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. [Sidenote: _Æsthetic as science of sensory consciousness._] What was Æsthetic to Baumgarten? Its objects are sensible facts (ασθητά), carefully distinguished by the ancients from mental objects (νοητά);[29] hence it becomes _scientia cognitionis sensitivae, theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars analogi rationis_[30] Rhetoric and Poetry constitute two special and interdependent disciplines which are entrusted by Æsthetic with the distinction between the various styles in literature and other small differences,[31] for the laws she herself investigates are diffused throughout all the arts like guiding-stars for these various subsidiary arts (_quasi cynosura quaedam specialium_)[32] and must be extracted not from isolated cases only, or from incomplete induction empirically, but from the totality of facts (_falsa regula peior est quant nulla._)[33] Nor must Æsthetic be confounded with Psychology, which furnishes its presuppositions only; an independent science, it gives the norm of sensitive cognition (_sensitive quid cognoscendi_) and deals with "_perfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis,_" which is beauty (_pulcritudo)_, just as the opposite, imperfection, is ugliness (_deformitas_)[34] From the beauty of sensitive cognition (_pulcritudo cognitionis_) we must exclude the beauty of objects and matter (_pulcritudo obiectorum et materiae_) with which it is often confused owing to habits of language, since it is easy to show that ugly things may be thought of in a beautiful manner and beautiful things in an ugly manner (_quacum ob receptam rei significationem saepe sed male confunditur; possunt turpia pulcre cogitare ut talia, et pulcriora turpiter_).[35] Poetical representations are confused or imaginative: