Notwithstanding these intuitions, so like those of Vico early in the same century, Herder as a philosopher is inferior to his Italian predecessor, and in point of fact does not rise superior to Baumgarten. By application of Leibniz' law of continuity, he too arrived at the opinion that the pleasing, the true, the beautiful and the good are degrees of one single activity. For instance, sensible pleasure" is a participation in the true and the good, so far as the senses may comprehend them; the feeling of pleasure and pain is no other than the feeling of the true and the good, that is to say, the consciousness that the aim of our organism, the conservation of our well-being and the avoidance of our hurt, has been attained."[63] Fine arts and letters are all instructive (_bildend_): hence the terms _humaniora,_ the Greek _καλόν,_ the Latin _pulchrum,_ the _gentle_ arts of days of chivalry, _les belles lettres et les beaux arts_ of the French. A group of them (gymnastic, dance, etc.) educates the body; a second group (painting, plastic, music) educates the nobler senses of man, the eye, the ear, the hand and tongue; a third (poetry) touches the intellect, the imagination and the reason: a fourth group governs human tendencies and inclinations.[64] Herder disapproved of the facile theorists of art who began straight away with a definition of beauty, a complex and involved concept. He held that the theory of fine arts should be subdivided into three theories, each to be built up from the foundations, the theory of sight, of hearing and of touch, that is to say of painting, music and sculpture, _i.e._ into æsthetical Optics, æsthetical Acoustics and æsthetical Physiology. "Fairly well elaborated in the psychological and subjective aspects, Æsthetic is sadly undeveloped in all that belongs to the object and to the sensation of beauty, without which there can never be a fertile theory of the Beautiful capable of influencing all the arts."[65] Taste is not "a fundamental faculty of the soul but a habitual application of our judgement (intellectual judgement) to objects of beauty"; an acquired facility of the intellect (of which Herder outlines the genesis).[66] The poet is poet not only in his imagination but in his intellect. In 1782 he writes: "The barbarous name Æsthetic of recent invention indicates nothing beyond a section of Logic: that which we call taste is neither more nor less than a quick and rapid judgement which does not exclude truth and profundity, but rather presupposes and promotes them. All didactic poetry is nothing more than philosophy rendered sensible: the fable as exposition of a general doctrine is truth in act, in activity.... When expounded and applied to human affairs, Philosophy is not only a fine art in herself (_schöne Wissenschaft,_) but the mother of Beauty: it is only through her that Rhetoric and Poetry can ever be educational, useful, or in the truest sense pleasant."[67]