e of Life beneath the shadow of the Bodleian.

Why have the professional philosophers--ever since that Master of
Baliol who used to spend his time boring holes in the Ship that
carried him--"fought shy" of Pater's Philosophy? For a sufficient
reason! Because, like Protagoras the Sophist, and like Aristippus the
Cyrenean, he has undermined Metaphysic, _by means of Metaphysic._

For Walter Pater--is that clearly understood?--was an adept, long
before Nietzsche's campaign began, at showing the human desire,
the human craving, the human ferocity, the human spite, hidden
behind the mask of "Pure Reason."

He treats every great System of Metaphysic as a great work of
Art--with a very human, often a too human, artizan behind it--a work of
Art which we have a perfect right to appropriate, to enjoy, to look at
the world through, and then _to pass on!_

Every Philosophy has its "secret," according to Pater, its "formula,"
its lost Atlantis. Well! It is for us to search it out; to take colour from
its dim-lit under-world; to feed upon its wavering Sea-Lotus--and
then, returning to the surface, to swim away, in search of other
diving-grounds!

No Philosopher except Pater has dared to carry Esoteric Eclecticism
quite as far as this. And, be it understood, he is no frivolous
Dilettante. This draining the secret wine of the great embalmed
Sarcophagi of Thought is his Life-Lure, his secret madness, his
grand obsession. Walter Pater approaches a System of Metaphysical
Thought as a somewhat furtive amorist might approach a sleeping
Nymph. On light-stepping, crafty feet he approaches--and the hand
with which he twitches the sleeve of the sleeper is as soft as the
flutter of a moth's wing. "I do not like," he said once, "to be called a
Hedonist. It gives such a queer impression to people who don't know
Greek."

Ardent young people sometimes come to me, when in the wayfaring
of my patient academic duties, I speak about Pater, and ask me
point-blank to tell them what his "view-point"--so they are pleased
to express it--"really and truly" was. Sweet reader, do you know the
pain of these "really and truly" questions? I try to answer in some
blundering manner like this. I try to explain how, for him, nothing in
this world was certain or fixed; how everything "flowed away"; how
all that we touch or taste or see, vanished, changed its nature,
became something else, even as we vanish, as the years go on, and
change our nature and become so