ABSTRACT
Twenty years earlier than John Bascom, Mark Hopkins, the President of Williams College published his lectures titled The Connexion between Taste and Morals: Two Lectures by Mark Hopkins, who incidentally invoked the definition of taste given by Alison in his argument. Like other thinkers of the period, Bascom seems to embrace the concepts of unity and variety in design as being present in beautiful objects, but he argued that they do not of themselves produce beauty. Bascom thought there was a distinct ‘science of taste’ that needed to be cultivated through education, which would eventually lead to virtuousness and morality in a population. Fashion may also be said to be the impotence of taste, substituting for the gratification of a higher intuition the meaner pleasures of wonder and novelty. As a community is capable of the better, it will desert the inferior impulse; as its ignorance debars it from the higher, will it fall into the lower pursuit.
