  According to Du Bos, we judge artworks by means of our sentiments rather than by means of reason. He rejects the rationalist school of criticism associated with writers such as Roland Fréart de Chambray (1606—76), the author of L’Idée de la perfection de la peinture demonstrée par les principles de l’art (1662) and Jean Terrasson, whose work Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homere appeared in 1715. Terrasson wrote that, “Any man who does not think of any literary matter as Descartes prescribes to think about physical matters, is not worthy of the present century … Nothing prepares better than mathematics to properly judge works of wit” (Terrasson 1715, lxv). In a similar vein, Bosse wrote that the “noble art of painting must be based for the most part on correct and rule-governed reasoning, which is to say, geometrical and, consequently, demonstrative.” Du Bos mocks these writers as ‘geometrical critics’.