mething else. I try to explain how,
for him, we are ourselves but the meeting-places of strange forces,
journeying at large and by chance through a shifting world; how we,
too, these very meeting-places of such forces, waver and flicker and
shift and are transformed, like dreams within dreams!

I try to explain how, this being so, and nothing being "written in the
sky" it is our right to test every single experience that life can offer,
short of those which would make things bitterer, harder, narrower,
less easy, for "the other person."

And if my Innocents ask--as they do sometimes--Innocents are like
that!--"Why must we consider the other person?" I answer--for no
_reason,_ and under no threat or danger or categorical imperative;
but simply because we have grown to be the sort of animal, the sort
of queer fish, who _cannot_ do the things "that he would"! It is not, I
try to indicate, a case of conscience; it is a matter of taste; and there
are certain things, when it comes to that point, which an animal
possessed of such taste _cannot do,_ even though he desire to do
them. And one of these things is to hurt the other trapped creatures
who happen to have been caught in the same "gin" as ourself.

With regard to Art and Literature, Pater has the same method as with
regard to Philosophy. Everything in a world so fluid is obviously
relative. It is ridiculous to dream that there is any absolute
standard--even of beauty itself. Those high and immutable Principles
of The Good and True are as much an illusion as any other human dream.
There are no such principles. Beauty is a Daughter of Life, and is
forever changing as Life changes, and as we change who have to
live. The lonely, tragic faith of certain great souls in that high, cold
"Mathematic" of the Universe, the rhythm of whose ordered
Harmony is the Music of the Spheres, is a Faith that may well
inspire and solemnize us; it cannot persuade or convince us.

Beauty is not Mathematical; it is--if one may say so--physiological
and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and
pure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly
pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it
appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth
and change than we sometimes would care to allow.

Walter Pater's magnetic spell is never more wonder-working than
when he deals with the _materials_ which artists use. And m