 Addison’s fundamental idea is that the pleasures of taste are pleasures of the imagination. This should not be taken to imply that Addison identifies taste with the imagination. Taste is a faculty of judgment: it discerns the perfections of an author with pleasure (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 409). Imagination is a faculty of representation: it represents things in images; it is the faculty of visual representation (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 411). Hence Addison’s fundamental idea comes to this, apparently: taste judges what the imagination represents; the perfections that taste discerns with pleasure are perfections that things have as objects of visual representation. But if objects of taste are objects of visual representation, then objects of taste are first and foremost material objects: mountain ranges, waterfalls, sexually attractive bodies are among the paradigms Addison offers (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 412). It is here that the contrast with Shaftesbury becomes plain. It will be recalled that Shaftesbury holds objects of taste to be first and foremost objects of intellect, and that the fundamental difficulty that his theory must overcome is to explain our intuition that material objects are also capable of beauty. With Addison it is just the reverse.