 The aesthetic standard that Schlegel develops—perhaps best expressed in his claim that “criticism is not to judge works by a general ideal, but is to search out the individual ideal of every work” (Literary Notebooks, 1733)—owes debts both to Herder’s notions of the historical and cultural uniqueness of individuals (Eichner, 1970, 42) and to Kant’s stress in the Critique of Judgment on the impossibility of judging beauty according to some external rule (see Eichner, 1970, 35–36, for an account of Schlegel’s successive readings of the third Critique). Schlegel worked out his new criterion of the “individual ideal of every work” in three important early (1796) critical essays reviewing the work of Jacobi, Georg Forster and Lessing that give a reader a sense of his distinctive approach as stylist and literary theorist (Wilhelm von Humboldt called Schlegel’s method in the Jacobi essay one of “reviewing the whole man”—i.e., the man visible precisely in his work). Likewise, Schlegel applies his approach to critical judgment in a famous review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, where he insists that the novel “not only judges itself but describes itself.”