions that he opposes. First, there is a line of argument to show that beauty does not arise from any simple quality. It goes like this: (1) If beauty were the product of an internal sense (or a single principle), then it would be found whenever the quality or principle was present to the mind. (2) But this is not the case. If the associations that connect the individual mind to that quality or principle are destroyed, the emotional response disappears. Therefore, Alison concludes, beauty is not an immediate product of a sense that perceives a simple quality. This argument can be mounted either against a sense or a principle since, Alison reasons, either would automatically produce the emotion of taste if it were both the necessary and sufficient condition for beauty. For example, one can show that it is not the sound itself that is sublime by this line of argument: If any sounds were in themselves Sublime, or fitted by the constitution of our nature to produce the Emotion, independently of all Associations, it would seem that there could be no change of our Emotion, and that those sounds would as permanently produce their correspondent Emotion, as the objects of every other Sense produce their correspondent ideas.

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In all cases, however, where those associations are either accidental or temporary, and not, as in the former case, permanent in their nature, it will be found that sounds are sublime only, when they are expressive of qualities capable of producing some powerful Emotion, and that in all other cases, the same sounds are simply indifferent. … Their Sublimity therefore can only be attributed to the qualities which they signify.6

Throughout the essays, Alison returns again and again to this form of argument, adjusting it in each case to the example and the specific claim that he seeks to refute. The second line of argument that Alison sets up appeals to the kind of description that is given of the emotion of taste. Alison’s argument may be reduced to the following: (1) If beauty were a simple perceptual form, it would be sufficient to describe that form. That is, if beauty were simply the product of a sensuous line, for example, then whenever we wanted to refer to beauty, it would be enough to describe a sensuous line. ‘Sensuous line’ would mean ‘beautiful.’ (2) But that is not the case. Our descriptions of the emotion of taste typically require some emotional term such as gay or melancholy, lovely or graceful. Therefore, no single term or principle is sufficient to describe what the emotion of taste refers to. Again, Alison repeats this argument throughout the essays with appropriate adjustments to the particular case under discussion. For example, if the claim is that musical works appeal to a sense of beauty directly when they are perceived, Alison replies as follows: If the Beauty of Music arose from any of those qualities, either of sound, or of the Composition of Sounds, which are immediately perceivable by the Ear, it is obvious that this would be expressed in Language, and that the terms by which such Music was characterized, would be significant of some quality or qualities discernable by the Ear;7 if, on the contrary, this Beauty arises from the interesting or affecting qualities of which it is expressive to us, such qualities, in the same manner, ought in common language, to be assigned as the causes of this emotion; and the terms by which such Music is characterized ought to be significant of such qualities, That the last is the case, I think there can be no dispute. The terms Plaintive, Tender, Cheerful, Gay, Elevating, Solemn, etc. are not only constantly applied to every kind of Music, that is either sublime or Beautiful but it is in fact by such terms only that men ever characterize the Compositions from which they receive such Emotions. … If the Beauty or Sublimity of Music arose from the laws of its Composition, the very reverse of all this would obviously be the case.8

In all the versions of this argument, Alison’s claim seems to be that the necessity of a multiplicity of taste predicates indicates that there cannot be a purely sensuous account of beauty and that no single principle can account for the multiplicity of emotional descriptions. He concludes that there must always be some synthetic operation of the mind for which expressive predicates are provided by association. The second argument differs from the first in its appeal to the language of emotional qualities that we use to describe expressive emotions. It is noteworthy that Alison appeals to what we would call taste predicates as a central part of his argument. He thus

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lays the foundation for and anticipates the twentieth-century discussions of “aesthetic qualities” by Frank Sibley9 and others. Although Alison does not seem to have any particular thesis about the centrality of language in the operation of the mind that he is describing, he does see language as the manifestation of that operation. (Alison does claim that language, particularly poetry, is one of the principal ways that expressive associations are formed.10) Alison’s acceptance that the traditional link between taste and emotion must be expressed in “interesting or expressive qualities” presents him with a problem, however. If there were a specific emotion or principle of mind that one could identify with beauty, then whatever the problems that arose in specifying it, there would be no further problems in claiming for it the associated emotional quality. This is the aesthetic experience thesis that we have encountered before: aesthetic experience rests upon immediate experiences with their own unique emotional qualities. The presence of this form of experience would be the basis for judgments of taste. But Alison rejects the conclusion that beauty is a simple emotion and thus that taste is the response to it. The emotion that he refers to is a complex emotion that requires imagination and association and that must be expressive of mind. On Alison’s theory, anything can be the basis for the emotion of taste as long as it is capable of becoming “significant or expressive to us of very different, and far more interesting qualities than those it possesses itself.”11 As with Reid, the distinction from simple emotion rests on an exercise of mind, and the more interesting qualities are those that are expressive of mind. But such qualities become interesting and expressive of mind just because they are the product of imagination. “The pleasure, therefore, which accompanies the emotions of Taste, may be considered not as simple, but as a complex pleasure; and as arising not from any separate and peculiar Sense, but from the union of the pleasure of SIMPLE EMOTION, with that which is annexed by the constitution of the human mind, to the EXERCISE OF IMAGINATION.”12 Others before Alison maintained that the ideas of taste are complex. If Alison’s position is different, and that is open to question, it is because he is concerned with a complex emotion.

III Alison is not wedded to the Lockean way of ideas, though he remains in the Lockean tradition generally that relies on experience alone. In Locke, for example, the idea of beauty is a complex idea, but the pleasure that accompanies it is itself simple. Alison, who does not depend on the simple form of empiricism that moves from impressions to ideas to complex ideas but on Reid’s more realist form of perception based on belief plus conception, has no such need for a simple starting point. But Alison also distinguishes the resulting emotion from the process that produces it. The complexity that Alison requires is primarily in the process. It is a complexity due to association and imagination, which Alison takes to be a faculty similar to but independent of reason. The resultant process is thus a uniquely mental one, as it is for Reid, and the emotion is really a response to this mental activity. This is what makes the original qualities

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expressive of mind. Alison is obviously following Reid and the tradition that finds in the mind signs of a world of uniquely mental qualities. But note the differences. When these mental qualities appear in Shaftesbury, they clearly echo Neoplatonic language. For Alison, the mind is interesting because it is sympathetic and human. Without the human qualities, we find perception indifferent; with them, we experience an emotion of pleasure. Neither the emotion nor the qualities are as important as the mind, which they come to mirror.13 The uniqueness of particular emotions of taste plays no real role for Alison beyond the expressive language identified with them, therefore. For him, the mind, by working upon the material qualities and simple emotions, builds up associations and connections that make the original quality a sign of the mind’s own imaginative operation. “It requires afterwards some pains to separate this connection, and to prevent us from attributing to the Sign, that effect which is produced alone by the Quality signified.”14 Alison seems confident that such a separation can be made, but it is by no means clear how that is to be done. One cannot appeal directly to the expressive quality because it is not unique; it is the product of imagination and association, which will vary from individual to individual. And to say that it is the quality “expressive of mind” is obviously circular since we are trying to identify just those qualities. Imagination and expression do not, in fact, require a different kind of emotion at all as Alison develops them, though he continues to speak as if taste were a matter of a feeling or emotion of some complex but distinctive kind. Viewed in this way, Alison’s identification of the emotions of taste is in danger of becoming empty. It is based on a complex circle of definitions and theoretical terms that act as natural signs that might be identified as one form of naturalism. At bottom, Alison appeals to a kind of intuitive ground. This is provided by the taste predicates that appear frequently throughout the essays. Beauty, sublimity, and grace are made more explicit by particular adjectives: In those trains [of thought] … which are suggested by objects of Sublimity or Beauty, however slight the connection between individual thought may be, I believe it will be found, that there is always some general or principle of connection which pervades the whole, and gives them some certain or definite character. They are either gay, or pathetic, or melancholy, or awful, or elevating, etc., according to the nature of the emotion which is first excited.15

Each of these predicates identifies some character of emotion for Alison. But since there is no single emotion of beauty or sublimity, there is no self-evident reason why ‘awfulness’ should be an emotion of sublimity but ‘nauseating’ should not. We just know that some predicates are taste predicates and others are not. Alison does try to specify what produces emotions of taste, however. A major part of the answer is the faculty of imagination itself. Alison does not go as far as Coleridge in making imagination a creative faculty.16 Nor does Alison distinguish imagination and fancy, and their operation is subsequent to the presentation of any object to the mind. But imagination transforms the objects of beauty or sublimity into emotionally productive objects.

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The landscapes of Claude Lorraine, the music of Handel, the poetry of Milton, excite feeble emotions in our minds when our attention is confined to the qualities they present to our senses, or when it is to such qualities of their composition that we turn our regard. It is then, only, we feel the sublimity or beauty of their productions, when our imaginations are kindled by their power, when we lose ourselves amid the number of images that pass before our minds, and when we waken at last from this play of fancy, as from the charm of a romantic dream.17

We can say, then, that the predicates that characterize the specific emotions of taste are those that are the product of imagination. But for Alison an independent faculty is no real solution. He holds that all taste predicates are expressive of qualities of mind, and he attributes them to imagination, which is “the indulgence of a train of thought.”18 That does not succeed in identifying them. The appeal to imagination is too broad, as well. “It is by no means true that such an exercise of imagination is necessarily accompanied with pleasure, for those conceptions not only may be, but very often are of a kind extremely indifferent, and sometimes also simply painful.”19 Thus imagination is at most a necessary condition for the emotion of sublimity or beauty. Alison appeals to the uniqueness of the emotions of beauty and sublimity here to distinguish one result of imagination from another. But in that case one cannot use the presence of imagination as the identifying characteristic for the emotions of beauty and sublimity. Alison vacillates between his traditional acceptance of a unique emotion of beauty and his need to find a more precise specification of it once he gives up the simplicity of sense or principle. At most, imagination can be a necessary condition for some object producing an emotion properly described by one of the taste predicates. The incipient circularity that is at work throughout is, perhaps, most evident here. There are objects that are “simply indifferent, or at least are regarded as indifferent in our common hours either of occupation or amusement.”20 But since the objects do not always produce such emotions and the imagination can also be indifferent, neither by itself is sufficient. Jointly, each is defined in terms of the other. Imagination, in and of itself, does not break the circle, and ideas of emotion are nothing other than the class of taste predicates, so one cannot define membership in the class without circularity except by specifying all of the specific emotions. Alison does not pretend to do that. Alison tries to break out of the circle in a different way by appealing to a principle of composition: unity of character. “It is true, that [if] those trains of thought which attend the Emotions of Taste, are uniformly distinguished by some general principle of connection, it ought to be found, that no Composition of Objects or qualities in fact produces such emotions, in which this Unity of character or of emotion is not preserved.”21 By this unity of character, Alison seems to mean that one cannot mix gaiety or sadness, for example, without destroying the emotion of taste that either would produce by itself. The great positive example of unity is found in landscape gardening where the artist has a power “to remove from his landscape whatever is hostile to its effect, or unsuited to its character, and, by selecting only such circumstances as accord with the general expression of the scene, to awaken an emotion more full, more simple, and more harmonious than any we can receive from the scenes of Nature itself.”22 As

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such, however, unity of character is only a limiting condition. Its absence can tell us why a landscape fails to excite the emotions one might expect, but it cannot tell us why a spring scene excites a particular emotion or is beautiful in the first place. One part of the answer to this last question comes from Alison’s use of the theory of association, of course. A spring scene provides associations that are of the same character as itself, and the complex emotions that result are expressive just because they provide a regular train of association that recur whenever a similar object appears. By themselves, qualities of matter produce no emotion; “yet it is obvious that they may produce this effect, from their association with other qualities.”23 Also, Alison is quite clear that when one breaks the associations, then the emotion disappears. But his theory of association is limited in what it can tell us. Alison presents it this way: It should seem, therefore, that a very simple and obvious principle is sufficient to guide our investigation into the source of the sublimity and beauty of the qualities of Matter. If these qualities are in themselves fitted to produce the Emotions of Sublimity or Beauty (or, in other words, are in themselves beautiful or sublime), I think it is obvious that they must produce these Emotions, independently of any associations. If, on the contrary, it is found that these qualities only produce such Emotions when they are associated with interesting or affecting qualities, and that when such associations are destroyed, they no longer produce the same emotions, I think it must also be allowed that their Beauty or Sublimity is to be ascribed, not to the material but to the associated qualities.24

Alison clearly maintains that the latter is the case. But association does not explain the nature of the associated qualities. It only accounts for how it is that one thing, a spring scene, for example, can have a set of associated qualities, tenderness, for example, which it does not itself supply. It is the exercise of the imagination that provides associations that are emotionally qualified as emotions of taste and that distinguish them from other associations that we would characterize differently. Association, by itself, cannot supply the nature of the ideas themselves. It can only give us the source of the ideas. The distinction between simple pleasures of emotion and the complex delight that we feel in an emotion of taste rests upon what Alison calls “the production of a regular or consistent train of ideas of emotion.”25 This begins as a restatement of a necessary condition: The account which I have now given of this effect, may perhaps serve to point out an important distinction between the Emotions of Taste, and all our different Emotions of Simple Pleasure. In the case of these last emotions, no additional train of thought is necessary. The pleasurable feeling follows immediately the presence of the object or quality, and has no dependence upon anything for its perfection, but the sound state of the sense by which it is received. … In the case of the Emotions of Taste, on the other hand, it seems evident that this exercise of mind is necessary, and that unless this train of thought is produced, these emotions are unfelt.26

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But the production by the imagination of a regular or consistent train of ideas or emotions is not enough by itself. Alison is in fact proposing a new condition. He takes it to be equivalent to the exercise of imagination, but the difference is evident: imagination produces a kind of emotion; a regular and consistent train of ideas of emotion requires only a kind of associative link. Alison comes very close to turning this into a sufficient condition: “Whenever … this train of thought, or this exercise of imagination is produced, we are conscious of an emotion of a higher and more pleasing kind; and which, though it is impossible to describe in language, we yet distinguish by the name of the Emotion of Taste.”27 This exercise of the imagination, one that produces the “higher emotion,” is what Alison has been seeking to distinguish. In spite of admitting that it cannot be described in language, he gives it a name: “delight”28 and identifies it with the taste predicates referred to above.

IV Once he has established that “the constant connection we discover between the sign and the thing signified, between the material quality and the quality productive of Emotion, renders at last the one expressive to us of the other,”29 Alison turns to an examination of the particular simple qualities—sound, sight, form, motion, color, attitude, and gesture. He does not develop the distinction between imagination and connection further. In any event, the subtle move to constant connection and a consistent train of ideas would still be too broad. Just as in the case of imagination, Alison cannot consistently hold that every instance of a consistent train of ideas is productive of the emotion of taste. The schema at which Alison arrives for distinguishing emotions of taste from simple emotions now looks something like this: Material qualities need produce no emotion at all; one can be indifferent to them. But objects are suited to produce simple emotions. Spring and babies produce an emotion of tenderness, for example. Association links those objects so that the same simple emotion belongs not to one thing but to a consistent train of ideas. The faculty of imagination extends the associations and unites the simple emotion throughout an occasion. When that happens, a special emotion of taste results, and this can be called beauty or sublimity or grace depending on the simple emotions involved. The special form of pleasure that accompanies this special emotion of taste is given the name ‘delight.’ The difficulties that this schema leaves are obvious. The whole enterprise of identifying the emotions of taste on the basis of empirical rather than rational principles such as order and unity requires that the emotion be identifiable. If it is not the result of a separate sense, then some other grounds had to be supplied for judgments that some object or scene inspired beauty, sublimity, or grace. Alison has taken up this problem as a matter of course. However, his solution leaves this difficulty: if the simple emotions are characterized by descriptive predicates (e.g., ‘tenderness’), then no noncircular account is given of how the complex emotion of beauty is an emotion of taste. If simple emotions such as tenderness are not yet emotions of taste, then no account is given of how those that lead to beauty are to

