"Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other"
About this Quote
Hume’s line is a cool splash of water on a perennial fantasy: that beauty needs a little lying to keep its glow. He’s writing against the romantic impulse to treat precision as pedantry and reason as a killjoy. “Accuracy” here isn’t just about factual correctness; it’s about disciplined perception. When we see clearly, Hume suggests, we don’t drain the world of charm - we sharpen it. Beauty, on this view, isn’t a fragile ornament that shatters under scrutiny; it’s something sturdy enough to benefit from being properly understood.
The pairing is strategic: “accuracy” with “beauty,” “just reasoning” with “delicate sentiment.” Hume refuses the familiar culture-war split between the head and the heart. He’s not arguing that reason should dominate feeling, but that the best feeling is informed feeling. Sentiment without a tether to good judgment becomes theatrical, easily manipulated, and prone to mistaking intensity for truth. Meanwhile reasoning without sensitivity becomes sterile - “just” reasoning implies fairness, proportion, a moral aesthetics of its own.
The subtext is also social. In Hume’s 18th-century context, taste and moral judgment were being debated as if they belonged to different courts: art to the salon, truth to the study. He’s collapsing that division. “In vain” lands like a verdict: attempts to elevate beauty by discrediting accuracy are not only misguided, they’re self-defeating. For Hume, the most persuasive elegance is the kind that can survive cross-examination.
The pairing is strategic: “accuracy” with “beauty,” “just reasoning” with “delicate sentiment.” Hume refuses the familiar culture-war split between the head and the heart. He’s not arguing that reason should dominate feeling, but that the best feeling is informed feeling. Sentiment without a tether to good judgment becomes theatrical, easily manipulated, and prone to mistaking intensity for truth. Meanwhile reasoning without sensitivity becomes sterile - “just” reasoning implies fairness, proportion, a moral aesthetics of its own.
The subtext is also social. In Hume’s 18th-century context, taste and moral judgment were being debated as if they belonged to different courts: art to the salon, truth to the study. He’s collapsing that division. “In vain” lands like a verdict: attempts to elevate beauty by discrediting accuracy are not only misguided, they’re self-defeating. For Hume, the most persuasive elegance is the kind that can survive cross-examination.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste" (essay, 1757), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary — commonly cited source for this passage. |
More Quotes by David
Add to List
