Elsewhere in Europe Hartmann, Haeckel, and others were busy measuring the imagination and putting fancy into the melting-pot--they offered us the chemical equivalent of the wings of Aurora. We believed them, believed those materialists, those treacherous neo-Kantians, perverters of their master's doctrine, who waited for guileless youth with mask and rapier at the corner of every thicket. Such as escaped this ambush were indeed fortunate if they shook themselves free of Schopenhauer, the (personally) comfortable philosopher of suicide and despair, and fell into the arms of the last and least of the Teutonic giants, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose spasmodic paragraphs, full of genius but often empty of philosophy, show him to have been far more of a poet than a philosopher. It was indeed a doleful period of transition for those unfortunate enough to have been born into it: we really did believe that life had little or nothing to offer, or that we were all Overmen (a mutually exclusive proposition!), and had only to assert ourselves in order to prove it. To the writings of Pater I have already referred, and of them it may justly be said that they are often supremely beautiful, with the quality and cadence of great verse, but mostly (save perhaps the volume on _Plato and Platonism,_ by which he told the present writer that he hoped to live) instinct with a profound scepticism, that revelled in the externals of Roman Catholicism, but refrained from crossing the threshold which leads to the penetralia of the creed. Ruskin also we knew, and he too has a beautiful and fresh vein of poetry, particularly where free from irrational dogmatism upon Ethic and Æsthetic. But we found him far inferior to Pater in depth and suggestiveness, and almost devoid of theoretical capacity. Sesame for all its Lilies is no Open Sesame to the secrets of the world. Thus, wandering in the obscure forest, it is little to be wondered that we did not anticipate the flood of light to be shed upon us as we crossed the threshold of the twentieth century. It was an accident that took me to Naples in 1909, and the accident of reading a number of _La Critica,_ as I have described in the introduction to the _Æsthetic,_ that brought me in contact with the thought of Benedetto Croce. But it was not only the _Æsthetic,_ it was also the purely critical work of the philosopher that appeared to me at once of so great importance. To read Hegel, for instance, after reading Croce's study of him, is a very different experience (at least so I found it) to reading him before so doing. Hegel is an author most deeply stimulative and suggestive, but any beginner is well to take advantage of all possible aid in the difficult study.