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be distinguished. In either case, Alison is left without an account of imagination and expression that does not presume the kind of distinctions that he is using imagination and expression to explain. That he is left with an unresolved problem does not detract from Alison’s achievement, however. He has moved a considerable distance beyond the earlier eighteenth-century positions that he inherits. Alison’s development of the theory that emotions of taste are complex emotions dependent on the operation of the mind retains the fundamental empiricism of Locke and the sentimentalism of Hume without committing him to a further fragmentation of experience. In this, he follows a path similar to Kant’s. Both see the operation of the mind and its ability to transform the data of the senses into a perception as a necessary condition for complex ideas, though Alison gets his version from Reid. Alison lacks Kant’s transcendental a priori categories, however. He tries to make association and imagination do the job of producing ideas of beauty and sublimity as complex ideas of taste by themselves. In the process, he develops much more sophisticated theories of imagination and of the expressive power of objects than anything earlier. What has happened, I think, is that Alison continues to think of beauty as an emotion with unique qualities. But he sees that it cannot be a simple emotion. Taste is too diverse, and it involves too many different expressive predicates. His real opponents, acknowledged or not, are Hutcheson, Hogarth, Hume, and Burke. Hutcheson postulated an internal sense as the mechanism by which a perception of beauty operated. This sense could then respond to complex formal features in the object—uniformity amidst variety. Hogarth and Burke, in different ways, respond to the psychological difficulties in Hutcheson’s position and shift to a more formal description—sensuous line or magnitude and delicacy. Hume also makes this shift, but rather than try to locate the formal principles in the object, he examines the delicacy itself and the ability of the judge as the only way to refer to experiences of taste in any way that is not relative to the individual whose experience it is. These alternatives exemplify the principal eighteenth-century options for a proto-aesthetic theory before Alison. Both lines retain an essentially Lockean ideational form. That is, the emotion in question is the result of a perceptual or quasi-perceptual capacity that is immediate and that requires only a passive capacity of the mind. Beauty, sublimity, and their subjective counterpart, taste, are thus the immediate and unique result of the experience of the perceiver. That is at once the guarantee of their empirical status and the source of their subjectivity, as Hume saw. One answers the question what is color by pointing to a range of color perceptions and the laws governing such perceptions. But where physical laws come into play as a check on the subjectivity of color perception, no such laws seem to govern taste. Alison, following Reid, approaches this problem differently. The range of experience with which taste is concerned is produced by an operation of the mind itself, and minds are distinct from inanimate objects of sensation because of a mind–body dualism. The laws that will govern taste are the laws that govern association and that a faculty psychology (including imagination) makes plausible. They make the activity of the mind expressive in the way that taste requires. What Alison does not notice is that this shift makes the language of an emotion of taste problematic. Because he has

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moved away from the Lockean presuppositions that governed the earlier theories that he contests, he no longer has a theoretical need for the uniqueness that gave empirical status to the emotions of taste. The presence of this proto-aesthetic emotion now proves a theoretical embarrassment because Alison has no way to identify it. He is still carrying along the baggage of unique modes of experience when he has shifted the ground fundamentally. Alison identifies three specific emotions as common proto-aesthetic sentiments: beauty, sublimity, and grace. Beauty and sublimity correspond to qualities of mind. Grace differs from beauty but is allied to it. It is “never observed without affecting us with emotions of peculiar delight.”30 Like Kant, Alison distinguishes the emotions of taste from other kinds of pleasure as a form of delight, therefore, but his use of delight is neither the specialized use of Burke nor Kant’s distinct form of disinterested pleasure. It is simply a common experience of pleasure that is provided by a class of expressive emotions. For Alison, the simple emotions require “no additional train of thought” while for emotions of taste “it seems evident that this exercise of mind is necessary, and that unless its train of thought is produced, these emotions are unfelt.”31 Thus Alison makes the same emotional distinction that we find in Kant but he locates it on the opposite end to the logical scale, so to speak. Kant locates the delight in the beautiful as prior to the more complex pleasures that involve desire and concepts. Alison places it subsequent to the complex operation of the mind.

V Alison still seems to have the common eighteenth-century problem of the variability of taste, however. At the beginning of his Essays, he promised to establish a standard of taste: These speculations will probably lead to the important inquiry, whether there is any standard by which the perfection or imperfection of our sentiments upon these subjects may be determined; to some explanation of the means by which Taste may be corrected or improved; and to some illustrations of the purpose which this peculiar constitutions of our nature serves, in the cause of human HAPPINESS, and the exaltation of human CHARACTER.32

Therefore, one object of his essays is to stabilize taste. For example, he worries that They who are most liable to the seduction of Fashion, are people on whose minds the slighter associations have a strong effect. A plain man is incapable of such associations, a man of sense is above them; But the young and the frivolous, whose principles of Taste are either unformed, or whose minds are unable to maintain any settled opinions, are apt to lose sight of every other quality in such objects but their relation to the practice of the great, and of course, to suffer their sentiments of beauty to vary with the caprice of this practice.33

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Shaftesbury at the beginning of the century shared the same concerns. The common theme throughout the century is that if taste is founded upon an emotion of taste and emotions or sentiments vary, there is no telling where taste will lead us; so a standard of taste is needed. But when it comes to providing a standard, Alison goes in a different direction from the earlier discussions of a standard of taste. He thinks of a standard as a standard for the qualities or objects of taste. It applies not to the judgment but directly to the quality of the emotional object. Is there a standard for the beauty of a human face, for example? Put this way, the answer has to be negative: If there is any peculiar form which is permanently beautiful, let the Inquirer state it to himself, and then let him examine the countenance of actual Nature or the representations of the Painter by this standard. He will find, if I mistake not, not only that this peculiar form has no permanency of Beauty, but, on the contrary, that it is often the reverse.34

So Alison does not provide a standard of the kind that Hume sought to decide between different judgments of taste—Ogilby or Milton. Instead, “The sentiment of beauty is felt from many different and even opposite appearances of human form.”35 Only those that are expressive are beautiful. That does not mean that there is no standard. Our opinions upon the subject [of the beauty of human form] are perhaps very seldom very accurate or scientific, and the standard by which we judge is, in general, perhaps, only the common or average form. But we have all some standard of judgment on this subject, and that we actually feel this sentiment, either of the fitness or unfitness, in observing the forms of those around us, the experience of every day may convince us.36

We simply feel the emotion, and the experience convinces us that the form is beautiful. No comparison or decision is called for. The standard is simply that the emotion is the natural one. Reid similarly dismissed the need for a standard in Hume’s sense. For Reid as well, the combination of realism and naturalism is sufficient to make the need for a Humean standard moot. It is enough for Alison that the variations in individual emotions can be explained by their expressive qualities. “With respect to the variable Features (those which are expressive of momentary or local Emotions) that the Beauty of their Forms does not arise from their approach to any one standard, but the nature of the Expression they signify to us.”37 This is a commonsense solution to the variations in taste. Judgments of taste are not normative but natural, and one knows naturally what is being expressed. That is enough. Alison comes rather close to making judgments of taste simply taste predicates that can only be identified by a kind of look-and-see claim, which would leave him with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century problems of identifying taste predicates in a way that allows critical judgment. It seems to me highly unlikely that Alison would have been comfortable with that conclusion had he

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formulated it clearly. Instead, he suggests both proto-aesthetic and Romantic themes without abandoning Reid’s faith in common sense and a providential naturalism. His proto-aesthetic theory is transitional, therefore. It looks back to its empiricist roots while anticipating many of the nineteenth-century themes that will be developed by Kant and the Romantics.

12

Dugald Stewart: Beauty and Taste Again

I Dugald Stewart’s work stands at the end of the two traditions we have just considered— the eighteenth-century tradition of writings on taste and the commonsense school of Thomas Reid. The nature of beauty remained a metaphysical issue and taste was a matter of judgment that was moral as well as critical, though the moral element increasingly was separated from taste in the arts as the fine arts gained autonomy. Stewart’s metaphysical and ethical concerns reflect the earlier empiricist tradition, but his theories of taste and beauty belong to the Scottish naturalism of Reid and Alison, so they demonstrate the shifts that are taking place and mark a transition to a different form of ethical and epistemological philosophy. The basics of Stewart’s philosophy are clear. He accepts Reid’s fundamental distinction between the internal world of the mind and the external world of material objects and sense data. The former is known by reflection and the latter by the external senses and experience.1 Any connection between the two remains mysterious and beyond the competence of philosophy. Philosophy should concern itself only with establishing the general rules and laws of thought that are open to investigation by induction.2 These rules and laws fall into two classes. The first are the scientific conclusions based on experience. No such conclusions can be known a priori. The second are the laws of belief themselves. They are the objects of reflection. Their evidence comes from consciousness itself, but they can only reach as far as human consciousness allows. Personal identity, the existence of the material world, and the uniformity of nature, including cause and effect, are conditions of consciousness, for example. Further speculation about them is pointless. So Stewart holds a basic mind/world dualism that acts as a limit on philosophy. He need not deny that there are connections between the mind and the material world, including the material world of our own bodies and brains, but he refuses to speculate about such connections. He criticizes David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Erasmus Darwin extensively for falling into such speculation. Stewart acknowledges the priority of Thomas Reid in establishing these ground rules for philosophizing and agrees with the outlines of the commonsense view, though he finds the phrase “common sense” misleading,3 preferring his own formulation of “fundamental laws of belief ” to Reid’s commonsense “first principles.”4 Stewart accepts that the fundamental laws of belief are beyond argument; he agrees with Reid

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that it is as foolish to argue for them as to argue against them. He rejects all forms of skepticism and materialism as either self-refuting or built on speculation that is without foundation. Stewart also agrees with Reid that philosophy must follow Bacon in its methodology, so inductive logic guides it. But Stewart, by way of contrast to Reid, is much more moderate in his approach to Hume and much more careful in his uses of induction. He recognizes that hypotheses form a useful and even necessary part of scientific method, and he reinstates ideas, which he calls notions, as long as they do not depend on an overt resemblance between notion and object. Stewart rejects the kind of first principles that Reid depends on, therefore. Those principles are, if not innate propositions (and Reid explicitly rejects innate ideas), still capable of expression as propositions, and thus they were epistemologically foundational. According to Reid, our perceptions are knowledge-based, and though Reid is careful not to adopt a Platonic form of knowledge of the material world, there are striking resemblances between Reid’s perceptual knowledge and the Cambridge Platonists’ perceptual forms. It seems unlikely that Reid could go as far as Stewart in accepting that sense provides the occasion for all of our knowledge.5 In place of first principles, Stewart tries to establish specific mental faculties: attention, conception, abstraction, association, memory, imagination, judgment and reasoning, acquired faculties, and auxiliary faculties. Faculties, of course, are a staple of eighteenth-century philosophy and psychology. But for the most part, eighteenth-century philosophers understood faculties very generally, like humors and sentiments. They are simply a way of talking about whatever the mind does when it thinks. Stewart, however, analyzes faculties precisely; they replace first principles as the cornerstone of his system. The difference between principles and faculties is subtle but important. Principles are truths, necessary or contingent, to which the mind must accede. Faculties, on the other hand, are psychological operations of the mind—instinctive or acquired by education and habit—that allow the mind to perceive qualities and relations. Both result in knowledge, but principles are known themselves while faculties provide only a route to specific facts. We know the facts as they are delivered by the mind, but all metaphysical speculation, even that of Reid about first principles, is useless.

II It would be interesting to continue to work out the details of Stewart’s epistemology and its relation to that of Reid and other commonsense philosophers. Enough has been said, however, to provide the groundwork for my particular interest, which is the way that Stewart’s treatment of beauty and taste involves a shift away from earlier epistemological and moral theories of taste and the adoption of a more autonomous epistemology of the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetic experience. Stewart’s theory depends on the application of three faculties—association, imagination, and taste—to beauty. It is never quite clear what Stewart understands by beauty. When he discusses the topic in some detail in the Philosophical Essays, he does not have in mind quite the same distinctions that he was making in the Elements of Philosophy. In the latter

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work, he was concerned to distinguish the faculties themselves.6 In the first essay of the second part of the Philosophical Essays, “On the Beautiful,” on the other hand, his object now is “to begin with considering the more simple and general principles on which depend the pleasures that we experience in the case of actual perception.”7 Yet he never succeeds in actually identifying any “simple and general principles” that apply specifically to beauty. Stewart is an avowed nominalist.8 So, with respect to beauty, Stewart is explicitly opposed to any essentialism. Instead, he develops a theory of associative extension. He draws the following distinction: I shall begin with supposing that the letters A, B, C, D, E denote a series of objects; that A possesses some one quality in common with B; B a quality in common with C; C a quality in common with D; D a quality in common with E;—while, at the same time, no quality can be found which belongs in common to any three objects in the series. … In this manner, a common appellation will arise between A and E, although the two objects may, in their nature and properties, be so widely distant from each other, that no stretch of imagination can conceive how the thoughts were led from the former to the latter.9

Adopting a term from Richard Payne Knight, Stewart calls this way of extending the meaning of a term “transitive” rather than metaphorical or figurative. In other words, there need be no essential quality that the word ‘beauty’ denotes in all cases.10 Stewart is quite explicit about the limitations of association in extending a term: “If there was nothing originally and intrinsically pleasing or beautiful, the associating principle would have no materials on which it could operate.”11 So, while in any specific case of beauty there need be no essential property, some original cases must be “intrinsically pleasing” in order to begin the process. Stewart singles out two characteristics on two very different bases. The first is pleasure itself. Joseph Addison distinguished between primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination, depending on whether they arose from perception or from imagination. In contrast, Stewart treats beauty as a more extensive classification than pleasures of the imagination. It is the generic term for perceptual pleasures. But that cannot be sufficient. Instead, Stewart grants that ‘beauty’ denotes more than pleasure: “It always, indeed, denotes something which gives not merely pleasure to the mind, but a certain refined species of pleasure, remote from those grosser indulgences which are common to us with the brutes.”12 But that is as far as he can go without slipping into an essentialism he has rejected. Stewart also distinguishes between intrinsic and relative beauty in a way that seems straightforward: “Of these elements [which may enter into the composition of the Beautiful], there are some which are themselves pleasing, without a reference to anything else; there are others which please only in a state of combination. … The beauty of the former may be said to be absolute or intrinsic; that of the latter to be only relative.”13 If ‘beauty’ works by the kind of nominalistic extension that Stewart advocates, however, then his notion of an intrinsic beauty seems problematic. Say one admires a landscape. It presumably combines many visual effects and so is relatively beautiful according to Stewart’s description, and its beauty can be accounted for by its

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association with other applications of the term ‘beauty.’ But if any of the effects—say the color of the water—is agreeable in itself, then that effect is intrinsically beautiful. That intrinsic beauty would have to occupy one extreme of a sequence of applications of the word ‘beautiful.’ But the only claim so far that can make the color of the water intrinsically beautiful is that it is agreeable in itself, and that could be said just as well of the whole combination. The distinction between intrinsic and relative beauty collapses unless intrinsic really means more than just singular or causally first experiences. In order to further distinguish beauty from other forms of pleasure, therefore, Stewart relies on a genetic argument. Beauty is originally the pleasure of a specific sense—sight.14 This privileges one kind of pleasure as is required. One looks for the first literal use of beauty; then one can account for other uses in terms of the transitive extension of the term. The problem, of course, is that on Stewart’s account, there need be no relation between more remote extensions of a term, so to say that beauty is what is pleasing to the eye will tell us nothing about nonvisual applications of the term except that at some point they must have had some associative relation through a chain reaching back to the literal use. Even if one accepts Stewart’s claim that beauty belongs originally with sight, that fact alone will not help us to understand other uses of the term ‘beauty.’ In fact, Stewart probably means more than simply that beauty denotes what is pleasing to the eye. That pleasure is, he thinks, refined and significantly different from other derivative uses. It is original in a stronger sense. Stewart begins with perception of simple properties: “The first ideas of beauty are, in all probability, derived from colours.”15 From there, beauty is extended to forms: “From the admiration of colours, the eye gradually advances to that of forms; beginning first with such as are most obviously regular.”16 A problem for this kind of extension ought to be from Stewart’s point of view that it is not a true induction supported by observation but a speculation, of which Stewart, with his Baconian theory of induction, should be suspicious. Nevertheless, he moves from form to motion and holds that each is independent, though ‘beauty’ is applied to all.17 If the connection is merely organic and spatiotemporal, there will be no limit on the extension of the word “beauty.” Stewart explores one line—uniformity, the pleasure of which he attributes to the implication of a sufficient reason for the choice. But the explanations seem either ad hoc or designed to accommodate the already established status of uniformity amidst variety that Francis Hutcheson had offered. Stewart seems to be accepting that the relation of beauty to sight is fundamental largely on the basis of a claimed ontogenetic priority; he gives extensive counterexamples to Edmund Burke’s claim that smoothness is a necessary condition for beauty and likewise rejects Uvedale Price’s introduction of the picturesque. He comes fairly close, therefore, to offering a relational definition of beauty: “Philosophical distinctness, as well as universal practice, requires that the meaning of the word Beauty, instead of being restricted in conformity to any partial system whatever, should continue to be the generic word for expressing every quality which, in the works either of Nature or of Art, contributes to render them agreeable to the eye.”18 This definition is not quite the same kind of relational definition advocated by contemporary institutional and family resemblance theories because Stewart believes that particular qualities such as William Hogarth’s line of beauty are “one of [nature’s] favourite forms,”19 though no

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one such quality is essential. But the relation itself seems to be intended as at least a sufficient condition—if a quality is agreeable to the eye, then it, or the object that exhibits it, should be called beautiful. In summary, Stewart’s theory of beauty begins with a primary application of the word to the agreeable feelings that accompany some visual experiences. Color, form, and motion are the ones that Stewart singles out. Color comes first, and form and motion, which require some additional experience, follow. Then, by a process of what Stewart calls transitive application of the word, beauty is applied to the experience of other senses. Thus, Stewart denies that there are any essential qualities common to all experiences that are denominated beautiful. Instead, association works to extend the application from visual phenomena to other senses. Imagination enters to create associations that extend beauty to intellectual phenomena, though Stewart’s theory of the imagination limits it to the combination of prior images. Stewart’s theory of beauty, therefore, is basically hedonistic; beauty is a form of visually stimulated pleasure or the associative extensions to other sensory experiences. Stewart speaks as if there is some special “refined” pleasure, but he nowhere gives to that pleasure any particular quality. The primary beauties are natural; art uses imitation and imagination to extend them.

