For many eighteenth-century European philosophers and writers, the beautiful soul was a symbol of enlightened humanity, carrying with it the possibility that aesthetic beauty and moral goodness would be fused in a new, indivisible unity. In the first book in English on the subject, Robert E. Norton follows the fortunes of this cultural icon, exploring the reasons for both its initial popularity and its subsequent decline as a cultural ideal during the Enlightenment. Tracing the emergence of the notion of moral beauty as it first appears in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth...