  Five years after the Considerations, Herz developed this conception of beauty as objective but yielding only indeterminate rules for taste into the far more extensive Essay on Taste. Herz begins with what he considers to be a Baumgartian definition of beauty as the appearance of perfection in an object, where perfection in turn consists in the unity of a manifold. However, he adds that a work of art also has a Haltung, or expresses an attitude, and that its beauty also depends upon the harmony between the attitude expressed in the work and the goal or purpose of the work. We do not attribute purposes to natural objects, he argues, so in their case beauty lies in manifoldness and unity alone, but in human productions and therefore in art we always expect and respond to a purpose. Here Herz’s analysis anticipates Kant’s differentiation between natural and artistic beauty.  He next argues that as natural beauty consists only in manifoldness and unity, we respond to it with the play of our imagination, which apprehends manifoldness, and reason, which recognizes unity. But as artistic beauty consists in the objective factors of manifoldness, unity, and attitude, the response to artistic beauty depends upon imagination, reason, and the further element of feeling, for response to the attitude of the work. In this analysis, Herz stresses that the perception of beauty is not passive, but rather active, because of the rôle of both imagination and reason. He also argues that our pleasure in beauty is ultimately due to the activity of our mental powers in its perception, activity being the greatest source of our pleasure. Here Herz clearly aligns himself with Sulzer. Herz then argues that human beings share their basic capacities of imagination, reason, and feeling, but that there are numerous factors that affect how these general faculties function concretely in different individuals and populations. This explains differences of taste without undermining the metaphysical objectivity of beauty: these differences include variations in freedom of thought, religion, morality, material wealth, climate and regime. Here Herz’s thought parallels the contemporary thought of Herder.