Valid objections can no doubt be raised against an over-tidy imposition of the rationalism-empiricism dichotomy upon the fluid and complex movements of modern thought. And certainly it is a serious mistake to use this distinction as a kind of spatula for separating two groups of thinkers, since it is tendencies of thought, rather than individuals (who may have divided tendencies) that ought to be marked by these terms. But when we undertake a relatively brief survey of the philosophy of the Enlightenment—and if we put ourselves on guard against too rigid an interpretation of what we are doing—it must be confessed that the terms are quite helpful. In the preceding chapter, I have grouped together a number of ideas that seem to me (as they have seemed to others) closely connected with the Cartesian methodology and theory of knowledge, though few of the thinkers I discussed can be summed up or dismissed by general labels—and their ideas are often worthy of careful consideration quite apart from any affinity for Descartes’ philosophy. In the present chapter, I shall discuss together several lines of inquiry opened up by those philosophers whose main contribution to modern philosophy has been the development of an empiricist theory of knowledge. It was, on the whole (though not at all exclusively), the British philosophers who promoted the important thinking that was done during this period on the psychological causes and effects of works of art. I do not mean that they were merely psychologists, of course, for in this period psychological questions and questions of (what was then called) moral philosophy had not yet been separated, or even clearly distinguished. And from their discoveries, or seeming discoveries, about such processes as creative imagination and aesthetic enjoyment, the empiricist aestheticians drew many conclusions of considerable historical—and some of permanent—significance.
As Descartes, no doubt with some arbitrariness, is often placed at the fountainhead of modern rationalism, so Sir Francis Bacon, with perhaps less solid claim, is generally regarded as the first-mover, or at least the herald and pilot projector of modern empiricism. There is, at least, no question of the impetus he gave to empirical lines of inquiry in all fields of thought.
Neoclassical rationalism and formalism, as we saw it in the preceding chapter, claimed to derive its logical force from the analysis of the essential nature of the arts. And the rationalistic method retained a large a priori, and (in Kant’s sense) “dogmatic,” element, even though in fact it could not really deduce the rules of correctness and the principles of genres without employing any empirical premises at all. The Baconian tradition, on the other hand, called attention from the start to the need for empirical study of the psychological processes involved in art, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British school concentrated its main, and most fruitful, effort on this task.
Part of what was needed was a freeing of the arts from criticism, a kind of Declaration of Independence that would, like many such declarations, be contagious—that would free criticism itself from its own shackles of unexamined, or insufficiently examined, aesthetic theory. For example, we find the British critic, John Dennis, in A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry (1702), speaking out in a new way for the poet, and insisting “that for the judging of any sort of Writings, those talents are in some measure requisite, which were necessary to produce them.” And George Farquhar, in the same year, argued forcefully that “Aristotle was no poet, and consequently not capable of giving instructions in the art of poetry” (Discourse upon Comedy; Elledge, p. 90). Such a principle might have far-reaching implications. As one scholar has remarked,
Criticism was becoming self-conscious and examining the scope, the assumptions and the methods of its own work, and it was from this increase of self-consciousness that the study of aesthetics was born in England.1
Close studies of individual works became more usual than hitherto. And the authority of general rules, both of composition and criticism, began to be challenged more firmly. There arose the concept of the poet as “genius,” who (in Pope’s words) can “snatch a grace beyond the reach of art”—that is, who produces great work by defying the rules. Addison, in his Spectator, No. 291 (1712), for example, observes that
the productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertencies, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author, which are scrupulously exact and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.
The authority of the classics—to imitate which is to follow nature, reason, and the rules—was undermined by the same criticism. A hard blow was struck by Edward Young (an admirer and follower of Bacon) in his Conjectures upon Original Composition (1759). “A GENIUS differs from a good UNDERSTANDING,” he said, “as a Magician from a good Architect” (p. 26). One of his main points was that until we cease to imitate the ancients—who were lucky to have no one to imitate—we cannot free ourselves to surpass them. Though not given much attention in England, the Conjectures were enthusiastically read in Germany, where many of Young’s ideas fitted in well with, and strengthened, some tendencies in German aesthetic theory that we shall come to later.
IMAGINATION AND ARTISTIC CREATION
The concept (or concepts) of the imagination first came into the forefront of thinking in the seventeenth century. It had been, of course, a commonplace that the mind somehow has the capacity to rearrange the materials of its experience, at least within limits set by logical consistency, but seventeenth-century thinkers began to take seriously the possibility that a more exact and searching study of this process might throw light on a number of problems about the arts, particularly literature, and especially the relation between art and other enterprises of civilized man, such as science, and religion. If, as the central classical tradition maintained, poetry can teach, as well as delight, one might obtain a clearer notion of just what sort of truth it has to teach (as well as a more solid backing of its claim to truth) and a fuller explanation of its delight, by asking what faculties of the mind it proceeds from, and how these faculties connect with others.
The philosophers of the Cartesian tradition generally were not attracted to this inquiry, because they conceived of imagination as playing a very subordinate role, along with sensation, in the acquisition of genuine knowledge. Giving his definition of “intuition” in the Regulae (Rule III), Descartes says emphatically that he does not refer to “the fluctuating testimony of the senses, nor the misleading judgment that proceeds from the blundering constructions of imagination” (trans. Haldane and Ross, p. 7). Later on (Rule XII) he cites “understanding, imagination, sense, and memory” as the “four faculties” of the mind involved in cognition, and allows that the imagination may be of some service to the understanding (p. 35). But in the Principles of Philosophy (I, lxxi–lxxiii) the data of the “senses and imagination” are contrasted with the concepts of the primary qualities, which reason can grasp but of which no images can be formed. This distinction is also elaborated at the beginning of the sixth Meditation, which asserts that imagination “inasmuch as it differs from the power of understanding, is in no wise a necessary element in my nature, or in my essence” (trans. Haldane and Ross, p. 186). In Descartes, the term “imagination” wavers between two senses: it means the passive image-forming faculty, registering the deliverances of the senses; it also means the semi-active power of recombination. But the distinction is not sharply made, and the latter is not emphasized. In the Recherche de la Vérité (1674) of Descartes’ successor, Malebranche, all of Book II is devoted to a proof that imagination is the source of manifold illusions and delusions, from which we can be protected only by reining it in severely and keeping reason in control.
A rather different status was assigned to imagination by Bacon (1561–1626). His Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (1605), which afterward he amplified in a Latin version, the De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), constituted his call to the new age, and he undertook not only to review the current state of human knowledge, classifying and systematizing it, but to prophesy what the future held in store if proper methods were applied. The classification at the beginning of Book II was to count heavily with later thinkers:
The parts of human learning have reference to the three parts of Man’s Understanding, which is the seat of learning: History to his Memory, Poesy to his Imagination, and Philosophy to his Reason [see Works, III, 329].
And further:
POESY is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the Imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things [III, 343].
Poetry, says Bacon, is “Feigned History,” which exists to “give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it”; it improves upon nature, “by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind,” in contrast to reason, which “doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things” (I, 343–44). But if the dignity of poetry is properly manifested by its being made coordinate with history and philosophy, that does not make it one with those disciplines, “for imagination hardly produces sciences; poesy (which in the beginning was referred to imagination) being to be accounted rather as a pleasure or play of wit than a science,” as Bacon added in the Latin version (IV, 406).
In these few but carefully meditated remarks, Bacon posed a problem for the seventeenth century: What is the imagination, and exactly how does it work to produce poetry (and painting and sculpture)? By separating off the imagination as a special active power in its own right, Bacon opened up a new field of inquiry; but his suggestion that “imagination hardly produces sciences” prophesied that when the imagination was better understood, poetry would turn out to be something rather different from what had long been supposed.
Bacon’s challenge may be said to have been taken up by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who devoted the first chapters of his Leviathan (1651)—and also sections of other works—to a careful account of imagination (or fancy, as he often calls it) and its relation to sense. The aim of all his work was to establish the lawfulness of human behavior, individual and social—to treat man naturalistically, and on that basis solve pressing problems of religion and government. His theory of the imagination was a part of the general system, and despite his reputation as a dangerous thinker, he did much to advance, as well as to stimulate, scientific psychology.
“There is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense,” Hobbes tells us (I, i; ed. Molesworth III, 1), thus rejecting all innate or a priori ideas, and giving every idea the character of an image—either a sensible quality, or a group of them. The physiology of sensation consists of motions, whose appearance to us is “fancy” (I, i), or imagination (I, ii). When the physical motions cease, these images, or phantasms, remain: “IMAGINATION therefore is nothing but decaying sense” (I, ii; p. 4). Sense does not decay by simply fading away; it is obscured or covered up by later and more vivid images, as the light of the stars is by that of the sun, or “as the voice of a man is in the noise of the day” (p. 5). When the sense is “fading, old, and past, it is called memory” (p. 6).