III Before turning to Stewart’s theory of taste, the other primary proto-aesthetic term in the eighteenth-century vocabulary, some issues concerning Stewart’s theory of the imagination and association need to be resolved because fundamentally Stewart understands taste in terms of imaginative associations. Throughout the eighteenth century, ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’ were usually treated as synonyms. Imagination is the ability to combine ideas or images, particularly those of sight, into different combinations and to recall to the mind those ideas or images at will. Thus, imagination is based on sight, and it is closely related to memory. Addison’s treatment in the Spectator essays on the pleasures of the imagination is typical. Addison writes in No. 417, A noble writer should be born with this faculty in its full strength and vigour, so as to be able to receive lively ideas from outward objects, to retain them long, and to range them together upon occasion, in such figures and representations as are most likely to hit the fancy of the reader. A poet should take as much pains in forming his imagination, as a philosopher in cultivating his understanding.20

Stewart cites Addison, and his theory differs from Addison’s only in dispensing with Addison’s distinction between present and remembered images. Yet what for Addison is merely a commonplace of eighteenth-century literary theory becomes for Stewart a much more complex and important part of Stewart’s faculty psychology. While the function of imagination remains essentially to combine and recombine images provided by sight and, by association, other sources of ideas, Stewart’s theory relates imagination to other faculties and to other mental terms, particularly the role of conception that is central to Reid’s theory of perception. Stewart writes,

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The business of conception, according to the account I have given of it, is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. … I shall employ the word imagination to express this power; and I apprehend that this is the proper sense of the word, if imagination be the power which gives birth to the productions of the poet and the painter. This is not a simple faculty of the mind. It presupposes abstraction, to separate from each other qualities and circumstances which have been perceived in conjunction; and also judgment and taste, to direct us in forming the combinations. If they are made wholly at random, they are proofs of insanity.21

Imagination and conception are not identical, but they are so closely related that they seem to be. For Reid, conception precedes perception, which is a more complex mental activity. For Stewart, however, conception follows perception and is a “transcript” of it. Imagination is the power that allows the mind to manipulate what conception transcribes. Since that manipulation will often be subliminal, only careful attention would be able to separate conception from imagination, and by itself, conception (what Reid would call bare conception or mere apprehension) has little purpose. At this point, Stewart ventures into a speculation that he knows is problematic and that brings him into further disagreement not only with Reid but also with the majority of his philosophical contemporaries. Stewart holds that both conception and imagination at the moment of application imply belief in the existence of their objects.22 The implication would then be, “When a painter conceives the face and figure of an absent friend, in order to draw his picture, he believes for the moment that his friend is before him.”23 It would seem to follow that every presentation of a poem, play, or painting involves at least a momentary belief in the existence of what is represented. When Tom Jones’s friend, Partridge, is taken in by the ghost at a performance of Hamlet, therefore, he is only persisting in what everyone in the audience momentarily believes. Stewart is aware how odd this will sound, and he allows that it is replaced quickly in all but abnormal cases with a negation of the belief. But he is forced to the initial conclusion because he avoids the alternative problem of locating conception in a preperceptual mental world that gets Reid entangled with innate ideas. Here, as elsewhere, Stewart is not only a nominalist about particulars; he also is very restrictive about what kind of mental entities his acceptance of the dualism of mind and external world implies. As a faculty, imagination is complex since it presupposes abstraction, judgment, memory (in some cases), and taste. Abstraction, memory, and judgment are primary faculties. Taste is itself a complex faculty as we shall see shortly. The problem that runs through Stewart’s treatment of imagination is just what it is that imagination combines. Stewart agrees with Reid that the “ideal philosophy” is based on a mistake; ideas cannot be resembling images that act as mental intermediaries between their objects and the mind. We perceive the objects themselves. But Stewart’s avowed nominalism about particulars means that each object will be individually perceived. So when abstraction and memory act to produce conceptions and fancied objects and the imagination then works with those objects, it is still working with individuals. That is one reason that Stewart must hold that there is at least a momentary belief in what

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is conceived. But if these fancied objects are not ideas, it is unclear what they are. Imagination seems to be operating on some mysterious mental entities that have no place in Stewart’s ontology. (Reid, who allows conceptions to precede perception logically, does not have this problem because whatever kind of mental entity or form conceptions turn out to be, they have always been mental, not particulars derived from perception.) The mechanism that allows imagination to do its work is provided by the association of ideas. Stewart’s theory of the association of ideas is very much his own. He claims more for it than Reid does: The ingenious author whom I last quoted [Reid], seems to think that the association of ideas has no claim to be considered as an original principle, or as an ultimate fact in our nature. … With this observation I cannot agree, because I think it more philosophical to resolve the power of habit into the association of ideas, than to resolve the association of ideas into habit.24

On the other hand, the association of ideas encompasses an almost infinite range of relations. Stewart denies that any enumeration can be given. He allows that there is one primary distinction, however: “The relations upon which some of them are founded, are perfectly obvious to the mind; those which are the foundation of others, are discovered only in consequence of particular efforts of attention.”25 From this theory of association, Stewart derives distinctions between fancy and imagination and between philosophy and poetry. Fancy provides data; it is a necessary condition of imagination. Poetry produces pleasure, and that pleasure arises from the associations that are formed by rhyme, wit, and poetic language. Poetry depends, therefore, on one kind of association, that which is “obvious to the mind.” Philosophy depends on another, that which requires “particular efforts of attention.” Reid criticized the association of ideas because it is about ideas, and Reid thinks ideas are myths. They simply do not exist in the way that the association of ideas requires. Stewart agrees as far as the theories of Hartley and Priestley are concerned; they do not have sufficient evidence for their physiological theories and Stewart, like Reid, rejects any attempt to get from physiology to mental phenomena.26 But Stewart is much looser in his use of ‘idea’ than Reid. He takes ideas to be equivalent to objects of thought, and as such, an association of ideas is commonplace in that thoughts succeed each other on the basis of all kinds of associations. So Stewart means by the association of ideas any relation of succession or transition in thoughts. For Stewart, such associations are largely ad hoc. Stewart thinks that we have a natural language, but it provides us with concepts and abstract or general ideas, not with associations. Stewart’s theory of poetic association, therefore, is limited to responses and separated from the laws and generalizations of philosophy. He has no room for Alison’s expressive properties. If there are regularities or rules in the arts, it is because our faculties respond in common ways. Association cannot supply new ideas or thoughts. For Stewart, association can do no more than link ideas that would otherwise be independent and transfer from one idea to another the emotions felt in connection with the first.

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This means that for Stewart, although the association of ideas plays a prominent role in his thought as it does in that of any others of his school, it is not a source of ideas of beauty. At most, the association of ideas provides a kind of reflected or secondary beauty to objects or qualities that would not otherwise be considered beautiful. As important as this is, it says nothing at all about what beauty is: The principle of Association is not, in this instance, employed to account for the pleasing effect which the smell of the rose produces on its appropriate sense; but to explain in what manner the recollection of this agreeable sensation may enter, as an element, into the composition of an order of pleasures distinguished by a different name, and classed with the pleasures of a different organ.27

Beauty is the pleasure of a particular sense, sight, extended to other pleasant sensations of other sources by association. Imagination is the combination and recombination of remembered experiences either to reproduce the pleasures of the beautiful or to enhance them by idealization and intensification.

IV From his theory of imagination and association, Stewart is able to develop a theory of taste. His theory of taste has three elements. Taste is itself a faculty, and it is influenced by two other faculties, the associative faculty and the imaginative faculty. All three are acquired or auxiliary faculties that depend on other faculties for their starting point. Stewart claims, Taste is not a simple and original faculty, but a power gradually formed by experience and observation. It implies, indeed, as its ground-work, a certain degree of natural sensibility; but it implies also the exercise of the judgment, and is the slow result of an attentive examination and comparison of the agreeable or disagreeable effects produced on the mind by external objects.28

The picture one gets is of an initial response to some beauty—either an original beauty based on sight or one derived on the basis of some chain of association or some further activity of imagination. For that to occur, one must have a certain sensibility, but sensibility in and of itself is not taste. Taste enters only as a form of judgment based on further associations formed, to some degree, by education as well as simple preference. There are two kinds of taste—tastes common to everyone on the basis of human nature such as a taste for simple pleasures, and tastes that have to be formed such as a taste for rhymed couplets. Neither kind says much about what causes taste, however. There are natural associations and acquired associations, but what causes the pleasure in the first place seems to have nothing to do with taste. Perverted tastes are possible. Although taste is described as a form of judgment, its role is not the moral or prudential judgment of earlier theories of taste.

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The point of a theory of taste is to account for a class of pleasures—like sweetness, critical taste is a response to some natural property. But for Stewart, association is possible on the basis of any natural or acquired response. As long as it is pleasant, it will produce a positive taste response. So simply to have a taste for something says little about what forms that taste or whether it is good or bad in any sense other than a hedonic one. The kind of influences that Stewart considers include both classical models and cultural influences: As the air and manner of a gentleman can be acquired only by living habitually in the best society, so grace in composition must be attained by an habitual acquaintance with classical writers.29 … From the remarks which have been made on the influence of the association of ideas on our judgments in matters of taste, it is obvious how much the opinions of a nation with respect to merit in the fine arts, are likely to be influenced by the form of their government, and the state of their manners.30

Both models and manners depend on association and education. Imagination adds to the effect: “A cultivated taste, combined with a creative imagination constitutes genius in the Fine Arts. Without taste, imagination could produce only a random analysis and combination of our conceptions; and without imagination, taste would be destitute of the faculty of invention.”31 One might add that without imagination, taste would also be limited to direct perceptions, so a refined beauty produces a refined taste. The fundamental issue for Stewart is how taste is acquired; he is more interested in its epistemology than its moral nature. Therefore, he is less concerned with whether it is good or bad taste (the primary issue for Shaftesbury and most earlier theories of taste, for whom critical taste reflects on the qualities of a person) than with how one comes to arrive at judgments of taste. Stewart begins by arguing that there are many acquired powers that operate so rapidly and automatically that they seem to be natural. He includes in his list acquired perception (our ability to recognize distances, for example), the ability to read and write, to do rapid calculations, and to take in a strategic location, adding taste to the list. Not everything in Stewart’s list seems exactly analogous, however. Perception may be acquired, but all that is necessary to acquire it is normal sight and experience; reading and writing, on the other hand, have to be learned, and the learning process is not natural but one that must be taught. It is not clear where taste fits into this scheme or how one would distinguish it from a natural ability. Taste is closer to acquired perception than to a learned skill among those Stewart cites. One must be able to see a painting, including such acquired seeing as perspective, but that does not mean that one must learn to “read” a painting iconographically in order to appreciate it. One’s taste may operate much more directly than that, given the requisite perception. At issue is a matter of evidence; if natural abilities vary, as Stewart holds that they do against the claims that all men start with equal powers, then it is unclear how one will determine whether taste is truly acquired or merely one of those powers that are not equally distributed among persons, like intelligence or acuteness of vision.

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Stewart subordinates the normative aspect of taste as a judgment to the genetic development of taste. He sets out to show that taste is an acquired faculty, not a natural one. To do that, he needs to show that taste does not appear until after a certain point in one’s experience or education. Now that may be the case, but it is not the same as the distinction between having taste and having good taste. Simply showing that good taste depends on experience or education will not be sufficient to show that taste itself does, nor, conversely, will showing that taste responds normatively rule out its being natural rather than acquired. The eighteenth-century essays on taste, including those of Alexander Gerard and Archibald Alison, begin with the assumption that one naturally responds in some way to art and nature. In any but unnatural individuals, spring will please and merit the predicate fresh. Everyone, therefore, has taste. Everyone does not have good taste, however, and from Shaftesbury on, the issue was who has good taste and how it may be judged. These are just the issues of philosophical criticism that Stewart attempted to set aside. The most important thing to note about Stewart’s theory of taste is how far he has moved away from the conditions that justified the metaphor in the first place. Stewart notes, very accurately, that the metaphorical application of taste to a distinguishing judgment is of modern origin.32 The origin of the metaphor in the Renaissance depends on the analogy between the physical sense of taste and the judgmental application of taste to the arts. On that theory, our physical sense of taste perceives immediately, without inference. It is individual and subjective; whatever I feel, I feel. It involves a judgment, but that judgment is a simple one of liking or disliking; I do not justify my preference for Scotch over gin. And, as a physical sense, taste is factually dependent on the simple accuracy of its perceptions; the only way to refute my claim that a white powder is salt is to show that even if it tastes salty to me, it tastes sweet to everyone else and thus that ‘sweet’ denotes this particular chemical compound. Moral and taste theorists throughout most of the eighteenth century take all of these characteristics to describe moral and critical taste as well. There, too, a sense was believed to operate to produce immediate judgments that had individual subjective corrigibility but the empirical standing of a physical sense of taste. The metaphor, once introduced, fit exactly the new faith in empirical science. But in spite of Stewart’s adherence to the science of Bacon, his theory of taste makes little or no use of the analogy that justified the term. For Stewart, mental observation is sui generis. When he turns to taste, therefore, Stewart is talking about an acquired faculty, not a sense of taste, even analogically. The implication of this for the protoaesthetics of the eighteenth century is that although Stewart continues to develop the language of taste, as he himself has cautioned, he is using a misleading form of language borrowed from material phenomena. He has no way of adequately recategorizing taste phenomena, but he thinks of them in a way that is closer to the nineteenth-century concept of aesthetic sensibility based on an aesthetic faculty or attitude than to the eighteenth-century theory of taste that includes moral and critical judgment. The real problem for Stewart is that he is committed to a true faculty psychology while Shaftesbury and most of the eighteenth-century tradition of essays on taste after him mean by faculties only abilities, not distinct mental operations. So Stewart, who takes taste to be a faculty, is forced to distinguish it from nonjudgmental faculties

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like attention. Once judgment becomes part of the faculty, it follows that the faculty itself must be acquired. For earlier writers, principles of taste do not imply a separate, distinct faculty; they are “ideas of reflection” based on the mind’s reflection on its own powers and primary ideas. Stewart, on the other hand, thinks there are principles of taste because taste is a faculty; but because it is a form of judgment, it requires reason as part of its makeup. It follows that the faculty of taste is a complex, acquired faculty. Between Stewart and earlier theories of taste a gap filled by discrete faculties and senses had opened, though it seems doubtful if Stewart was aware of the change. Eighteenth-century taste theorists must give an account of how character is formed in such a way that the response is reliable—the man of sentiment or taste. Nineteenthcentury, post-Kantian aesthetics attribute aesthetic response to a separate mental operation that produces a unique kind of experience. Stewart is at least moving in that direction. But taste is no longer the right term, so he is really at the end of a philosophical tradition.33 The strength of eighteenth-century theories of taste lay in their allegiance to the same scientific standards that produced such significant results in chemistry and physics—the ability to formulate law-like empirical generalizations that had verifiable projections and grounded knowledge of the material world. In morals and criticism, it was hoped that a similar adherence to direct sensory input would produce similar surety. A moral sense and a sense of taste seemed most closely related to the physical sense of taste, so in spite of the classical reliance on sight and touch, taste became the preferred theoretical sense of morals and eighteenth-century proto-aesthetics. It depended on experience; it offered the hope of generalizable rules and standards; and even its subjectivity seemed a useful empirical antidote for the authoritarian, a priori claims of transcendent morality and rational critical rules. Reason was to be reduced to its proper role of analysis and internal consistency. David Hume, however, pushed the new theories of taste to their limit in criticism as he did in morals. It was not, as his contemporaries, including Reid, thought, that Hume was the great skeptic who would destroy morality. It was simply that, pushed to the limit, the empirical rules that moral theory and the theory of taste produced turned out to be nothing like Newton’s laws or the chemistry of Lavoisier and Priestley. They were historically conditioned and remained unrepentantly sentimental. Reid rebelled against that conclusion, almost to the extent that he was willing to look back to the pre-Newtonian forms, now called common sense and cloaked in a pious limitation of philosophical investigation by principles that must be acceded to because there was no alternative. The science of Bacon was opposed to the science of Newton. Stewart thinks that he belongs to that earlier tradition of taste theories, but he does not. On its face, Stewart’s theory of taste and beauty is very unexciting. He offers no new formulations, and he continues to say all of the right things about beauty and taste. Beauty is a form of pleasure. The imagination is a power or faculty, developed by experience, that allows beauty to be refined, recombined, recalled, and finally incorporated into the fine arts. It is opposed to the philosophical generalities and the faculties of the mind that pursue philosophical questions. Whoever develops his faculties on one side is likely to ignore or allow his faculties on the other to atrophy.

