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Notes 5. Even though Addison asserts that “unless all Animals were allured by the Beauty of their own
Species, Generation would be at an End, and the Earth unpeopled,”
Darwin points out:
Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by artificial selection,
I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and complexity of the coadaptations
between all organic beings . . . which may have been effected in the long course of time .
Certainly, as Darwin points out, “the gradual process of improvement” by crossing different
varieties of flowers “may plainly be recognized in the increased size and beauty which we not
see in the varieties” of “rose, pelargonium, dahlia, and other plants, when compared with the
older varieties . . . “ Yet, recent experiments have shown, in the words of researcher Piotr
Winkielman:
What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on. A stimulus becomes
attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain
to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by
preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.
This phenomenon is termed the “beauty-in-averageness effect” Does prototypicality then reflect
health and fitness value of potential mates as
Addison suggests? Or do these conflicting results suggest beauty is independent of biological
explanation? Addison writes, “[We] immediately assent to the Beauty of an Object, without
enquiring into the particular Causes and Occasions of it.”
6. Explain clearly why Addison believes the necessary conditions for the experience of the pleasures
of the imagination, including the experience of beauty, cannot be discovered? Why does he
think we cannot know the nature of ideas or the mind? To what extent do you think he is
following John Locke’s analysis that by “putting together the ideas of thinking and willing, or
the power of moving or quieting corporeal motion, joined to substance, of which we have no
distinct idea, we have the idea of an immaterial spirit.
7. Do you think that Addison makes a mistake in attributing the pleasures of the imagination as
proceeding from sight alone? Why do you suppose he does not include pleasures of sense and
pleasures of understanding as imaginative also? Indeed, Addison emphasizes that beauty is
enhanced by the ideas of other senses such as music or fragrance. Could not he argue that
different pleasures of the imagination derive from different “intelligence” types such as those
proposed by Howard Gardner? That is, beauty in words and language stem from linguistic
ability; beauty in numbers and logic is accounted for by logico-mathematical skill; beauty in
music and rhythm originate from musical talent; beauty in structure and form of sculpture are
attributable to tactile-kinesthetic experience and so forth, just as beauty in spatial perception
derives from spatialvisual ability.
8. How do you think Addison’s account of the delight afforded by horrible or monstrous effects
of pleasures of the imagination relate to Edmund Burke’s analysis of the sublime where Burke
states, “Another source of the sublime is infinity; . . . [i]nfinity has a tendency to fill the mind
with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the
sublime.”?
9. William Temple, in his essay “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” contrasted the natural expression
of Chinese gardens to disadvantage of the symmetry and order of English gardens, and for a
time altered the practice of design landscape of English gardens. Pope also criticized the
English formal landscape garden:
His Gardens next your admiration call;
On ev’ry side you look, behold the Wall!

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