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,