So much may be said of “simple imagination,” but there is also “compound imagination,”
as when, from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaur. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own person with the image of the actions of another man, as when a man imagines himself a Hercules or an Alexander, which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of romances, it is a compound imagination, and properly but a fiction of the mind [I, ii; p. 6; cf. Elements of Philosophy IV, xxv].
So much had often been noted, but Hobbes faced more directly than others the evident next question: how does this compounding take place? What laws explain why certain combinations (centaurs, for example) occur and not others? Hobbes notes (I, ii) that some philosophers have thought that such novel images arise purely spontaneously, without cause; or that they are inspired by God or devil—but he insists that a naturalistic explanation can be given.
Hobbes sketches his answer in the following chapter, “Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations” (I, iii), and it is an early version of the association theory;
When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after, is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. . . . But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole, or in parts; so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses [p. 11].
Because, in sensation, a given image may be followed by a variety of other images on different occasions, the same image becomes capable of giving rise to the same variety in imagination: but it can never give rise to any other image except one that has been associated with it in sensation. Such is Hobbes’s account. He goes on to distinguish “unguided” trains of thoughts—free association, a “wild ranging of the mind”—from those that are “regulated” by the dominance of desire or need, as when the desire of an end leads to thoughts about appropriate means (I, iii).
When Hobbes turns a little later (I, viii) to further psychological observations, he makes another distinction that was to pass (via Locke) into wide critical currency. When men compare their images, they may find similarities and differences among them: those who are good at discerning similarities “are said to have a good wit; by which, in this occasion, is meant a good fancy” (p. 57). Those who are good at detecting differences “are said to have a good Judgment.” Both of these capacities are required in composing poems, “But the fancy must be more eminent; because they please for the extravagancy; but ought not to displease by indiscretion” (p. 58). It is fancy that gives rarity of invention, richness of metaphorical adornment. This same point Hobbes had developed in his Answer to Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert (1650): “Judgment begets the strength and structure, and fancy begets the ornaments of a poem” (IV, 449; cf. the preface to his translation of the Odyssey, 1675). The ornamental view of imagination’s contribution is to be noted, but it is perhaps given more depth in this statement, also from the Answer:
All that is beautiful or defensible in building; or marvellous in Engines and instruments of motion; whatsoever commodity men receive from the observations of the heavens, from the description of the earth, from the account of time, from walking on the seas; and whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the barbarity of the American savages; is the workmanship of fancy but guided by the precepts of true Philosophy [IV, 449–50]
—where “Philosophy,” of course, means empirical science.
It is imagination, according to Hobbes, that primarily gives poetry the power to arouse the passions. Hobbes can find within his general system a justification of poetry in terms of its emotional effects. Each man he sees as a bundle of desires and aversions, or (as we might say now) drives, tied together by that fundamental and incessant urge toward self-preservation which makes life in the state of nature a hell and drives men to political organization. Living is essentially desiring, and satisfying desire by voluntary actions whose motive power and accompaniment is emotion. “To have no desire, is to be dead” (Leviathan I, viii; p. 62). Hobbes distinguishes sensual pleasures from “pleasures of the mind,” among which one of the greatest is the satisfaction that is afforded by new experience and new knowledge. “Because curiosity is delight, therefore also all novelty is so” (Elements of Law, I, ix, 18)—and it is precisely novelty that the compounding imagination exists to give.
In his great, and quietly revolutionary, inventory of the resources and capacities of the human mind, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke (1632–1704) nowhere discusses the imagination under that name. He does, at one point, in his discussion of memory, say that in the mind’s ability to furnish readily the “dormant ideas” of memory “consists that which we call invention, fancy, and quickness of parts” (II, x, 8), but the term “fancy” does not figure much in the work, either. Nevertheless, one of his major aims is to show how the understanding, though its sources are limited to the simple ideas of sensation and reflection, can so operate upon them as to produce all the complex ideas that we have, even those (like infinity and power) that had been regarded by the Rationalists as incapable of being traced to experience. One of the important activities of understanding that is needed to explain our complex ideas is composition: the combining of simple ideas of the same or of diverse sorts (II, xi, 6). “In this faculty of repeating and joining together its ideas, the mind has great power in varying and multiplying the objects of its thoughts, infinitely beyond what sensation or reflection furnished it with” (II, xii, 2). Here, apart from the limits imposed by original experience, the emphasis is on the freedom of the mind to assemble ideas—even inconsistent ideas, so long as the inconsistency is not noted.
If Locke were concerned to work out a theory of artistic creation, it would begin here, with this faculty; we must take note of his words because of what they meant to others. Locke is interested in what he considers to be far more important operations of the understanding, by which it constructs knowledge. Knowledge consists in the comparison of ideas, in the search for genuine connections. For some time, Locke meditated a line of thought that finally took shape in a new chapter, added to the fourth edition (1700), “Of the Association of Ideas” (II, xxxiii). Here he distinguishes between a “natural correspondence and connection” that ideas sometimes have with each other, which “it is the office and excellency of our reason to trace,” and “another connection of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom.”
Ideas that in themselves are not all of kin, come to be so united in some men’s minds, that it is 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, show themselves together [II, xxxiii, 5].
The examples by which Locke illustrates this association of ideas are in themselves of great interest to the history of psychology, and also of education, for he has a pedagogical intent. Thus, for example, he points out how the “ideas of goblins and sprites,” which “have really no more to do with darkness than light,” can become associated with darkness in the mind of a child, by the tales of a “foolish maid,” so that the child will ever afterward be terrified of the dark (II, xxxiii, 10). Other examples are given, and the lesson is that we must take utmost care to avoid “this wrong connection in our minds of ideas in themselves loose and independent of one another” (9)—for it “is the foundation of the greatest, I had almost said of all the errors in the world” (18; cf. Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 1762, § 41). In Locke’s view, then, the association of ideas is the source of error, superstition, and prejudice—totally opposed to the kind of orderly process of thinking that may be expected to eventuate in truth. It would be only a step to suggest that these unnatural associations are more characteristic of poetry than of philosophy.
Though Locke does not take this step, he has another train of thought that moves toward the same general conclusion. This begins with his very famous distinction between “wit” and “judgment”:
For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion; wherein for the most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit, which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore is so acceptable to all people, because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labor of thought to examine what truth or reason there is in it [II, xi, 2].
The difference between this passage and Hobbes goes deeper than the substitution of “wit” for “fancy”: here there is a quite un-Hobbesian separation and opposition of the two supposed faculties. It is suggested not only that the same person is not likely to be good at both, but that they lead away from each other, one by an easy and pleasant path to entertainment, the other by a difficult discipline to knowledge.
Moreover, the contrast is explicitly referred to language, as though wit (or fancy) and judgment (or reason) must have different ways of speaking, at least when they are at their best. Not only is fancy a “court-dresser,” a flatterer “that studies but to please” (Conduct of the Understanding, § 33; cf. §§ 32, 42), but its “figurative speeches and allusion in language” are to be classified among the primary abuses of language. Fancy is no fault when we have pleasure in view, but figures of speech are “perfect cheats” when “we would speak of things as they are” (III, x, 34). Locke here expresses one of the most powerful new ideas about language that the seventeenth century brought forth: that when language is used as a tool in the acquisition and teaching of well-confirmed empirical knowledge, it must meet certain standards of professional plainness, clarity, and precision—and that these standards are radically different from the standards that language must meet when it is used to the fullest advantage in poetry. Hobbes had taken a similar stand briefly (Leviathan, I, viii). The definitive statement of this point of view was that of Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society (1667), where he argued for new criteria of style suited to the needs of empirical science. “Who can behold, without indignation, how many mists and uncertainties, these specious Tropes and Figures have brought on our Knowledg?” (p. 112). The members of the Royal Society, says Sprat, have cultivated “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can” (p. 113). A widespread distrust of the imagination itself, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, went along with this suspicion of its characteristic language. Samuel Parker, in his Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophy (1666), went so far as to say this:
Now to Discourse of the Natures of Things in Metaphors and Allegories is nothing else but to sport and trifle with empty words, because these Schemes do not express the Natures of Things, but only their Similitudes and Resemblances . . . All those Theories in Philosophy which are expressed only in metaphorical Termes, are not real Truths, but the meer products of Imagination, dress’d up (like Childrens babies) in a few spangled empty words. . . . Thus their wanton and luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes [1667 ed., pp. 78–79].
