  However, this opening sally against Lessing is misleading in two regards, first for its suggestion that the task for aesthetics is to give a better explanation of beauty than Lessing did and second for its suggestion that aesthetics must be grounded on a metaphysical distinction between mind and body. The latter suggestion is misleading because Herder does more than almost anyone else in eighteenth-century Germany to minimize any separation between mind and body. This is a result of his emphasis on the connection between thought and speech, bodily sensation and expression, and the natural and man-made environment of the linguistic community. The former suggestion is also misleading because, while Herder will go on to argue that painting in particular strives after beauty, he also links beauty to mere appearance Indeed, he connects beauty with illusion. Herder also argues that both sculpture, which he emphatically distinguishes from painting, and poetry ultimately aim much more at truth than at beauty. Herder’s path to this conclusion is not direct, however, and just what sense or senses of truth he has in mind is difficult to pin down, so we will have to look at his classification of the arts in some detail to see how to construe his theory.