The debate between the absolutist who tries to judge a literary work by one universal standard and the relativist who maintains that the standard is determined historically, culturally, or psychologically, is as old as the early neoclassical one and as new as that between Herbert Muller and Cleanth Brooks, for instance. And Pater's charge against Coleridge's "absolute" spirit on the ground of his "relative" one is an important link of such a chain of discussions, but it is not so much concerned with the standard of judging a work as with the critical spirit itself. Coleridge sought, as Pater says, to arrest every object in an eternal outline, and to classify them by kinds. Pater, on the contrary, endeavoured to comprehend them as ever changing, and to see the distinction as only in degrees. Coleridge conceived, for example, "the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination", but Pater, on the other hand, regarded it as "the distinction between higher and lower degrees of intensity." Thus, Coleridge, as if he considered justice as absolute, said Angelo in Measure for Measure grossly wounded his sense of justice; whereas Pater, as he thought of it as relative, tolerated him as a child of his own circumstances. In this respect, if Coleridge reflects Bentham's "moral" view of justice, then Pater adopts J. S. Mill's "sympathetic" one, getting the relativist idea of "the finer justice". Also, while Coleridge prizes "intellectual accuracy or truth" as "the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility", Pater suggests the similar relativist idea of "the finest truth" as an aesthetic one, because he believes, with John Payne, that beauty is necessarily truth, but truth is not necessarily beautiful. In the same way, Coleridge, on one hand, distinguished morals from manners, and valued Shakespeare's morals, but Pater, on the other hand, identified manners with morals, and set great store by Shakespeare's manners. In this way, Coleridge's absolutism and Pater's relativism correspond closely to, in the phrase of John Steegman, "Art for Morals' sake" and "Art for Art's sake" respectively. Now, Coleridge sought the absolute which is subject to neither time nor change, but Pater, on the contrary, emphasized the relative which changes, grows and develops. Thus, Coleridge, interpreting the Greek metempsychosis, for example, said that the present was a mere semblance of a past. But Pater, on the other hand, elucidating the same Pythagorean doctrine, regarded the present as accumulating "the experience of ages". In this point, Pater seems to be of the same mind with Herder, who, comparing it to "the immense snowball which the movement of time has rolled up for us", thinks of any return to the old times as an impossibility. So, while Coleridge reagrds it as inferior to a past, Pater affirms that it is "an intellectually rich age", and we can only return to a past at the price of an impoverishment of it. In this respect they are different, but not always. For often they agree strangely in neglecting the distinction between past and present, which is, however, not so much in the absolute spirit that identifies them, as in the relative one that seeks in past "but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan of one's self". It is with such subjective relativism of theirs in mind that T. S. Eliot says Coleridge "made of Hamlet a Coleridge" and "we should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play". Now, by this quality they are distinguished from classicists, and by this Pater is farther removed from them than Coleridge. It follows that, if we compare them with classicists, they are in a greater or less degree

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