and pregnant phenomenon of the whole—is a matter of practice, not of theory, of infinite local explorations, not of a Pisgah-sight. The whole tendency, as we have indicated in the sub-title of the book, is rather to dissolve what exists than to put anything definite in its place. The survey of their actual accomplishment,[342] therefore, may be best executed, for the purpose of corresponding with and continuing those formerly given, by first considering more generally the main new critical engines—Æsthetic inquiry and the Study of Literature—which have formed in detail the subjects of the last two chapters; then by summarising, as usual, the most significant performances of national groups and individuals; and, lastly, by indicating, as best may be done, the point to which the stage has brought us. The advantages and importance of the wider and more abstract æsthetic inquiry in reconstituting or reorganising criticism should be pretty obvious. The worst fault of the later Neo-classicism, in its corruption, was that it tended to become wholly _irrational_—a mere reference to classification; that even its appeal to Nature, and to Reason herself, had got utterly out of _rapport_ with real nature, with true reason. Now the construction of a general theory of the Sublime and Beautiful— however partial or however chimerical the inquiry into the appeals of different arts and different divisions of the same art—could not but tend—however indirectly, however much in some cases against the very will of the inquiry—to unsettle, and sometimes to shatter, the conventional hypotheses and theories. “Why?” and “Why not?” must force themselves constantly on such an inquirer; and, as has been said more than once or twice, “Why?” and “Why not?” are battering-rams, predestined, automatic, irresistible, to conventional judgments of all sorts. It was, indeed, not impossible for a person sufficiently stupid, or sufficiently ingenious, to construct an æsthetic which, somehow or other, should fit in with the accepted ideas.[343] But what stupid people do does not count for much in the long-run, despite the proverbial invincibility of stupidity for the time. And the ingenious person, unless his perverseness were truly diabolical, must sometimes hit upon truth which would explode all his convention. At the same time Æsthetics have proved, and might by an observer of sufficient detachment have from the first been seen to be likely to prove, a very dangerous auxiliary