February 1861 found Walter Pater bent over a volume of Hume's Philosophical Works, making notes on little squares of paper in the gloom of his college library. He was a third year undergraduate, and Hume was part of a self-directed programme of reading that ranged far beyond the requirements of his degree in Literae Humaniores. His contemporary and friend Ingram Bywater recalled that Pater ‘devoured all the serious literature of the period: Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, J. S. Mill, and also our older writers, Berkeley and Hume’ (1917: 79). Those ‘older writers’ of philosophy feature particularly prominently in Pater's library records inspired in part by his young tutor, the polymath, William Wolfe Capes. This was a time of increasing introspection and self-questioning in Oxford philosophy, as the natural sciences began to encroach on the domain of the moral sciences. A generation later, in December 1897, Bertrand Russell would declare that ‘Philosophy, by the slow victories of its own offspring, has been forced to forgo, one by one, its high pretensions. Intellectual difficulties, for the most part, have been acquired by Science’ (1999: 80). This realisation was just beginning to dawn in the early 1860s, as an iconoclast like Pater was well aware.