These Determinations to be pleas’d with any Forms, or Ideas which occur to our Observation, the
Author chooses to call Senses; distinguishing them from the Powers which commonly go by that Name,
by calling our Power of perceiving the Beauty of Regularity, Order, Harmony, an Internal Sense;....
(Cited in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 403, original emphasis)Hutcheson’s “inner sense” theory influenced Hume, Alexander Gerard (1728–1795) and other thinkers,
and became a marker of the “polite” and informed amateur. Hume’s view of taste also allowed for some
subjective variation through his theory of associationism, inherited from classical philosophy, according
to which we find beauty in things when they arouse certain associations or memories in our minds. In
1790, Archibald Alison (1757–1839) developed a similar view, in his Essays on the Nature and
principles of Taste. For Alison, any formulaic classical idealism would offer too restrictive and
“aristocratic” an approach, given the complexities of human nature and taste:
If ... in the human countenance and form, there were only certain colours, or forms, or proportions,
that were essentially beautiful, how imperious a check would have been given, not only to human
happiness, but to the most important affections and sensibilities of our nature! ... an Aristocracy would
be established even by Nature itself, more irresistible, and more independent either of talents or
virtue, than any that the influence of property or of ancestry has ever yet created among mankind.
(Cited in Macmillan, 1986, 129)Unlike the skeptic Hume, however, Alison reinterpreted the workings of taste in a way that devoted a
large role to Christian spirituality (Macmillan, 1986, 149). Such approaches allowed for some variations
in taste, while retaining its exclusivity within the domain of the educated and refined. Artists themselves
were often barred from the category of “man of taste” because of their close proximity to the messy,
material world of paint (Brewer, 1997, 88–92).
Neoplatonic conceptions of beauty were “formalist” in the sense that they placed emphasis on aspects
of an object’s form: in the eighteenth century these normally included regularity, order and harmony in, for
example, the composition of a work or in the drawing of a figure. Such conceptions of beauty also had the
advantage of offering a universal explanation of its cause and of its effects on viewers. Enlightenment
thinkers generally sought the rational, universal principles underlying phenomena. For this reason neo
platonic explanations of beauty continued to be influential throughout the eighteenth century, increasingly
modified, however (as in Hume’s case), by a greater acknowledgement of empirical or “scientific”
method. Hybrid neoplatonicempiricist approaches were common. In his A Notion of the Historical
Draught of the Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules (published in English in 1713), Shaftesbury saw
taste as a particularly refined form of empiricism based on a patrician experience of art and informed by a
universalizing neoplatonic view of beauty based on the idea of visual harmony. He was also strongly
influenced by a traditional emphasis on the narrative, quasiliterary effectiveness of history paintings
(Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 373).
Other theorists who applied neoplatonic principles included Hogarth in his The Analysis of Beauty
(1753), who identified a formal cause for beauty and grace: the use of waving and serpentine lines, the
latter consisting of a threedimensional, spiraling version of the former, in, for example, the twisting
forms of a dancer’s body. Hogarth placed the waving line, derived from beautiful natural forms, at the
heart of his rococo aesthetic. His very particular formalist approach to taste has been seen as an attempt
to distance himself from the prevailing taste for works by foreign, often Catholic, old masters, too
influenced by less natural antique forms (Craske, 2000, 19). Additionally, like other critics, including Du
Bos and the philosopher LouisJean Lévesque de Pouilly (1691–1750) in his 1736 Theory of Agreeable
Sentiments (Théorie des sentiments agréables), Hogarth placed great emphasis on good sense and