 Hume’s account of tragic pleasure has two components. First, different features of the work must generate the viewer’s agreeable and disagreeable responses. Disagreeable aspects contribute to our general approbation because those properties are balanced by naturally agreeable properties. Second, a general psychological principle explains how it is possible for competing emotions to produce a complex, pleasing sentiment. Borrowed from the Treatise (T, 419), that principle holds that when the same object produces different passions, even those “of a contrary nature,” then the subordinate passion can be “converted” into the predominant (OT, 262). “Of Tragedy” combines these two ideas. Our natural delight in “imitation” provides a strong and predominant passion. The naturally disagreeable emotions aroused by the plot provide a subordinate and contrary emotion, the “movement” of which “fortifies” the predominant passion. Unless the negative emotion becomes predominant, the overall effect of a well-written tragedy will be an audience “pleased in proportion as they are afflicted” (OT 258). The details of Hume’s theory are explored by Cohen (1962), Budd (1991), Neill (1992, 1999), and Dadlez (2004, 2016).