If my facts are inconvenient to any philosophy, so much the worse for it: if they are convenient, let it take them and welcome. At any rate—with what results of success or failure, of advantage or disadvantage to the work, the reader, not the writer, must judge,—my initial undertaking of abstinence has, I think, been fairly discharged. The point, however, at which we have arrived is one of those where the _force majeure_ makes itself felt. In the Book where we aim at exhibiting the process of change which is so noticeable as between the general criticism of the eighteenth and the general criticism of the nineteenth centuries, and at examining to some extent the causes of that change, we could not possibly omit an influence so powerful for good or for evil as that of the constitution—as a regular branch of philosophy— of inquiries into the principles of Beauty, into the æsthetic sense, into the psychological aspects of the appeal of art generally. We shall still deal in the most economical and temperate fashion with these matters: but we cannot here abstain from them entirely. Indeed it might be open to anybody to urge that large passages occurring elsewhere in this volume, and even to some extent in the last, properly belong to the present chapter—that Lessing, Diderot, Du Bos are strayed sheep of this fold. But one remarkable person in France, another in Italy, and two still more remarkable groups in Germany and England, will find better place here than anywhere for something like individual notice: and others must be at least the subject of reference and glance. [Sidenote: _Modern Æsthetics: their fount in Descartes and its branches._]