 Reid takes this position to be “not so much an error in judgment, as an abuse of words” (Reid 1785 [1969, 782]). There are words by which one may say of Virgil’s Georgics that it is the cause of a feeling, but these are not the words The Georgics is beautiful; there is no reason to think they say anything of The Georgics other than that it has the property of beauty (Reid 1785 [1969, 759]). Hence a theory of taste that does not contradict “the universal sense of mankind, as expressed by their language” (Reid 1785 [1969, 760]) must allow the internal sense of beauty to have, in addition to its affective ingredient, a cognitive one—a judgment ascribing a property to the object.