  Meier thus departed from the strictly cognitivist aesthetics of Wolff and connected what he had learned from Baumgarten with the passionate aesthetics of the French Abbé Du Bos. With his connection of the pleasure in experiencing emotions to the pleasure of experiencing mental activity as such he brought Wolffian aesthetics a step closer to contemporary British aesthetics. Meier thereby prepared the way for the tremendous influence that British aesthetics would have in Germany by the end of the 1750s. But while Meier stressed the activity of the mind and Baumgarten argued that aesthetic experience is based in an analogue of reason, not reason itself, neither was quite ready to introduce the idea of the free play of our mental powers as the fundamental source of our pleasure in aesthetic experience. Baumgarten mentions play once, but only to recommend that children be allowed to play in order to develop their cognitive powers, not as the fundamental source of mature aesthetic pleasure (Poppe, §55, p. 102). Baumgarten also at least once characterizes the mental state of aesthetic experience as a form of harmony: he says that the “aestheticodogmatic” thinker (by which he means a thinker aiming to express a true doctrine aesthetically )