 This long quarrel had largely concerned whether writers had properly applied literary rules. This ancient method for evaluating literature, which we can observe as early as in Aristotle’s Poetics, aimed to determine whether literary works correctly followed the conventions of, say, genre, diction, or the decorum that was based on characters’ social category. While some French thinkers were still approaching literature this way, others were developing new ways of judging beauty—artistic and otherwise—at the cognitive level. The sides they took in debates not only reflected the way they reasoned, but their social milieu and their institutional status.