 What, beyond this, are Herder’s most important contributions to aesthetics? He is skeptical about the sort of aprioristic and systematic aesthetics that the inventor of the discipline of aesthetics, the Rationalist philosopher Baumgarten, had recently developed. Instead, he calls for a bottom-up, or empirical, approach to the discipline. And his considered position concerning the ideal of an aesthetic system is dismissive as well. It is true that he began his career aspiring to something of the sort and that in the Critical Forests (1769) he accordingly set out to argue for the following little aesthetic system: whereas music is a mere succession of objects in time, and sculpture and painting are merely spatial, poetry has a sense, a soul, a force; whereas music, sculpture, and painting belong solely to the senses (namely, to hearing, feeling, and vision, respectively), poetry not only depends on the senses but also relates to the imagination; whereas music, sculpture, and painting employ only natural signs, poetry uses voluntary and conventional ones. It is also true that this system would later be taken over (with only minor modifications) by Schleiermacher in his aesthetics lectures, and that it has sometimes been touted as Herder’s main achievement in aesthetics more recently as well (for example, by Robert Norton). But as Herder himself quickly came to realize after formulating it, it is a very naive system. And his real achievements in aesthetics are other than and contrary to it.