  While Wolff’s basic account of pleasure is problematic, he does provide a straightforward account of beauty. Wolff defines beauty as the perfection of an object insofar it can be perceived by us with and through the feeling of pleasure: “Beauty consists in the perfection of a thing, insofar as it is suitable for producing pleasure in us” (Psychologia Empirica, §544, p. 420).  This definition enunciates a clear position on the ontological status of beauty, which will often be vexed in the eighteenth century.  Beauty is an objective property, founded in the perfection of things, but it is also a relational rather than intrinsic property, for it is attributed to perfection only insofar as there are subjects like us who can perceive it sensorily. Given perceivers like us, beauty is coextensive with or emergent from perfection, but in a universe without such perceivers perfection would not be equivalent to beauty.