 Baumgarten did not extensively develop his comment that art must be touching, but this became central to Meier’s aesthetics. In his early work on the emotions, Meier emphasized that aesthetics should deal with the passions because they have a “strong influence on sensible cognition.” His position is not just that the passions have influence on sensible cognition, but that they are themselves a great source of sensible pleasure, and that it is therefore part of the aim of art to arouse them. Meier analyzes the passions, in spite of their name (the German term Leidenschaft, like the Latin passio, etymologically means something that happens to someone rather than something that one does, an actio), as a form of mental activity: they are “efforts or strivings of the soul” that result in a desire or an aversion, more precisely particularly strong and firm desires or aversions (Meier, Gemüthsbewegungen, §27, p.  30). This might lead one to expect that desires and aversions can be sources of great pleasure or displeasure, depending upon whether they are realized or not, but Meier goes on to argue that “all emotions, the disagreeable ones not excluded, produce a gratification,” because they are active states or perfections of the soul, and “whenever the soul feels a perfection in itself, it is sensitive of a gratification.” And because they are so strong, the passions, whether desires or aversions, are those among our mental states that make us most aware of our own mental activity, and therefore are actually the strongest source of pleasure for us: