Passages in which Shaftesbury's character Theocles asserts that material things cannot possess beauty do not represent Shaftesbury's considered view.

Adherents of the instrumentalist interpretation take Shaftesbury’s points about beauty of mind and the hierarchy as evidence that Shaftesbury thinks physical objects are not really beautiful at all, and that we should aspire to care only about the beauty of minds (see especially Tiffany 1923). On this view, the beauty of objects (including all art) is merely an early stage of appreciation of beauty that the wise person eventually leaves behind. Against this interpretation, however, Glauser argue