As for the first point, I may perhaps be allowed to say that “divine Philosophy” has been by no means such a stranger or stepmother to me as some of my critics seem to suppose. I have duly sojourned in her courts, and have found them the reverse of unamiable: I have eaten of her bread and found it both palatable and nourishing. But it is Philosophy herself who teaches us, by the mouth of not her least but, as some have thought, her greatest exponent, not to shift or mix the Kinds. And, to my possibly heretical judgment, the “kind” of Criticism seems one into which such “general ideas” as my critics desiderate can only be introduced by a most doubtful and perilous naturalisation. I suppose it would be generally granted that no “philosophical” critics stand higher than Plato and Coleridge: Aristotle himself has, in comparison with them, but contented himself with middle axioms and empirical observation. And the result of this is that—again to my possibly heretical thinking—Plato has actually left us nothing in pure criticism but an often mischievous theory: while Coleridge is just so much the more barren in true criticism as he expatiates further in the regions of sheer “philosophy.” Nor should I, if I chose to take up the quarrel, in the least lack other arms or armour of offence and defence, sufficiently proofmarked by Philosophy herself. I hold that the province of Philosophy is occupied by matters of the pure intellect: and that literary criticism is busied with matters which, though not in the loosest meaning, are matters of sense. I do not know—and I do not believe that any one knows, however much he may juggle with terms—why certain words arranged in certain order stir one like the face of the sea, or like the face of a girl, while other arrangements leave one absolutely indifferent or excite boredom or dislike. I know that we may generalise a little; may “push our ignorance a little farther back”; may discover some accordances of sound, some rhythmical adjustments, some cunning and more or less constant appeals to eye and ear which, as we coolly say, “explain” emotion and attraction to some extent. But _why_ these general things delight man he knows no more than, in his more unsophisticated stage, why their individual cases and instances do so. I do not think that my own doctrine of the Poetic (or the literary) Moment—of the instant and mirific “kiss of the spouse”—is so utterly “unphilosophical”: but I do know that that doctrine, if it does not exactly laugh to scorn theories of æsthetic, makes them merely facultative indulgences. And just as physiology, and biology, and all the ’ologies that ever were ’ologied, leave you utterly uninformed as to the real reason of the rapture of the physical kiss, so I think that æsthetics do not teach the reason of the amorous peace of the Poetic Moment.