However, this opening sally against Lessing is misleading in two regards, first for its suggestion that the task for aesthetics is to give a better explanation of beauty than Lessing did and second for its suggestion that aesthetics must be grounded on a metaphysical distinction between mind and body. The latter suggestion is misleading because Herder does more than almost anyone else in eighteenth-century Germany to minimize any separation between mind and body. This is a result of his emphasis