standing, and assigns ignorance as the cause of
sin; that his philosophy 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
movements 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 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 th