on what is smooth, and
in the pleasure from thence, will disagree when they come to settle
which table has the advantage in point of polish. Here is indeed the
great difference between tastes, when men come to compare the excess or
diminution of things which are judged by degree and not by measure. Nor
is it easy, when such a difference arises, to settle the point, if the
excess or diminution be not glaring. If we differ in opinion about two
quantities, we can have recourse to a common measure, which may decide
the question with the utmost exactness; and this, I take it, is what
gives mathematical knowledge a greater certainty than any other. But in
things whose excess is not judged by greater or smaller, as smoothness
and roughness, hardness and softness, darkness and light, the shades of
colors, all these are very easily distinguished when the difference is
any way considerable, but not when it is minute, for want of some common
measures, which perhaps may never come to be discovered. In these nice
cases, supposing the acuteness of the sense equal, the greater attention
and habit in such things will have the advantage. In the question about
the tables, the marble-polisher will unquestionably determine the most
accurately. But notwithstanding this want of a common measure for
settling many disputes relative to the senses, and their representative
the imagination, we find that the principles are the same in all, and
that there is no disagreement until we come to examine into the
pre-eminence or difference of things, which brings us within the
province of the judgment.

So long as we are conversant with the sensible qualities of things,
hardly any more than the imagination seems concerned; little more also
than the imagination seems concerned when the passions are represented,
because by the force of natural sympathy they are felt in all men
without any recourse to reasoning, and their justness recognized in
every breast. Love, grief, fear, anger, joy, all these passions have, in
their turns, affected every mind; and they do not affect it in an
arbitrary or casual manner, but upon certain, natural, and uniform
principles. But as many of the works of imagination are not confined to
the representation of sensible objects, nor to efforts upon the
passions, but extend themselves to the manners, the characters, the
actions, and designs of men, their relations, their virtues and vices,
they come within the province of the judg