Art is similarly understood by Lessing, Herder, and afterwards by Goethe and by all the distinguished æstheticians of Germany till Kant, from whose day, again, a different conception of art commences. Native æsthetic theories arose during this period in England, France, Italy, and Holland, and they, though not taken from the German, were equally cloudy and contradictory. And all these writers, just like the German æstheticians, founded their theories on a conception of the Beautiful, understanding beauty in the sense of a something existing absolutely, and more or less intermingled with Goodness or having one and the same root. In England, almost simultaneously with Baumgarten, even a little earlier, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke, Hogarth, and others, wrote on art. According to Shaftesbury (1670-1713), “That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence agreeable and good.”[13] Beauty, he taught, is recognised by the mind only. God is fundamental beauty; beauty and goodness proceed from the same fount. So that, although Shaftesbury regards beauty as being something separate from goodness, they again merge into something inseparable. According to Hutcheson (1694-1747—“Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue”), the aim of art is beauty, the essence of which consists in evoking in us the perception of uniformity amid variety. In the recognition of what is art we are guided by “an internal sense.” This internal sense may be in contradiction to the ethical one. So that, according to Hutcheson, beauty does not always correspond with goodness, but separates from it and is sometimes contrary to it.[14] According to Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), beauty is that which is pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by taste alone. The standard of true taste is that the maximum of richness, fulness, strength, and variety of impression should be contained in the narrowest limits. That is the ideal of a perfect work of art. According to Burke (1729-1797—“Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”), the sublime and beautiful, which are the aim of art, have their origin in the promptings of self-preservation and of society. These feelings, examined in their source, are means for the maintenance of the race through the individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by nourishment, defence, and war; the second (society) by intercourse and propagation. Therefore self-defence, and war, which is bound up with it, is the source of the sublime; sociability, and the sex-instinct, which is bound up with it, is the source of beauty.[15] Such were the chief English definitions of art and beauty in the eighteenth century. During that period, in France, the writers on art were Père André and Batteux, with Diderot, D’Alembert, and, to some extent, Voltaire, following later.