 Herder is thus no straightforward historicist or cultural relativist. Rather, his convictions that the best art reveals the truth about its world and that there are deep commonalities in human emotional responses to such truths allow him to defend the ideal of a standard of or paradigm for taste after all. It will be noted, however, that throughout Herder’s aesthetics the notion of play has hardly figured at all; it has been mentioned only in connection with the superficial art of painting rather than with the deeper arts of sculpture, poetry, and even music. For an attempt to combine an aesthetics of truth with an aesthetics of play that is in some ways shallower than Herder’s thought but in other ways an important innovation in German aesthetics, let us now take a look at the work of Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779). He was born a quarter-century before Herder but his encyclopedic General Theory of the Fine Arts, first published from 1771 to 1774, was contemporaneous with such central works of Herder as the essays on Ossian and Shakespeare. Sulzer advocates a conventional view of the relation between aesthetic experience and truth: the experience of art—although not solely of beautiful art—can make moral truths vivid and efficacious for us, even though we can know those truths independently of art, and indeed must know the most fundamental principles of morality independently of art. But he also emphasized that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically enjoyable and therefore valuable experience of the unhindered activity of the mind. His conception of the mind has Leibnizian origins, but his emphasis on the pleasure of its unhindered activity points the way toward Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience as the free play of the cognitive powers. While Sulzer was generally a more conventional thinker than Herder, he here introduces a theme that is almost entirely absent from Herder’s thought and prepares the way for Kant’s synthesis of two although not all three of the main approaches of eighteenth-century aesthetics.