  In fact, Herder suggests two different classifications of the arts, and a central challenge in the interpretation of his aesthetics is to see how they are connected. In the first of the Groves of Criticism, Herder argues that Lessing’s distinction between the visual arts as the representation of objects in space at a single moment in time and poetry as the representation of a succession of events in time confuses poetry with music. Lessing thereby misses what is essential to poetry altogether, namely that it communicates to us the real force of objects, including but not limited to actions, and thus most deeply engages our own force in response. The first part of this argument is that the contrast between the coexistence of the properties of an object in space and the succession of events in time properly grounds the contrast between painting and music, not between painting and poetry, and that both painting and music depend upon natural signs of coexistence and succession (“First Grove,” p. 193).  Both painting—which Herder is thus far, like Lessing, using as a generic term for the visual arts comprising both painting proper and sculpture—and music use natural signs, that is, signs that communicate the thought of their objects to us by means of resemblance between their own fundamental properties and the fundamental properties of their objects. Painting and music are thus best suited to represent objects in space and successions of events in time, respectively.  Poetry, however, uses primarily artificial rather than natural signs, and is thus, unlike music, not restricted to the depiction of events as Lessing thought it was (“First Grove,” pp. 193–4).  Herder turns Lessing’s distinction between natural and artificial signs against him, arguing that precisely because poetry uses artificial rather than natural signs its content is in no fundamental way constrained by the natural properties of its signs themselves. Thus, in the proper hands poetry can effectively represent anything, and in this way it certainly has a wider sphere of truth accessible to it than painting or music do.