 One of Hume’s most puzzling claims is that taste is an “immediate” response. In his extended treatment of the passions and emotions in the Treatise, Hume says that “immediate” feelings are ones that do not involve the “interposition” of ideas (T, 275). Some pleasures and pains are “immediate” in the sense that they are impressions that immediately accompany other impressions (e.g., the experience of a very hot flame is accompanied by an experience of pain). How does a literary work “give immediate pleasure”? Taken literally, the Treatise appears to commit Hume to the view that literary works are beautiful independent of the audience’s ability to assign ideas or meanings to the words. As noted by James Grant (2014, p. 368), the Treatise sometimes posits a distinction between beauty, which is the quality of the object that acts upon us, and the pleasure it arouses. But these proposals are not repeated in Hume’s later writings and a commitment to observer-independent beauty is certainly not Hume’s mature position. His official theory is that there is “mental, as well as bodily taste” (SOT, 274), and both moral and aesthetic discrimination depend on mental taste. The requisite sentiments are spontaneous products of the mind, but they are not uninformed responses.