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. [Sidenote: _Alexander Baumgarten: his "Æsthetic."_]