 The essay's focus on the subject (the viewer, the reader) rather than the object (the painting, the book) is typical of the British "sentimentalists" or moral sense theorists of the eighteenth century.Unlike the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, who sought an objective definition of beauty, the British school tended to look for the connections between taste and aesthetic judgments.Hume begins with the observation that there is much variety in people's taste (or the aesthetic judgments people make).