In this kind of logical positivist thinking, launched by Locke, we see emerging the concept of two distinct languages, the metaphorical language of poetry and the literal language of science. But this distinction reflects a deeper conflict over the nature of knowledge itself. The Horatian injunctions, that poetry should please and instruct, now for the first time seem in danger of being split apart: for if the language that serves one of these ends best is destructive of the other, it would seem that they cannot both be done (well, at least) by the same discourse. It will be necessary to specialize. This does not necessarily mean that poetry must be assigned quite so low a role as Locke casually assigns it, and in any case the implications of this distinction would take time to be felt. Poetry would still be widely thought of as a vehicle of knowledge; but it would also be thought of as something that exists to give an experience, a special kind of pleasure, quite apart from any claim to inform or prove.
Meanwhile, the theory of the association of ideas developed into a systematic psychological theory that pervaded the thinking of the eighteenth century (especially in England, but also in France), and in the nineteenth century led to the founding of modern experimental psychology. David Hume (1711–76) undertook in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40) a Newtonian inquiry into the workings of the human mind, and in his system the propensity of the mind to associate ideas became one of the cardinal principles of explanation (I, i, 4). He distinguished ideas from impressions, the former being the fainter copies of the latter that remain after them, and he asked how certain ideas tend to follow or accompany one another in the mind. His answer consisted in postulating a kind of psychological “attraction,” or gravitation of ideas, a “gentle force, which commonly prevails,” by which ideas tend to associate according to their resemblance, causal connection, and the spatial and temporal contiguity of their original impressions. In the first edition of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748; Section 3), Hume illustrated these principles of association in an interesting passage (omitted from later editions) in which he discussed the problem of unity of action in epic and dramatic poetry.2
It was David Hartley (1705–57), however, who worked out the elaboration of this psychology, and provided, in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), what became the definitive associationist psychology until the Mills a century later, though its principles and particular explanations were worked over and added to by many other eighteenth-century thinkers. Hartley simplified Hume’s scheme, in certain respects, but he gave associationism its classic form. Association reduces essentially to contiguity, and his law of association predicts that the mere repetition (“a sufficient number of times”) of sensations in conjunction will give each of them the power to call to mind the corresponding ideas. In terms of this principle he explained both successive and simultaneous association—sequences of thoughts as well as compounded ideas, such (he said) as “beauty, honor, moral qualities, etc.” Locke (Essay II, xii, 5) had also classified beauty as a complex idea, because “consisting of a certain composition of color and figure, causing delight in the beholder,” but he had not explained his complex ideas by the associative mechanism.
One interesting modification of pure associationism was suggested by later eighteenth-century thinkers, and ought to be remarked here, even though it did not become highly influential until the coming of Romanticism. This was the theory that emotion also plays an important role in determining the mind’s bringing together of associated ideas. Alexander Gerard, for example, in his associationist Essay on Genius (1774), pointed out that a strong passion reaches out like a magnet, to draw toward itself all the ideas that might gratify it, or feed it, or that are associated with its causes or effects. Hence the poet, in the grip of such an emotion, finds almost miraculously the unity of his material; relevant ideas are suggested, irrelevant ones are shunted aside, by the mind that is under the control of emotion. Evidently a new conception of artistic creation, very different from that of the Rationalist aesthetics appears here.
THE PROBLEM OF TASTE: SHAFTESBURY TO HUME
A psychological approach to art invites at least a preliminary distinction between two lines of inquiry, however much they may turn out to overlap. There are problems about the origin, or genesis, of art: the psychology of the creative process. And there are problems about the effects of art: the psychology of aesthetic enjoyment. Though the thinkers in the empiricist aesthetic movement did not always make this distinction very definitely, their work can, without serious distortion, be so divided. Most of their theories about imagination, for example, bear upon the genetic problem—though Addison, as we shall see, in his writings on the “pleasures of the imagination,” was really concerned with the experience of the appreciator, rather than the artist. In the present section I turn from the genetic or causal theories to the affective or experiential theories.
And, despite his lack of sympathy with Hobbesian and Lockean psychology, it is that seminal though unsystematic thinker, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), with whom we must begin. (His Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, was published in 1711, revised 1714.) Shaftesbury’s general metaphysics, which permeates all of his writings, was a reinvigorated Neoplatonism. God is conceived as exercising a continually creating power in nature, which is then itself the greatest of all works of art. The central notions in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics are all implicit in the following passage, which we may take as our first text:
Is there then, said he, a natural beauty of figures? and is there not as natural a one of actions? No sooner the eye opens upon figures, the ear upon sounds, than straight the beautiful results and grace and harmony are known and acknowledged. 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. How is it possible therefore not to own “that as these distinctions have their foundation in Nature, the discernment itself is natural, and from Nature alone?” [Moralists (1709), III, 2; Characteristics, ed. Robertson, II, 137].
The Plotinian spirit of this passage (and, more directly, its echo of the Cambridge Platonists) is evident, but in Shaftesbury’s hands (because he abhorred systems, was not too proud to learn from anyone, and thought everything over in his own individual style) the ideas take on new forms. Harmony is one of the central themes—the harmony of the natural world, as created by God, reflecting itself in the virtuous character, in which traits and impulses are balanced and integrated, and also in works of art. Thus beauty and goodness are identical (see II, 128, and Miscellany III, 2), and are grasped in the same way, by the same faculty. The theory of this “inward eye,” to which Shaftesbury gave the name “moral sense,” was his contribution to eighteenth-century ethical theory, and at the same time to aesthetics. For the faculty that is called a moral sense when applied to human actions and dispositions is the sense of beauty when applied to external objects, of nature or art (see An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit [1699], I, ii, 3; I, 251). Its essential feature is that it grasps its object immediately, without reasoning, but its grasp involves a comparison of the object with an a priori concept of harmony. It is not sensuous, but intuitive (see Moralists, III, 2). The human action (or the painting) must, of course, be sensuously perceived before the moral (or aesthetic) sense can come into play, but what that inner sense reports has something of the character of G. E. Moore’s “non-natural quality.” Harmony, under the name of goodness or beauty (see II, 63; I, 251), is not a sense quality, but a transcendental one (see II, 144).
The question whether we possess a special faculty by which we appreciate, or “relish,” beautiful objects, was one that had already turned up in seventeenth-century thinkers, and was to have a high priority among the topics of eighteenth-century aesthetic empiricism. The name “taste” had already been given to this capacity, by analogy with the sense that delivers the most immediate and decisive verdicts of liking and disliking. “Taste” came to cover a good deal of ground, since its ambiguities could be exploited in many different directions. For one very significant chapter in aesthetic history it seemed like a fruitful concept, a clarifying aid in posing questions about the effects and values of works of art. The split between relativistic and absolutistic tendencies developed quite early, for taste could easily be analyzed as simply subjective response. Shaftesbury, though his theory of the aesthetic sense did a great deal to develop the concept of taste, made it clear that he did not think of taste as relative (see Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author III, iii). The aesthetic sense, like the moral sense, permits, he held, universal standards of judgment. When he came to discuss these standards, in his essays on painting (Second Characters, ed. Rand, 1914), he often fell back upon fairly conventional rationalistic principles, and never reconciled them with the theory of the aesthetic sense which, it might seem, would have no use for any rules.
Locke’s “new way of ideas,” his analysis of experience as built up out of simple ideas, was one of the most decisive and pervasive philosophical influences upon eighteenth-century thought, in all departments. Even those philosophers who, like Shaftesbury, resisted the implications of that epistemology, were turned in the same direction. Just as he was led to face directly the question by what faculty beauty is apprehended, so Shaftesbury also took a closer look at the phenomenology of that apprehension, and in doing so he helped to formulate a notion that was to have a long and significant later history. He got into the problem of what is now often called the “aesthetic attitude” by reflecting on the theory of psychological egoism, which was so much in the air around the turn of the century. Are all human actions selfish? Hobbes, for one, said they were; and it took some very acute analyses by Bishop Butler and David Hume to show what subtle equivocations were required for a defense of this proposition. Shaftesbury saw clearly one of the important points: the fact that a person actually gets pleasure out of a particular action does not entail that the action was selfish. In certain satisfactions of the mind, no self-reference at all is involved, said Shaftesbury:
And though the reflected joy or pleasure which arises from the notice of this pleasure once perceived, may be interpreted a self-passion or interested regard, yet the original satisfaction can be no other than what results from the love of truth, proportion, order and symmetry in the things without [Characteristics I, 296].
The enjoyment of beauty, especially, is completely separate from the desire of possession:
Imagine then, good Philocles, if being taken with the beauty of the ocean, which you see yonder at a distance, it should come into your head to seek how to command it, and, like some mighty admiral, ride master of the sea, would not the fancy be a little absurd? . . . Let who will call it theirs, . . . you will own the enjoyment of this kind to be very different from that which should naturally follow from the contemplation of the ocean’s beauty [II, 126–27].
Here disinterested aesthetic contemplation is clearly contrasted with the practical interest.
There is one other important eighteenth-century achievement in which Shaftesbury was something of a pioneer: that widening of the scope of the aesthetic that came in with the recognition of other valuable aesthetic qualities besides beauty. Of these others, the sublime was to be the most discussed. This concept, or cluster of concepts, has itself a most complex history, which we must drastically oversimplify here. It begins with the pseudo-Longinian Peri Hypsous, and one of its astonishing features is that this work should have reached its long-delayed peak of popularity and influence in the early decades of the eighteenth century. In “Longinus,” the sublime was partly a stylistic concept, though the “elevated style” commended by “Longinus” was not separated in his mind from elevated thoughts and passion strongly stirred. Reflections upon the Longinian sublime were given a boost by Boileau’s famous translation (1674), and subsequent commentaries, which multiplied rapidly; and this development played an important part in producing more fundamental and valuable concepts of the sublime. But another important stimulus came with the emergence, in the late seventeenth century, of a powerful new feeling for nature and for natural beauty, as we see it expressed, for example, in Shaftesbury (and, about the same time, in John Dennis3).
There is something new in Shaftesbury’s taking nature as an object of aesthetic contemplation, along with art. Since he thought of nature as produced by the greatest of all artists, it is understandable that nature was to him more than an object to be manipulated for maximum utility. The willingness to enjoy the look and feel of nature opened the eye to the delights of its more wild and fearsome aspects: rugged cliffs, chasms, raging torrents—and the appalling vastness of interstellar space. Out of this broadening of appreciation grew the deeper concept of the sublime. True, the world contains vast deserts and seas, cold wastes, jungles, and rocks; but “they want not their peculiar beauties” (II, 122; see all of Moralists III, 1). The basic principle of this new sort of contemplative delight—which he does not contrast with beauty, but places under it—Shaftesbury found in the size of the object, in relation to the human mind. Thomas Burnet, in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), had already suggested the idea:
The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold: and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of those things that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions; we do naturally upon such occasions think of God and his greatness, and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration [I, xi].
These are the themes that Shaftesbury develops. The vastness of nature, in certain aspects, its being “too big for our comprehension,” or for our apprehension, makes it a reminder of the Infinite that created it. This religious experience becomes the aesthetic experience of the sublime.
The concept of the sublime was next taken up, though not under that name, by Joseph Addison (1672–1719), in the stimulating series of papers on the “Pleasures of the Imagination” which he wrote for the Spectator in June and July 1712 (Nos. 409, 411–21). These papers, written in his liveliest and most provocative manner, hardly formulated a systematic aesthetics, or pursued any problem very deeply, but they lived up to the author’s claim to originality (see No. 409) by posing most of the topics of eighteenth-century British aesthetics. In the paper announcing the series (No. 409), Addison promises to “give some account” of “a fine taste in writing,” which he defines as “that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike” (ed. Aitken; VI, 63). He commends “Longinus” as one of the few to have noted that in great poetry the rules and unities do not take one far, and that “there is still something . . . that elevates and astonishes the fancy, and gives a greatness of mind to the reader”—something he finds pre-eminently in “those rational and manly beauties which give a value to that divine work,” Milton’s Paradise Lost (No. 409; VI, 66; this poem is discussed in a number of essays, beginning with No. 267).
The Pleasures of the imagination (or fancy), says Addison, are “such as arise from visible objects, either when we have them actually in our view, or when we call up their ideas into our minds by paintings, statues, descriptions, or any like occasion” (No. 411; VI, 72), the pleasures from present objects being “primary,” those from remembered or fictitious ones being “secondary” (VI, 73). And the problem he sets himself is the empirical problem of discovering “from whence these pleasures are derived” (No. 411; VI, 76). The primary pleasures, “I think, all proceed from the sight of what is great, uncommon, or beautiful” (No. 412; VI, 76).4 “Greatness” is his word for the sublime—
the largeness of a whole view, considered as one entire piece. Such are the prospects of an open champian country, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices . . . with that rude kind of magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous works of Nature. Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them [No. 412; VI, 76–77].
Uncommonness is novelty, which “fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity” (No. 412; VI, 78).
But there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret satisfaction and complacency through the imagination, and gives a finishing to anything that is great or uncommon. The very first discovery of it strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties” [VI, 79].
Beauty is not opposed to the great, or sublime; Addison says in fact (No. 369) that parts of Paradise Lost “are beautiful by being sublime, others by being soft, others by being natural.”
Here Addison’s conclusions raise many doubts, which were to be seized upon by his successors, but his method is simple enough. He is trying to give a phenomenological description of a certain species of pleasure (which was not yet called “aesthetic pleasure”), and he is trying to discriminate the chief varieties or sources of this pleasure in terms of the qualities to which it is a response. The secondary pleasures he treats in a somewhat different way, and much less clearly. All the arts are capable of giving such pleasures, he says, even music, for “there may be confused, imperfect notions of this nature raised in the imagination by an artificial composition of notes” (No. 416; VI, 99). The mind compares “the ideas arising from the original objects, with the ideas we receive from the statue, picture, description, or sound that represents them” (VI, 99)—and here suddenly Addison adds that “it is impossible for us to give the necessary reason why this operation of the mind is attended with so much pleasure.” But granting that it is so, we can explain many things: the enjoyment of representational art, of mimicry, of wit (VI, 99), and the pleasure we take in “apt description” of things not themselves delightful, such as a “dunghill.” In such cases, it is not “the image that is contained in the description,” but “the aptness of the description to excite the image” that pleases (No. 418; VI, 107–8).
Addison’s work invited, and to some extent exemplified, a new approach to the problems of art and beauty. The first modern essay in philosophical aesthetics was An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, and Design, the first half of An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, which Francis Hutcheson published in 1725. Hutcheson was in part a disciple of Shaftesbury, from whom he took the concept of a moral sense, which he introduced in the Inquiry and developed further in his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations of the Moral Sense (1728).5 Because of its originality and clarity, the Inquiry was much read, respected, and reprinted.
Hutcheson begins with a Lockean review of sensation, of simple and complex ideas, of primary and secondary qualities, then turns to beauty.
Let it be observ’d that in the following papers, the word beauty is taken for the idea rais’d in us, and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea. Harmony also denotes our pleasant ideas arising from composition of sounds, and a good ear (as it is generally taken) a power of perceiving this pleasure [Inquiry, sec. 1; 2d ed., p. 7; capitalization and italicization modernized].
Hutcheson’s aim is to discover “what real quality in the objects ordinarily excites” these ideas (beauty in the case of vision, or its analogue, harmony, in the case of hearing). He holds that “It is of no consequence whether we call these ideas of beauty and harmony, perceptions of the external senses of seeing and hearing, or not” (p. 8)—that is, whether they are (in Locke’s terms) ideas of sensation or reflection. But he “should rather chuse to call our power of perceiving these ideas, an internal sense,” for several reasons. First, because many people have excellent vision and hearing but get little or no pleasure from music, architecture, etc.—which suggests that they lack some other sense, or “taste” (pp. 8–9). Second, because beauty can be perceived in cases “where our external senses are not much concern’d,” such as mathematical theorems and the virtues (p. 9). Hutcheson compares the idea of beauty briefly with those of other sense qualities. Cold, heat, sweetness, bitterness, are sensations in the mind, which do not correspond to the primary qualities of external objects; and so is beauty, except that, since beauty and harmony are excited by sensations involving “figure and time,” which are primary qualities, beauty and harmony have a closer resemblance or at least relation to external objects than cold and sweetness (pp. 14–15).
The capacity to perceive beauty may correctly be called a “sense” because the pleasure it produces does not arise from “any knowledge of principles, proportions, causes, or of the usefulness of the object” (p. 11). The idea of beauty strikes us immediately and directly. Further knowledge about the object may “superadd” distinct pleasures, intellectual or practical, but can neither augment nor diminish that pleasure peculiar to the perception of beauty. Associations of ideas, for example, may affect the sense of beauty, but it is antecedent to custom, habit, education, prospect of advantage, or association of ideas (sec. 7; cf. Essay on the Passions, Treatise I, sec. 6; 1st ed., pp. 171–72). And this is evident because, though association of ideas might explain how certain objects become able to excite the idea of beauty by accompanying other objects that already do, association explains nothing unless some objects afford the idea independently of any other objects.
