Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste"

David Hume (1711-1776) published the essay "Of the Standard of Taste" in the collection Four Dissertations, issued in London by the bookseller Andrew Millar in 1757. The essay opens from a thoroughly empiricist premise Hume had already stated in his earlier Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40): "Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty." Aesthetic judgments, on this view, report a sentiment of pleasure or approbation felt by the perceiving mind rather than describing an objective property residing in the object itself, placing Hume squarely within the broader eighteenth-century sentimentalist tradition running through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.