 This moral and aesthetic subjectivism attracts Hume for the same reason that it attracts Hutcheson. The appeal to sentiment offers a middle position between the two prevailing theories within English letters, Hobbesian egoism and ethical rationalism. Hutcheson holds that virtue and beauty are not qualities of the people and things to which they are attributed. We may speak as if objects and people have moral and aesthetic properties, but the relevant property is merely an “idea raised in us.” Hume alters Hutcheson’s theory by imposing his own philosophical vocabulary, making beauty an impression rather than an idea. But they agree that to describe a person as virtuous or an object as beautiful is to make a claim about their tendency to cause a certain response. Is it imprudent and “too strong,” Hume asks Hutcheson, to summarize the thesis in the following terms (HL, I, 39–40)? “[W]hen you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind” (T, 469). Emphasizing Hume’s debt to Hutcheson, Kivy (2003, pp. 307–310), argues that Hume understands beauty very much on the model of colors. Although they are secondary qualities and so do not directly reveal the properties of the occasioning object, some color perception is “true and real” (SOT, 272), and so it is for Hume likewise with beauty. However, virtue and beauty are not strictly analogous to secondary qualities, such as heat and cold, because a critic’s claim that a work is beautiful involves an element of endorsement that does not arise in the observation that ice is cold. The case against reading Humean beauty on the model of ideas of secondary qualities is provided by Shiner (1996) and Taylor (2011).