To admit that artists judge with confused perceptions, clear but not distinct, does not involve denying that these perceptions may be capable of being connected and verified by intellectual consciousness. The self-same object that is confusedly though clearly recognized by imagination is recognized clearly and distinctly by the intellect; which amounts to saying that a work of art may be perfected by being determined by thought. In the very terminology adopted by Leibniz, who represents sense and imagination as obscure and confused, there is a tinge of contempt, as well as the suggestion of a single form of all cognition. This will help us to understand Leibniz' definition of music as "exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi." Elsewhere he says: "Le but principal de l'histoire, aussi bien que de la poésie, doit être d'enseigner la prudence et la vertu par des exemples, et puis de montrer le vice d'une manière qui en donne l'aversion et qui porte ou serve à l'éviter."[15]
The "claritas" attributed to æsthetic fact is not specifically different from, but rather a partial anticipation of, the "distinctio" of intellect. Undoubtedly this distinction of degree marks a great advance: but careful analysis shows that Leibniz does not differ fundamentally from those who, by inventing the new words and empirical distinctions examined above, called attention to the peculiarities of æsthetic facts.
Speculation on language.
We find the same invincible intellectualism in the speculations on language greatly in vogue at the time. When critics of the Renaissance and sixteenth century tried to rise above merely empirical and practical grammar and strove to reduce grammatical science to a systematic form, they fell into logicism and described grammatical forms by such terms as pleonastic, improper, metaphorical or elliptic. Thus Julius Cæsar Scaliger (1540); thus, too, the most learned of all, Francisco Sanchez (Sanctius or Sanzio), called Brocense, who, in his Minerva (1587), asserts that names are attached to things by reason, exclusive of interjections which are not parts of speech but merely sounds expressive of joy or sorrow; he denies the existence of heterogeneous and heteroclitic words, and works out a system of syntax by means of four figures of construction, proclaiming the principle "doctrinam supplendi esse valde necessarium," that is to say, that grammatical diversities must be explained as ellipsis, abbreviation or omission with reference to the typical logical form.[16] Gaspare Scioppio follows him exactly, abusing the old grammar with his accustomed violence and crying up the "Sanctian" method, at that time still almost unknown, in his Grammatica philosophica (1628).[17] Amongst critics of the seventeenth century, Jacopo Perizonio must not be forgotten; he wrote a commentary on Sanchez' book (1687). Amongst recognized philosophers who studied the philosophy of grammar and noted the merits and defects of various tongues, we find Bacon.[18] In 1660 Claude Lancelot and Arnauld brought out the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal, a work applying the intellectualism of Descartes rigorously to grammatical forms, and dominated by the doctrine of the artificial nature of language. Locke and Leibniz both speculated about language,[19] but neither succeeded in creating a fresh point of view, although the latter did much to provoke inquiry into the historical origin of languages. All his life Leibniz cherished the notion of a universal language and of an "ars characteristica universalis" as a combination likely to result in great scientific discoveries: prior to him, Wilkins had fostered the same hope, nor indeed, in spite of its utter absurdity, is it even yet wholly extinct.
C. Wolff.
In order to correct the æsthetic ideas of Leibniz it was necessary to alter the very foundations of his system, the Cartesianism upon which it rested. This could not be undertaken by disciples of his own personal school, in whom we notice rather an increase of intellectualism. Giving scholastic form to the brilliant observations of the master, Johann Christian Wolff's system began with the theory of knowledge conceived as an "organon" or instrument, followed by systems of natural law, ethics and politics, together constituting the "organon" of practical activity: the remainder was theology and metaphysics, or pneumatology and physics (doctrine of the soul and doctrine of phenomenal nature). Although Wolff distinguishes a productive imagination, ruled by the principle of sufficient reason, from the merely associative and chaotic,[20] yet a science of imagination considered as a new theoretical value could find no niche in his schematism. Knowledge of a lower order, as such, belonged to Pneumatology and was incapable of possessing its own "organon": at most it could be brought under the organon already existing, which corrected and transcended it by means of logical knowledge in the same way in which Ethics treats the "facilitas appetitiva inferior." As in France the poetics of Boileau corresponded with the philosophy of Descartes, so in Germany the rationalistic poetics of Gottsched[21] reflect the Cartesian-Leibnitian theories of Wolff (1729).
Demand for an organon of inferior knowledge.
It was no doubt dimly seen that even in the inferior faculties some distinction was operative between perfect and imperfect, value and non-value. A passage in a book (1725) by the Leibnitian Bülffinger has often been quoted where he says: "Vellem existerent qui circa facultatem sentiendi, imaginandi, attendendi, abstrahendi et memoriam praestarent quod bonus ille Aristoteles, adeo hodie omnibus sordens, praestitit circa intellectum: hoc est ut in artis formant redigerent quicquid ad illas in suo usu dirigendas et iuvandas pertinet et conducid, quem ad modum Aristoteles in Organo logicam sive facultatem demonstrandi redegit in ordinem."[22] But on reading the extract in its context one recognizes at once that the desired organon would have been merely a series of recipes for strengthening the memory, educating the attention, and so forth: a technique, in a word, not an æsthetic. Similar ideas had been spread in Italy by Trevisano (1708), who, by declaring that the senses might be educated through the mind, asserted the possibility of an art of feeling which should "endow manners with prudence and judgement with good taste."[23] We notice, moreover, that in his day Bülffinger was counted a depreciator of poetry, so much so that a tract against him was written in order to show that "poetry does not diminish the faculty of clear conception."[24] Bodmer and Breitinger were ready "to deduce all the parts of eloquence with mathematical precision" (1727), and the latter sketched a Logic of the Imagination (1740) to which he would have assigned the study of similitudes and metaphors; even had he carried out his project, it is difficult to see how it could have differed materially, from a philosophic point of view, from the treatises on the subject written by the Italian rhetoricians of the seventeenth century.
Alexander Baumgarten: his "Æsthetic."
These discussions and experiments filled the boyhood and helped to form the intellect of young Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten of Berlin, a follower of the philosophy of Wolff and, at the same time, student and teacher of Latin rhetoric and poetry; these studies led him to reconsider the problem and search for some method by which the precepts of rhetoricians could be reduced to a rigorous philosophical system. On taking his doctor's degree in September 1735, when twenty-one years old, he published a thesis Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poēma pertinentibus:[25] in which the word "Æsthetic" appears for the first time as name of a special science.[26] Baumgarten always remained much attached to his youthful discovery, and in 1742 when called to teach at the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and again in 1749, he gave by request a course of lectures on Æsthetic (quaedam consilia dirigendarum facultatum inferiorum novam per acroasin exposuit).[27] In 1750 he printed a voluminous treatise wherein the word "Æsthetic" attained the honours of a title-page;[28] in 1758 he published a more slender second part: illness and finally death in 1762 prevented him from completing the work.