The writers who comprise the category of imagination theorists form what is the most extensive and eclectic group of the eighteenth century, their number spanning the period from Addison’s graceful and seminal essays for The Spectator (1712), to Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, delivered over the course of some thirty years, concluding in 1790 and published in their entirety in 1797, three years shy of the new century. In the interim, one finds Hume’s disparate observations on beauty and taste, including his influential treatments of a standard and the curious nature of tragic emotions; Hogarth’s singular and unduly neglected The Analysis of Beauty; and undoubtedly the most influential work of the entire eighteenth-century tradition, Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 and destined to make waves so powerful that their effects are felt still, moving like ripples through the waters of contemporary aesthetics. Eclectic these contributors might be – literary gentleman, accomplished artists, philosophers of first rank – but they are united as a body by the emphasis each gives to imagination and its role as facilitator of artistic creativity and enabler of aesthetic receptivity. As noted in the introduction, only Hume might be snubbed as a possible interloper, as he flirts on the one side with Hutcheson’s “internal sense” and anatomizes the principles of association on the other. As we shall see in due course, however, neither of these plays a prominent role in his aesthetics, and it is the faculty of imagination and its representative power that Hume finds most intriguing and defines his contribution to the tradition.