Quote by David Hume: “Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.”

Beauty is not a property of an object itself — it is what happens when a particular mind encounters it. This means there is no universal standard of beauty, only different minds responding differently. Hume is not saying beauty is arbitrary, but that it is relational.

Hume published Essays, Moral and Political in 1742, during a period when British empiricist philosophy was challenging Continental rationalism. Questions of taste, beauty, and aesthetic judgment were central to eighteenth-century philosophy, with thinkers debating whether standards of taste could ever be universal.

Scottish philosopher and historian whose radical empiricism challenged the foundations of metaphysics and religion. His Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding are landmarks of Enlightenment thought, and his scepticism about causation profoundly influenced Kant.