We have here then, in the first place, a basis for an _a priori_ Philosophy of Taste; and Kant works out its details with great elaboration. He borrowed little from the writings of his predecessors, but struck out, as was ever his plan, a line of his own. He quotes with approval from Burke’s _Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful_, which was accessible to him in a German translation; but is careful to remark that it is as psychology, not as philosophy, that Burke’s work has value. He may have read in addition Hutcheson’s _Inquiry_ which had also been translated into German; and he was complete master of Hume’s opinions. Of other writers on Beauty, he only names Batteux and Lessing. Batteux was a French writer of repute who had attempted a twofold arrangement of the Arts as they may be brought under Space and under Time respectively, a mode of classification which would naturally appeal to Kant. He does not seem, however, to have read the ancient text-book on the subject, Aristotle’s _Poetics_, the principles of which Lessing declared to be as certain as Euclid. Following the guiding thread of the categories, he declares that the aesthetical judgement about Beauty is according to _quality_ disinterested; a point which had been laid down by such different writers as Hutcheson and Moses Mendelssohn. As to _quantity_, the judgement about beauty gives universal satisfaction, although it is based on no definite concept. The universality is only subjective; but still it is there. The maxim _Trahit sua quemque voluptas_ does not apply to the pleasure afforded by a pure judgement about beauty. As to _relation_, the characteristic of the object called beautiful is that it betrays a purposiveness without definite purpose. The pleasure is _a priori_, independent on the one hand of the charms of sense or the emotions of mere feeling, as Winckelmann had already declared; and on the other hand is a pleasure quite distinct from that taken which we feel when viewing perfection, with which Wolff and Baumgarten had identified it. By his distinction between free and dependent beauty, which we also find in the pages of Hutcheson, Kant further develops his doctrine of the freedom of the pure judgement of taste from the thraldom of concepts.