It is necessary to bear in mind that there were two distinct strains in Pater’s mind: there was on the one hand a strong impulse towards transcendental philosophy, a desire to discern as far as possible the absolute principles of life and being. He hankered after a certain clearness of view, a theory which could explain for him the strange confusion of the intellectual life, where so many currents of the human spirit seem not so much to blend, as to check and oppose each other. The human mind seems to be haunted by a conception of ultimate truth, and to deal in intuitions which appear to hint at a possible solution; but the higher in the scale of perception that a mind is, the more complex are the influences which seem to distract it. On the other hand there was a strong attraction to precise and definite types of beauty. Pater was checked in his metaphysical researches by his acute sense of the relativity of thought, by his apprehension of the sacredness of beauty, by his deep sensitiveness to art. What he longed for was a reasonable formula, which could connect the two, which could make him feel that the same law was at work both in the region of beauty and in the region of philosophical truth. “It is no vague scholastic abstraction,” he wrote, “that will satisfy the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ... colourless, formless, intangible being Plato put so high?” The influence of his metaphysical studies is seen in his first published writing, a fragment on Coleridge, considered as a philosopher, which appeared in the _Westminster Review_ in 1866. This was afterwards reprinted in the _Appreciations_ in 1889, with a passage added on the poetry of Coleridge, which he had contributed, in 1883, as a biographical introduction to the selections from the poet in Ward’s _English Poets_. The first part of this essay traces the retrograde character of the philosophy of Coleridge, his rebellion against the patient generalisation of the scientific method. There are flashes of acute criticism, as when he points out that the chief faults of Coleridge’s philosophical writings are in the first place their roughness, their lack of form; and in the second place the writer’s excess of seriousness, “a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of the perfect manner.”