  Ordinarily, the faculty of cognition aims at truth, and the faculty of desire aims at action. The faculty of approval, however, aims just for the pleasing activity of the other two faculties without their usual results. The faculty of approval should be distinguished from the faculties of cognition and desire, since it does not aim at the same results they do. But it is itself satisfied by creations that set those faculties into an “agreeable play.” This is not a breach with Mendelssohn’s earlier doctrine, but an explanation of it. Mendelssohn’s explicit introduction of the concept of play here, finally, may be just as influential for the development of Kant’s aesthetics as is his insistence that the faculty of approval does not lead to actual knowledge or actual desire.