  In Wolff’s description of the experience of beauty as the “sensitive cognition of perfection,” cognition is naturally understood as knowledge of truth, so in the first instance Wolff’s formula meant that the experience of beauty is knowledge of truth by means of the senses. Yet Wolff’s conception of perfection was broad enough to include successful adaptation to an intended purpose, and thus in his analysis of our experience of architecture he emphasized our sense of the utility of structures as well as a sensory response to the kind of abstract form that could be considered an object of cognition.  But it was the idea that aesthetic experience is a sensory apprehension of truth that dominated in Wolff’s most general statements.  After 1720, Wolff’s philosophy enjoyed an influence in most parts of Germany similar to that which the philosophy of Locke exercised in most quarters in Britain by then and in France beginning a decade or two later. So the history of German aesthetics after Wolff is a history of the attempt to find room for a fuller account of aesthetic experience within a framework that privileges the idea of cognition, and only gradually was room found for the idea that the free play of our mental powers, including not only imagination but at least for some authors also emotion, could be equally important. The first round of this struggle was a debate extending from the late 1720s until the 1740s between the Leipzig literary figure Johann Christoph Gottsched and the Zürich critics Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger, in which the issue was really just how much room there could be for the freedom of imagination within a theory of poetry based on the idea that poetry is a truthful imitation of nature. This might be understood as an early form of debate over how much room there is for the free play of imagination in aesthetic experience.