Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Pater

Modernity, Pater suggests, is a solvent: it doesn’t just challenge old certainties, it makes the very idea of certainty feel naive. His phrasing is deliberately cool and observational - “to regard,” “has become the tendency” - as if he’s charting a climate shift rather than launching a manifesto. That restraint is the point. Pater’s criticism often works by seeming to describe a mood while quietly legitimizing it.

The key move is the pairing of “things” with “principles of things.” It’s not only tastes, institutions, and social arrangements that look temporary; the frameworks that once claimed to explain them start to read like period pieces, too. By calling them “inconstant modes or fashions,” he borrows the language of style - the domain of aesthetic change - and applies it to metaphysics and morality. Subtext: what if the deepest beliefs of an era are closer to clothing than commandments?

Context matters. Late Victorian intellectual life was being rattled by evolutionary theory, historical criticism of scripture, and a growing sense that truth is mediated by perspective and temperament. Pater, a key voice of Aestheticism, isn’t merely lamenting relativism; he’s diagnosing how historical consciousness turns permanence into an illusion. Once you see ideas as products of time, you can’t unsee it.

There’s also a sly self-protection here. If principles are fashions, the critic’s job isn’t to defend timeless standards but to register shifts in sensibility with exquisite accuracy. Pater makes that stance sound inevitable - “more and more” - turning a potentially scandalous worldview into the simple drift of “modern thought.”