also meant reaction, a reaction against reaction, setting itself the impossible task of individually but not individualistically creating a new classicism--a classicism founded on a philosophical theory which each poet was bound to interpret differently because he was not, so to speak, classically born. The habit of philosophy is to observe and from observations to order conduct; to generalize from particulars and to simplify its generalities, in search of a code of perfection: and thus to minimize the reality of variation, digression, error in order to arrive at a single barbaric whole. Pure philosophy is thus always classical in spirit. When the relativist idea of personality began to break down classical social formality, pure philosophy grew more and more feeble. Philosophy could either devote itself to attacking caprice (it could fight the battle of classicism against romanticism), or it could become romantic--that is, it could allow itself to decay. This in the main is what it did, any other alternatives being generally too obscure, unhistorical and eccentric to be attractive. The chance, however, eventually came to philosophy of reviving its old authority as the science of sciences against the encroachment of modern differentiation and specialization, in a prospective alliance with poetry, which originally had first-class and general significance as the undifferentiated art of arts in a barbaric order. Poetry itself, dissatisfied with the position to which it had been reduced by the romantic nineteenth century--a position in which it seemed to be allowed to exist only by the humour and grace of science--was, of course, favourably inclined to such an alliance. And so began the new classicism.