 Eighteenth-century theories of beauty were in many ways a continuation of debates that took place during the previous century. The changes that were introduced during the Enlightenment included an increased focus on the mind’s inner workings when perceiving beauty and attempts at finding universal standards that could be applied to all objects. These two features are what twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer called “empirical” and “Cartesian” tendencies in eighteenth-century aesthetics. In the second part of the century, major Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot claimed that the authority to judge was no longer in the hands of worldly amateurs or of little-known academics but in those of professional critics such as themselves.