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Taste is an acquired faculty that discriminates within the imaginative and associative realm of experiences. In transforming taste into an acquired faculty, however, Stewart has broken with the taste tradition, which, by the time he writes, had failed to produce the standards that it promised. Stewart effectively detaches taste from its roots, and what is left is easily assimilated to his primary concerns with developing an adequate psychology of the human mind. That his reliance on faculties and his failure to foresee the possibility of extended investigation of the mind–brain relation limit his range is hardly a total failure, therefore. If nothing else, he brings the eighteenth-century theories of taste to their logical end.

A Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded

The basic argument of this book is that the kind of empiricism that is associated with John Locke provides a paradigm for philosophically informed theories of taste developed in eighteenth-century Britain. The premises of Lockean empiricism are broadly known, though they are matters of great complexity both in their historical development and in the details of their theory. They constitute what John Yolton called the “way of ideas,”1 and ideas themselves are the theoretical entities that form this new paradigm. The premises themselves, stated in terms of the eighteenthcentury language of ideas, are (1) that knowledge must be based on direct personal experience that produces “ideas” that are the content and referent of that experience; (2) that those ideas begin as simple ideas and develop into more complex ideas by reflection, association, and the faculties of memory and imagination; (3) that there are no inborn or “innate” ideas; and (4) that no rules or rational conditions can be established that take epistemological precedence over one’s personal experience of ideas. These premises are the commonplaces that describe what we call empiricism and that were gradually accepted in eighteenth-century Britain. They were successful in shaping the natural sciences, but they were matters of contention, particularly in moral judgments and judgments of taste. When applied to the newly institutionalized “fine arts,” they produce theories of taste and judgments in the arts that are different from the rationalist and classical theories of taste and beauty. I have called this a proto-aesthetic to distinguish it from what we might call “aesthetics proper”—the aesthetics of Romanticism, Kantian, and neo-Kantian philosophy and their analytical and phenomenological progeny. It shapes critical and philosophical theories that are significantly different from earlier classical and rationalist theories of beauty while anticipating what we now call aesthetics. Taste, in the extended metaphor that emerges in the course of the eighteenth century in Britain, follows the new Lockean paradigm. That proto-aesthetic can legitimately stand on its own philosophically. Some explanation for calling eighteenth-century theories of taste and experience of the arts a new paradigm may be called for. Thomas Kuhn introduced several seminal notions in the intellectual history of ideas of science. Science, he argues, proceeds on the basis of “normal science,” “which means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community

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acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for further practice.”2 He continues, Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as “paradigms,” a term that relates closely to “normal science.”3

Kuhn’s use of the term ‘paradigm’ and his arguments that science proceeds not only by the expansion of normal science but also by paradigm shifts or revolutions were and still remain controversial. The basic distinction is suggestive for the kind of philosophical development of a proto-aesthetic I have tried to describe here, however. The work of John Locke and its presumed relation to the empirical science of Newton, Boyle, and others in the latter part of the seventeenth century provides something like a paradigm for subsequent philosophical theories of taste and beauty in the eighteenth century. A community of critics and philosophers from Shaftesbury to Dugald Stewart acknowledges that paradigm as the basis for further discussion. That stretches Kuhn’s use of paradigm, of course. No normal philosophy of taste, beauty, and the arts on the model of normal science can emerge because, in spite of the hopes of philosophers in the eighteenth century, philosophy is not a science in the way that the eighteenthcentury studies of mechanics or electricity were sciences. Nevertheless, the model for investigating human understanding and knowledge provided by Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume and subsequently made canonical as “empiricism” works as a paradigm that guides philosophical speculation in morality and taste throughout the eighteenth century. A significant ‘group’ (a term Kuhn uses) of philosophers (as we now identify them), connoisseurs, critics, and artists share a broad adherence to the kind of empiricism Locke formulated. From their work we can discern what I have called a proto-aesthetic, though it is certainly not a science or a paradigm in the narrower sense that Kuhn suggests. Philosophy, of course, does not proceed by paradigmatic stages from revolution to normality. Its arguments from the eighteenth century are as relevant now as they were then when they are read with sufficient hermeneutic care and sympathy. But the argument of this book has been that there is something like a paradigmatic empiricist thread that is running through the local arguments about genius, the sublime, the picturesque, and other topics related to taste and beauty that we can still learn from. One major difference between science and the kind of philosophy being discussed here is that the audience for this proto-aesthetics in the eighteenth century remains that of the educated middle class. Kuhn explains, “Sometime between 1740 and 1780, electricians were for the first time enabled to take the foundations of their field for granted. From that point they pushed on to more concrete and recondite problems, and increasingly they then reported their results in articles addressed to other electricians rather than in books addressed to the learned world at large.”4 Discussions of taste and beauty in the eighteenth century are similarly addressed to a wide, nonspecialist audience, but unlike the “progress” of science, that remained their

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audience. (If contemporary philosophy has become a specialist discipline, more’s the pity.) Archibald Alison in 1790 is still writing for a broad audience of the intelligentsia, and Dugald Stewart, while he is a “professional philosopher” in some sense, is also addressing a wider audience. Their work is discussed in The Edinburgh Review, not in academic monographs. They share underlying assumptions that reach back to Locke, and even as the assumptions change toward the end of the century they continue to address much the same audience. Those assumptions are, first of all, that one can appeal only to experience as a foundation for a theory of taste or beauty. No one comes into the world with a hardwired understanding of beauty or a preordained taste. There are no innate ideas, even though that cliché means many things in the eighteenth century. Only when one experiences beautiful things or is exposed to what will be codified in the course of the century as the “fine arts” does one develop one’s own taste. Since it is presumed that some things are in fact beautiful, an experience of beauty and a taste for the arts must be put on the same basis as all other forms of experience of the world. So as a first move, Francis Hutcheson postulates internal senses that respond more or less as other senses do to what is in the world. The interiority and subjectivity of those responses lead to successive reformulations that culminate, I believe, in David Hume’s analysis of sentiment, and his defense of sentiment as itself an epistemologically respectable element in both morals and taste. That continuing thread then is worked out in theories of genius, the sublime, the picturesque, and expression together with theories of judgment that seek to make taste a defensible public judgment as well as a private pleasurable perception. The models and theories proposed are varied. Mechanical association, on the model of chemistry, is one attempt argued for by David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. A new psychology advocated by Edmund Burke as a basis for perception of the sublime is another. The problems of a standard of taste in the face of the obvious variability of taste that follows from making taste a personal experience have to be addressed. Hume is, perhaps, most successful in sorting out the problem of a standard in “Of the Standard of Taste,” where he shifts the ground from taste itself to the role of the critic, but there are numerous discussions that all share the premise that taste is a matter of personal experience independent of rules. Threats of subjectivism and solipsism persist and are addressed by Thomas Reid and his followers in the “commonsense” school of Scottish philosophy. A form of naturalism gives “expression” a new and more extensive meaning, particularly in the work of Archibald Alison. I have tried to explicate the resulting theories and give them a sympathetic reading in the successive chapters of this book, not only because they seem to me to present a coherent working out of the paradigm suggested by Locke but also because I find them interesting in their own right. This is particularly true of the turn given to the theories by Hume’s form of epistemological sentimentalism, but it is also true of what it opens up as a theoretical space for the fine arts and their practice. Literary criticism and art criticism are transformed by the empiricism of response in eighteenth-century philosophy. That is why the role of such “amateurs” as John Baillie, Edmund Burke, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight remains important.

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Another reason for going back to the eighteenth-century British empiricist paradigm that I have called a proto-aesthetic is that much of its value has been obscured by what immediately followed. There are anticipations of Romanticism and an “aesthetics proper” in the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetic. That sense of aesthetics has formed the basis of subsequent theories, both psychological and analytical, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If one mentions aesthetics today, something of that Kantian and neo-Kantian theory will be somewhere in the presumed foundation. Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline takes for granted aesthetic experience, no matter how difficult it may be to give aesthetic experience a sound explication. The difficulties of “aesthetics proper” have led to an abandonment of a comprehensive theory of taste, however. Instead of the kind of theory of the arts and critical judgment that one would like to have and that is still sought in ethical theories, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury aesthetics tends to fragment into theories of individual arts and individual psychological theories of response. ‘Aesthetics’ itself is often an empty term referring vaguely to the range of arts in our increasingly chaotic artworld or simply to whatever one thinks about everything one likes. It need not be so, however. It is too soon to give up on something like a theory of the fine arts that was at the basis of the eighteenth-century proto-aesthetics. The work of Shaftesbury, Hume, and Reid in particular suggests that thinking about taste and beauty in the Lockean empiricist tradition need not presume nineteenth- and twentiethcentury forms of a unique aesthetic experience. It may be enough to recognize that sentiment and individual response can serve an epistemological role as well as being a purely idiosyncratic experience of pleasure or interest. Perhaps that is too much to hope for. It is certainly more than the detailed explications and connections set forth in this book have established. But it is a hope.

Notes Introduction 1. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics (1711), ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). 2. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963). 3. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) and Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), in The Works of Thomas Reid, 6th ed., ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1863; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1984). 4. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Edinburgh: 1790). 5. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1854). 6. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987) and A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Biggs, 2nd ed. revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed., 1759), ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 8. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London: 1777) (facsimile ed., Menston, England: Scholar’s Press, 1968). 9. Hutcheson was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, but his principal work on aesthetics was composed while he was still a Presbyterian minister in Ireland. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London: Printed for J. Darby, etc. 1725). 10. Baumgarten equated his term with the Latin sentio (Aesthetica, para. 1). He understood it to designate the outer, external, or bodily sense as opposed to the inner sense of consciousness. Thus aesthetics is the realm of the sensate, of sense perception and sensible objects. Texte zur Grundlegung der Asthetik, ubersetze und herausgegeben von Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983 (four key aesthetic texts, including a Latin text with parallel German translation of key sections of Baumgarten’s Mestaphysica of 1739) and Theoretische Asthetik, ubersetzt und herausgegeben von Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983 (Latin text with parallel German translation of selected sections of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica). 11. Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General (1728), trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrell, 1963). 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). 13. William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics (Boston: 1870), I, vii, 124.

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14. For example, Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 15. I have collected and surveyed many of them in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, ed. Dabney Townsend (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1999). 16. See my article on the early history of taste in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4:355–60. 17. For example, Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 18. Monroe Beardley, Aesthetics (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958) and The Aesthetic Point of View, ed. Michael Wreen and Donald Callen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). 19. Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20. George Dickie, The Century of Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 21. Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 22. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rodgers (London: Penguin Books, 1992). The discourses were delivered between 1769 and 1790 as lectures to the Royal Academy. 23. William Hogarrth, Analysis of Beauty, Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: 1753).

1 The Empiricist Move in Aesthetics: Locke and Shaftesbury 1. Jerome Stolnitz, “Locke and the Category of Value in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophy 38 (January 1963), 40. 2. Stolnitz, “Locke and the Category of Value,” 41. 3. Daniel Webb, “Literary Amusements in Verse and Prose,” [1763] in Miscellanies (London: J. Nichols, 1802), 256. 4. Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1964). 5. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, “To Jean Le Clerc, Feb. 1705,” in The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regime of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London: Swan and Sonnenschein, 1900), 332. 6. Robert Voitle, Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 12–13. 7. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, “Letter to General Stanhope, Nov. 7th, 1709” in Rand, 416. 8. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, “The Moralist: A Philosophical Rhapsody” (1709) in Characteristics, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), II, 132–3. 9. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “The Moralist,” II, 141. 10. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules” (printed 1713) in Second Characters, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 35–6. The actual painting is by Paolo de’Matteis and is titled “The Choice of Hercules.” It is in the Ashmolean Museum, Accession Number WA180.92. 11. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics or the Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art,” 97. 12. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 114.

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1 3. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Soliloquy or Advice to an Author,” I, 113. 14. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987) and Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed., 1759), ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 15. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 124. 16. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 101. 17. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophical Quarterly, 2.43 (April 1961), 98. 18. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “The Moralist,” II, 137. 19. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,” I, 251–2. My emphasis. 20. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Concerning Virtue or Merit,” I, 251. 21. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “The Moralists,” II, 142–3. 22. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Hercules,” 61. 23. Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans. Joseph Jacobs (New York: Macmillan, 1945). 24. George Berkeley, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, vol. 3 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964). 25. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Miscellaneous Reflections,” 311–12. 26. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 184. 27. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 112. 28. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 184; Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 113. 29. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 114. 30. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 207–8. 31. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 180–1. 32. Quoted by Thomas Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (London: 1882), 16. 33. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Concerning Virtue or Merit,” I, 258–9. 34. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 146. 35. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Concerning Virtue or Merit,” I, 252. My emphasis. 36. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 93. 37. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 199. 38. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 200. 39. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Concerning Virtue or Merit,” I, 243. 40. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 193. 41. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” II, Section II. 42. Shaftesbury, Second Characters, “Plastics,” 119. 43. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, “The Moralists,” II, 131.

2 Francis Hutcheson: The Sense of Taste 1. His students published a defense of their teacher, “Vindication of Mr. Hutcheson from The Calumnious Aspersions of a Late Pamphlet by Several of his Scholars,” printed 1738. Facsimile, SN Books World, India. 2. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London: Printed for J. Darby, etc. 1725).

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3. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728; 3rd ed., 1742). (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969). 4. Hutcheson, Inquiry, title page. 5. Abbé Jean Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Printed for John Nourse, at the Lamb, opposite Katherine Street in the Strand, 1748). It was widely read in Nugent’s translation. A modern French translation is available: Réflexion critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993). 6. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, Nos. 411–421 (June 21, 1712–July 3, 1712). Frequently anthologized, for example in Scott Elledge, ed., Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), I, 41–75 and Dabney Townsend, ed., Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1999), 107–35. 7. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 11. 8. See, for example, Mark Strasser, Francis Hutcheson’s Moral Theory: Its Form and Utility (Wakefield, NH: Longwood Academic/Hollowbrook Communications, 1990) and Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 9. John Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, [1956] 1996), 97–8. 10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 11. Hutcheson, Essay, 5–6. 12. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 79. 13. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 144. 14. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 173–4. 15. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: 1749; facsimile reproduction with an introduction by Theodore L. Huguelet. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966). See Chapter 4. 16. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 95. 17. Jerome Stolnitz, “Locke and the Category of Value in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory,” Philosophy, 38, 143 (January 1963), 44. 18. Stolnitz, “Locke and the Category of Value,” 46–7. 19. Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 45–6. 20. John Locke, Essay, II, 12, 5, 165. 21. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 47. 22. Kivy, The Seventh Sense, 54–5. 23. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 7. 24. Locke, Essay, II, 1, 9. 25. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 9–10. 26. Locke, Essay, 105. 27. Locke, Essay, II, 3, 1. 28. Cf. Locke, Essay, IV, I. 29. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 75. 30. Francis Hutcheson, Letters between the Late Mr. Gilbert Burnet and Mr. Hutcheson in Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Bernard Peach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 216. 31. Hutcheson, Letters, 230. 32. Hutcheson, Letters, 230. 33. Locke, Essay, II, 21, 5. 34. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 6–7.

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3 5. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 65. My emphasis. 36. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 65. 37. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Biggs, 2nd ed. revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) and Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963). See Chapters 3 and 5. 38. Hume also differs from Hutcheson because he does require that ideas be representations, though not in Locke’s simple sense of representation. See chapter three, section I. 39. Hutcheson, Inquiry, ix. 40. For a different perspective on this issue, see Peter Kivy’s comments, “Hutcheson’s Idea of Beauty: Simple or Complex,” in the Seventh Sense, 2nd ed., 260–5. 41. Hutcheson, Essay, 131–2. 42. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988). 43. Squares are more beautiful than triangles because they have more sides, and more beautiful than irregular four-side figures because they have greater uniformity.

3 Hume: The Priority of Sentiment 1. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940). Published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. 2. “Introduction” to The Project Gutenberg edition of Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. The comment is presumably that of the editor, David Price. 3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, 1773. https://johns​onsd​ icti​onar​yonl​ine.com. 4. Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (London: Macmillan, 1964). 5. Páll Άrdall, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). 6. Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 7. Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume, Chapter II. 8. Donald Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 26–7. 9. David Hume (1739), A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 10. Hume, Treatise, 2.3.3; 414–15. 11. Dominique Bouhours, “ ‘The Je Ne Sais Quoi’ from ‘The Conversations of Arioste and Eugene’” (1671), in The Continental Model, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), 230–8. 12. This claim is controversial. I have defended it minimally elsewhere, and I will not go into greater detail here. Even if one finds exceptions, I believe that the consequences for a sentimental epistemology will remain. Taste and sentiment as they relate to a proto-aesthetics are clearly representational because there needs to be some work of art or instance of natural beauty that is referred to. This in no way commits Hume to believing that sentiment is somehow a mirror or image in the sense that some of his critics (Thomas Reid and, recently, Richard Rorty) have maintained. Nor is it the same as saying that ideas are images of their cause. Hume does not hold some kind of picture theory of ideas. 13. Hume, Treatise, 1.2.2; 29.

