Note 632 — Chapter V

‘The ideas of beauty and harmony, like other sensible ideas, are necessarily pleasant to us, as well as immediately so.’ Hutcheson's Inquiry into our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, p. 11. ‘Our sense of beauty seems designed to give us positive pleasure.’ p. 71. ‘Beauty gives a favourable presumption of good moral dispositions.’ p. 257. ‘But it is plain we have not in our power the modelling of our senses or desires, to form them for a private interest; they are fixed for us by the Author of our nature, subservient to the interest of the system; so that each individual is made, previously to his own choice, a member of a great body, and affected with the fortunes of the whole; or at least of many parts of it; nor can he break himself off at pleasure.’ Hutcheson's Essay on the Passions, pp. 105, 106.