 It seems clear, for starters, that our interest in artistic representations is not exhausted by our interest in what they represent: we take pleasure in the representations themselves as representations. To supply this deficiency Addison proposes a “a new principle of pleasure, which is nothing else but the action of the mind, which compares the ideas that arise from [the representation], with the ideas that arise from the objects themselves” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 418). The description of a beautiful scene pleases us, according to this proposal, both for the beauty of the scene and for “the aptness of the description to excite its image” (Addison and Steele 1879, no 418). But Addison himself seems less than fully convinced by this proposal, since there is no reason to think of a pleasure arising from an act of comparison as a pleasure of the imagination; such a pleasure, he concedes, “may be more properly called the pleasure of the understanding” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 418).