  Mendelssohn’s introduction of a faculty of approval in 1785 may have been influential for Kant’s elevation of judgment to a faculty on a par with understanding and reason, signaled in his letter of December 25, 1787, to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a decisive step in the genesis of the third critique.  But as far as Mendelssohn is concerned, his explanation of the faculty of approval shows that his basic theory has not changed. By introducing this faculty, he wants to emphasize that the experience of beauty or other aesthetic qualities is not actual knowledge, nor does it lead to specific desires and actions (except perhaps the desire to be able to continue contemplating an object already found to have been beautiful). But what satisfies the faculty of approval is still the activity of the other mental powers. Thus Mendelssohn writes, first with reference to the power of cognition but then with reference to desire as well, that