Edmund Burke (1729–1797). On Taste.

http://www.bartleby.com/24/1/1.html

I have to say I feel sunstantially dumber for reading this waffle.

He is trying to analyse our sense of artistic taste. He says we are all made the same. Our senses register the same information. Sweet is sweet and bitter is bitter to the tongues of all men.
Therefore [?] everyone who looks at a swan will see that it is more beautiful than a goose, because it just is [And with this Burke misses the whole issue of what taste actually is by the widest margin imaginable], and it you don't agree you must be a coarse fellow with imperfect taste.
The only other variables involved in taste are imagination and judgement.
Everyone has the same imagination [and imagination is incapable of producing anything new, apparently] and everyone is issued with the same sense of judgement.
So if people have differing tastes, it imust be because they have faulty judgement and fall short of an ideal common to all men but accessible to a cultivated few who are of gentle birth but not Turkish..

Is this sort of verbose and pseudo-logical essay aping the [much] earlier Greek writers?