Beauty and Metaphysics in a lecture devoted to Beauty and Criticism. It is perhaps the less necessary to make the attempt since I do not remember that in this country, with the exception of Professor Bosanquet, metaphysicians, even those most in sympathy with the general attitude of the great transcendentalists, have dwelt at length upon their aesthetic speculations. However this may be, I cannot, for my own part, find that these have provided me with any way of escape from the difficulties which I most acutely feel. I get no aid from such doctrines as that 'aesthetics is the meeting point of Reason and Understanding', or that 'it is the sensible expression of the Idea', or that 'it is the expression of the Unconscious Will'. In truth these views labour under the disadvantage that, while they are almost meaningless to those who cannot accept the systems of which they are a fragment, they are not, I think (though I speak with diffidence), enthusiastically adopted even by those to whose general way of thinking those systems are congenial.
The result, then, of this concise survey of a great subject is negative. Apart from transcendental metaphysics, I have said enough (in my belief at least) to show that neither considered in themselves, nor in their relation to any wider outlook,
