 A third important idea that he develops is that beauty is in fact much less important in literature and art than it has often been thought to be. This demotion of beauty is based not only on his somewhat deflationary genealogy of the concept just mentioned but also on his proto-Romantic conception that literature and art have fundamental functions in relation to language/thought, religion, and morality, and on his mature insistence that meaning and thought play a vital role even in “non-linguistic” art. He tended to accentuate this demotion of beauty increasingly as time went on. Accordingly, whereas in early works such as On the Ode and the Critical Forests he still treated beauty as central to aesthetics, by the time he writes the Calligone he has changed his mind and now insists that it is not nearly as essential to art as it is often taken to be. In particular, he argues there that art is much more essentially a matter of Bildung—cultural formation or education (especially in moral respects).