Title page from An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (old version)

An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (old version)

A seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment which was written as a critical response to the work of Bernard Mandeville and as a defense of the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. It consists of two treatises exploring our aesthetic and our moral abilities.