 Shaftesbury takes up aesthetic questions from time to time across his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (first published in 1711), particularly within its third, fourth, and fifth Treatises. But it is perhaps only within this last treatise—the dialogue The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody—that he can be said to develop a theory of taste. Near the beginning of the dialogue’s climactic section (Section II of Book III) Shaftesbury’s spokesman, Theocles, issues a pair of imperatives: one ought “never to admire the Representative-Beauty, except for the sake of the Original; nor aim at other Enjoyment than of the rational kind” (Cooper 1711 [2001, 221]). It is largely in the subsequent explication of these imperatives that Shaftesbury’s highly influential theory of taste emerges.