Shaftesbury, it may be repeated, was an amateur, not only in philosophy, but even in the arts. He regarded literature as one of the schoolmasters for fine living, yet he has not been generally regarded as a fine artist in writing, though, directly or indirectly, he helped to inspire not only Pope, but Thomson and Cowper and Wordsworth. He was inevitably interested in painting, but his tastes were merely those of the ordinary connoisseur of his time. This gives a certain superficiality to his general æsthetic vision, though it was far from true, as the theologians supposed, that he was lacking in seriousness. His chief immediate followers, like Hutcheson, came out of Calvinistic Puritanism. He was himself an austere Stoic who adapted himself to the tone of the well-bred world he lived in. But if an amateur, he was an amateur of genius. He threw a vast and fruitful conception—caught from the “Poetics” of Aristotle, “the Great Master of Arts,” and developed with fine insight—into our modern world. Most of the great European thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were in some measure inspired, influenced, or anticipated by Shaftesbury. Even Kant, though he was unsympathetic and niggardly of appreciation, helped to develop the conception Shaftesbury first formulated. To-day we see it on every hand. It is slowly and subtly moulding the whole of our modern morality. “The greatest Greek of modern times”—so he appears to those who study his work to-day. It is through Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury alone that Greek morals, in their finest essence, have been a vivifying influence in our modern world. Georg von Gizycki, who has perhaps most clearly apprehended Shaftesbury’s place in morals, indicates that place with precision and justice when he states that “he furnished the _elements_ of a moral philosophy which fits into the frame of a truly scientific conception of the world.”[101] That was a service to the modern world so great and so daring that it could scarcely meet with approval from his fellow countrymen. The more keenly philosophical Scotch, indeed, recognised him, first of all Hume, and he was accepted and embodied as a kind of founder by the so-called Scottish School, though so toned down and adulterated and adapted to popular tastes and needs, that in the end he was thereby discredited. But the English never even adulterated him; they clung to the antiquated and eschatological Paley, bringing forth edition after edition of his works whereon to discipline their youthful minds. That led naturally on to the English Utilitarians in morality, who would disdain to look at anything that could be called Greek. Sir Leslie Stephen, who was the vigorous and capable interpreter to the general public of Utilitarianism, could see nothing good whatever in Shaftesbury; he viewed him with contemptuous pity and could only murmur: “Poor Shaftesbury!”