Among the followers of Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) deserves the first place, as the founder of German aesthetics (Aesthetica, 1750 seq.).  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 manifests 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 followers, the aesthetic writer G.F.  Meier at Halle, Baumeister, and others, contributed like himself to the dissemination of the Wolffian system by their manuals on different branches of philosophy.  To this school belong also the following:  Thuemmig (Institutiones Philosophia Wolfianae, 1725-26); the theologian Siegmund Baumgarten at Halle, the elder brother of the aesthete; the mathematician Martin Knutzen, Kant’s teacher;[1] the literary historian Gottsched [2] at Leipsic; and G. Ploucquet, who in his Methodus Calculandi in Logicis, with a Commentatio de Arte Characteristica Universali appended to his Principia de Substantiis et Phaenomenis, 1753, took up again Leibnitz’s cherished plan for a logical calculus and a universal symbolic language.  The psychologist Kasimir von Creuz (Essay on the Soul, in two parts, 1753-54), and J.H.  Lambert,[3] whom Kant deemed worthy of a detailed correspondence, take up a more independent position, both demanding that the Wolffian rationalism be supplemented by the empiricism of Locke, and the latter, moreover, in anticipation of the Critique of Reason, pointing very definitely to the distinction between content and form as the salient point in the theory of knowledge.

[Footnote 1:  Benno Erdmann, M.  Knutzen und seine Zeit, 1876.]

[Footnote 2:  Th.  W. Danzel, Gottsched und seine Zeit, 1848.]

[Footnote 3:  Lambert:  Cosmological Letters, 1761; New Organon, 1764; Groundwork of Architectonics, 1771.  Bernoulli edited some of Lambert’s papers and his correspondence.]

Among the opponents of the Wolffian philosophy, all of whom favor eclecticism, A. Ruediger[1] and Chr.  Aug.  Crusius,[2] who was influenced by Ruediger, and, like him, a professor at Leipsic, are the most important.  Ruediger divides philosophy according to its objects, “wisdom, justice, prudence,” into three parts—­the science of nature (which must avoid one-sided mechanical views, and employ