We should note also Hutcheson’s proposed distinction (sec. 1) between “absolute or original beauty,” which objects have independent of comparison with other objects, and “comparative or relative beauty”—“that which we perceive in objects, commonly considered as imitations or resemblances of something else” (p. 15). Comparative beauty is founded on a “kind of unity between the original and the copy” (p. 40), and the original doesn’t have to have beauty in itself (sec. 4).
An inductive survey of beautiful objects—beginning with simple geometrical figures—reveals, according to Hutcheson, the common characteristics on which the perception of beauty depends:
What we call beautiful in objects, to speak in the mathematical style, seems to be in a compound ratio of uniformity and variety: so that where the uniformity of bodys is equal, the beauty is as the variety; and where the variety is equal, the beauty is as the uniformity [p. 17].
Mathematical theorems that cover an infinite set of figures or curves, and principles that are rich in explanatory power, also derive their beauty from the same feature (sec. 3). The generalization holds in nature as in art; Hutcheson discusses the beauties of plants and animals. The sense of beauty may therefore be redefined as “a passive power of receiving ideas of beauty from all objects in which there is uniformity amidst variety” (p. 82; sec. 6). Though not all men possess this sense in the same degree, wherever it exists it operates by the same laws. Thus is laid the ground of a nonrelativistic standard of aesthetic judgment (almost indeed of a method of numerical grading). It is not denied, however, that actual judgments sometimes differ (sec. 6). Deformity is “the absence of beauty, or deficiency in the beauty expected in any species” (p. 73)—not a positive thing in itself, but relative to expectations or demands, and hence varying somewhat with experience, even where the beauty actually perceived is the same. Moreover, various associations of ideas give to objects a kind of agreeableness or disagreeableness that is easily confused with beauty and ugliness (pp. 83–85).
Perhaps Hutcheson’s most fruitful influence was that upon David Hume, whose moral philosophy (including the philosophy of criticism) especially owes something to Hutcheson’s work, despite its original features. Hume’s earliest concern with problems about beauty is reflected in his Treatise of Human Nature (Books I, II, 1739; Book III, 1740), where they are treated subordinately to other problems, as illustrations of his general explanatory principles, rather than for their own sake.
If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been form’d either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul [Treatise II, i, 8; ed. Selby-Bigge, p. 299].
Since “beauty like wit, cannot be defin’d, but is discern’d only by a taste or sensation, we may conclude, that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain” (p. 299).6 This is the essence of beauty and deformity, which are therefore sometimes referred to as “sentiments.” Hume also divides feelings, or impressions of reflection, into the “calm” and “violent,” and places under the first heading “the sense of beauty and deformity in action, composition, and external objects” (Treatise II, i, 1; p. 276; cf. pp. 438, 472).
Now, “a great part of the beauty, which we admire either in animals or in other objects, is deriv’d from the idea of convenience and utility” (p. 299)—and to a large extent is proportioned to fitness (p. 577). Of this Hume gives several illustrations. “The top of a pillar shou’d be more slender than its base . . . because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant” (p. 299). And “When a building seems clumsy and tottering to the eye, it is ugly and disagreeable; tho’ we be fully assur’d of the solidity of the workmanship.” “The seeming tendencies of objects affect the mind,” as well as their “real consequences,” even when these are opposed, as when the enemy’s fortress fortifications “are esteem’d beautiful upon account of their strength, tho’ we cou’d wish that they were entirely destroy’d” (III, iii, 1; pp. 586–87; cf. 576). Like the disinterested pleasure we take in utility in general, our pleasure in beauty, as far as that pleasure is derived from association with utility, is explained by Hume’s basic principle of sympathy. This is what enables us to admire the beauty of a house or swift vessel (p. 576), even when it does not belong to us (cf. 584). It is important to note that Hume never reduces beauty to utility; he argues that within certain limits we transfer our pleasure in beauty from things that have it in themselves to things that have a capacity to serve some human end. But, like Hutcheson, Hume acknowledges (in the phrase “primary constitution of our nature”) that this explanation presupposes that some enjoyment of beauty must arise as a natural response to the “order and construction of parts” in what we observe.
It is this primary sentiment of beauty that raises the epistemological problems about critical judgment. It can be argued that a moral judgment expresses the speaker’s pleasure in what he sees, and “as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows, that there is just so much vice or virtue in any character, as every one places in it” (III, ii, 8; p. 547)—and Hume indicates in his footnote that the same argument might be made for the judgment of beauty or ugliness. And so the problem is “in what sense we can talk either of a right or a wrong taste in morals, eloquence, or beauty.” When he came to rewrite Book III of the Treatise, in the form of his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Hume was ready to suggest a distinction between (1) those “species of beauty” which “on their first appearance command our affection and approbation,” so that “it is impossible for any reasoning to redress their influence or adapt them better to our taste and sentiment,” and (2) “many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts,” where “it is requisite to employ much reasoning in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection” (sec. 1; ed. C. W. Hendel, p. 6). It is this problem to which he addressed himself directly and carefully in his chief work in aesthetics, the essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” This essay first appeared7 in the Four Dissertations (1757), and was later included among the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects.
Hume begins his essay by remarking that the diversity of taste prevailing in the world is obvious at a glance, but turns out to be even greater on close inspection, since those who agree, for example, in “applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing” and in “blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy,” are found to mean rather different things when their judgments are examined in detail (Elledge II, 811). Nevertheless,
It is natural for us to seek a “standard of taste,” a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled, at least a decision afforded, confirming one sentiment and condemning another [II, 813].
Now, there is one philosophical position that regards this aim as hopeless.
The difference, it is said, is very wide between judgment and sentiment. All sentiment is right, because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right, because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact [II, 813].
A sentiment “only marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind” (II, 813). “Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty.” There is no “real” beauty, any more than there is a “real sweet or real bitter.” Nevertheless, says Hume, though common opinion may accept this view, and repeat that there is no disputing about tastes, it is also strongly inclined to acknowledge an opposite view. For “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance than if he had maintained a molehill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean” (II, 814). Where objects are nearly equal, the “principle of the natural equality of tastes” seems plausible; where objects are widely different in beauty, it is a “palpable absurdity.”
Now, it is evident, says Hume, that critical principles, or “rules of composition,” are not a priori, but based upon experience; they can only be established by induction from many observations of the actual effects that poems and paintings have upon the beholder, and to generalize from these observations supposes (and there is adequate evidence for) common dispositions of human nature to be pleased or displeased by certain things. This does not mean that all men will actually be moved in the same way:
Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favorable circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness according to their general and established principles. . . . When we would make an experiment of this nature and would try the force of any beauty or deformity, we must choose with care a proper time and place and bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object, if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty” [II, 815].
“It appears, then, that amidst all the variety and caprice of taste there are certain general principles of approbation or blame” (II, 816)—namely, general propositions about which forms and qualities, in which relations and combinations, will give immediate pleasure to the qualified percipient. In the light of these general propositions, a person who judges of beauty or ugliness can correct his judgment, can discover that he lacks sufficient perceptual discrimination, or “delicacy of imagination” (II, 817), or has formed his opinion in haste or from a bias. He discovers that “the fault lies in himself” (II, 818), and in this sense he was mistaken. To be a “true judge” is rare and admirable: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (II, 823).
Hume has, then, the concept of a Qualified Observer, in terms of which critical disputes are resolvable within limits, since some judgments can be disqualified or overruled on various grounds—insensitivity, inattention, prejudice, inexperience. Hume’s system thus has a nonrelativist basis: “The general principles of taste are uniform in human nature” (II, 824). Yet there is room for a good deal of explainable variability, since different works of art will appeal to different temperaments or at different stages of life. Hence there is a residual range of unresolvable disagreements:
It is plainly an error in a critic to confine his approbation to one species or style of writing and condemn all the rest. But it is almost impossible not to feel a predilection for that which suits our particular turn and disposition. Such preferences are innocent and unavoidable and can never reasonably be the object of dispute, because there is no standard by which they can be decided [II, 825].
THE AESTHETIC QUALITIES: HOGARTH TO ALISON
In the eighteenth century’s determined effort—particularly in England—to understand and explain our experience of art, we can trace two fundamental lines of interest, labeled on the one hand “taste,” and on the other “beauty, the sublime, etc.” They are distinct because one question calls for an investigation into the nature of the critic’s verdict, and ultimately of his judgment and its justification, and so involves a normative inquiry, while the other invites an analysis, or at least a full description, of the predominant aesthetic qualities, as these thinkers identified them. Of course the two problems are closely related, and hence frequently intermingled, but at this point in our history we change emphasis for the moment, when we come to the seventeen-fifties and two writers who did much to develop and clarify the concepts of beauty and the sublime.
