"In these nice cases, supposing the acuteness of the sense equal, the greater attention and habit in such things will have the advantage. In the question about the tables, the marble-polisher will unquestionably determine the most accurately. "In the imagination, beside the pain or pleasure arising from the properties of the natural object, a pleasure is perceived from the resemblance which the imitation has to the original. "All men are nearly equal in this point, as far as their knowledge of the things represented or compared extends. "The principle of this knowledge is very much accidental, as it depends upon experience and observation, and not on the strength or weakness of any natural faculty; and it is from this difference in knowledge that what we commonly, though with no great exactness, call a difference in taste, proceeds. "A man to whom sculpture is new sees a barber's block, or some ordinary piece of statuary; he is immediately struck and pleased, because he sees something like a human figure; and entirely taken up with this likeness, he does not at all attend to its defects. No person, I believe, at the first time of seeing a piece of imitation, ever did. Some time after, we suppose that this novice lights upon a more artificial work of the same nature; he begins to look with contempt on what he admired at first; not that he admired it even then for its unlikeness to a man, but for that general though inaccurate resemblance which it bore to the human figure. What he admired at different times in these so different figures, is strictly the same; and though his knowledge is improved, his taste is not altered. Hitherto his mistake was from a want of knowledge in art, and this arose from his inexperience; but he may be still deficient, from a want of knowledge in nature. For it is possible that the man in question may stop here, and that the masterpiece of a great hand may please him no more than the middling performance of a vulgar artist; and this not for want of better or higher relish, but because all men do not observe with sufficient accuracy on the human figure, to enable them to judge properly of an imitation of it." On other points, Hume makes the following observations:-- "Without being frequently obliged to form _comparisons_ between the several species and degrees of excellence, and estimating their proportion to each other ... a man is indeed totally unqualified to pronounce an opinion with regard to any object presented to him. By comparison alone, we fix the epithets of praise or blame, and learn how to assign the due degree of each. "But to enable a critic more fully to execute this undertaking, he must preserve his mind free from all _prejudice_ and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination.