  In the five years after the publication of Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education in 1795, both Romanticism and Absolute Idealism emerged, the former in works by Friedrich von Hardenburg (“Novalis”) and Friedrich Schlegel, the latter in works by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. But since both of these movements blossomed more fully in the early decades of the nineteenth century, they will not be included in this survey. Instead, it will conclude with a second look at the work of Johann Herder, in this case with his late critique of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Herder, who as we saw had done the bulk of his work in aesthetics long before the publications of Kant and Schiller, indeed even before the publication of Sulzer’s encyclopedia, reacted violently to the new aesthetics of play in his late work Kalligone (1800), i.e., “The Birth of Beauty.” This work, published only three years before Herder’s death and after his renown had been eclipsed by such new stars as Schelling and Fichte, has never received much attention, but beneath its bursts of ill-temper it contains interesting and important criticisms of Kant. The theme of Kalligone may be summed up with this statement from its table of contents: “Nothing harms immature taste more than if one makes everything into play” (Kalligone, p. 660). Herder’s critique came too late in his Kant’s life for him to respond to it.  If he had been able to respond, he would have had no good reply to some of Herder’s criticisms; but if Herder had had more sympathy for Kant’s expository method in the third Critique, he might have realized that on some of the central substantive points of his criticism the distance between himself and Kant is not as great as it initially seems. In particular, Herder’s representation of Kant’s aesthetics as a pure theory of mental play mistakes Kant’s initial analysis of the simplest form of natural beauty for his whole theory of natural and artistic beauty. If Herder had recognized the importance for Kant of the more complicated cases of adherent and artistic beauty, he would have seen that there is considerable common ground between Kant’s aesthetics of free play and his own aesthetics of the sensory apprehension of truth.