We begin our history of the British aesthetic tradition with a group of eighteenth-century British writers who, though not coincident in time, share a similar philosophical predilection for approaching aesthetic matters through the idea of “internal sense.” The idea of imagination and association is not entirely absent from their writings, as that of internal sense can be found in those to be considered in later chapters (Hume and Kames being obvious cases in point). As we shall see in what follows, however, these thinkers are united by the conviction that aesthetic value is to be explained ultimately through a sense of taste that, analogously or literally, shares crucial features with its external counterparts, especially, as writers emphasize throughout, that of sight. On this view, objects possess or exhibit certain qualities that elicit, directly or indirectly and in more or less complicated ways, a certain response on the part of the subject; that is only possible, these theorists conjecture, if some distinct organ or capacity is present and correctly adapted to receive and be affected by the qualities in question.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

The first internal sense theorist of the tradition – Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl Shaftesbury (1671–1713) – is also, fittingly, the philosopher whose work is usually regarded as its founding text. “The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody” is one of a series of lengthy essays Shaftesbury composed between 1705 and 1710 and published together in three volumes as Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in 1711; with the exception of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), it was destined to become the most reprinted English-language book in the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury was educated under the direction of Locke (whose patron was the first earl, Shaftesbury’s grandfather), but he came to take issue with central doctrines of his former tutor, and although Lockean language pervades the Characteristicks, it is largely a gloss on a philosophical canvas indebted to the rationalist lineage of neo-Platonism with its origins in the thought of the third-century philosopher Plotinus.