William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (1753) aimed
to shew what the principles are in nature, by which we are directed to call the forms of some bodies beautiful, others ugly; some graceful, and others the reverse; by considering more minutely than has hitherto been done, the nature of those lines, and their different combinations, which serve to raise in the mind the ideas of all the variety of forms imaginable [Intro.; Burke ed., p. 21].
The single-mindedness and definiteness of the method, and the simplicity of the main conclusions, laid this book open to a good deal of criticism and ridicule, but it nevertheless left its mark upon later writers.
Hogarth begins by simplifying the problem of visual beauty; he argues that solids and shapes, as seen, can be reduced to lines of various sorts, and that if we can analyze beauty of line, that will explain all visual beauty. Six characteristics cooperate in producing linear beauty: fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity, or size (p. 31). Fitness is principally important in defining species of beauty—the beauty of a race horse is not that of a war horse (ch. 1, p. 33). Variety and intricacy are closely associated; uniformity and simplicity are thought of as their limits or ordering factors; quantity makes for intensification. Hogarth constructs and proposes a kind of line that optimally embodies these criteria, the wavy line that is “the line of beauty,” and its three-dimensional serpentine counterpart, “the line of grace,” which adds grace to beauty (ch. 10; p. 68). These lines are distinguished from those that are “mean and poor” because they lack sufficient variety and intricacy (curvature) and those that are “gross and clumsy” because they lack sufficient uniformity and simplicity—they are too twisted and bulged (ch. 9; p. 65). All sorts of beautiful paintings, quite different from each other (as, say, Raphael from Botticelli) can be explained, Hogarth believed, as variations on these fundamental linear relationships.
The most famous investigation into the nature of the aesthetic qualities is that published by the young Edmund Burke in 1757, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Because of its ingenuity and originality of argument, as well as its fresh and vigorous style, this work became very popular, at least among the general public. Though Burke did not make many converts among the aestheticians, partly because he was opposing the dominant associationism by a new combination of physiological and phenomenological methods, his theories had to be reckoned with.
One of Burke’s aims, explained in the “Introduction on Taste” which he added to the second edition (1759), was to discover an intersubjectively valid standard of taste—meaning by this term “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” (Enquiry, ed. Boulton, p. 13). He thought that if various confusions and ambiguities in the conceptions of the aesthetic qualities, the sublime and the beautiful particularly, could be cleared up, and aesthetic satisfactions more sharply discriminated from other enjoyments, it would be found probable “that the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures”, and that a kind of “logic of Taste, if I may be allowed the expression” (pp. 11–12), might be worked out as a basis for criticism. Noting that the human mind deals with external objects through the senses, imagination, and judgment, he offers evidence to show that the principles operating in the production of the satisfactions we get through taste and judgment are probably universal, and that differences in preference among different people derive “either from a greater degree of natural sensibility, or from a closer and longer attention to the object” (p. 21). In other words, Taste may be the same always, but some have more of it than others, and some exercise what they have more carefully than others. But Burke also points out that it is a mistake to overlook the complexity of Taste.
On the whole it appears to me, that what is called Taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners and actions [p. 23].
The basis of Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is his distinction between two types of agreeable sensation: positive “pleasure,” and “the removal or diminution of pain” (Part I, Section 3; p. 33), which he calls “delight.” He first emphasizes this difference, and then makes a brief “attempt to range and methodize some of our most leading passions” (p. 52), according to a scheme recapitulated in I, 18: the passions connected with self-preservation “turn on pain and danger”; “they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances. . . . Whatever excites this delight I call sublime.” The social passions, on the other hand, are of two main types. The first is love of female beauty, which is mixed with lust; and “beauty” is to mean “all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the most nearly resembling these.” The pleasure of love is positive. The second social passion is sympathy, whose nature is “to put us in the place of another in whatever circumstance he is in, and to affect us in like manner,” giving us either pain or pleasure or delight (pp. 51–52). In terms of this scheme, Burke hopes to explain the aesthetic feelings without postulating any autonomous faculty of taste or inner sense.
Burke’s method of investigation is quite clearly marked out; he is one writer who knows what he is doing. Consider the sublime. There is, first, a certain emotion to be identified and analyzed. This he calls “astonishment”—“that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” a sense of the mind’s being filled with what it contemplates, held and transfixed. The lower grades of this feeling of sublimity are “admiration, reverence and respect” (II, 1; p. 57). Thus fear—of pain or death—is closely connected with this experience, and is indeed a precondition of it.
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling [I, 7; p. 39].
Note the three things distinguished here, and the qualification in the term “source.” In order for an object to excite the feeling of sublimity, either it must be terrible, or it must be connected with actually terrible things, or it must have certain properties by which it “operates in a manner analogous to terror.” Terribleness (immediate, indirect, or analogical) arouses the feeling of sublimity, and its peculiar delight, when its painfulness is controlled and diminished by safety.
The second step is to inquire into those sensible qualities of things that make objects terrible, or make them seem terrible, or enable them to affect us in a manner analogous to terrible things. And here Burke is very specific. Obscurity is necessary to terribleness, because fear is increased by ignorance (II, 3). Power (II, 5), privation and emptiness (II, 6), and greatness of dimension (II, 7) also contribute strongly to sublimity. Burke even attempts finer discriminations: “I am apt to imagine likewise, that height is less grand than depth; . . . but of that I am not very positive” (p. 72). Greatness that approaches, or seems to approach, infinity is sublime in a high degree (II, 8), and this is closely connected with obscurity, since “to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea” (p. 63)—but infinity has no bounds. Burke notes also that “The eye is not the only organ of sensation, by which a sublime passion may be produced” (p. 82), for there is loud music (I, 17); “Smells, and Tastes, have some share too, in ideas of greatness; but it is a small one” (II, 21; p. 85); and, of course, there is sublime poetry, which Burke discusses in Part V, concluding with a theory that poetry produces its effects by a kind of emotive language (see V, 7).
The analysis of beauty is parallel to that of the sublime: Burke investigates “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (III, 1; p. 91), the response to female beauty (minus lust) being taken as the paradigm here, as was the response to the terrible (minus actual fear) in the case of sublimity. Burke analyzes with great care, and rejects, two familiar answers to this question: that beauty consists in “proportions of parts”—an examination of vegetables and animals reveals no set of proportions either necessary or sufficient for beauty (III, 2–5)—and that beauty is caused by, or consists of, fitness (III, 6–7). The qualities that cause beauty are smallness (III, 13), smoothness (14), gradual variation (15), delicacy (16). Burke adds, incidentally, brief analyses of two other aesthetic qualities, distinct from beauty, namely gracefulness (III, 22) and elegance (III, 23). And he has a little to say of beauty in touch (III, 24) and sound (III, 25). The final conclusion is that beauty and sublimity are opposed in many of their conditions, but a complex work of art may have some of both, though it is not likely to have either so strongly as a work that concentrates on one or the other.
It is an important methodological feature of Burke’s inquiry that he attempts two levels of explanation (see IV, 1, 5). If we ask what causes the feelings of beauty and sublimity, the answer will be in terms of sensible qualities, as we have seen. If we ask, on the other hand, what causes these qualities to produce those feelings, the answer will be a physical one. If actual terror produces “an unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nerves” (p. 134), then anything else that produces such a (physiological) tension may be expected to produce passions similar to terror. Mere induction has shown us that certain qualities produce sublimity; it remains to be shown how these qualities (or their physical counterparts) operate upon the body in a manner analogous to terror, and so produce sublimity. Burke’s explanations here are highly speculative, of course; two will serve as examples. Why does greatness of dimension contribute toward sublimity? Because the light coming from so vast an object must tax the eye, which, “vibrating in all its parts must approach near to the nature of what causes pain” (IV, 9; p. 137). Again, why do smooth, small, delicate objects make us feel love? Because they have a similar effect upon the organism: “beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system” (IV, 19; pp. 149–50). Similar explanations are given for the other qualities. They may not be found very helpful today, but here is an important idea with some novelty in the history of aesthetics: that the explanation of aesthetic enjoyment is to be sought on the physiological level.
It is impossible, in a short history, to do justice (in the sense of rendering every man his due) to all those who contributed to the development of aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century— a period that probably ranks below only our own in the intensity and variety of its creative thinking about fundamental aesthetic problems. In this chapter, we have considered the leading ideas of the most seminal thinkers in England, where, before Kant, the greatest ferment was going on. The developments they initiated, or gave definitive shape to, continued in a steady line through the middle of the nineteenth century. There was, for one thing, a continuous growth in the associationist theory, the attempt to explain more and more aesthetic phenomena, more subtly and completely, in terms of the association of ideas. There was a further widening of the aesthetic categories, one of the prime achievements of the eighteenth century. It may be true, as Professor Monk has said, that in the eighteenth century, the term “sublime” “grew more and more into a catch-all for elements in art that the Cartesian aesthetic had suppressed or had not accounted for,”8 though to some extent the broadening of the concept of the sublime entailed a narrowing and a sharpening of the classical concept of beauty, too. Nevertheless, the upshot of this development was a recognition that other qualities than beauty, even though the latter be taken broadly, were capable of affording direct aesthetic satisfaction. And the introduction, toward the end of the century, of a new category of the “picturesque” (as, for example, in William Gilpin’s essay On Picturesque Beauty, 1792), despite some odd features in this notion, led to the exploration of new ranges of aesthetic response.
