It argues that Addison and his contemporaries understood aesthetics foremost as a means of enriching life through sharpening our sensory experience of the world, especially the world of nature.

Focusing on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's Spectator papers, this essay links mod- ern ideas of happiness to the emergence of aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that Addison and his contemporaries understood aesthetics foremost as a means of enriching life through sharpening our sensory experience of the world, especially the world of nature. The «hap- piness» that attends this experience, as they describe it, is a heightened sense of feeling alive, of con- necting to the providential order, and being part of a common universe of existing things.

It argues that Addison and his contemporaries understood aesthetics foremost as a means of enriching life through sharpening our sensory experience of the world, especially the world of nature.

The Spectator, Aesthetic Experience and the Modern Idea of Happiness