Let us briefly recall what this apparently so “dangerous” philosophy of Pater’s is, and we cannot do better than examine it in its most concentrated and famous utterance, this oft-quoted passage from that once-suppressed “Conclusion” to The Renaissance: 

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.  A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life.  How may we see in them all that there is to be seen in them by the finest senses?  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?  To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life....  While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.  With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch....  Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says; we are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—­les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis:  we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.  Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song.  For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.  Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.  Only be sure it is passion—­that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.  Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.  For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

Now, if it be true that the application, or rather the misapplication, of this philosophy led Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol, it is none the less true that another application of it led Marius to something like Christian martyrdom, and Walter Pater himself along an ever loftier and serener path of spiritual vision.