Abstract: Edmund Burke's The Sublime and Beautiful is familiar to Chinese scholars, the studies of which nevertheless are inadequate, as many studies confine themselves to Burke's exposition of the sublime. But in fact Burke implies a critique of the tradition of the medieval doctrine of beauty, which is particularly evident in the first section of the third part of this book. As central concepts in the Scholastic doctrine of beauty in the Middle Ages, proportion, fitness, and perfection are transmitted to Burke's times. Burke, employing John Locke's empiricism, criticizes traditional qualities of the beautiful on the side of the object, and traditional intellectual powers required to the apprehension of beauty on the side of the subject, thus establishing an aesthetic based on the pleasure of five corporeal senses. This kind of aesthetics, in its intimate relation to politics and the masses, implies some characteristics of modernity. According to Burke, the word "aesthetica", or "logic of taste", which is put forward in the eighteenth century, not only aims for the wholeness of the scientific system, as Baumgarten claims, but has its own secret historical and political purpose.

Key words: Edmund Burke, the medieval doctrine of beauty, empiricism, sense, modernity