Of the Standard of Taste

Of the Standard of Taste was a seminal essay on aesthetics that is innovative because it requires Hume to address the apparent relativity of taste, a conclusion that appears to follow from his own assumption that the "good" or "beauty" of a good work of art is identical with the positive human responses it generates. The essay's focus on the subject (the viewer, the reader) rather than the object (the painting, the book) is typical of the British "sentimentalists" or moral sense theorists of the eighteenth century. Unlike the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, who sought an objective definition of beauty, the British school tended to look for the connections between taste and moral judgments.