  The contrast between perfection or imperfection in the content of a representation and the enjoyable activity of the mind in representing that content is the heart of Mendelssohn’s theory, so we can interrupt our catalogue of all four of the axes of perfection that he recognizes for some comments on this contrast. The first thing to be noticed is that Mendelssohn here emphasizes the engagement of our powers of both knowing and desiring in aesthetic experience, not merely the power of knowing. This gives him room to add an emphasis on our enjoyment of the arousal of our emotions to Baumgarten’s emphasis on our enjoyment of the perfection of sensible cognition. Now, as we saw, Baumgarten in fact made room for this dimension of aesthetic experience in his early Meditations on Poetry, even though he did not take it up again in the Aesthetica, and Meier emphasized it in several of his works. But Mendelssohn adds a crucial point here, leading to a fundamental revision in the significance of artistic imitation: in order for us to enjoy the mixed emotions in a pleasing representation of something that is objectively displeasing, our sense of the difference between the represented content and our act of representing it cannot be allowed to collapse, and the rôle of artistic imitation is precisely to create enough distance between our representation and its object to allow us to enjoy the representation rather than to collapse that space by creating the illusion that we are in the actual presence of the depicted object. Mendelssohn writes,