It is characteristic of Pater’s criticism, and of much of the criticism of his school, that it exists, as it were, within a world of its own. The meanings to be attached to his most important terms are always suggested or insinuated; they are never defined. The method is useful, perhaps even necessary, in dealing with a complex and elusive object, and where appeal is made to perceptions which lie on the fringe of consciousness. But it runs the grave danger of becoming altogether too tenuous to be intelligible when we make direct reference to the object it is supposed to illuminate. When, for instance, Pater says of the best music, “the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression,” we become acutely aware of the absence of definition in each of these primary terms directly we think of any actual composition. We feel, indeed, that the terminology is not natural; in contemplating a poem the mind may be naturally impelled to distinguish between subject and expression as a kind of first effort in analysis; it is doubtful whether, in listening to music, this direction for analysis ever presents itself. So that to say that in music subject and expression are identical is not to say anything useful about music, but merely to declare that that kind of analysis is irrelevant. It is very probable that nothing is to be gained by first making distinctions which have a meaning for other arts and then bringing music into the scheme by saying that for music such distinctions become meaningless. But if we are to maintain that this kind of criticism is irrelevant, then music becomes not only an isolated art but the art of which we know least. If it cannot be accommodated as an example within the general body of æsthetic criticism, the criticism that uses such terms as Pater uses, then whatever general conclusions the multifarious writings of the last two centuries on the “beautiful” may be considered to have reached are not applicable to music. In this extremity it is natural, nowadays, to become “scientific.” Comparative studies are undertaken: the music of Java is compared with the music of Bach: the evolution of musical devices is made clear; the psychological condition of the patient under music is examined: the time taken for the right degree of hypnosis to be induced is determined. That such methods may one day stumble upon important facts it would be rash to deny, but nothing has yet been reached which illuminates the particular problem that music presents. We are frankly of the opinion that, so far, the difficult utterances of certain mystical or semi-mystical writers throw more light on the real nature of music than do those of common sense.