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 WOLFF'S FOLLOWERS. 299 of the reason agree so beautifully with the facts of experi- ence; in his naive, unquestioning belief in the infallibility of the reason he is a typical dogmatist. A closer examination of the Wolflfian philosophy seems unnecessary, since its most essential portions have already been discussed under Leibnitz and since it will be necessary to recur to certain points in our chapter on Kant. Therefore, referring the reader to the detailed accounts in Erdmann and Zeller, we shall only note that Wolff's ethics opposes the principle of perfection to the English principle of happiness (that is good which perfects man's condition, and this is life in conformity with nature or reason, with which happiness is necessarily connected); that he makes the will determined by the understanding, and assigns ignorance as the cause of sin ; that his philoso- phy of religion, which argues for a natural religion in addition to revealed religion (experiential and rational proofs for the existence of God, and a deduction of his attributes), and sets up certain tests for the genuineness of revelation, favors a rationalism which was flexible enough to allow his pupils either to take part in orthodox move- ments or to advance to a deism hostile to the Church. Among the followers of Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) deserves the first place, as the founder of Ger- man aesthetics {^sthetica, 1750 scq.). He perceives a gap in the system of the philosophical sciences. This contains in ethics a guide to right volition, and in logic a guide to correct thinking, but there are no directions for correct feeling, no aesthetic. The beautiful would form the subject of this discipline. For the perfection (the harmonious unity of a manifold, which is pleasant to the spectator), which mani- fests itself to the will as the good and to the clear thinking of the understanding as the true, appears — according to Leibnitz — to confused sensuous perception as beauty. From this on the name aesthetics was established for the theory of the beautiful, though in Kant's great work it is used in its literal meaning as the doctrine of sense, of the faculty of sensations or intuitions. Baumgarten's pupils and fol- lowers, the aesthetic writer G. F. Meier at Halle, Baumeister, and others, contributed like himself to the dissemination of