Schopenhauer long ago pointed out that a picture should be looked at as a royal personage is approached, in silence, until the moment it pleases to speak to you, for, if you speak first (and how many critics one knows who “speak first”!), you expose yourself to hear nothing but the sound of your own voice. In other words, it is a spontaneous and “mystical” experience. Footnote 137: It is through Plotinus, also, that we realise how æsthetics is on the same plane, if not one, with mysticism. For by his insistence on Contemplation, which is æsthetics, we learn to understand what is meant when it is said, as it often is, that mysticism is Contemplation. (On this point, and on the early evolutions of Christian Mysticism, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, _Western Mysticism_ (1922).) Footnote 138: Really, however, Plotinus was here a Neo-Aristotelian rather than a Neo-Platonist, for Aristotle (_Ethics_, book X, chap. 6) had put the claim of the Contemplative life higher even than Plato and almost forestalled Plotinus. But as Aristotle was himself here a Platonist that does not much matter. Footnote 139: See Inge, _Philosophy of Plotinus_, p. 179. In a fine passage (quoted by Bridges in his _Spirit of Man_) Plotinus represents contemplation as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and bright vision. This “metaphysical Narcissism,” as Palante might call it, accords with the conception of various later thinkers, like Schopenhauer, and like Gaultier, who however, seldom refers to Plotinus. Footnote 140: R. Schmidt, _Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen_ (1921), vol. II. Footnote 141: E. Förster-Nietzsche, _Das Leben Nietzsches_, vol. II, p. 99. Footnote 142: W. M. Salter in his _Nietzsche the Thinker_—probably the best and most exact study of Nietzsche’s thought we possess—summarises Nietzsche’s “æsthetic metaphysics,” as he terms it (pp. 46-48), in words which apply almost exactly to Gaultier. Footnote 143: See especially his book _Über den Nervösen Charakter_ (1912). It has been translated into English. Footnote 144: Jules de Gaultier, _Le Bovarysme_, and various other of his works. Georges Palante has lucidly and concisely expounded the idea of Bovarism in a small volume, _La Philosophie du Bovarysme_ (_Mercure de France_). Footnote 145: Gaultier has luminously discussed the relations of War, Civilisation, and Art in the _Monde Nouveau_, August, 1920, and February, 1921. Footnote 146: