But he can hardly be said to have had any philosophical system, just as he himself believed Plato to have had none. Plato’s writings represented to Pater an atmosphere, not a defined creed. Pater was rather a psychologist, and it was through the effect of metaphysical ideas upon personality that he approached philosophy. He was not an abstract thinker; he says, indeed, plainly, “Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such.... We cannot love or live upon _genus_ and _species_, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses.” But his psychology gave him the power of making metaphysics real to people who are not naturally metaphysical, by touching them with a personal appeal, and showing their ethical significance; he translates the pure thought of abstract thinkers into artistic and ethical values. It is interesting, for instance, to contrast his development with the development of such a man as Henry Sidgwick. Both were saved by the uneventful course of academic life from the pressure of hard facts and of social problems. Both began with a metaphysical and a literary bias; but Henry Sidgwick was fitted for abstract speculation, and the literary and artistic interests of his life tended to diminish; whereas in Pater’s case the literary and artistic interests developed, and subordinated his metaphysical interests to his artistic prepossessions. In _Plato and Platonism_, then, Pater is absorbed in the task of bringing out the personality of Plato. This he does with singular skill. He shows that Plato was not an originator of philosophical thought; that it is the form and not the matter that is new; and that his charm lies in his romantic realism, his love of modest and ingenuous youth, his dramatic sense of character; so that, as Pater says, he had a resemblance to Thackeray, and was fully equipped to be a writer of noble fiction. He shows that Plato was in no sense a doctrinaire, but held that ideas and notions are not the consequence of reason but the cause of it. That they are there to be discovered, not non-existent and capable of being originated; he shows how Plato, in the _Republic_, was presenting philosophy as an essentially practical thing, a thing to mould life and conduct, an escape from the evils of the world—a religion, in fact, and not a philosophical system. Philosophy is, according to Plato, to teach us how to cultivate the qualities by which we can obtain a mastery over ourselves, how to arrive at a kind of musical proportion, the subordination of the parts to the whole. “It is life itself,” he says, “action and character, he proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts.”