 In these and similar ways Gerard reduces internal sense to imagination. An important consequence of the reduction is that it allows Gerard to be neutral on the question of the primacy of the intellectual or the material with respect to objects of taste, over which internal-sense theorists and imagination theorists had divided. Gerard, unique among the major British theorists of his century, shows no inclination to make one sort of object prior to the other. Indeed, within the essay’s first pages he offers a rural prospect, a scientific discovery, a philosophical theory, a poem, and a painting, all as equally uncontroversial examples of objects of taste (Gerard 1759, 6).