  Working within the tradition of Wolff and Baumgarten, Sulzer bases his aesthetics on the premise that the experience of beauty is founded on the sensuous perception of perfection. Perfection consists in the rich variety of a manifold on the one hand and its unity on the other but also in a third element, namely the “complete agreement” of what a thing is “with what it ought to be, or of the real with the ideal” (“Vollkommenheit” (“Perfection”) in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, volume IV, pp. 688–9, at p. 688).  He thus allows for no conception of perfection without a concept of purpose. Kant will subsequently reject the assumption that we must have a conception of the purpose of an object in order to make a (pure) judgment of beauty about it. But Sulzer himself already departs from the purely Wolffian conception that the experience of beauty consists simply in a clear but obscure recognition of the perfection of an object relative to a conception of its purpose because he holds that the experience of the beauty of an object is an awareness of its effect on our representational faculty rather than an awareness of the cause of that effect in the object. Thus the experience of beauty becomes the sensation or sentiment (Empfindung) caused by the perfection of the object, rather than a clear but indistinct cognition of that perfection.  The real object of pleasure then becomes the activity of one’s own representational state, manifested in the form of sentiment, that is caused by the perfection of the beautiful object. This is Sulzer’s decisive modification of the Leibnizo-Wolffian approach to aesthetics, not to be found in Baumgarten nor in Herder. However, from this innovation Sulzer does not draw the conclusion that Kant subsequently will, namely, that there can be no general rules for beauty. On the contrary, in his view the causal relation between perfection in the object and the pleasurable sentiments of activity in the subject is precisely the sort of relation that gives rise to rules, although such rules will be fairly general rather than very specific.