Abstract

English eighteenth-century aesthetic writers from Hume to Alison made it their aim to establish “a standard of taste by unfolding those principles that ought to govern the taste of every individual”, to set out as it were a blue-print of “a just relish” which would serve as a basis for criticism and appreciation. They thought to do this by exhibiting in the field of appreciation permanent uniformities of affective behaviour behind the conflicting idiosyn-cracies of temperament and fashion. It was a psychological programme, “to explain the nature of man considered as a sensitive being capable of pleasure and pain,” a science of “apolaustics” as Hamilton would have preferred to call it. But the most that could be achieved through an empirical sociological investigation was to set up sanctions of restricted social approval for selected norms of taste and conformities of emotional response. As an approach to the problem of a rational criticism it could seem plausible only in an age where philosophical outlook was confined within the narrowly coherent traditions of a small cultivated class.