The faltering centre of Walter Pater's aesthetic philosophy is his conception of the individual. The individual, and not art, is at the very heart of his aestheticism. Amid the storms that assailed subjectivity in mid-Victorian culture, Pater's aesthetic is a portrait of humanity ‘in its uncertain condition’ (R 39); an admission that we may be but ‘a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream’ (R 151), spiritually desolate and ever possessed by conflicting desires. Yet still it is animated by the quiet Romantic ambition that self-identity in the modern world may be reconceived through aesthetic experience. Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy explores Pater's individualism, both intellectual and personal, and how this individualism is formed through his attempt to redefine the scope of philosophical thought under the conditions of modernity. As it does so it asserts that Pater is the philosophical centre of aestheticism, and explores his significant interventions in the relationship between the individual and art, and ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’, as they underwent significant revision in mid to late nineteenth-century Britain.