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Notes peculiar delight” (T, 298) and a “particular kind of pleasure” (T, 472). It feels different from other
pleasures. He variously characterizes approbation as a feeling of approval, liking, or affection. A
beautiful object or action strikes us as amiable, agreeable, and desirable. Hume describes the
feeling of disapprobation as one of disapproving, disliking, and contempt. An ugly object or
vicious action feels odious, disagreeable, and undesirable.
In the eighteenth-century context of moral theory, “sentiment” is a generic label for emotions.
(Hume’s theory is sometimes identified as “sentimentalism,” but that term has unfortunate modern
connotations.) In Hume’s technical vocabulary, all emotions are impressions, not ideas. The
sentiments associated with beauty and ugliness are reflective impressions. They are not “impressions
of the senses.” Instead, they are responses to sensory impressions.

Hume is an inner sense theorist who treats aesthetic pleasure as an instinctive and natural
human response. Successful art exploits our natural sentiments by employing appropriate
composition and design. Only empirical inquiry can establish reliable ways to elicit the
approval of taste.

Beauty is a feeling of approbation, and an original, simple impression of the mind. Impressions
are contrasted with ideas, which he alternatively calls “thoughts.” Ideas are “copies” of impressions,
and seldom have the force or clarity of the experiences they copy. For Hume, experiencing beauty
is a necessary condition for thinking about the idea of beauty. An individual cannot construct the
idea of beauty out of other ideas, which is equivalent to saying that the idea derives from the
proper sentiment of approbation (T, 469). In the complete absence of the operations of taste,
thoughts about beauty would not occur.
Hume seems to equate perception of beauty with the experience of the sentiment. (This equation
underlies the problem of whether all tastes are equal). Does he distinguish between the critic’s
experience of the sentiment and the judgment or verdict? If a verbal pronouncement that an object
is beautiful is nothing more than an expression or report of the speaker’s sentiment, then Hume
faces the difficulty that a critic’s verdict is not really a recommendation of the object. If your
pronouncement that a piece of music is beautiful means no more than that you have felt a certain
pleasure upon hearing it, then your verdict expresses your pleasure without saying anything
about the music’s capacity to please others. So although critics issue judgments of taste based on
their own sentiments, a judgment of taste must involve something more than a pleasing or
displeasing sentiment.
Hume observes that there is a difference between expressing one’s own sentiments and making a
moral distinction. When someone speaks of another’s behavior as “vicious or odious or depraved,
he then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments, in which he expects all his audience
to concur with him” (EPM, 272). Moral and aesthetic judgment requires “steady and general
points of view” (T, 581–82; see also SOT, 276), common to others (EPM, 272). Hume’s various
descriptions of this point of view invite conflicting interpretations. However, it clearly requires
the critic to reflect upon the relationship between the sentiment and its object.
Whether we call them “aesthetic judgments” or “judgments of taste,” aesthetic verdicts are unlike
ordinary judgments about matters of fact. Matters of fact are relevant states of affairs, which render
complex ideas either true or false. The same cannot be said about verdicts arising from the operations
of taste. Sentiment, and sentiment alone, determines that a particular object is or is not beautiful.
Truth is disputable; not taste: what exists in the nature of things is the standard of our judgement;
what each man feels within himself is the standard of sentiment. Propositions in geometry may be

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