According to Père André (“Essai sur le Beau,” 1741), there are three kinds of beauty—divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty.[16] According to Batteux (1713-1780), art consists in imitating the beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.[17] Such is also Diderot’s definition of art. The French writers, like the English, consider that it is taste that decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not only not laid down, but it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same view was held by D’Alembert and Voltaire.[18] According to the Italian æsthetician of that period, Pagano, art consists in uniting the beauties’ dispersed in nature. The capacity to perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.[19] According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori (1672-1750),—“_Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e le arti_,”—and especially Spaletti,[20]—“_Saggio sopra la bellezza_” (1765),—art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (as with Burke) on the desire for self-preservation and society. Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720-1790), who had an influence on the German æstheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According to him, beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can attain.[21] Such were the æsthetic theories outside Germany during the last century. In Germany, after Winckelmann, there again arose a completely new æsthetic theory, that of Kant (1724-1804), which more than all others clears up what this conception of beauty, and consequently of art, really amounts to. The æsthetic teaching of Kant is founded as follows:—Man has a knowledge of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, outside himself, he seeks for truth; in himself he seeks for goodness. The first is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (free-will). Besides these two means of perception, there is yet the judging capacity (_Urteilskraft_), which forms judgments without reasonings and produces pleasure without desire (_Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnügen ohne Begehren_). This capacity is the basis of æsthetic feeling. Beauty, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.[22]