  Lessing thus touches upon the new idea that aesthetic response is based on the free play of our mental powers stimulated by an object, in his case always by a work of art, and he exploits several of Mendelssohn’s theoretical tools. He should nevertheless be seen as a practicing critic using theoretical developments for his own purposes rather than as a theorist in his own right. However, his criticism immediately triggered more philosophical aesthetics in response. In the next section, we shall see how Johann Gottfried Herder reasserted yet refined an aesthetics of truth beginning with a response to Lessing, while Johann Georg Sulzer attempted to combine an aesthetics of truth with an aesthetics of play. Sulzer’s combination of the aesthetics of truth and play would in turn prepare the way for Kant, while Herder’s final work, more than twenty years after he completed his main work in aesthetics, would be a critique of Kant’s aesthetics. This section will also include a discussion of the aesthetic theory of Marcus Herz, who was first a student of Kant and then a friend of Mendelssohn, but who developed an aesthetic theory that is in interesting ways independent of both.