The psychological study of aesthetic feelings, and the enthusiasm—in the third quarter of the century, especially—for the sublime (reflected in new tastes in poetry and nature), gave the final blow to the neoclassic system of criticism. The concept of decisive rules and canons gave way to the emphasis on taste (personal, or interpersonal, or cultivated); with the welcome to stronger and less controlled emotions came the admiration of genius (Michelangelo supplants Raphael as the sublimest of painters), a pre-Romantic emphasis on imaginative or intuitive truth, as something perhaps superior to reason.
Many other thinkers played a part in this whole movement, and the names of some of them should be recorded, even though their contributions can only be touched upon. Dr. John Baillie’s Essay on the Sublime (published posthumously in 1747) echoed “Longinus,” but aimed to improve on him. The necessary condition of sublimity, for him, is vastness, either directly presented in nature, or indirectly brought into literature and painting (and architecture and music) by association. “Where an Object is Vast, and at the same Time uniform, . . . the Mind runs out into Infinity,” and the sublime is experienced as “one simple, grand Sensation,” which fills the mind to the exclusion of all else, and gives the soul a feeling of elevation and serenity that enlarges and dilates it (pp. 8–11). Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (written by 1756; published 1759; enlarged in 3d ed., 1780) analyzes taste into seven “internal senses,” or “powers of imagination,” which perceive novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. Each of these is further analyzed; for example, the pleasure obtained from beauty is resolved into “the pleasure of facility, that of moderate exertion, and that which results from the discovery of art and wisdom in the cause” (III, i; p. 147). His concept of the sublime follows that of Baillie; he explains the sublimity of passions by association with their objects, causes, or effects (universal benevolence is sublime, rather than beautiful); and works of art become sublime either through their subjects or through the passions they evoke. Gerard’s discussion of the standard of taste is also interesting: while acknowledging the actual diversity of aesthetic preferences, he holds that an inductive study of the effects of various objects on the human perceiver can provide at least general principles of criticism by which, within limits, divergences of taste can be reconciled (3d ed., III, iii)—“that a standard may be found, to which even they whose relish it condemns, may find themselves obliged to submit. The person who feels in a certain manner . . . may yet be convinced that he feels amiss, and yield readily to a judgment in opposition to his feeling” (3d ed., IV, ii).
Another large and systematic treatise, partly concerned with aesthetics, was the Elements of Criticism written by Henry Home, Lord Kames (1762). The range of this book is wide: it is concerned, in part, to answer the skeptical views of Berkeley and Hume concerning the self and the external world, and the general method of reply consists in postulating a variety of “senses,” by which intuitive assurance of things can be obtained. Like his predecessors, Kames searches out general rules of art, “drawn from human nature, the true source of criticism” (Intro.; 4th ed., 1769, p. 13). He bases them on the general and persistent preferences among civilized nations (xxv). Beauty is analyzed into regularity and simplicity, as properties of a whole, and uniformity, proportion, and order as properties of the parts (iii, xviii). Grandeur is distinguished from sublimity; the former is produced by great magnitude, the latter by great elevation: “A great object makes the spectator endeavor to enlarge his bulk. . . . An elevated object produces a different expression: it makes the spectator stretch upward, and stand a-tiptoe” (iv; p. 210)—an early and interesting version of empathy.
Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, given at the University of Edinburgh from 1759 on, and published in 1783, define taste as “the power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and of art” (ii; I, 20). He holds that “mighty force or power, whether accompanied with terror or not, . . . has a better title, than anything that has yet been mentioned, to be the fundamental quality of the Sublime” (iii; I, 71). He distinguishes beauty by its brisker, gayer, more soothing, more serene emotion, but reminds us that a great number and variety of visually pleasing qualities are comprehended under the term “beauty,” some of which have nothing in common save the “agreeable emotion which they all raise” (v; I, 102).
The discussion was continued by Thomas Reid, the leader of the school of “Scottish philosophy,” in the last of his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785). He criticizes a subjective analysis of the judgment of taste, the view that “when I say Virgil’s ‘Georgics’ is a beautiful poem, I mean not to say anything of the poem, but only something concerning myself and my feelings”; he appeals to ordinary language, which furnishes a more direct and appropriate idiom for saying, “I like it” when that is all we mean (viii, 1; Works, ed. Hamilton, 8th ed., 1882, p. 492a). Reid holds that “original” beauty is found in those mental qualities that deserve love, “the whole train of the soft and gentle virtues” (viii, 4; I, 502b), and the beauty of shapes, colors, sounds, etc., is derived from this original source. We take pleasure in the concord of music (Reid suggests that “concord” applies literally to human conversation and only metaphorically, or analogously, to music), and in the regional qualities of paintings (grace, harmony, dignity, etc.) because we see in them analogues of moral qualities. Sublimity (which Reid calls “grandeur”) is similarly analyzed: the grandeur we admire in created works or in nature is admirable because it reflects the creative mind behind.
Another noteworthy essay, especially in its penetrating discussion of music, is Adam Smith’s essay Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in what are Called the Imitative Arts (1795). He shows clearly how music, alone among the arts, can be said to imitate only what may be indicated by accompanying words or gestures—we would not know from the music itself that it “represents” a battle, or the rocking of a cradle (as in Corelli’s Christmas Concerto). The effects of absolute music are direct and immediate:
instrumental Music does not imitate, as vocal Music, as Painting, or as Dancing would imitate, a gay, a sedate, or a melancholy person; . . . it becomes itself a gay, a sedate, or a melancholy object [Works (1811), V, 287].
Music, adds Smith, in words that anticipate later well-known remarks:
seldom means to tell any particular story, or to imitate any particular event, or in general to suggest any particular object, distinct from that combination of sounds of which itself is composed. Its meaning, therefore, may be said to be complete in itself, and to require no interpreters to explain it. What is called the subject of such Music . . . is altogether different from what is called the subject of a poem or a picture, which is always something which is not either in the poem or in the picture. . . . [V, 301].
Even this sketchy account of several subordinate thinkers has had to leave out others with serious, though lesser, claim to notice: for example, Joseph Priestley’s Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777), a defense of associationism; Richard Payne Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), which included a severe criticism of Burke, a defense of beauty independent of association, and a subtle analysis of sublimity in terms of the concept of energy; Dugald Stewart’s Philosophical Essays (1810); and numerous others. Philosophers, divines, landscape gardeners, architects, painters, rhetoricians, and poets were teased and excited by the problem of analyzing beauty and sublimity, explaining their effects and causes, justifying judgments about them.
A more extensive history would also have to deal with a parallel, and often interacting, development on the Continent. The Swiss aesthetician Jean Pierre Crousaz, in his Traité du beau (1714), argued that aesthetic judgments are not propositions, but expressions of our immediate feeling for beauty. But he insisted that beauty depends on uniformity and variety. The Abbé Jean Baptiste Dubos, in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et · sur la peinture (1719; trans. into English 1748), a notable and influential work, held a similar Hutchesonian notion of the sense of beauty (we know immediately whether music is melodious or a stew is tasty). He went on to justify aesthetic pleasure as a relief from the monotonies of ordinary existence. A similar view of the judgment of taste as a sudden discernment, not requiring reflection or thought, was presented in Voltaire’s Temple du goût (1733). The Essai sur le beau of Père Yves-Marie André (1741) was Cartesian in its foundations, and Platonic and Augustinian in its conclusion that beauty is a transcendental perfection, but this set of lectures was influential, even on the empirically minded Diderot, who borrowed from it and discussed it in his essay on beauty in the Encyclopedia.
Among his multifarious projects, Denis Diderot gave more—and more systematic—thought to aesthetic problems than most of his French contemporaries. His famous essay, Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (a fragment of which was published in 1770, but the whole not until 1830) dealt subtly with the problem of the relation between the actor’s emotions and the role he is playing: artistic creation, in acting or poetry, is far removed, he argued, from mere emotional self-expression. He wrote on painting with much enthusiasm in his Salons and in his Essai sur la peinture (first published 1796). And he was especially interested in poetics. The heart of his poetic theory is explained in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751). The poet’s problem, he says, is that he must convey a complex psychological state through a medium—language—that is a product of reason, suited to logical analysis, and hence inherently discursive—words have to be laid down in sequence, one idea at a time. Poetry overcomes this limitation by metrical devices, by syntactical inversions that jam ideas together, and by figurative language. The term “hieroglyph” came to Diderot, via Condillac, from Warburton’s writings on the Egyptian hieroglyph, which Warburton believed to be a picture that compresses and expresses many meanings all together. So poetic discourse, says Diderot,
is no longer only a linking together of strong terms that set forth the thought nobly and forcibly, but a fabric of closely interwoven hieroglyphs that picture it (un tissu d’hiéroglyphes entassés les uns sur les autres qui la peignent). I might say that in this sense all poetry is emblematic [trans. M. Gilman, The Idea of Poetry, p. 79].
Diderot’s Encyclopedia article on beauty, Recherches philosophiques sur l’origine et la nature du beau (1751), discusses critically some earlier writers, including Crousaz and Hutcheson, and attempts a definition that will at least avoid excessive narrowness. The qualities that are the condition of beauty, says Diderot, must be common to beautiful things of all varieties, must be such that without them there is no beauty, and such that when they change, the degree of beauty changes. There is only one concept that will serve, the concept of rapports, or relationships—not simply relationships in the logical sense, but relationships involving some sort of connection or mutual fitness or conformity. Whatever “awakens in my understanding the idea of rapports” is to be called beauty. No special inner perception need be postulated here; the ideas of order, symmetry, proportion, etc., that enter into various sorts of beauty are those with which we are familiar in our practical experience, for, Diderot says, we are born with needs that we must learn to satisfy by experimenting with the world, and these constant experiments acquaint us with the manifold ways in which things fit together and work upon each other. We are glad to perceive, in great art, the congruence of multiple relationships all at once, and the more rapports, the more beautiful the work. Since beauty has many varieties, depending on the species or class of things considered, our grasp of beauty is refined by a close study of natural objects: thus Diderot tries to give a clearer meaning to the maxim of Batteaux and others that art is “the imitation of beautiful nature.”
As a final measure of the distance that empiricist aesthetics (and particularly associationist aesthetics) had come since, say, Hobbes or Addison, we may conclude this chapter by noticing a little more fully the work of Archibald Alison, who represents one of the high points of achievement in this movement, a culmination and exemplification of much of what was best and most fruitful in it. His Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste went almost unnoticed when first published at Edinburgh (1790), but the second and expanded edition (1811) came to be acknowledged as a most important systematic work, distinguished by the care and subtlety of its arguments, and by the interesting implications of its attempt to explain the “pleasures of the imagination” on completely associationist principles. We can consider only a part of his argument, and briefly, but it is an important part.
Alison’s first main thesis is that the pleasures of taste, that is, the enjoyment of beauty and sublimity in nature or art (see Intro.), occur “when the Imagination is employed in the prosecution of a regular train of ideas of emotion” (Essay I, Conclusion, 4; 6th ed., I, 172). The first argument, then, is to show that for an object to be aesthetically enjoyed (in this sense), it must initiate a train of associated ideas. The argument is inductive, and it is both thorough and exact. First, “when we feel either the beauty or sublimity of natural scenery—the gay lustre of a morning in spring,” etc., “we are conscious of a variety of images in our minds, very different from those which the objects themselves can present to the eye” (I, i, 1; I, 5). Second, when the object is prevented from initiating an associative chain, as when we are occupied with grief or with practical business, or when we are taking the role of art critics rather than appreciators, or if we are people of limited imaginative capacity—then the aesthetic enjoyment is not felt (I, i, 2). Third, the intensity of aesthetic enjoyment varies concomitantly with the number and variety of associations aroused by the object (I, i, 3).
The train of imaginations is a necessary condition of aesthetic enjoyment, but not sufficient: the ideas must also be “productive of Emotions”; and the train itself must be characterized by a single “principle of connection” so that the whole chain is bound together, not just connected by separate associative links (I, ii). Again, careful inductive arguments are drawn out to prove both points: “That no objects, or qualities in objects, are, in fact, felt as beautiful or sublime, but such as are productive of some simple Emotion” (I, ii, 2; I, 81)—any simple emotion—and that in successful works of art there is a dominant quality or emotion that makes them wholes. The conclusion is that “the pleasure . . . which accompanies the Emotions of Taste, may be considered not as a simple, but as a complex pleasure” (I, Conclusion; I, 169).
It follows also “that the qualities of matter are not to be considered as sublime or beautiful in themselves, but as being the signs or expressions of such qualities as, by the constitution of our Nature, are fitted to produce pleasing or interesting emotion” (II, Conclusion; II, 416). Alison does not deny that colors and sounds of themselves, and even Hogarth’s curves, may produce “agreeable sensations,” but he holds that the beauty of colors arises from their expressiveness, and their expressiveness from association (II, iii, 1). “Purple, for instance, has acquired a character of Dignity, from its accidental connection with the Dress of Kings” (I, 298). And he argues by ingenious experimental comparisons that even Hogarth’s principle is not fundamental, for when his lines are beautiful their beauty is not purely formal, but depends on expression (II, iv, 1, Part II).
The associationist analysis of beauty was developed still further by later British writers. For example, Francis Jeffrey, in his essay on Beauty (Edinburgh Review, 1811; later in the 8th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), after some good criticisms of his predecessors, such as Hutcheson, Diderot, Knight, Stewart, and Alison (whom he admires), proposes that a beautiful object is one that is
associated either in our past experience, or by some universal analogy, with pleasures, or emotions that upon the whole are pleasant, and that these associated pleasures are instantaneously suggested, as soon as the object is presented, and by the first glimpse of its physical properties; with which, indeed, they are consubstantiated and confounded in our sensations [par. 12].
A significant feature of Alison’s system is that it represents an abandonment of the persistent attempt to discover a neat formula for the perceptual conditions of beauty, and opens up the possibility of an indefinite range of beauties. Jerome Stolnitz has remarked that “By the closing decades of the century, discouragement over the possibility of finding a successful formula of objective beauty, has turned into despair.”9 Alison concluded that the attempt was “altogether impossible” (I, 316). Even more interestingly, Dugald Stewart suggested that this failure might be explained if we would abandon the “prejudice, which has descended to modern times from the scholastic ages;—that when a word admits of a variety of significations, these significations must all be species of the same genus” (Philosophical Essays, 1810, p. 214)—and would allow that the objects to which “beautiful” applies have only a “family resemblance” (in Wittgenstein’s term) to one another.
One further consequence that Alison draws from his arguments recalls the neoclassic discussions of the preceding chapter. Since a work of art provides the genuinely aesthetic pleasure by the coherence of the association chain it provokes, it is essential for the work of art to preserve its “Unity of character or expression” (I, 133), which, in the drama for example, “is fully as essential as any of those three unities, of which every book of Criticism is so full” (I, 152). From this follows a general principle of critical evaluation:
In all the Fine Arts, that Composition is most excellent in which the different parts most fully unite in the production of one unmingled Emotion; and that Taste the most perfect, where the perception of this relation of objects, in point of expression, is most delicate and precise [I, 157].
From this generalization, in turn, particular critical rules might be derived. Alison seeks an empirical warrant for objective criticism—which had been on the agenda since Hutcheson and Hume. It is perhaps a bit startling to find that, when he ventures into the illustration of his principles by specific examples, his condemnation of Shakespeare’s mixtures of tragic and comic elements in the same play is as severe as could be wished by the most rigorous neoclassicist. However, what is philosophically significant in the long run, in any field of human endeavor, is, of course, not what people believe but what reasons they have for believing it.
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1 R. L. Brett, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1951), p. 127.
2 For this passage see Antony Flew, ed., Hume on Human Nature and the Understanding (New York, 1962), pp. 39–46.
3 The transformation of feeling toward mountains, and the accompanying theological controversies, have been well told and documented by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Cornell U., 1959).
4 Cf. Longinus (xxxv, 3; trans. Fyfe): “Look at life from all sides and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme.”
5 He also wrote three essays on humor, Reflections on Laughter (1725), criticizing Hobbes’s theory.
6 That beauty is not a quality is also argued in the essay “The Sceptic” (“Euclid has fully explained every quality of the circle, but has not, in any proposition, said a word of its beauty”)—but Hume is not speaking in his own voice here, and need not subscribe to all that the skeptic says.
7 Along with the essay “Of Tragedy,” which deals ingeniously with the problem of explaining our pleasure in viewing painful events.
8 Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime, A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, 1960), p. 233.
9 “ ‘Beauty’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea,” Jour Hist Ideas XXII (1961): 199.