Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste.

Dublin: Printed for Messrs. F. Byrne, J. Moore, Grueber and M'Allister, W. Jones, and B. White, 1790. FIRST IRISH EDITION. 8vo, pp. xiii [xiv blank, xv drop-title, xvi blank], 384, contemporary tree calf, gilt spine, red leather label; small piece torn from corner of title-page, wormed from outer margin of front paste-down end-paper to B2 (10 leaves), with occasional loss of a letter or two, more worming of lower margin of last six leaves, with, again, loss of a letter or two, outer margin of G8 partially uncut, front joint a little worn, but an attractive copy. Alison bases his theory of taste on the principle of association, holding that in some instances we are powerless to articulate our feelings and that we are thus swept along by our conceptions, unable to guide them. For Alison, the imagination functions in much the same way that sympathy does, and this suggestion proved to be important for the Romantic development of the concept of imagination. Coleridge spoke highly of the work in Biographia Literaria, while in recent years other scholars have begun to re-assess Alison's contribution to the history of aesthetic theory. For example, in Probability and literary form: Philosophical theory and literary practice in the Augustan age (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Douglas Lane Patey notes, "Archibald Alison's influential Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) develops in particularly interesting detail a theory of reading and composition as associative manipulation of probable signs."