  Baumgarten’s Meditations on Poetry conclude with his famous introduction of the term “aesthetics”: “The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have always carefully distinguished between the aistheta and the noeta,” that is, between objects of sense and objects of thought, and while the latter, that is, “what can be cognized through the higher faculty” of mind, are “the object of logic, the aistheta are the subject of the episteme aisthetike or AESTHETICS,” the science of perception (Meditationes, §CXVI, p. 86).  But this work says nothing about in what way the new discipline might be a general science of perception, and analyzes only the nature of poetry and our experience of it. We will first see what is novel in Baumgarten’s theory of poetry, and then turn to his larger work to see what it suggests about the general character of the new discipline. Baumgarten begins the work with a series of definitions, defining “discourse” as a “series of words that bring to mind [intelligimus] connected representations,” “sensible representations” as ones “received through the lower part of the cognitive faculty,” “sensible discourse” as a “discourse of sensible representations,” and finally a “poem” as a “perfect sensible discourse.” The parts of sensible discourse are “(1) sensible representations, (2) their interconnections, and (3) the words, or the articulate sounds which are represented by the letters and which symbolize the words,” and sensible discourse is “directed toward the apprehension of sensible discourse” (Meditationes, §§I–IX, pp.  6–10). The key thoughts in this series of definitions is that poetry is aimed not just at conveying truth, but at conveying it by means of “sensible representations,” or imagery drawn from the senses, and that the “perfection” of a poem may lie in both its medium, that is, the words its uses, and the imagery it arouses, and indeed in the relationship between these two dimensions. Thus Baumgarten introduces the idea that the sensible imagery a work of art arouses is not just a medium, more or less perfect, for conveying truth, but a locus of perfection in its own right. This is a view that was barely hinted at by Wolff, and not at all in his discussion of imitation as the perfection of mimetic arts, but only in his discussion of mixed arts like architecture, where he took into account the appearance as well as the function of structural elements.