Hume Quote on Beauty: Not in Things but in the Mind

Quote

"Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." — David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757)

Author

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian, one of the greatest of the empiricist tradition and the most important philosopher of the English-speaking eighteenth century. His Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and his Enquiries established the empiricist theory of knowledge and the sentimentalist theory of morality, and his essays — including Of the Standard of Taste (1757) — applied the same philosophical method to aesthetics, politics, and economics.

Source

The quotation comes from the opening section of Of the Standard of Taste, published in 1757 in Hume's Four Dissertations. The essay is one of the founding texts of modern aesthetics, and the quoted passage — with its companion claim that "each mind perceives a different beauty" — is its most famous statement.

Context

Hume wrote Of the Standard of Taste in the context of the eighteenth-century debate about taste. The empiricist philosophy he had developed implied that all our ideas derive from impressions — and if beauty is not a quality of things but a response of the mind, then beauty is a sentiment, like pleasure or pain. The essay confronts the problem this creates: if beauty is subjective, how can we say that Homer is a greater poet than a hack, or that one judgment of taste is better than another? Hume's answer has two parts. The first is the subjectivist claim stated in the quotation: beauty is a sentiment. The second is the objectivist discipline: the sentiment is not arbitrary, because it depends on the "delicacy of taste" — the cultivated capacity to perceive the qualities that reliably produce the sentiment in well-ordered minds. The standard of taste, Hume concludes, is "the joint verdict of the true judges": those who possess delicacy of imagination, freedom from prejudice, and long experience of the arts.

Meaning

The quotation states Hume's subjectivism about beauty with exemplary clarity: "Beauty is no quality in things themselves." The claim is a direct consequence of his empiricism. Since all our ideas derive from impressions, and since the impression of beauty is a feeling of approbation in the mind — not a perception of a property in the object, like its shape or color — beauty must be a sentiment, not a quality. "It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." This is the thesis that has come to be called the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment, and it has dominated aesthetics since Hume.

But the essay is not a simple relativism, and the second half of the argument is as important as the first. "Each mind perceives a different beauty" — yes — but minds are not equally well constituted for perception. The person with delicate taste perceives what the coarse perceive only dimly; the practiced critic perceives what the novice misses; the unprejudiced judge perceives what the biased cannot. The standard of taste is therefore neither the arbitrary preference of the individual nor an objective property of the object, but the disciplined consensus of the qualified: "the joint verdict of the true judges." Hume thus gives aesthetics its characteristic modern shape: the experience of beauty is subjective, but the judgment of beauty is not therefore arbitrary — it is the subject's discipline that makes the difference between taste and its absence.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the philosophical exploration of beauty and its nature. Hume's subjectivism about beauty parallels his subjectivism about morals — in both cases, value is a sentiment projected onto the world by the mind — and it connects to the wider empiricist account of truth and knowledge. The essay's account of the standard of taste remains the reference point of contemporary debates in aesthetics about the objectivity of aesthetic judgment, and its insistence that taste is cultivated rather than innate connects the philosophy of beauty to the philosophy of education and the disciplines of attention.