  Sulzer’s earliest works in aesthetics concerned nature rather than art, but already demonstrated his lifelong concern for the moral significance of aesthetic experience. In his Conversations on the Beauties of Nature (Unterredungen über die Schönheiten der Natur, 1750), which was republished in 1770 together with his earlier Moral Thoughts on the Works of Nature (Versuch einiger moralischen Gedanken über die Werke der Natur, 1745), Sulzer analyzed the benefits of the enjoyment of natural beauty in a way that prefigured his subsequent complex analysis of the value of art. In the first conversation he argued that the contemplation of natural beauty has a calming and moderating influence on our passions. The remaining conversations argue that the contemplation of the order of nature proves to us that its existence cannot have been a matter of chance, and that its beauty gives us palpable evidence of the wisdom and benevolence of its creator. This analysis foreshadows Sulzer’s later position that the enjoyment of art is of immediate moral value because it directly contributes to our happiness, which is the ultimate object of morality, and is also of indirect moral value because it can enliven and thereby make more effective our knowledge of the general precepts of morality, and is indeed the best instrument for that end.