  We may now turn to Herder’s second main criticism of Lessing, hinted at in the first of the Groves of Criticism but more fully developed in the unpublished fourth Grove and the essay on Sculpture. The fourth Grove is cast as a critique of Riedel’s Theory of the Fine Sciences and Arts, as earlier noted, but also continues the debate with Lessing. Herder begins with several methodological objections to Riedel. First, although he otherwise admires Baumgarten, Herder criticizes Riedel’s acceptance of Baumgarten’s characterization of aesthetics as both a theory of beauty and “the art of thinking beautifully,” that is, a prescription of concrete rules and methods for artists to follow in order to produce beautiful or otherwise successful works (“Fourth Grove,” p. 267). Herder is clear that there are no such rules, thus that aesthetics must confine itself to understanding the work of artists and our experience of their work without telling them how to do that work. Second, Herder objects to a tripartite classification of the methods of aesthetics, as such a theory, that Riedel proposes. According to Riedel, aesthetic theories can be divided into those employing the methods of Aristotle, Baumgarten, or Kames: the Aristotelian method aims to reach general principles from the analysis of particular masterpieces of art, the method of Kames tries to reach the same goal from the analysis of our sensations in response to aesthetic objects, and what Riedel characterizes as the “miserable dry” method of Baumgarten simply begins from definitions (“Fourth Grove,” p. 262). In Herder’s view, these distinctions are artificial and the characterization of Baumgarten’s method in particular is unfair. Although the charge that Baumgarten simply began with definitions may seem a fair critique of his early Meditations on Poetry, Herder must have felt that in his larger and more mature Aesthetica Baumgarten did support his definitions by his extensive examples. In any case, Herder’s own method is certainly to reach general conclusions only from close examination of examples of art and of our response to them. This is why he engages Lessing in such detail, for example, and why some of his most important claims in aesthetics are contained in the essays on Ossian and Shakespeare. Further, Herder’s approach ends rather than begins with definitions.