ABSTRACT
Francis Hutcheson's main attempt was to rid the moral sense, and the sense of beauty, from contents which Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl attributed to them, in his attempt to bridge the "preestablished" and the culturally acquired. Music, accordingly, becomes an imitative art only when "married to immortal verse or even to words of any kind which have a distinct sense of meaning." Music, which deals with passions, is, by definition, not immediate. Music's distance from the thing to which it refers is compounded by the fact that it does not share a "sensible medium" with the effects it describes. In fact, the British predilection for "common sense" made the bridging between some approaches possible. In comparison to morality, beauty is more readily experienced by ordinary people, and exemplifies what Shaftesbury, the moralist, had in mind in the field of ethics.
