 French philosophers of the Ancien Régime wrote treatises on beauty or taste; the term “aesthetics”, coined in Latin as “aesthetica” by German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 (§116), was not in popular usage in France and appeared only in rare instances at the end of the eighteenth century. Philosophers described taste (“goût” or “goust”) as a sentiment that allowed both creators and consumers to discern the beauty of an object. At times, authors focused more on the object, such as a painting; at other times, they examined what was happening inside the mind of the person who created it or of the person who looked at it.