AT the beginning of the eighteenth century, the seed-time of our modern ideas, as it has so often seemed to be, the English people, having in art at length brought their language to a fine degree of clarity and precision, and having just passed through a highly stimulating period of dominant Puritanism in life, became much interested in philosophy, psychology, and ethics. Their interest was, indeed, often superficial and amateurish, though they were soon to produce some of the most notable figures in the whole history of thought. The third Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the earliest of the group, himself illustrated this unsystematic method of thinking. He was an amateur, an aristocratic amateur, careless of consistency, and not by any means concerned to erect a philosophic system. Not that he was a worse thinker on that account. The world’s greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professorial chair offers no special opportunities. Shaftesbury was, moreover, a man of fragile physical constitution, as Kant was; but, unlike Kant, he was not a childish hypochondriac in seclusion, but a man in the world, heroically seeking to live a complete and harmonious life. By temperament he was a Stoic, and he wrote a characteristic book of “Exercises,” as he proposed to call what his modern editor calls the “Philosophical Regimen,” in which he consciously seeks to discipline himself in fine thinking and right living, plainly acknowledging that he is the disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But Shaftesbury was also a man of genius, and as such it was his good fortune to throw afresh into the stream of thought a fruitful conception, in part absorbed, indeed, from Greece, and long implicit in men’s minds, but never before made clearly recognisable as a moral theory and an ethical temper, susceptible of being labelled by the philosophic historian, as it since has been under the name, passable no doubt as any other, of “Æsthetic Intuitionism.”