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1 4. Hume, Treatise, 1.2.2; 29. 15. This is one important distinction between Hume’s proto-aesthetics and Kant’s use of the aesthetic as a purely disinterested form. 16. This is one reason, I think, that in formalist aestheticians such as Roger Fry (e.g., Vision and Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)) and Susanne Langer (e.g., Feeling and Form (New York: Macmillan, 1953)), we value their examples of form more than their analytical justifications of it. 17. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.5; 615. 18. Hume, Treatise, 2.3.5; 424. 19. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.10; 120. 20. Thomas Reid will arrive at the same point from the opposite direction. Reid’s psychological realism requires belief in its object. Hume’s sentimentalism requires that a sentiment be believable. See Chapter 10, Section II. 21. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.10; 120. 22. This is a fundamental point of contact with Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism, which Blackburn derives, at least in part, from Hume. See Simon Blackburn, How to Read Hume (London: Granta Books, 2008) and especially Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and Essays in Quasi-Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Blackburn’s reading of Hume is at least compatible with mine, though Blackburn is not interested in Hume’s theory of taste except in passing. 23. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988). 24. Hume’s sense of disinterestedness is very different from Kant’s, therefore. As was noted with Shaftesbury, interest in its eighteenth-century sense of a real relation is not bad in itself, and disinterestedness in either morality or taste may or may not be desirable. If interestedness connotes prejudice or an overriding self-interest, it will produce false sentiment. But disinterestedness may equally lead to a lack of sympathy and thus of an inability to rely on one’s own sentiment as a form of judgment. The key point here is that a pure disinterestedness does not make it desirable, and it certainly is not the criterion of good taste or an aesthetic attitude that it became in twentiethcentury aesthetics. 25. We will return to the problem of painful sentiments below when considering tragedy. 26. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), EPM 9.1; 271–72. 27. Hence, in matters of taste, Hume shifts the burden to the critic’s standing in common life. 28. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 1, 5. 29. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 1, 6. 30. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 7, 60. 31. Texte zur Grundlegung der Asthetik, ubersetze und herausgegeben von Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983. (Four key aesthetic texts, including a Latin text with parallel German translation of key sections of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica of 1739) and Theoretische Asthetik, ubersetzt und herausgegeben von Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983 (Latin text with parallel German translation of selected sections of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica). 32. Hume, Treatise, 1.1.6; 15. 33. Colin Radford, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Volume 49 (1975), 67–80 and “Tears and

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Fictions,” Philosophy 52 (1977), 208–13. Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 5–27. There is an extensive literature. It also does not make Hume a positivist as A. J. Ayer would have liked. A. J. Ayer, Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 34. Hume, Treatise, 1.2.4; 48. 35. Hume, Treatise, 1.2.4; 48–9. 36. Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2; 274. 37. Or better, but more awkwardly, beauty-ideas and taste-ideas, to avoid any implication that there is some concept of beauty or taste at work. Beauty is simply the sentiment or pleasure experienced, and taste is the associated judgment. 38. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.5-appendix; 628. 39. This typology is mine, not Hume’s. His treatment of fictions is interspersed throughout his writings but is found especially in the Treatise. 40. Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2; 274. 41. This is the point at which both Hume and Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982)) appeal to sympathy, though in different ways. Smith acknowledges that fictions produce real sentiments. 42. I am reading this as leaving open that there may be ideas based on fictions that are presented by more than the fancy alone, and my analysis claims that elsewhere Hume routinely makes positive use of such fictions. Here, he is concerned specifically to address how we can distinguish an idea assented to from a fanciful idea. 43. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.7-appendix; 628. 44. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 12.3; 165. Emphasis in original. 45. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 226–49. 46. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.10; 120–1.

4 Associationism: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley 1. Martin Fitzpatrick, “Priestley Caricatured,” in Motion toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley, ed. A Truman Schwartz and John G. McEvoy (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1990), 161–218. 2. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London: 1777; facsimile ed.: Menston, England: Scholar’s Press, 1968), 2. 3. R. E. Schofield, “The Professional Work of an Amateur Chemist: Joseph Priestley,” in Motion toward Perfection. Alexander Gerard worked out an associationist theory of beauty and taste well before Alison, however. See Chapter 5. 4. Priestley, Lectures, 1. 5. Joseph Priestley, Selections from His Writings, ed. Ira V. Brown (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962); Priestley, “Memoirs,” 13. 6. Priestley, Lectures, 72 and 125–6. 7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book II, Chapter XXXIII, 395. 8. John Gay, A Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle and Immediate Criteria of Virtue as also the Obligation, and Aprobation of it. With some account of the Origin of the Passions and Affections (London: 1731), xiv. 9. Gay, A Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle, xxx–xxxi.

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10. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: 1749; facsimile reproduction Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966). 11. Hartley, Observations on Man, II, 338. 12. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, 360–1. 13. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, ii. 14. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, 6. 15. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, 25. 16. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, 81. 17. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, 322. 18. Hartley, Observations on Man, I, 416. 19. Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas; with Essays relating to the Subject of it (London: J. Johnson, 1775), vii–viii. 20. Priestley does add a three-page section of his own as a conclusion. This addition is discussed by Ronald B. Hatch, “Joseph Priestley: An Addition to Hartley’s Observations,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (July–September 1975), 548–50. 21. Priestley, Hartley’s Theory, vii–viii. 22. Priestley, Hartley’s Theory, xix. 23. Priestley, Hartley’s Theory, xl. 24. Hartley, I, 324. It is probably too much to hear hints of a Tarski-like truth predicate in Hartley’s way of explaining truth, but he does make truth a linguistic property. 25. Joseph Priestley, An examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of common Sense, Dr. Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth and Dr. Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion (London: J. Johnson, 1774), “Introductory Observations on the nature of JUDGMENT and REASONING, with a general view of the PROGRESS OF THE INTELLECT, with respect to the principal subjects of this treatise,” xxxviii–xliii. For example, Priestley says that “This class of truths contains those in which there is an universal, and therefore a supposed necessary connection between the subject and the predicate” (xxxviii) and “Another class of truths contains those in which the subject and predicate appears, upon comparison, to be, in reality, nothing more than different names for the same thing” (xxxviii–xxxix). It is not clear whether Priestley would have made this distinction as early as the Lectures on Oratory or where he got it, but it shows that he is aware of the logical problems that association raises. 26. Priestley, Examination, “Remarks on Dr. Beattie’s Essay on the nature and Immutability of Truth,” 130. 27. Priestley, Examination, 137. 28. Priestley, Lectures, 72. 29. Priestley, Lectures, 72–3. 30. Priestley, Lectures, 125–6. 31. Priestley, Lectures, 74. 32. Priestley, Lectures, 74. 33. Priestley, Lectures, 135. 34. Priestley, Memoirs, 27. 35. Priestley, Lectures, 136. 36. Priestley, Lectures, 13. 37. Priestley, Lectures, 130. 38. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963), 3.

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3 9. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 29. 40. Priestley, Lectures, 141. 41. Priestley, Lectures, 144. 42. Priestley, Lectures, 157. 43. Priestley, Lectures, 144–5. 44. Priestley, Lectures, 147. 45. Priestley, Lectures, 148. 46. Priestley, Lectures, 150. 47. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 48. Priestley, Lectures, 151. 49. Priestley, Lectures, 156. 50. Priestley, Lectures, 159. 51. Priestley, Lectures, 162. 52. Priestley, Lectures, 158. 53. Priestley, Lectures, 164. 54. Priestley, Lectures, 133. 55. Priestley, Lectures, 166–7. 56. See Chapter 2, 36–7. 57. Priestly, Examination, 36. 58. R. E. Schofield’s view of Priestley as a follower of Newton and Father Boscovich on the nature of matter has been vigorously challenged. J. G. McEvoy and J. E. McGuire conclude, “Priestley’s theory of matter is radically different from Newton’s in both its nature and assumptions. So it is, too, in its conception of the nature of chemical explanation since it excludes any appeal to the invisible realm of particles and forces of either the Newtonian or the Boscovichean system.” J. G. McEvoy and J. E. McGuire, “God and Nature: Priestley’s Way of Rational Dissent,” in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Sixth Annual Volume, ed. Russell McCormmach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 389 n. 247.

5 Theories of Taste 1. See my article on the early history of taste, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), IV, 355–60. 2. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (1709), Characteristics, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964); “Plastics,” 144. 3. Joseph Addison, “The Spectator, No. 409,” in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), I, 38. Frequently anthologized. 4. Addison, “The Spectator, No. 409,” 39. 5. Thomas B. Gilmore, ed. Early Eighteenth-Century Essays on Taste (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972). 6. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759/1780) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963). 7. Henry Home (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism in Three Volumes (Edinburgh: Printed for A. Millar, London; and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, Edinburgh, 1763). 8. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985).

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9. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 109. Page numbers are to the 1780 edition. 1 0. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 144. 11. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, Essays 409 and 411–21. 12. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 1. 13. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 1. 14. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 47. 15. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 93. 16. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 105. 17. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 101. 18. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 143. 19. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 144. 20. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 151. 21. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 154–5. 22. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 161–2. 23. Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas; with Essays relating to the Subject of it (London: J. Johnson, 1775). See Chapter 4. 24. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 184–5. 25. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 18. 26. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 102. 27. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 133. 28. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 83–4. 29. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 86–7. 30. After Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” appeared, Gerard returned to the topic by adding a fourth part to his essay in 1780. It requires a separate consideration. 31. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 88. 32. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 95. 33. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 96. 34. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 126–7. The reference to “peculiar feeling” should not be taken as an aesthetic emotion. It is just that they are distinct from each other. 35. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) in The Works of Thomas Reid, 6th ed. ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1863; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1984). See Chapter 10. 36. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 105. 37. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 71. 38. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 88. 39. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 145–6. 40. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 147. 41. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 157. 42. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 179. 43. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 193. 44. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 194–5. 45. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 125. 46. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 149. 47. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 386–7. 48. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 378–9. 49. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 380. 50. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Biggs, 2nd ed. revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I,4,2.

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5 1. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 380. 52. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 107. 53. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 332. 54. Kames, Elements of Criticism, 333. 55. Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Essays, 5 (in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 3–8). 56. Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Essays, 6. 57. Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Essays, 7.

6 Problems of Taste: The Tragic Paradox and a Standard of Taste 1. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 40. in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), 157. 2. Addison, The Spectator, No. 40, 158. 3. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759/1780) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963), 51. 4. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 216–25. 5. Abbé Jean Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Printed for John Nourse, at the Lamb, opposite Katherine Street in the Strand, 1748). Réflexion critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993). Part I, Chapter 1. Gerard agreed. 6. Bernard de Fontenelle, “Reflections on the Poetics,” sec. 36 in Oeuvres diverses de M. de Fontenelle (1742), 3:34. 7. Hume, “Of Tragedy,” Essays, 219. 8. Hume, “Of Eloquence,” Essays, 104. 9. Hume, “Of Tragedy,” Essays, 220. 10. Alex Neill, “Hume’s ‘Singular Phenomenon’,” British Journal of Aesthetics 39, 2 (April 1999), 112–26; and “Yanal and Others on Hume on Tragedy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, 2 (Spring 1992), 151–4. 11. Robert Yanal, “Reply to Neill,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, 4 (Autumn 1992), 324–6; and Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999). 12. Neill, “Hume’s ‘Singular Phenomenon’,” 115. 13. Neill, “Hume’s ‘Singular Phenomenon’,” 118. 14. Arguably the strategy of his essays on religion. 15. A more or less direct response to Hume’s “Of Tragedy” is provided by Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed., 1759), ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 16. Thomas B. Gilmore, ed. Early Eighteenth-Century Essays on Taste (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972). 17. There is a very extensive literature for such a short essay. See, for example, Babette Babich, ed. Reading David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) for an extensive collection; in addition, see Noel Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, 2 (Winter 1984), 181–94;

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Jerrold Levinson, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, 3 (Summer 2002), 227–38; Stephanie Ross, “When Critics Disagree: Prospects for Realism in Aesthetics,” Philosophical Quarterly 64, 257 (October 2014), 590–618; James Shelley, “Hume’s Double Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, 4 (Autumn 1994), 437–45; and more. 18. For example, “No gratification, however sensual, can of itself be esteemed vicious. A gratification is only vicious, when it engrosses all a man’s expense, and leaves no ability for such acts of duty and generosity as are required by his situation and fortune.” Hume, Essays, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 279. The issues of taste do, however, have consequence as Shaftesbury and Pope had insisted. One who wastes his estate in a misguided quest to be thought a man of taste is a fool. 19. Noel Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, 2 (Winter 1984), 181–94. 20. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 227. 21. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 229. 22. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 230. 23. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 229. 24. Jeffrey Wieand, “Hume’s Two Standards of Taste,” Philosophical Quarterly 34, 135 (April 1984), 129–42. 25. Peter Kivy, “Breaking the Circle,” British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967), 57–66. 26. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 234. 27. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 234. 28. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 234. 29. Compare Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter 13, 492. 30. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 235. 31. Much of the discussion about taste in polite circle was led by connoisseurs and dilettantes like Richard Payne Knight. 32. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 235. My emphasis. 33. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 235. 34. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 238. 35. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 238. 36. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 238. 37. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 238. 38. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 239. 39. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 239–40. 40. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 240. 41. This is the function Locke and Hutcheson assigned to association. 42. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 240. 43. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 240. 44. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 240. 45. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 241. 46. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 241. 47. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 241. 48. This is what is wrong with the frequent arguments that Hume’s standard is an ideal critic. There is no such beast, and Hume would not expect to find one. 49. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 247. 50. Of course, Hume was only too aware of the way that appeals to emotion could lead to action. Patriotic feelings start wars.

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51. cf. Hume, Essays, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” for example, where Hume writes, “In such a state of mind [enthusiasm], the imagination swells with great, but confused conceptions, to which no sublunary beauties or enjoyments can correspond” (74). 52. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed., 1759), ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 13. 53. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 26. 54. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 13–14. 55. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 14. 56. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 15. 57. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 16. 58. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 17. 59. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 17. 60. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 20. 61. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 19. 62. Henry Home (Lord Kames), Elements of Criticism in Three Volumes (Edinburgh: Printed for A. Millar, London; and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, Edinburgh, 1762), III, 351. 63. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 353. 64. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 356. 65. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 358. 66. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 364. 67. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 365. 68. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 367. 69. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 369. 70. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 372. 71. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 373–4. 72. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 331–2. 73. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 360. 74. Kames, Elements of Criticism, III, 394. 75. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759), fac. of 3rd ed. (1780) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & reprints, 1963), 214–16. Quotation is from Part IV, added in 1780. 76. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 197–8. 77. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 199–200. 78. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 202. 79. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 204. 80. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.7-appendix; 628. 81. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 194–5. 82. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 223. 83. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 223. 84. Hume, Essays, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 227. 85. Perhaps that changes when in current slang “bad” can mean “good.” 86. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 221. 87. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 221. 88. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 222. 89. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 229. My emphasis. 90. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 229–30. 91. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 233.

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9 2. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 240. 93. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 242. 94. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 244. 95. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 247. 96. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 250–1. 97. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 253. 98. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 255. 99. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 255. 100. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 263. 101. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 265. 102. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 266. 103. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) (Edinburgh: Printed for Bell & Bradsute, etc., 1811; reprint: Hildesheim: Olms, 1968). See Chapter 11. 104. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 268–9. 105. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 274.

