ABSTRACT
England produced philosophers who developed an abstract and transcendent aesthetic, but one more tinged with sensationalism than that of the French Cartesians. The sensitive perfection of Cartesianism and Wolffianism was liable to be confused with simple pleasure, with the feeling of the perfection of our organism: but Baumgarten falls into no such confusion. Baumgarten always feels himself to be in perfect accord with his predecessors; never at variance with them. Nearly all German critics are of opinion that from his own conception of aesthetic as the science of sensitive cognition Baumgarten should have evolved a species of inductive Logic. But he can be cleared of this accusation: a better philosopher, perhaps, than his critics, he held that an inductive Logic must always be intellectual, since it leads to abstractions and the formation of concepts. Baumgarten often curiously brisk and vivacious in his scholastic Latinism.
