 Herder also has important ideas concerning a topic that has often been assumed to be central to aesthetics: beauty. A first important idea he develops here (both in relation to art and more generally) is that standards of beauty vary greatly from one historical period or culture to another. At least, this is his normal position, from early works such as On the Ode and On the Change of Taste to late ones such as the Calligone (where he invokes it against Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment). Occasionally—for example, in the Critical Forests and even at points in the Calligone—he instead argues (as other thinkers, such as Hume, had done before him) that there is a deeper uniformity in standards of beauty across historical periods and cultures. However, the former position is his more considered one and is ultimately the more plausible one.