The subject of Pater's second paper for the Old Mortality Society was Fichte's Ideal Student, and it focused on self-culture. Its effect portended the moral outrage that his Renaissance would ignite nine years later. Audaciously eschewing the social conscience that was a feature of the Old Mortality meetings where they addressed subjects including education for the poor, Pater's paper focused on self-culture. Pater found ideas in Fichte's work which ‘seem to have become personal insights or personal ideals to Pater, or to have justified tendencies that were intrinsic to his personality’ (Inman 1981a: 70). As Gerald Monsman says, ‘it is evident that for Pater in 1864 the criterion of right conduct is not an external standard of morality, but the comeliness of the individual life’ (1970: 371). As noted in Chapter 3 Pater's paper was, according to one of Old Mortality's more conservative members, S. R. Brooke, vociferous in advocating ‘selfish principles’ and he summed it up as ‘one of the most infidel productions it has ever been our pain to listen to’ (qtd Monsman 1970: 371).