  In 1791, Moritz dedicated a review of the Essay on Taste by “our mutual friend” Herz to Salomon Maimon, another Jewish intellectual who had arisen to prominence in Berlin from beginnings even more unpromising than those of Mendelssohn and Herz. Here he manifests his own allegiance to Wolff and Baumgarten, arguing that his conception of beauty as the internal perfection of a work of art as it strikes the senses and imagination is essentially the same as their conception of beauty as “sensible perfection” (he draws no distinction between Wolff and Baumgarten) (“Über des Herrn Professor Herz Versuch über den Geschmack: An Herrn Salomon Maimon,” Werke, volume II, pp. 923–7, at p. 925). In this work he also tries to paper over any difference between himself and Kant, whose Critique of the Power of Judgment had also appeared the year before, by claiming that Kant’s concept of “purposiveness without purpose is nothing other than an ideal purpose,” and thus that Kant’s concept of beauty is essentially the same as Wolff’s and his own (ibid., p.  926). This is not true, because Moritz’s conception of the beauty of an individual work of art is that it is an intimation of the true and objective order of nature as a whole, while Kant’s notion of purposiveness without purpose is that of a subjective state of mind in which our mental powers of imagination and understanding are in a free harmony that does not by itself represent anything at all. At least in what Kant calls the “pure” judgment of taste, the experience of beauty is pleasurable without meaning anything or conveying any truth. As we will see, that is in fact only the starting-point of Kant’s aesthetics, although as he moves past his initial analysis of “pure” or “free” beauty he does add back into his view the beauties of truth that figured so prominently for so many of his German predecessors up through Herder and Moritz, as well as the beauty of utility that we saw to play a large rôle in the British tradition, for example in Hume. But we cannot appreciate the complexity of Kant’s aesthetics unless we have seen the separate approaches that he ultimately combines.