 It may be objected that such a reduction of material to mental beauty cannot serve Reid’s case for realism, at least as it applies to material objects. For it may seem that the beauty we attribute to material objects can never be real, by Reid’s lights, given that no material object ever can have any of the mental perfections capable of grounding beauty. But such an objection misses a subtlety of Reid’s position. Strictly speaking, material objects never are beautiful. But this does not imply that the beauty that we attribute to them never is real. It is real, at least generally, though strictly speaking it belongs only to the minds that the material objects in question signify. If it seems to us that these objects themselves possess beauty, this is because beauty is prone to be “transferred” or “communicated” from the minds that really have it to the material objects that merely signify it (Reid 1785 [1969, 788]). Reid never uses the term “association” to refer to the mechanism by which beauty is thus communicated from mental signified to material sign. But that he does not distance himself from association—the mechanism by then at the center of a great deal of theorizing about taste—makes it hard to deny that it has found a positive role in his own theory.