Journal of the History of Philosophy

90 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the authors grapple with important issues in an attempt to understand Spinoza, and their papers will, it is to be hoped, stimulate further interest in Spinoza's works. CHARLESJARRETT Rutgers University Peter Kivy. The Seventh Sense: A Study of Francis Hutcheson's Aesthetics And Its Influence in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Burt Franklin and Co., 1976. Pp. ii + 268. Kivy's admirable book is a great deal more than just an account of Hutcheson's theory of taste; it is an account that, using Hutcheson's view as foundational, describes the development of the theory of taste in Britain from Shaftesbury at the beginning of the eighteenth century to Dugald Stewart at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The book is divided into two parts of almost equal length. Part 1 describes the background out of which Hutcheson's view arose, and then proceeds to a careful and detailed analysis of Hutcheson's theory. Part 2 traces the course that theorizing about taste followed after Hutcheson to its demise at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Kivy outlines the views of a number of pre-Hutcheson thinkers--from Lord Herbert of Cherbury to Shaftesbury--who claimed that there is an internal sense of beauty. Kivy notes that on the title page of the first edition of Hutcheson's Inquiry one finds the following: "In which the principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are explained and defended against the author of the Fable of the Bees.... " But as Kivy carefully explains, it is the empiricism of John Locke that forms the philosophical background of Hutcheson's theory, not Shaftesbury's Neoplatonism; so the title page is somewhat misleading. Kivy might have noted that the mention of Shaftesbury was dropped from the title page of the second edition. Kivy's f'LrStanalytic task is to examine what "sense" means for Hutcheson. He here shows Hutcheson's debt to Joseph Addison and discusses whether Hutcheson thought there was one or several aesthetic senses. Whether one or many, Hutcheson thought that our power to appreciate beauty, grandeur, and the like, is a sense because it displays the characteristics that mark sense perception: independence of the will, innateness, independence of knowledge, and immediacy. Kivy argues forcefully that these four do not distinguish sense perception from reason. The next question is what Hutcheson takes to be the referent of the term "beauty." Kivy quotes the well-known passage, "the word Beauty is taken for the Idea rais'd in us.... " But an idea for Hutcheson might be a sensation of pleasure, a sensation of a secondary quality, or a sensation of a primary quality. And the idea might be either a simple idea or a complex idea. Kivy infers that the idea must be a simple one because Hutcheson posits a specific sense that receives it. After examining and discussing passages that suggest that beauty is "something like a secondary quality" and passages that suggest that beauty is a pleasure, Kivy concludes that just as Berkeley identifies intense heat and pain, Hutcheson really thought the secondary-quality description and the pleasure description were two descriptions of the same simple idea. But this conclusion really gives the nod to the pleasure interpretation because on the "something like a secondary quality" interpretation there are two things to be accounted for: a simple idea of beauty, and a pleasure that accompanies it. Kivy also notes that Hutcheson sometimes "speaks with the vulgar" and calls unity in variety "beauty," although, strictly speaking, beauty is a simple idea caused by unity in variety. Kivy rejects the view of Frankena that Hutcheson holds a noncognitivistview of the analysis of "x is beautiful"; that is, the view that "x is beautiful" expresses rather than describes a feeling of approval. Kivy thinks that what clinches the argument is that Locke's philosophy of language, which Hutcheson can be presumed to adhere to, does not make provision for an expressive use of words. But Hutcheson might have developed a theory that is inconsistent with his own higherorder view of language. Such occurrences are often the prelude to philosophical change. Kivy BOOK REVIEWS 91 might have noted that in An...