August 4, 1839

Walter Pater (August 4, 1839 to July 30, 1894) was an Oxford academic who is mainly remembered today for his formulation of the phrase, "hard gemlike flame." This Victorian thinker analyzed human consciousness as an ever shifting haze in which the fleeting present alone is real. He wrote that the individual must struggle, to preserve any beauty in the now, from the vitiating effects of stereotyped thinking.

[There is a] "continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves" [In this haze the individual must struggle to apprehend a present beauty] "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
His magazine essays were collected in books like Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).

The story of how the western world transitioned from a theocentric universe to one where individual psychology could be viewed as self sustaining has not been told, but I think Pater would have a chapter in such a survey.

What is not in doubt is Pater's affection for cats. We read in The life of Walter Pater, by
Thomas Wright (1907).

[When Pater was ten years old,] the chief object of his affection was a beautiful white Angora, "with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a flower"—the first of a long series of cats. The cat, indeed, life through, was to Pater what the owl was to Minerva, the hare to Cowper. He was never without one, and often he had several. ....

It is appropriate that the father of aestheticism, the idea that beauty can be a religion, was fond of felines.