  This in turn means that an aesthetic perception of a perfection is always a less than optimal cognition of that perfection, for having described sense perception or sensory cognition as clear but indistinct or confused, Wolff next defines pleasure as the sensory or “intuitive” cognition of perfection. In his German metaphysics, he writes that “Insofar as we intuit perfection, pleasure arises in us, thus pleasure is nothing other than an intuition of perfection, as Descartes already remarked” (German Metaphysics, §404, p. 344). Wolff’s successors will struggle to avoid the limitations on the cognitive significance of aesthetic response that follow from his definition of pleasure as a kind of sense perception and the limits he places on the cognitive significance of sense perception.