 Taste is immediate and spontaneous, yet the application of “good sense” and “reason” improves it (SOT, 277). Taste is not improved by reasoning from a priori normative principles. Moral and aesthetic discriminations “are not conclusions of reason” (T, 457). Neither results from a mere “comparing of ideas” (T, 463). However, taste can be influenced by consultation of “general rules of art” or “rules” that “are founded only on experience and observation” (SOT, 270). For different views on the content of these rules or principles, see Hester (1979), Dickie (1996, pp. 126–131), Shelley (2002), Dickie (2003), and Shelley (2004). Mental taste involves reason in the sense of “sound understanding,” which ultimately depends on imaginative associations of ideas. So taste involves imaginative pleasure, as Addison proposed. This doctrine of imaginative pleasure has no special connection with creativity or with the capacity to produce art.