The aesthetic judgment is synthetic, connecting the theoretical cognition of the object with its evaluation. The former is the subject of the judgment, the latter its predicate (SW IX: 80; 329, n.*). Herbart does not, of course, regard such judgments as functions of a power of judgment. Rather, judgments of taste are the involuntary effect of any perfect representation, “provided the latter does not immediately disappear in the flux” of psychic change (SW II: 45). The aesthetic judgment seems to possess an absolute validity. This might seem strange, given the subjectivity of taste, but as we saw above, the neutral judge’s judgment makes a claim about the object (cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§2, 4).  But there is a further problem: if each aesthetic judgment pertains to a single and particular representation, how can it have universal validity? (Cf. esp. Beiser 2014: 129) On Herbart’s view, it gains the “appearance of an enduring, indeed eternal authority”, thanks to a kind of “subjective necessity” (SW II: 350). That is, although each new perfected representation inevitably draws after it a new judgment, yet it is also true that the same representation will always provoke the same judgment (SW II: 350). In other words, under identical subjective and objective conditions, the same aesthetic judgment must recur, and this produces the appearance of eternal validity.