the ruler and another of the ruled. He says of the Sophists: “And if old-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to it, in regard to one’s self? ‘It will break up--this or that ethical deposit in your mind, ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear, when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to know their place.’” This may seem like ironic criticism of Nietzsche before the fact, but it has not been noticed as such, even by Nietzscheans, and that is a proof of the completeness with which Pater made negligible what he said, beside the manner, the personal quality, of himself saying it. Yet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to the personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow rhythm of his mind to his careful observation of his own philosophic attitude. It is easy to talk of a battle in his mind between metaphysic and art; but no such battle was fought. Pater never lost his interest in philosophies, and that interest never interfered with his interest in art, but was rather its ally, an essential element in the mental temper of all his work. He shared Nietzsche’s dislike of dialectic, because in approaching the condition of mathematical speculation philosophy denudes itself of personality. He disliked, for example, Spinoza’s Euclidean demonstrations, “the dry bones of which rattle in one’s ears,” but was enabled to use finely, in _Sebastian van Storck_, that one of Spinoza’s sayings in which the man seems to be epitomised: “Whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return.” “Philosophic truth,” for him, “consists in the philosophic temper.” He finds that “perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract questions.... Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them.” That was said in the first of his printed papers. In the last book of his that was published in his lifetime, he says of the essay: “It provided him (Montaigne) with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to