  These essays commence with the ambitiously entitled “Attempt at a Unification of all the Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of that which is complete in itself,” dedicated to Moses Mendelssohn and published in 1785 in an issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift that also contained an article (on astronomy) by Kant. In these essays Moritz argues that works of art please us because they have an “internal purposiveness” independent of any purpose external to them, a conception that might seem to anticipate Kant’s own account of beauty as “purposiveness without a purpose” and the nineteenth-century conception of “art for art’s sake.” It is certainly possible that Kant read Moritz’s essay, appearing as it did alongside one of his own, but Kant’s notion of “subjective” or “formal” purposiveness is more a repudiation of Moritz’s conception of “internal purposiveness” than a successor to it. Moritz’s view is also distinct from later conceptions of “art for art’s sake.” In fact, as the brief “Outlines of a Complete Theory of the Fine Arts” that he published in the journal of the Academy of Arts in 1789 makes clear, Moritz rejected the “subjectivist” view that our pleasure in artistic or natural beauty is due primarily to the way in which it freely engages our own mental powers on which the theory of Kant and later advocates of “art for art’s sake” is based in favor of an “objectivist” view: