He accepts De Quincey’s distinction between “the literature of power and the literature of knowledge,” with the comment, “in the former of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of fact, whether past or present.” In the fine art of literature, the identity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words and the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its particular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. Throughout his works is scattered evidence of the importance that Pater attributed to this particularity of thought, dependent on the thinker and his circumstances, the personality of thought which is really the guarantee of its uniqueness, and in a sense, not only of its truth but of its artistic rightness. In _The Child in the House_, for example: “In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.” And, in the essay on “Style” we are considering: “... just in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work _fine_ art....” “Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or incident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.” Let me attach to these another quotation from the same essay, to illustrate his use of the word “soul,” the keyword of his belief: “Mind and soul;--hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of preponderating soul embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.”