 Hutcheson influenced most of the Scottish philosophers who succeeded him, perhaps all of them, whether because he helped to set their agenda or because they appropriated, in a form suitable to their needs, certain of his doctrines. In the field of aesthetics for example, where Hutcheson led, many, including Hume, Reid, and Archibald Alison, followed. But influences can be hard to pin down and there is much dispute in particular concerning his influence on David Hume (1711–1776). It is widely held that Hume’s moral philosophy is essentially Hutchesonian, and that Hume took a stage further Hutcheson’s projects of internalisation and of grounding our experience of the world on sentiment or feeling. For Hume agreed with Hutcheson that moral and aesthetic qualities are really sentiments existing in our minds, but he also argued that the necessary connection between any pair of events E1 and E2 which are related as cause to effect is also in our minds, for it is nothing more than a determination of the mind, due to custom or habit, to have a belief (a kind of feeling) that an event of kind E2 will occur next when we experience an event of kind E1. Furthermore Hume argues that what we think of as the ‘external’ world is almost entirely a product of our own imaginative activity. As against these reasons for thinking Hume indebted to Hutcheson there are the awkward facts that Hutcheson greatly disapproved of the draft of Treatise Book III that he saw in 1739 and that Hutcheson did his best to prevent Hume being appointed to the moral philosophy chair at Edinburgh University in 1744–1745. In addition many of their contemporaries, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, held that Hume’s moral philosophy was significantly different from Hutcheson’s (Moore 1990).