The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy.  The secret lies in Aristotle.  The true literary critic must have a humanistic philosophy.  His inquiries must be modulated, subject to an intimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life.  He is not the mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymous with value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never be deluded into believing that it is.  He will not accept from Hegel the thesis that all the events of human history, all man’s spiritual activities, are equally authentic manifestations of Spirit; he will not even recognise the existence of Spirit.  He may accept from Croce the thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not be extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than another.  A philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords no indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred to the expression of another is of little value to him.  He will incline to say that Hegel and Croce are the scientists of art rather than its philosophers.

Here, then, is the opposition:  between the philosophy that borrows its values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art.  We may put it with more cogency and truth:  the opposition lies between a philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them.  For values are human, anthropocentric.  Shut them out once and you shut them out for ever.  You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such and such a thing is true.  Nothing is precious because it is true save to a mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good to know the truth.  And the making of that single decision is a most momentous judgment of value.  If the scientist appeals to it, as indeed he invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a humanist.  He would do better to confess it, and to confess that he too is in search of the good life.  Then he might become aware that to search for the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of it before his mind’s eye.

An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and the organic force of a true ideal, must inevitably be aesthetic.  There is no other power than our aesthetic intuition by which we can imagine or conceive it; we can express it only in aesthetic terms.  We say, for instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of the diverse elements in his soul.  For the good life, we know instinctively, is one of our human absolutes.  It is not good with reference to any end outside itself.  A man does not live the good life because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives the good life.  And here we touch the secret of the most magnificently human of all books that has ever been written—­Plato’s Republic.