Shaftesbury, with his followers Arbuckle and Hutcheson, may be regarded as the founders of æsthetics; it was Hutcheson, though he happened to be the least genuinely æsthetic in temperament of the three, who wrote the first modern treatise on æsthetics. Together, also, they may be said to have been the revivalists of Hellenism, that is to say, of the Hellenic spirit, or rather of the classic spirit, for it often came through Roman channels. Shaftesbury was, as Eucken has well said, the Greek spirit among English thinkers. He represented an inevitable reaction against Puritanism, a reaction which is still going on—indeed, here and there only just beginning. As Puritanism had achieved so notable a victory in England, it was natural that in England the first great champion of Hellenism should appear. It is to Oliver Cromwell and Praise-God Barebones that we owe Shaftesbury. After Shaftesbury it is Arbuckle who first deserves attention, though he wrote so little that he never attained the prominence he deserved.[104] He was a Dublin physician of Scottish ancestry, the friend of Swift, by whom he was highly esteemed, and he was a cripple from boyhood. He was a man of genuine artistic temperament, though the art he was attracted to was not, as with Shaftesbury, the sculptor’s or the painter’s, but the poet’s. It was not so much intuition on which he insisted, but imagination as formative of a character; moral approval seemed to him thoroughly æsthetic, part of an imaginative act which framed the ideal of a beautiful personality, externalising itself in action. When Robert Bridges, the poet of our own time, suggests (in his “Necessity of Poetry”) that “morals is that part of Poetry which deals with conduct,” he is speaking in the spirit of Arbuckle. An earlier and greater poet was still nearer to Arbuckle. “A man to be greatly good,” said Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry,” “must imagine intensely and comprehensively.... The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” If, indeed, with Adam Smith and Schopenhauer, we choose to base morals on sympathy we really are thereby making the poet’s imagination the great moral instrument. Morals was for Arbuckle a disinterested æsthetic harmony, and he had caught much of the genuine Greek spirit.