7 Genius 1. E. C. Knowlton, “Genius as an Allegorical Figure,” Modern Language Notes 39, 2 (1924), 94–5. 2. D. T. Starnes, “The Figure Genius in the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance 11 (1964), 234–44. 3. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London: A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 10. 4. Young, Conjectures, 27. 5. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 160, Monday, September 3, 1711 in EighteenthCentury Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), I, 27. 6. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 154 (Saturday, September 7, 1751). The Works of Samuel Johnson, New Cambridge Edition, Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Cooperative Society; New York; Bigelow, Smith and Company, n.d.), 260. 7. Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” l. 81. Frequently anthologized. 8. Parts of the poem are frequently anthologized, and the complete poem is available as a Project Gutenberg EBook, #27221. 9. Addison, The Spectator, Nos. 411–421 (June 21, 1712–July 3, 1712 in EighteenthCentury Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), I, 41–76. 10. Abbé Jean Baptiste Du Bos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Printed for John Nourse, at the Lamb, opposite Katherine Street in the Strand, 1748). Réflexion critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993). I quote from Nugent’s translation as the text most likely to be used in Britain in the eighteenth century, though it is sometimes a free translation. The French is given from the modern edition. 11. Paul Guyer gives an excellent summary of Du Bos’s positions in his History of Modern Aesthetics. Guyer starts from a somewhat different point than I do, however, and

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emphasizes “the idea of play with the full range of human emotions.” Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), I, 78. 12. Du Bos, (Nugent), I, 28, 198–9. Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts translation: “Il ne me paraît donc pas possible d’enseigner l’art de conciliar le vraisemblanble et le merveilleux. Cet art n’est qu’a lportée de ceux qui sont nés poetes et grands poètes,” I, 28, 81. 13. Du Bos, (Nugent), I, 27, 188. Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts translation: “Les artisans nés avec du génie ne prennent point pour modèles les ouvrages de leurs devanciers mais la nature même,” I, 27, 77. 14. Du Bos, (Nugent), II, 3 (misnumbered 5). Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts translation: “C’est à l’intention du peintre ou du poète, c’est à l’invention des idees et des images properes a nous emouvoir, et qu’il met en ouvre pour exécuter son inention, qu’on distingue le grand artisan du simple maneuver, qui souvent est plus habile ouvrier que lui dans l’exécution,” II, 1, 172. 15. Du Bos, (Nugent), II, 4. Ėcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts translation: “il faut être né avec du génie pour inventer, et l’on ne parvient même qu’a l’aide d’une longue étude à bien inventer,” II, 4, 172. 16. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 180–1. 17. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London: Printed for J. Darby, etc. 1725), essay I, sec. 1, para. 10, 7–8. 18. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selbe-Bigge; revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), bk. 1 pt. 3 sec. 10, para. 6/13, 121. 19. David Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 5–6. 20. Peter Kivy, “Genius and the Creative Imagination,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 481. 21. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell in the Strand and W. Creech at Edinburgh, 1774). 22. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767), ed. John L. Mahoney (Delmar, NY: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978), 87. 23. Duff, Essay, 6. 24. Duff, Essay, 11. 25. Duff, Essay, 16. 26. Duff, Essay, 158–9. 27. Duff, Essay, 131–2. 28. Duff, Essay, 177. 29. Duff, Essay, 190. 30. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) (Edinburgh: Printed for Bell & Bradsute, etc., 1811; reprint: Hildesheim: Olms, 1968). 31. Duff, Essay, 271–2. 32. Duff, Essay, 274. 33. Duff, Essay, 273. 34. William Bruce Johnson, Introduction to William Sharpe (1724–83), A Dissertation upon Genius (London: Printed for C. Bathurst, 1755; Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints 1973), xvi. 35. Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius, 5. 36. Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius, 6.

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3 7. Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius, 7. 38. Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius, 61. 39. Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius, 129. 40. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell; and W. Creech at Edinburgh, 1774), 3. 41. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) (chap. 24, 1460a), 1482. 42. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 109. 43. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 222. 44. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 196. 45. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 223. 46. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 41. 47. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) (Principles of Common Sense) in The Works of Thomas Reid, 6th ed. ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1863; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1984). 48. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 91–2. 49. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 172. 50. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 149. 51. Duff, Essay, 177. 52. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 185. 53. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 185. 54. Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 356. 55. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 11–12. 56. See Chapter 9. 57. See Chapter 10.

8 The Sublime: Baillie and Burke 1. Or pseudo-Longinus, as he would be known today, the first-century CE author of Peri Hypsos, On the Sublime. 2. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935), 44–5. 3. Friedrich Schiller, Essays (1793) (New York: Continuum) and On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) (Mineola, NY: Dover). 4. Monk, with his somewhat Hegelian approach to history, sees the sublime as moving toward a goal: “And just as eighteenth-century literature has as its unconscious goal, in the fullness of time, the literature of the early nineteenth century, so it may be said that eighteenth-century aesthetic has as its unconscious goal the Critique of Judgment, the book in which it was to be refined and re-interpreted.” The Sublime, 6. All I would argue is that the eighteenth-century understanding of the sublime is quite different from both its earlier and later usage. 5. For example, Guy Sircello asks whether a theory of the sublime is even possible and concludes that only after rejecting what he calls ontological transcendence (the thesis that the sublime refers to something that is in principle beyond knowledge) is it possible that there might be something left about the sublime to discuss. Guy Sircello, “How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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51.4 (1993), 541–50. See also Jane Forsey, “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65.4 (2007), 381–9. 6. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1968). 7. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime. Printed for R. Dodsley, 1747. The Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1953). 8. See Monk’s introduction to the reprint. 9. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 3. 10. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 4. 11. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 6. 12. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 7. 13. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 8. 14. Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vol. (London: Printed For J. Mawman, 1810). 15. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 12. 16. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 12–13. 17. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 17. 18. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 18. 19. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 21 20. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 21–2. 21. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 31. 22. Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 32. 23. Boulton follows the second edition of 1759 and includes the “Introduction on Taste” added to that edition. I deal with that essay separately. 24. Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society, ed. Frank N. Pagano (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982). The book is often treated as a satire on Bolingbroke’s philosophy. Pagano sums up the controversy thus: Was the Vindication a satire of Bolingbroke or was it a serious exposition of the young Burke’s political thought? … Those who maintained that he was a consistent conservative read the Vindication as a reductio ad absurdum of the arguments of Bolingbroke and his rationalist brethren. Others, who sought confirmation of Burke’s inconsistency, found too much true passion in the piece for it to be chiefly a satire. (xvi–xvii) The choice, it seems to me, is not either/or but both/and. 25. Stanley Ayling quotes the following from Burke’s correspondence in 1747, while he was still an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin: “I am told that a man who writes can’t miss here [in London] of getting some bread, and possibly good. I heard the other day of a gentleman who maintains himself in the study of the law by writing pamphlets in favour of the ministry.” Edmund Burke: His Life and Opinions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 8; The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. I, ed. T. W. Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), I, 101. 26. Burke, Enquiry, 1. 27. Burke, Enquiry, 32. 28. Burke, Enquiry, 34. 29. Burke, Enquiry, 38. 30. Burke, Enquiry, 39. 31. Burke, Enquiry, 40–2.

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3 2. Burke, Enquiry, 44. 33. Burke, Enquiry, 49. 34. Burke, Enquiry, 50. 35. Burke, Enquiry, 58. 36. Burke, Enquiry, 57. 37. Burke, Enquiry, 35. 38. Burke, Enquiry, 51. 39. The move becomes explicit in Richard Payne Knight’s An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London: Printed by Luke Hansard, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for T. Payne, Mews-Gate; and J. White, Fleet Street, 2nd ed., 1805), 367, discussed below. 40. Hume has the same interests, but his treatment of the problem of tragedy in “Of Tragedy” is directed toward a different end. See Chapter 6. 41. Burke, Enquiry, 45. 42. Burke, Enquiry, 47. 43. See, for example, Du Bos, Addison, Hume on tragedy, and so on discussed above. 44. Burke, Enquiry, 47. 45. Bouton, “Introduction” to Burke, lxiv. 46. Burke, Enquiry, 39. 47. Burke, Enquiry, 86. 48. Burke, Enquiry, 61. 49. Burke, Enquiry, 99. 50. Burke, Enquiry, 108. 51. Burke, Enquiry, 117. 52. Burke, Enquiry, 112. 53. Burke, Enquiry, 91. 54. Burke, Enquiry, 144. 55. Burke, Enquiry, 146–7. 56. Burke, Enquiry, 92. 57. Boulton, “Introduction” to Burke: “Above all, his utter reliance on sensationism was anathema to Blake,” cii. 58. Burke, Enquiry, 129–30. 59. Burke, Enquiry, 160. 60. Burke, Enquiry, 164. 61. Burke, Enquiry, 165. 62. Boulton thinks, “The Enquiry—and it should be clear now that the ‘essay on Taste’ is an organic part of it—is indeed a prize example of Newtonian experimental methods applied to aesthetics.” Introduction, xxviii. I disagree on both points. The introductory essay on taste is a polemical addition, and I obviously do not find the Enquiry itself to be fully Newtonian nor even fully empiricist in the Lockean tradition.

9 The Picturesque 1. James Thomson, The Seasons (1730). Four poems, Winter first published in 1726, Summer in 1727, Spring in 1728 and Autumn only in the complete edition of 1730. 2. Ann Bermingham, “The Picturesque and Ready-to-Wear Femininity,” in The Politics of the Picturesque, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86.

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3. John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 115. 4. Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, 128. 5. Repton attempted to apply his picturesque principles to his own cottage. See the before and after illustrations from Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening in David Worrall, “Agrarians against the Picturesque: Ultra-radicalism and the Revolutionary Politics of Land,” in The Politics of the Picturesque, 251–2. 6. Malcolm Andrews notes, “William Gilpin had no particular wish to confine the term ‘Picturesque’ to a narrow range of rural subjects. … In his usage it was equivalent to the contemporary slang designation of paintable subjects as ‘pictorish’, or pingible (a term used by Richard Wilson).” “The Metropolitan Picturesque,” in The Politics of the Picturesque, 282. 7. Most prominently in the work of Allen Carlson, especially The Appreciation of Nature, Art and the Environment (2000) from one perspective and Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (1992), from another. 8. Uvedale Price, Essays On The Picturesque, As Compared With The Sublime And The Beautiful; And, On The Use Of Studying Pictures, For The Purpose Of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vol. (London: Printed For J. Mawman, 1810), ix–x, 1st ed. (London: Printed for J. Robson, vol. I, 1796; vol. II, 1798). Quotations and pagination are to the 1810 second edition. 9. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 214. 10. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 21–2. 11. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 89. 12. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 90. 13. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 37. 14. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 40. 15. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, xii. 16. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 3. 17. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 43–4. 18. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 4–5. 19. See Early Eighteenth-Century Essays on Taste: Facsimile Reproductions, ed. Thomas Gilmore (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972). 20. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, x. Price specifically mentions Titian and “Carach” in the preface to the 1796 first edition. 21. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 10. 22. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 30. 23. 1685–1748. His notable gardens include Chiswick House. 24. R. W. Liscombe, “Richard Payne Knight: Some Unpublished Correspondence,” Art Bulletin 61, 4 (December 1979), 609. 25. Nikolaus Pevsner, “Richard Payne Knight,” Art Bulletin 31, 4 (December 1949), 293. 26. “He combines a biographical study with an analysis of Payne Knight’s principal published texts and provides the intellectual setting of Downton Castle, where Payne Knight lived—a building that has been called everything from a gimcrack castle to a precursor of modernism.” Vittoria Di Palma, in a review of Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape And Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and The Picturesque, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, 3 (September 1998), 337. Di Palma does not provide a reference to the gimcrack comment.

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27. Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape, A Didactic Poem. In Three Books: Addressed To Uvedale Price, Esq. By R. P. Knight, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by W. Bulmer and Co. and Sold by G. Nicol, Pall-Mall. 1795). 28. Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 2nd ed. (London: 1805. Printed by Luke Hansard, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for T. Payne, Mews-Gate; and J. White, Fleet Street), 17–18. 29. Knight, Inquiry, 99. 30. Knight, The Landscape, bk. I, ll. 275–86. 31. Knight, The Landscape, bk. I, ll. 413–16. 32. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 48. 33. Knight, Inquiry, 196. 34. Knight, Inquiry, 151–2. 35. Knight, Inquiry, 9. 36. Knight, Inquiry, 10. 37. Knight, Inquiry, 226. 38. Knight, Inquiry, 233. 39. Knight, Inquiry, 3–4. 40. Knight, Inquiry, 4. 41. Knight, Inquiry, 6–7. 42. Knight, Inquiry, 7. 43. Knight, Inquiry, 15. 44. Knight, Inquiry, 15. 45. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) in The Works of Thomas Reid, 6th ed. ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1863; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1984). Discussed in the next chapter. 46. Knight, Inquiry, 36. 47. Knight, Inquiry, 48. 48. Knight, Inquiry, 48. 49. Knight, Inquiry, 344. 50. Knight, Inquiry, 373. 51. Knight, Inquiry, 393. 52. Knight, Inquiry, 393. 53. Knight, Inquiry, 116. 54. Knight, Inquiry, 121. 55. Knight, Inquiry, 367. The anticipatory echo of Edmund Bullough’s well-known description of psychical distance in terms of a storm at sea is interesting. Edward Bullough, “ ‘Psychical distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912–1913), 87–118. 56. Knight, Inquiry, 386–7. 57. Knight, Inquiry, 447. 58. Knight, Inquiry, 454. 59. Joseph Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” The Spectator, No. 414. 60. William Gilpin, A Dialogue Upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in Buckinghamshire (1748), The Augustan Reprint Society, no. 176 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1976), 49. The words are spoken by Callophilus, Gilpin’s voice in the dialogue. 61. John Barrell, The Dark Side of Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730– 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 101.

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6 2. Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, 114. 63. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, “Introduction: The Genius of the Place,” in The Genius of the Place, 1–46. 64. Francis Bacon, “Of Gardens (1625),” in The Genius of the Place, 51. 65. For example, Fielding has Tom Jones expelled from Paradise Hall. 66. As it is upon practical good taste, in our more elegant manufactures, that the resources of this country, and consequently the liberties and civilization of mankind, in some measure depend, the object is too important for any petty triumphs of success, or any petty mortifications of defeat in theoretical controversies of verbal criticism or philosophical discrimination, to weigh even the dust of the balance. (Knight, Inquiry, iv) 67. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), III, 1, 577. 68. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 21. 69. See, for example, Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” which was dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds. At lines 277–82 we find, “The man of wealth and pride, / Takes up space that many poor supplied; / Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds, / Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds; / The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth, / Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth.” Goldsmith knew that Reynolds would not agree, but he asserts: “I have taken all possible pains, in my country excursions, for these four or five years past, to be certain of what I allege; and that all my views and enquiries have led me to believe those miseries real, which I here attempt to display.” So the dedication to Reynolds may be ironic. 70. Gilpin, A Dialogue Upon the Gardens, 45–9. 71. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 7–8. 72. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 188–9. 73. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 103–4. 74. Price, Essays On The Picturesque, 104. 75. These expressive features are taken up explicitly by Archibald Alison and are discussed in Chapter 11.

10 Thomas Reid and the Theory of Taste 1. Hilary Putnam, “Foreword” to Thomas Reid’s Inquiry by Norman Daniels (New York: Burt Franklin, 1972), vi. 2. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus and James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 4. 3. But there has been a significant shift, both in the relative assessment of Hume and Reid and in the judgment concerning Reid himself. For example, Putnam, in the same “foreword” cited above, says of Reid that he is “one of the most profound students of the theory of knowledge up to the present time. Thomas Reid was certainly a genius.” Much, though by no means all, of the Reid revival may be attributed to the positive assessment of Keith Lehrer who, in his 1989 book, Thomas Reid, judged that while Reid was, at that time, widely unread, “the combination of soundness and creativity of his work is unexcelled.” (Keith Lehrer, Thomas Reid (London: Routledge,

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1989), ix.) Lehrer also recounts a story about Roderick Chisholm who, when asked to recommend a single book “with a greater amount of truth than any alternative” recommended Reid (Lehrer, 1). At least among philosophers, Lehrer’s 1989 observation that Reid is not widely read is probably no longer true. Books and articles have proliferated, and Reid now has a wide circle of admirers and defenders. H. O. Mounce defends Hume by arguing that what is correct in Hume is close to Reid (H. O. Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism (London: Routledge, 1999). Roger Gallie finds much to defend in Reid’s moral theory (Roger D. Gallie, Thomas Reid: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Anatomy of the Self (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998). James Somerville takes Reid’s side against Hume and subsequent Hume scholarship, concluding, “Happily, as a result of the recent rediscovery of Reid’s contribution to philosophy, it will become less easy to get away with such shoddiness. (James Somerville, The Enigmatic Parting Shot (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), 3.” And most recently, Nicholas Wolterstorff has praised Reid extravagantly, calling him “one of the two great philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century, the other being of course Immanuel Kant (Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ix).” One might well conclude that Reid’s reputation is now secure. 4. See, for example, the letter to Dr. David Skene, of November 14, 1764. Works of Thomas Reid, 6th ed. ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1863; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1984), 39–40. 5. Quoted by E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 298. Mossner cites Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Smith, Robertson, and Reid (Edinburgh: 1811), 417, but notes that the letter is not extant. 6. J. C. Stewart-Robertson rejects the idea that as he says has been forming “cement-like in the minds of both supporters and detractors” that Reid’s aesthetics is determined by his theory of perception. Dialogue 14 (1975), 710. Nevertheless, Reid’s theory of perception is a necessary starting point for understanding his theory of taste. 7. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (Principles of Common Sense) in The Works of Thomas Reid, 6th ed. ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1863; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1984), 105. 8. Samuel Johnson, who proposed to refute Berkeley by kicking a stone, would have agreed. 9. Reid also acknowledges “acquired” perceptions that depend on prior natural perceptions. His example is that of a coach passing by. The conception of a coach and the sound that it makes must have already been acquired for one to have the perception of the coach passing by from the sound, but even acquired perceptions are of the object—the coach, in this case—and not simply of an idea. I hear the coach passing by; I do not hear an idea. Acquired perceptions are formed by experience, however, unlike the natural perceptions that are known as soon as they are perceived. 10. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 106. 11. “Nature does not exhibit these elements separate, to be compounded by us; she exhibits them mixed and compounded in concrete bodies, and it is only by art and chemical analysis that they can be separated” (Principles of Common Sense, 107). 12. Most notably in David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, both of whom are opposed by Reid. John Stuart Mill notes, “It was reserved for Hartley to show that mental phenomena, joined together by association, may form a still more intimate, and as it were chemical union—may merge into a compound in which the separate

