Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hume

Hume’s line is a polite grenade tossed into the cozy parlor of “good taste.” If beauty “exists in the mind which contemplates,” then the artwork isn’t a self-contained vault of value; the viewer is a co-author. The intent isn’t to flatten aesthetics into “anything goes,” but to relocate beauty from the object to the experience of perceiving it. That shift is classic Hume: empiricist, anti-mystical, suspicious of invisible essences. Beauty isn’t a property like weight. It’s an effect, produced when an object meets a particular kind of attention.

The subtext is social. Once beauty is admitted to be mind-dependent, cultural authority starts to look less like truth and more like consensus: who gets to declare something “refined,” whose sensibility counts as educated, whose reactions are dismissed as vulgar. Hume is opening the door to pluralism while also quietly setting up his later hedge: some minds are trained. He’ll argue that good critics, with practice and comparison, can arrive at more reliable judgments. Subjective doesn’t have to mean random; it can mean cultivated.

The context is the 18th-century project of explaining human life without appealing to divine blueprints. In an era trying to build knowledge from observation, Hume treats aesthetic judgment as another human phenomenon: contingent, psychological, shaped by habit and society. The line endures because it flatters and destabilizes at once. It grants your response legitimacy while warning that your response is a product of you - your history, your nerves, your tribe.