And then, too, there comes in the art of the psychologist, “to whom all the world is but a spectacle in which nothing is really alien from himself, who has hardly a sense of the distinction between great and little among things that are at all, and whose half-pitying, half-amused sympathy is called out especially by the seemingly small interests and traits of character in the things or the people around him.” The other points in which the character of Browne appealed strongly to Pater are his emotional interest in ecclesiastical ceremony, which made him rejoice in the return of the comely Anglican order to the Norwich churches at the time of the Restoration, which caused him to weep abundantly at the sight of solemn processions; and there is also the vein of curious speculation about death, his anatomical and antiquarian researches alike testifying to his preoccupation with the thought of the mystery of decay and extinction of vital power; till his life becomes, as Pater says humorously, “too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral.” Pater brings out very clearly the fact that the _Religio Medici_ is perhaps a misleading title. One would expect a treatise dealing with scientific analysis, tending naturally to materialism and scepticism, but struggling through and retaining a hold on religion, all the stronger for the speculative temptations that would seem to block the way. But Browne, says Pater, “in spite of his profession of boisterous doubt, has no real difficulties, and his religion, certainly, nothing of the character of a concession.” He is a convinced Theist, and a confirmed pietist. “The _Religio Medici_ is a contribution, not to faith, but to piety; a refinement and correction, such as piety often stands in need of; a help, not so much to religious belief in a world of doubt, as to the maintenance of the religious mood amid the interests of a secular calling.” He goes further, indeed, and shows that it is only Browne’s method, not his mind, that is scientific. “What he is busy in the record of, are matters more or less of the nature of caprices; as if things, after all, were significant of their higher verity only at random, and in a sort of surprises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched into sound by a wandering finger, among the lumber of people’s houses.” And thus, though Browne is in a sense an investigator, he misses the conclusion to which his investigations are tending; because he does not really seek to arrive at a conclusion, but only to harmonise facts, as he investigates them, with a conclusion which he has inherited rather than drawn.