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elements are no more distinguishable as such, than hydrogen and oxygen in water.” “Review of Alexander Bain,” Edinburgh Review 110.224 (October 1859), 294. Quoted by Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 3. See also Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, 381. The idea is implicit much earlier, however, for example, in Robert Boyle’s A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 13. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 142. 14. What shall we say of this conception, and belief, which are so unaccountable and untractable? I see nothing left, but to conclude, that, by an original principle of our constitution, a certain sensation of touch both suggests to the mind the conception of hardness, and creates the belief of it; or, in other words, that this sensation is a natural sign of hardness. (Reid, Principles of Common Sense 121) 1 5. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 146. 16. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Intellectual Powers of Man), 246. Reid does not imagine this as a natural process along the lines of some recent experimental forms of visual stimulation of the blind. He just means that God could connect things up differently. 17. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 106. 18. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 106. 19. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 106. 20. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 230. 21. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 232. 22. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 365. 23. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 407. 24. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 186. 25. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 187. 26. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 231. 27. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 231–3. 28. John Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 29. 29. Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas, 39–40. 30. William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London: 1724) (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1974), 23. Cited by Yolton from the 1722 privately printed edition, 17; Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas, 69–70. 31. Wolterstorff, The Religion of Nature Delineated, 97. 32. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 216. 33. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 253. 34. John Sergeant, Solid Philosophy Asserted, against the Fancies of the Ideists (London: Garland, [1697] 1984), 31. 35. H. O. Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. 36. Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism, 98. 37. David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 171. 38. As with Hume, we have to disentangle Reid’s proto-aesthetic theories of beauty and taste from his larger philosophical project. They are not his primary concern, but he does give proto-aesthetic taste direct theoretical treatment in the Essays on the

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Intellectual Powers of Man and An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. 39. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 244. 40. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 122. 41. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 453. One must wonder what Reid would make of Picasso’s cubist portraits, but perhaps not. 42. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 454. 43. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 481. 44. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 492. 45. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 492. 46. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 492. 47. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 493. 48. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 121. 49. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 122. 50. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 122. 51. Reid, Principles of Common Sense, 118. 52. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 322. 53. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 494. 54. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 495. 55. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 495. 56. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 496. 57. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 498. 58. See Chapter 11. 59. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 498. 60. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 498. 61. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 501. 62. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 502. 63. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 503. 64. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 503. 65. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 505. 66. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 508. 67. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 508. 68. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 312. 69. Reid, Intellectual Powers of Man, 503. 70. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759), facsimile of the third edition (1780) (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1963), 266. 71. Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 192. 72. Peter Kivy, Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). The lectures must be used with caution since they may well be student notes. See J. C. Robertson, Dialogue 14 (1975), 710–14. That does not mean that they are not helpful in understanding Reid’s views on the arts and taste. 73. Peter Kivy, “The Logic of Taste: Reid and the Second Fifty Years,” in Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations, ed. Stephen F. Barker and Tom L. Beauchamp (Philadelphia: Philosophical Monographs, 1976), 113–24; and “Thomas Reid and the Expression Theory of Art,” The Monist 61 (1978), 167–83. Timothy Duggan has also called attention to Reid’s possible interest to aesthetics in the introduction to his edition of An Inquiry into the Human Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). A summary treatment is available in David O. Robbins, “The Aesthetics of Thomas Reid,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2 (1942), 30–41.

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7 4. Kivy, “The Logic of Taste,” 116. 75. Kivy, “The Logic of Taste,” 121.

11 Archibald Alison: Experience and Expression 1. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 2 vols, 4th ed. Edinburgh printed for George Ramsey and Company, for Archibald Constable and Company, Edinburgh; and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown London, 1815. This is a reprint of the 1790 edition with the same pagination and only very minor variations in spelling. 2. Alison’s wife was the eldest sister of Reid’s friend and colleague, James Gregory. See William Hamilton’s note to Reid’s letter to James Gregory, “Correspondence of Dr. Reid,” Works of Thomas Reid, vol. 1, 64. 3. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (Winter 1961), 131–43 and “The ‘Aesthetic Attitude’ in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (Summer 1978), 409–22. George Dickie has argued that Alison should not be considered an attitude theorist in a strong sense. See Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). The debate between Dickie and Stolnitz has been reengaged subsequently; see George Dickie, “Stolnitz’ Attitude: Taste and Perception” and Jerome Stolnitz, “The Aesthetic Attitude in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics— Again,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (Winter 1984), 193–208. The problem with their way of arguing is that it puts too much emphasis on classifying someone like Alison, who is a complex, transitional figure. I think that Dickie is right that Alison is not an attitude theorist in the way that some later nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures are. However, Alison’s way of developing the complexity of the emotions of taste moves him away from earlier theories of taste in a decisive way. Thus Stolnitz is also correct to insist that Alison should be seen as breaking with the earlier theories of taste. There is no need, however, to place Alison in one box or the other. 4. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London: J. Reeves, 1753). Reprint Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. 5. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rodgers (London: Penguin Books, 1992). 6. Alison, Essays, I, 208. My emphasis. 7. Alison may be following Reid here in a somewhat confused manner since Reid would hold that perceiving a quality would be sufficient for knowing its existence. If so, however, Alison rejects that conclusion or does not go all the way to Reid’s understanding of perception. 8. Alison, Essays, I, 278–80. 9. Frank Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, John and Betty Redfern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) and elsewhere. 10. See the discussion of Buchanan’s poem, Alison’s Essays, for example; I, 1: 33–40. 11. Alison, Essays, I, 187. 12. Alison, Essays, I, 169–70. 13. For an alternative discussion of Alison’s understanding of ‘complex’ and his relation to other writers, see Kivy, The Seventh Sense, Chapter 11. 14. Alison, Essays, I, 187.

230

Notes

1 5. Alison, Essays, I, 77. My emphasis. 16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Dent, Every Man’s Library, 1962), Chapter Thirteen. 17. Alison, Essays, I, 6. 18. Alison, Essays, I, 69. 19. Alison, Essays, I, 71. 20. Alison, Essays, I, 73. 21. Alison, Essays, I, 120. 22. Alison, Essays, I, 122. The influence of landscape gardening is obvious. See the chapter on the picturesque above. 23. Alison, Essays, I, 178. 24. Alison, Essays, I, 188–9. 25. Alison, Essays, I, 158–9. 26. Alison, Essays, I, 159–60. 27. Alison, Essays, I, 160. 28. Alison’s “delight” is not the same as Burke’s nor Kant’s. It is just a different feeling from simple pleasure. 29. Alison, Essays, I, 179. 30. Alison, Essays, II, 380. 31. Alison, Essays, I, 160. 32. Alison, Essays, Introduction, I, xxvi–xxvii. 33. Alison, Essays, I, 109. 34. Alison, Essays, II, 251–2. 35. Alison, Essays, II, 299. 36. Alison, Essays, II, 313. 37. Alison, Essays, II, 260–1.

12 Dugald Stewart: Beauty and Taste Again 1. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Elements) in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1854), II, 47, 1st ed., 1792. 2. Stewart, Elements, II, 52n. 3. Dugald Stewart, Outline of Moral Philosophy for example: “They have been called Principles of Common Sense, by some late writers who have undertaken to vindicate their authority” The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, I, 28. 4. Stewart, Elements, II, 45–6. 5. Stewart, Elements, II, 117. 6. Stewart, Elements, II, 448. 7. Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 190. 8. Stewart, Elements, II, 173. 9. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 195–6. 10. This way of establishing a relational extension of a term has considerable resonance for twentieth-century aesthetics. Clive Bell uses it to argue for an essentialist position that identifies “significant form” as the common quality of art; Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), 18–19. Morris Weitz gives it a Wittgensteinian antiessentialist interpretation of aesthetic terms as “open” concepts; “The Problem

Notes

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of Theory in Aesthetics” in Problems in Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 176. 11. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 242. 12. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 192. 13. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 228. 14. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 201. 15. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 204. 16. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 205. 17. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 201. 18. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 225. 19. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 225. 20. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 417. Frequently anthologized including in Dabney Townsend, ed., Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1998). 21. Stewart, Elements, 145–6. 22. Hume has a similar problem with belief, but he resolves it by appealing to the strength and vivacity of ideas. Stewart, of course, following Reid, cannot appeal to ideas. 23. Stewart, Elements, 151. 24. Stewart, Elements, 258. 25. Stewart, Elements, 263. 26. Stewart, Elements, 208. 27. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 243. 28. Stewart, Elements, 333. 29. Stewart, Elements, 326. 30. Stewart, Elements, 333. 31. Stewart, Elements, 450. 32. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 344. 33. Kant, of course, develops a theory of taste along different lines.

A Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded 1. John Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, [1956] 1996). See Chapters 2 and 8. 2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Second Edition, Enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 10. 3. Kuhn, 10. 4. Kuhn, 21. Benjamin Franklin was an electrician in this broad sense. He gave demonstrations that addressed a wide public. James Maxwell was an electrician in the narrower sense. His audience was others like himself.

232

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240

Index Addison, Joseph  3, 103–5, 107, 169–70 The Spectator, No. 40  77 The Spectator, No. 160  104 The Spectator, No. 409 63–7 The spectator, Pleasures of the Imagination No. 411–21 22–3, 31, 48, 146, 191, 193 aesthetic (see also proto-aesthetic) aesthetic quality  2 attitude  2, 145, 149, 198 distance  2, 124, 145, 148, 150, 224 n.55 experience  2–3, 22–3, 100, 124, 139, 145, 180, 204 judgment  1, 40 predicate  2 the word  1 Alison, Archibald discussion 177–88 (see also expression) Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste  48, 109 theory of expression  5, 101, 109, 116, 171 allegory 103–5, 110, 148, 150 ambition  18, 123–4, 127 amplitude  100 analytic proposition  37, 54, 167, 174 ancients  110 Apelles  136 Apolaustic 2–3 Aquinas, Thomas  122 architecture  1, 13, 109, 178 Άrdall, Páll  36 Aristotle  4, 20, 73, 112, 117, 128, 167 art art and nature  2, 4, 11, 25, 30, 93, 105, 109, 118, 133–52, 182, 192, 198 art, criticism  4, 203 art, fine  2–5, 11, 46, 57, 66, 77, 80–1, 83, 92–4, 99–101, 109, 112, 114–15, 146–7, 153, 169–71, 173–5, 197, 199, 201, 203–4

art, neo-classical  4, 15, 20, 95, 126, 128, 134, 152, 167, 172 art, philosophy of  1, 4–5, 22, 80, 117–18 art, production of  2, 4, 25, 105, 107–8, 143, 170, 182, 194 art, purpose of  139 art, rules of  4–5, 17, 20, 47, 54, 63, 72, 85–90, 95, 117, 119, 141–9, 167, 195 art, theory of  1–3, 5, 7, 13, 20–1, 27, 34, 65, 174, 204 art, value of  151 art, work of  4, 45, 72, 99, 101 artists, status of  2–5, 15, 83, 105–6, 112, 202 artworld  133, 153, 204 association of ideas discussion 47–61 (see also Gerard, Priestley)  3, 5, 26–7, 33, 43, 66–8, 71–2, 75, 82, 96–7, 103, 110–16, 121, 128, 130, 135, 144, 148, 150–1, 166, 169, 171–3, 177–86, 190–7, 201–3 Augustine  13, 24, 44 auxiliary faculties  190, 196 axioms  162, 167–8, 170 Bacon, Francis  112, 130, 148, 161, 165, 169, 190, 192, 198–9 Baier, Annette  36 Baillie, John discussion 118–22 (see also Burke) An Essay on the Sublime 123–4, 203 Baroque  12 Barrell, John  147 Baumgarten, A. G.  1, 4, 8, 41 Beardsley, Monroe  4, Beattie, James  104 (“The Minstrel”), 154 beauty Alison discussion 178–89 (see also expression) Baillie beauty not sublime  121

242

Index

Burke discussion 122–31, 139 (see also sublime) based on society of the sexes  123 clarity  123 secondary quality  129 Sentiment of  90–1, 123 and the sublime  118–19, 121–3, 129, 133 classical theory of  139 Gerard and genius  66, 68–72, 99–101, 114 Hume sentiment of  38–46, 83–4, 88–90, 148 calm passion  79, 81 comparative  84, 87 eloquence  79, 81 of form  37 idea of  37, 43 rules  86 Hutcheson discussion 23–35 (see also internal sense) absolute or original  27, 65 idea of  27–8, 30–5 sense of  24–30, 32–5, 106, 137, 146 nature  133, 135, 137–8, 141, 145, 151 picturesque 133–42, 147, 150–1 Priestley discussion  47–8, 55–61 (see also association of ideas) Reid discussion  167–75 (see also common sense) realism about  160 Shaftesbury discussion 1–22 (see also uniformity amidst variety) idea of  106 neoplatonic  7, 9, 17, 21 sense of  12–13, 16–17, 22, 106 standard of  92, 143 Stewart discussion  189–93, 196–9 (see also Reid) uniformity amidst variety  25–8, 30–4, 83, 95, 100 Bell, Clive  100, 230 n.10 Belles Lettres tradition  1, 4, 82, 110, 153 Berkeley, Bishop George Alciphron  14 double aspect  27 ideas in the mind  36, 42, 144, 155, 157, 159–61, 202 notion  35

Bermingham, Ann  133 Blackmore, Sir Richard  7, 93 Blake, William  129 Boileau, Nicolas  117 Bouhours, Dominique  36 Boulton, John  125, 222 n.62 Brown, Lancelot “Capbility”  134, 140–1, 143, 151 Burke, Edmund discussed  90–2, 122–31 Delight 124–6, 130, 135–6, 139 Burnet, Gilbert  23, 29 Calvinism  23, 50, 153–4, 164–5, 173 Cambridge neo-Platonists  20–1, 173, 190 Campbell, George, Philosophy of Rhetoric  48 Cartesian  24, 155, 157, 162, 164–5 Cervantes, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra  86 character (of a person)  4, 8–9, 11–12, 14–5, 17–18, 22, 66, 71–2, 90, 103–4, 141, 146–8, 175, 186, 199 Cicero  108 classicism 4–5, 10, 12, 20–1, 23–4, 26–7, 63–5, 72, 103, 112, 126–7, 130, 139, 147, 197, 199, 201 Cobham, Lord  149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  118, 181 common sense  36, 39, 84, 93–4, 97, 99–100, 111, 114, 189, 199 Reid’s theory  154–73 conceptualist  160 connoisseur  3, 56, 86, 139, 153, 202 conversion theory 78–9, 81 criteria of a good critic  45, 87 criteriological theory of truth  174 Cudworth, Ralph  20 Darwin, Erasmus  189 deist  47, 50 delicacy  55, 64, 74, 96, 178, 185 Hume’s theory  74–90 Denoune, David  8 Dickie, George, The Century of Taste  4 disinterested attitude  18, 20, 149 disinterestedness 18–21, 26, 89–90, 149, 174, 177 divine illumination  13 Downton Castle  135, 140, 223 n.26

Index Dryden, John  3, 103–4 Du Bos, Abbé Jean-Baptiste Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting  23, 65, 78, 105–7, 109, 111–12, 119, 224 n.11 Duff, William An Essay on Original Genius discussion 107–10 Duns Scotus, John  122 Elgin Marbles  140, 145 eloquence  1, 40, 44, 48, 58, 78–9, 81, 84, 86–8, 109, 117, 167 emotion  17, 26, 35, 37–9, 41, 59, 67, 72, 109, 117, 123–30, 134–9, 144–8, 150, 170–1, 195 aesthetic  26 Alison’s theory emotions of taste  180–7 complex  178, 180, 183–5 simple  123, 178–80, 184–6 tragic 79–82 enthusiasm  15, 21, 90, 115 environmental aesthetics  133–4, 149, 151–2 essentialism  191 exemplars  13, 64 exhibition theory of taste  171 expression  3, 5, 10, 101, 109, 116, 135, 144, 146, 150–1, 171–4, 203 Alison’s theory discussed  177–89 faculties (acquired)  190 fancy  11, 14, 16, 19, 21, 44–6, 68, 71, 97, 111–12, 114, 142, 181–2, 193, 195 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe  84 fictions  46, 146 fine arts  2–5, 11, 46, 57, 66, 77, 80–1, 83, 92–4, 99–101, 109, 112, 114–15, 146–7, 153, 169–71, 173–5, 197, 199, 201, 203–4 Fontenelle, Bernard  78 Fox, Charles James  47 Foxley, (Uvedale Price’s estate)  135, 148 Franklin, Benjamin  47, 52 Gay, John  49–50 Gay, William  49

