Vernon Lee might have had Walter Pater in mind as she wrote these lines. His meandering aesthetic philosophy, itself ‘never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy’ (R 152), was on no account ever brought to a conclusion. And so, to write a conclusion about Pater is already to engage in an exercise quite foreign to the man himself.

The extent to which one may make conclusions about Pater's late- Romantic individual is limited to a notional sense of an ending, never to be confused with resolution. A feather on the breath of time is Pater's ever-shifting thought. His Prufrockian ‘visions and revisions’ understand themselves to be – like his idea of the late-Romantic individual – subject to ever-fluctuating time, even as he strives to overcome this limitation. It is with these qualifications that Pater has emerged in this study as a Romantic ‘aesthetic philosopher’, who engages in the history of modern philosophy in order to explore the ‘elusive inscrutable mistakable self’ (HP 23).