As for the first of these charges, the “abstractionism” of “Individuality and Value,” coming as it does on the top of the general perversity of the book, is really a very disastrous thing for philosophy. While we may pardon an enthusiastic literary Frenchman[360] for saying that, “_The fact is, you see, that a fine book is the end for which the world was made_,” there is hardly any excuse for a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet coming before the world with the appearance of believing that the richly differentiated universe that we know only in part, exists for the benefit of the science that he represents, for the dialectic of the metaphysician, to enable the “universal” to “become more differentiated” and “more individualized,” to become “more representative” _of the “whole.”_[361] We might compare, says Dr. Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling[362] passage, “the Absolute to Dante’s mind as uttered in the _Divine Comedy_ ... as including in a single, whole poetic experience a world of space and persons, ... things that, to any ordinary mind, fall apart.” Now even apart from the highly interesting question of the manifestly great and far-reaching influence of Dante over Dr. Bosanquet, and apart, too, from the notable modesty of Dr. Bosanquet’s confession as to the “imperfect” character of the simile just reproduced, no one to-day can think of attaching any ultimate importance to “Dante’s mind” without thinking of the extent to which this truly great man[363] was under the influence, not only of his own passions and of the general “problem” of his own life, but of such specialized influences as, for example (1) the mediaeval dualism between the City of God and the Empire of the World, (2) Aristotle’s unfortunate separation of the “intellectual” and the “practical” virtues, (3) the evil as well as the good of the dogmatic theology of the fathers of the Church. Goethe is of infinitely more value to us men of the twentieth century than Dante. And one of the very things Goethe is most calculated to teach us is precisely this very matter of the limitations of the cultural ideal of the Middle Ages and of the entire Renaissance period that succeeded it.[364] We should never, therefore, think for a moment of taking Dr. Bosanquet’s intellectual abstractionism about the “universal” literally without thinking at the same time of its limitations, and of its sources in Plato and in Hegel and in Neo-Hegelian rationalism, and of remembering with Hegel himself, “after all, the movement of the notion _is a sort of illusion_.”