243

genius 2–3, 5, 15–16, 20, 56, 59–60, 69, 104–7 as allegorical figure  103 Du Bos theory  105–6, 112 Duff ’s theory  107–10 Gerard’s theory  111–16 Sharpe’s theory  110–11 Gerard, Alexander  1, 3 31, 33–4, 48, 55, 57, 64, 74–5, 77–8, 107, 110, 119, 137, 144, 153, 178, 198 and Thomas Reid  39, 95–7, 107, 173 and a standard of taste  95–101 Essay on Genius discussed  111–16 Essay on Taste discussed  64–72 Gilpin, Rev. William  133–4, 140, 147–50 golden section  126 Gracian, Balthsar The Art of Worldly Wisdom  14 Grandeur  59, 92, 117, 119, 136, 145, 169–72, 175 Gray, Thomas  104 Guyer, Paul, A History of Modern Aesthetics  4 Hamilton, Sir William  2, 154 Handel, George Friedrich  182 harmony  3, 20, 25–6, 28, 59, 106, 130, 170 Hartley, David  5, 26, 47–8, 60, 116, 130, 164, 177, 189, 195, 203 Observations on Man discussed  50–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  116 hermeneutics  5, 122, 202 Hobbes, Thomas  15, 17–18, 24–6, 34, 164 Hogarth, William  3, 5, 30, 127, 150, 177–8, 185, 192 Homer  5, 84, 93, 104, 167 Horace  4, 117 The Art of Poetry  20 Hume, David  1, 3, 5–8, 22, 31–3, 68–9, 72–3, 92, 98–9, 107, 111–16, 123, 127, 130, 138, 140, 143–4, 148, 153–5, 157, 159–62, 164–5, 170, 174, 177–8, 190, 199, 202–4 passions  33–46, 80–2 sentiment  4, 15, 21, discussed 34–66, 74, 77–8, 77–8, 82–90, 107, 122, 138, 143, 154, 174, 185 “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion”  74–5, 85–7

244

Index

“Of the Standard of Taste”  11, 82–90, 94–5, 97, 149, 187 “Of Tragedy”  77–82, 121 Hunt, John Dixon  133–4, 147 Husserl, Edmund  2 Hutcheson, Francis  1, 3–5, 8, 21–4, 36, 39–40, 48, 78, 90, 108, 116, 121, 127, 130, 137–8, 153–4, 177 An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit  20 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue  23 internal sense  12–13, discussed 24–35, 55, 60, 65–7, 85, 95, 106–7, 119, 146, 148, 171, 173, 178, 185, 203 uniformity amidst variety  3, 26–8, 30–4, 86, 119, 135, 185,192

Priestley’s theory 54–60 products of  91, 145, 152, 161, 180–2, 184, 193–5, 197 and the sublime  91–2, 118–19 imitation  11, 27, 37, 65, 77–8, 81, 104–6, 109, 112, 114, 121, 123, 125, 127, 149, 152, 178, 193 impressions and ideas  37–8, 41–3, 46, 73, 143, 155, 161, 180 of reflection 40–3, 46, 48 of sense  11, 28, 41, 44–6, 48, 51, 67, 81, 85, 88, 90, 92, 108, 144, 159 improvers 135–6, 139, 142 intricacy  13, 69, 141, 148 irrationalism  36 irrealism  31

idealism  153 ideas adequate  37, 144 complex 27–8, 31–3, 44, 48, 50, 59–60, 64–5, 71, 78, 88, 90, 104, 128, 150, 156, 171, 178, 180–1, 183–6, 194, 199, 201 innate 12–13, 15, 24, 29–30, 33–4, 39, 64, 69, 104, 106, 108, 153, 157, 162– 4, 168, 171, 174, 190, 194, 201, 203 regarding society  123 related to self-preservation  123, 127 simple  11, 24, 27–8, 31–4, 50, 54–7, 60, 64–71, 88, 97, 101, 104, 123, 125, 128, 156, 160, 166, 171, 178–81, 183–6, 191–2, 194, 196, 201 way of ideas  7, 55, 64, 72, 107, 115, 155, 165, 177, 180, 201 imagination and association  103, 110, 150, 171, 177– 8, 180, 183, 185, 190, 193, 195–7 definition 193–4 delicacy of  74–5, 85–7 and genius  105, 108–10 Gerard’s theory 64–72, 78, 111–16 Hume’s theory  40, 43, 46, 88, 91 Kames’ theory  72–5 pleasures of  22–3, 34, 48, 55–60, 104, 191, 193 (see also Addison) as a power of the mind  31, 37, 92, 142, 156, 159, 190, 194, 199, 201

je ne sais quoi  61, 63, 172 Johnson, Samuel  35, 103–4, 145 Jonson, Ben  103 judgment (see also sentiment) moral  30, 40, 45, 60, 77, 90, 173, 201 of taste  16–17, 39–41, 45, 90–2, 93, 167–9, 175, 180, 187, 197, 201 Kames, Lord (Henry Home)  48, 64, 72–5, 77, 92–6, 98, 113, 164–5 Elements of Criticism  73, 92, 95 Kant, Immanuel  1–4, 9, 26, 39–40, 54, 60, 89, 103, 116–18, 138–9, 154, 174, 177–8, 185–8, 199, 201, 204 Kent, William  139 King, Archbishop William  49 Kivy, Peter  4, 27, 84–5, 107, 174 Knight, Richard Payne  3, 133–5, 140–8, 150–2, 203 Knowleton, E. C.  103 Kuhn, Thomas  201–2 landscape  10, 16–17, 30, 133, 148, 149, 151–2, 182–3, 11 landscape gardening  133–6, 139–40, 146, 150–2, 175, 182 latitudinarian  47 Lavoisier, Antoine  47 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  1 Lindsey, Theophilus  47 Livingston, Donald  36

Index Locke, John  1–5, 7–8, 11–3, 15, 20–33, 35–6, 48–51, 53–7, 60–1, 63–5, 72–3, 91–2, 103–11, 114–6, 121, 123, 125, 127–30, 139, 144, 153–4, 158–9, 163–6, 177, 180, 185, 201–4 (see also “the way of ideas”) Longinus  4, 21, 58, 117–18, 120–1, 123 Lorraine, Claude  148, 182 Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling  35 Mandeville, Bernard  34, 39, 149 mannerist art  4–5, 12, 14, 63 Michelangelo  143 Milton, John  7, 45–6, 68, 83–5, 103–4, 145, 182, 18 mind-body dualism  161, 164, 174, 185, 189, 194 moderns  112 Monk, Samuel  117 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Essay on Taste  48 morality  2, 4, 10, 17, 20, 31, 39–42, 49, 71, 90, 93, 103, 145, 147–8, 163, 165, 173–4, 199, 202 moral sense  17, 24–6, 29–31, 34, 50, 69, 71, 90, 106, 146, 173, 199 More, Henry  20 Moreland, George  147 Mounce, H. O.  165 music  1, 4, 12, 38, 43, 51, 56, 80–2, 109, 125, 137, 144, 146, 167, 178–9, 182 natural signs  157, 168–70, 172, 174, 181, 227 n.14 naturalism  15, 36, 105, 106, 109, 143, 163–5, 177, 181, 187, 203 providential or teleological naturalism  165, 188 Scottish naturalism  164–5, 177, 189 necessisarianism  47 Neill, Alex  79–80 Neoplatonism  10, 12–13, 17, 21, 24 Newton, Sir Isaac  1–3, 21, 23, 25, 34, 36–7, 50–2, 61, 112, 127–9, 162, 199, 202, 213 n.58, 222 n.62 nominalism  130, 194 normal science  201–2 Norton, David Fate  165

245

novelty 57–8, 60, 119, 169–70, 173 Nugent, Thomas  23, 105–6 obscurantism  158 occasionalism  42, 158, 173 Ockham, William of  122 Odysseus  84 Ogilby, James  45–6, 68, 84–5, 187 oratory  1, 47–8, 54, 57–8, 61, 81 originality  104, 106–10, 112, 115 Oswald, James  154 Paine, Thomas  47 painting  1, 4, 9–13, 16–17, 27, 81–2, 90, 109, 118, 125, 129, 133, 135–8, 140–2, 145–7, 149, 151–2, 167, 172, 178, 194, 197 passions  12, 14–15, 18, 23, 26, 49–50, 67, 71, 73, 78–9, 88, 114–15, 120–1, 123–6, 129–30, 145 Hume’ theory 33–46, 80–2 (see also sentiment) perception  1, 10, 12–13, 16, 18, 20, 39, 41–2, 57–8, 60, 64–6, 72–5, 83, 85, 93, 106–7, 112–15, 119–20, 128, 137, 143–4, 147, 181, 185, 203 Gerard’s theory  68–72, 96–7, 99 Hutcheson’s theory 25–34 Reid’s theory  155–74, 180, 190 Stewart’s theory 191–8 phlogiston  44, 47 picturesque 2–3, 5, 108, 131, 133–52, 175, 192, 202–3 Richard Payne Knight’s theory 140–6 “The Landscape”  140–1 An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste 141–6 Uvedale Price’ theory  134–9, 151–2 Plato  4, 20, 59, 121, 126, 153, 163 Meno  163 Phaedrus  20 pleasures of the imagination  22–3, 34, 48, 54–5, 60, 191, 193 (see also Addison) Plotinus  9, 21, 28 Pope, Alexander  63–4, 66, 104, 116, 133, 145 Epistle to Burlington  63 Poussin, Nicholas  148

246

Index

powers  9, 41, 49, 51, 57, 59, 84, 91–2, 96, 101, 103–11, 114–15, 119–20, 136–7, 150–1, 158, 166, 169, 171–4, 178–9, 182, 185, 194–7, 199 Gerard’s usage  64–72, 78 Hutcheson’s usage  24–34 Praxitiles  170 Price, Uvedale  3, 119, 133–4, 140–3, 146, 148–52, 192, 203 theory of the picturesque  134–9 Priestley, Joseph  1, 5, 47, 60–3, 67, 111, 130, 154, 177, 189, 195, 199, 203 Oratory and Criticism  48, 54–60 association 48–54 primary / secondary qualities  27, 30–1 proto-aesthetics 3–5, 8, 16–7, 20, 22–4, 26–7, 30, 35–9, 42, 44, 46–8, 60–1, 63, 65, 70, 75, 82, 90, 103, 105, 116, 122–4, 126–7, 129–31, 133–4, 139–41, 146, 150–3, 155, 166, 168, 173, 177, 185–6, 188, 190, 193, 198–9, 201–2, 204 Putnam, Hilary  154 Radford, Colin  42 raillery  11, 14 Reid, Thomas  1, 5, 39, 69, 71–2, 93, 95, 97, 107, 111–12, 114–6, 143–4, 177, 180–1, 185, 187–90, 193–5, 199, 203–4 Theory of perception 153–74, 180, 190 relativism  19, 39, 56, 65, 83, 101, 171, 185, 191–2 Rembrandt van Rijn  143 Repton, Humphrey  134, 139–41, 143 Reynolds, Joshua  3, 5, 143, 150, 178 Romantic  1, 20, 22, 67, 109, 115–6, 118, 129, 139–40, 145, 148–9, 153, 177–8, 182, 188, 201, 204 Romantic supernaturalism  105 Rosa, Salvator  148 Rousham  147 rules 4–5, 8, 11, 17, 20–1, 47, 50, 54, 63–4, 67, 72, 84–90, 92, 95, 99–100, 103, 109, 117, 119, 139, 141–3, 149, 167, 169, 189, 195, 199, 201, 203 Russell, Bertrand  42

Sancho and his kinsmen  84, 86–7 Schiller, Friedrich  116, 118 Sclater, William  163 Scottish Enlightenment  1, 116, 177 Scottish naturalism  164–5, 189 sculpture  10, 146, 178 self-identity  82 sense  1, 5, 16–21 of beauty  12–3, 16–17, 22, 24–30, 32, 34, 106, 137, 146, 171, 179 impressions  11, 42, 48 internal 12–13, 16, 24–35, 55–7, 60, 65–7, 85, 90, 95–7, 99, 106–11, 119, 146, 148, 167, 171, 173, 178, 185, 203 moral  17, 24–6, 29–31, 34, 50, 69, 71, 90, 106, 146, 173, 199 of taste  5, 14, 23, 75, 91, 167, 173, 198–9 sensuous line  30, 179, 185 sentiment  2, 4–5, 8, 14–5, 17–18, 20–4, 28, 30, 32–4, 103, 105–6, 109, 117, 126–7, 131, 142–6, 148–50, 153–4, 163, 177, 186–7, 190, 199, 203–4 (see also passions) Gerard  67–71, 95–100, 111–12, 114–16 Hume  34–66, 74–5, 77–8, 82–90, 97, 107, 116, 122, 138, 143, 154, 174, 185 Kames 92–5 Sergeant, John  164 Shaftesbury, first Earl of  8 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper)  1, 3, 5, 8–24, 35, 40–1, 60, 64, 66, 68, 72, 90, 106–7, 118, 121, 123, 148, 153–4, 175, 181, 187, 197–8, 202, 204 Shakespeare, William  40, 104, 121, 167 Sharpe, William  107, 110–11 significant form  17 skepticism  38, 60, 115, 129, 143, 154–5, 157–8, 160, 162, 164, 190 Smith, Norman Kemp  8, 36 Society of Dilettanti  140, 146 socinian  20, 47 soliloquy  11, 19, 106 Spenser, Edmund  103 Stanhope, letter to General  8 Sterne, Lawrence  35 Stewart, Dugald  1, 5, 116, 153–4, 177, 202–3 discussed 189–200

Index Stolnitz, Jerome  4, 7, 11, 27, 177 Stowe, gardens at  147, 149 sublime 2–3, 5, 11–12, 21, 45, 58–9, 71, 90, 92, 147–8, 150, 170, 178–9, 183, 202–3 discussed: Baillie 117–22, Burke 122–31, Price 133–9, Knight 140–5 substance  39, 41–5, 142, 160 sufficient reason  53, 91, 162, 192 superstition 44–6, 90 taste Addison  63 Alison’s theory  178–80 emotion of taste  180, 182, 184–7 delicacy of  73–5, 85–8 Duff ’s theory  107–10 Gerard’s theory  64–72, 111–15 good or bad  4–5, 63, 68, 148 history of  4–5, 63 Hume’s theory taste as sentiment  35–46 Hutcheson’s theory a sense of taste  23–34 Kames’ theory practical rhetoric  72–4 Knight’s theory  141–6 Locke’s theory  7 Pope 63 predicates  151, 181–2, 187 Price’s theory  137–40 Priestley’s theory association 47–61 Reid’s theory common sense realism and Scottish naturalism 165–76 sense of  5 sentiment of  4–5 Shaftesbury’s theory  8–22 Sharpe’s theory  110–11 standard of  2–3, 5, 82, 203 Alison qualities of objects 187–9 Burke a common nature  90–2

247

Gerard common sense principles  95–101 Hume “Of the Standard of Taste”  82–90 Kames pragmatic and natural 92–5 Stewart’s theory 196–200 Telemachus  84 teleology  24, 29, 39–40, 57, 60, 71, 121, 148 Thomson, James, The Seasons  133 Tom Jones  194 tour guides  133 transitive meaning 191–3 travel literature  133 true judges 89–90, 174 (see also standard of taste) Turnbull, George  164–5 uniformity amidst variety  3, 26–8, 30–4, 86, 119, 135, 185, 192 uniqueness thesis  2 utility  2, 37, 39, 45, 148, 169, 178 value, intuitive theory of  69 vastness 119–21, 126, 136, 150 vibrations 50–2, 54, 60 virtue  9, 12–13, 16, 23, 25, 40, 42, 44–5, 50, 70, 81, 93, 112, 121, 130, 147–8, 168 vivacity  38, 45–6, 108–9, 231 n.22 Webb, Daniel  7, 145 Webster, John  40 Whichcote, Benjamin  20 Wilson, Richard  134 Wolff, Christian  1, 8 Wollaston, William  163–4 Wolterstorff, Nicholas  154, 163, 226 n.3 Wordsworth, William  118 Yanal, Robert  79 Yolton, John  24, 60, 163, 201 Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition  104 Zeuxis  136

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