A Timely Aesthete
Richard Titlebaum on Walter Pater

(Excerpt)

In 1869, when Pater was thirty-one, there were, according to David Masson, two dominant intellectual influences at Oxford, "the one, in more or less cordial alliance with Comte's positive philosophy; the other, the more theoretical philosophy which connects itself with the names of Kant and Hegel."5 The date is most appropriate since only three years before Pater had published in the Westminster Review his maiden essay, "Coleridge" an essay whose anti-metaphysical and, moreover, anti-Christian sentiments, though later modified for inclusion in Appreciations , fall in line with the position of the Comtian School. That Comte's philosophy proved attractive to many radical English minds of the time is perhaps best illustrated by J. S. Mill's still highly readable book on the founder of modern sociology; but whereas it was Comte's methodology and politics that especially fascinated Mill's catholic and scrupulous intelligence, it was the Frenchman's revolutionary vision of history that supplied Pater with a set of categories by which to accommodate himself to the attacks against Christianity that, like a deluge, were inundating England from the Continent. Comte, it will be remembered, divided intellectual history into three stages corresponding to the development of man himself. In his Cours de philosophie positive , Comte rejected religion and metaphysics as pursuits that belonged to the childhood and adolescence of the race. In any civilization there are, in Comte's view, three stages of intellectual growth. In the first, the primitive projects his fears upon the universe, peopling it with spirits, gods, and demons; in the second, the philosopher substitutes an abstract metaphysical entity for the Creator; but, in the third, modern and enlightened man abandons these fruitless phantasmagoria and turns to nature herself, resigning himself to positive and relative knowledge gained from a scientific study of facts rather than deceiving himself by pretentious and shadowy metaphysical speculations. It would not take much effort to imagine the impact Comte must have had on Pater, who, himself raised as an Anglican and destined for the priesthood, was still smarting at Oxford from such controversial publications as Strauss' Das Leben Jesu and Renan's la Vie de Jesus , both of which contributed to Pater's loss of religious faith-- Pater, who, so eagerly devouring the latest books from Germany and France, filled the pages of his Coleridge essay with perceptive obiter dicta about the condition of modern knowledge.