David Hume on Art and Taste "The Epicurean" and "Of the
Standards of Taste", in Essays Moral, Political, Literary
(1748), Essays 15 and 23. It is a great mortification to the
vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal
the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.
Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few
strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the
hand of the master. ... Art may make a suit of clothes; but
nature must produce a man. ... All sentiment is right; because
sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is
always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all
determinations of the understanding are not right; because they
have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real
matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard.
... Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely
in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a
different beauty. One person may even per