  The concept of sentiments is crucial to Du Bos’s thought. He seems to have been the writer who made talk of sentiments so commonplace in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Du Bos never precisely defines what he means when he speaks of sentiments. In what is, perhaps, the closest he comes to a definition he writes that, “The first ideas born in the soul, when it receives a lively stimulus,…we call sentiments” (1.33). According to Du Bos, sentiments are not produced by a special sort of aesthetic experience. Rather, they are, as already indicated, ordinary emotional responses. We can receive sentiments from experience of ordinary objects and from experience of the imitations found in art. The difference, as already noted, is that sentiments produced by art are fainter.