Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

London

Printed for R. and J. Dodsley

1757

"The term Taste, like all other figurative terms, is not extremely accurate: the thing which we understand by it, is far from a simple and determinate idea in the minds of most men, and it is therefore liable to uncertainty and confusion."

The term Taste, like all other figurative terms, is not extremely accurate: the thing which we understand by it, is far from a simple and determinate idea in the minds of most men, and it is therefore liable to uncertainty and confusion. I have no great opinion of a definition, the celebrated remedy for the cure of this disorder. For when we define, we seem in danger of circumscribing nature within the bounds of our own notions, which we often take up by hazard, or embrace on trust, or form out of a limited and partial consideration of the object before us, instead of extending our ideas to take in all that nature comprehends, according to her manner of combining. We are limited in our enquiry by the strict laws to which we have submited at our setting out.
(p. 64)

Body::Taste

Reading

18 entries in the ESTC (1757, 1759, 1761, 1764, 1765, 1766, 1767, 1770, 1771, 1772, 1773, 1776, 1782, 1787, 1792, 1793, 1796, 1798).

See (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1757). <Link to ESTC><Link to ECCO-TCP>

Text from Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001.

Reading Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Wommersly (London: Penguin Classics, 1998).

Taste

09/23/2007