  The main thrust of the fourth Grove, building upon Herder’s insistence that aesthetics must employ the methods of both Aristotle and Kames in order to reach Baumgartian conclusions, is that recognition of the distinctions among our senses will explain the variety of both forms of art and forms of aesthetic response. The premise of Herder’s argument is that aesthetic response is not the disinterested reaction of a special internal sense to purely formal properties of objects, but is really the heightened response of various of our senses to their appropriate objects. Aesthetic responses naturally emerge from our senses. Herder rejects the traditional distinction between mind and body, arguing that mind is essentially connected to the bodily organs of sense, as well as any suggestion that aesthetic pleasures are essentially distinct from the other sources of our happiness and unhappiness. In this connection, Herder scorns Riedel’s thesis that the beautiful is that “which can please without an interested aim and thus also please if we do not possess it” (“Fourth Grove,” p. 291n.), thereby prefiguring his later critique of Kant’s aesthetics.  Instead, Herder argues that the phenomenon of distance that Riedel mistakenly characterizes as general quality of disinterestedness in all aesthetic response is a specific feature of the visual perception of beauty, indeed that beauty is properly speaking a property only of the visual. This in turn leads Herder to distinguish between sight as a sense for mere appearance and touch as the sense for reality, and thus to the essential distinction between painting and sculpture which, he charges, Lessing fails to make. Herder insists that visible beauty arises only from the most superficial features of objects, not from their full reality, and that only feeling—by which he here means the sense of touch—can put us into direct contact with reality, or with the deeper truth about physical reality. He expands upon this contrast in the essay on Sculpture: