Let us hear the conclusion of this whole æsthetic matter. Any man of rather more than ordinary intelligence—perhaps any man of ordinary intelligence merely—who has been properly educated from his youth up (as all men who show even a promise of ordinary intelligence should have been) in ancient and modern philosophy, who knows his Plato, his Aristotle, and his neo-Platonists, his Scholastics, his moderns from Bacon and Hobbes and Descartes downwards, can, if he has the will and the opportunity, compose a theory of æsthetics. That is to say, he can, out of the natural appetite towards poetry and literary delight which exists in all but the lowest and most unhappy souls, and out of that knowledge of concrete examples thereof which exists more or less in all, excogitate general principles and hypotheses, and connect them with immediate and particular examples, to such an extent as the Upper Powers permit or the Lower Powers prompt. If he has at the same time—a happy case of which the most eminent example up to the present time is Coleridge—a concurrent impulse towards actual “literary criticism,” towards the actual judgment of the actual concrete examples themselves, this theory _may_ more or less help him, need at any rate do him no great harm. _Mais celà n’est pas nécessaire_, as was said of another matter; and there are cases, many of them in fact, where the attention to such things has done harm. For after all, once more Beyle, as he not seldom did, reached the _flammantia mœnia mundi_ when he said, in the character of his “Tourist” _eidolon_, “En fait de beau chaque homme a sa demi-aune.” Truth is not what each man troweth: but beauty is to each man what to him seems beautiful. You may better the seeming:—the fact is at the bottom of all that is valuable in the endlessly not-valuable chatter about education generally, and it excuses, to a certain extent, the regularity of Classicism, the selfish “culture” of the Goethean ideal, the extravagances of the ultra-Romantics. But yet “A God, a God, the severance ruled,” and you cannot bridge the gulfs that a God has set by any philosophastering theory.[325]