Hume's General Rules - Serjeantson

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That they indeed do emerges from his late essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (first
published in the Four Dissertations of 1757). ‘All the general rules of art’, wrote
Hume there, ‘are founded only on experience, and on the observation of the common
sentiments of human nature’. Nonetheless, he continued,
we must not imagine, that, on every occasion, the feelings of men will be
conformable to these rules. Those finer emotions of the mind are of a very
tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable
circumstances to make them play with facility and exactness, according to
their general and established principles. 96
With this observation, Hume confirmed (as we might by now expect) that the scope of
his life-long interest in formulating explanatory rules that conform generally yet
precisely to the multiplicity of circumstances presented by experience extended from
natural and moral philosophy to ‘criticism’--a pursuit that was regarded in the
eighteenth century as a form of applied logic.
96 Hume, Essays, p. 232.