he should ever find time to reply to a critic of such calibre as to mistake his "_oratio perfecta sensitiva_" for an "_oratio perfecte_ (that is _omnino) sensitiva._"[56] [Sidenote: _New names and old meanings._] Save in its title and its first definitions Baumgarten's _Æsthetic_ is covered with the mould of antiquity and commonplace. We have seen that he refers back to Aristotle and Cicero for the first principles of his science; in another instance he attaches his Æsthetic to the Rhetoric of antiquity, quoting the truth enunciated by Zeno the Stoic, "_esse duo cogitandi genera, alterum perpetuum et latius, quod Rhetorices sit, alterum concisum et contractius, quod Dialectices,_" and identifying the former with the æsthetic horizon, the latter with the logical.[57] In his _Meditationes_ he rests upon Scaliger and Vossius;[58] of modern writers beside the philosophers (Leibniz, Wolff, Bülffinger) he quotes Gottsched, Arnold,[59] Werenfels, Breitinger[60]; by means of these latter he is able to make acquaintance with discussions upon taste and imagination, even without direct acquaintance with Addison and Du Bos, as well as the Italians, whose writings had immense vogue in Germany in his day, and with whom his resemblances leap to the eye. Baumgarten always feels himself to be in perfect accord with his predecessors; never at variance with them. He never felt himself to be a revolutionary; and though some have been revolutionaries without knowing it, Baumgarten was not one of them. Baumgarten's works are but another presentation of the problem of Æsthetic still clamouring for solution in a voice so much the stronger as it uttered a commonplace: he proclaims a new science and presents it in conventional scholastic form; the babe about to be born receives the name of Æsthetic by premature baptism at his hands: and the name remains. But the new name is devoid of new matter; the philosophical armour covers no muscular body. Our good Baumgarten, full of ardour and conviction, and often curiously brisk and vivacious in his scholastic Latinism, is a most sympathetic and attractive figure in the history of Æsthetic: of the science in formation, that is to say, not of the science brought to completion: of Æsthetic _condenda_ not _condita._ [1] Letters to Balzac and the Princess Elizabeth. [2] _Art poétique_ (1669-1674). [3] Letters to Marquis Maffei, about 1720, in _Prose e poesie,_ Venice, 1756, ii. p. cxx. [4] Sulzer, _op. cit._ i. p. 50. [5] _Traité du beau_ (2nd ed., Amsterdam, 1724; Paris ed., 1810). [6] _Essai sur le beau,_ Paris, 1741. [7] _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (French trans. in _Œuvres,_ Paris, 1854), bk. ii. ch. 11, § 2. [8] _Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,_ 1709-1711. [9] _Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,_ London, 1723. [10] See above, p. 179. [11] _Opera philosophica_ (ed. Erdmann), p. 78. [12] _Ibid,_ preface. [13] _Nouveaux Essais,_ ii. ch. 22.