 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, in his Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music (1719), presents the faculty of taste as a sentiment that he calls a sixth sense, disregarding the role of reason or of morality, which his contemporary Jean-Pierre Crousaz had considered important aspects of taste. His work precedes Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson’s aesthetic treatise of 1725, in which he also discusses a sixth sense that perceives beauty. According to Dubos, the reception of artistic works happens in the body: we tremble, cry, or feel a jolt of surprise when we see a play, for example. He describes how the arts affect our emotions positively, while admitting that the effect of seeing death depicted in painting or theater, for example, is different than if we were to witness a death in real life. He also goes into great detail to describe how climate affects nations and consequently how it fosters or impedes the proliferation of good artists in certain parts of the world. This type of thinking began as far back as Hippocrates’s reflections on the effects of climate on national character and extends to Juan Huarte’s thoughts on the influence of body temperature on eloquence and later to Montesquieu’s claims about the way climate determines human behavior and consequently each nation’s political system. This climate theory is part of Dubos’s idea that artistic perception happens in the body, both for the viewer and for the creator. For him, art is ultimately a means of communication from body to body.