Habit of mind

'..the doubt of one who would rather walk in mystery than in false lights, who awaits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of truth to the imposing completeness of a delusion.'

Characteristic

'Life seen throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually selected ­that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound by dogma.  Truth admits but the one rule:  No deficiency, and no excess!  Disobedient to that rule ­nothing attains full vitality.  And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of vital things.That aesthete, to be sure, was right, when he said:  “It is Style that makes one believe in a thing; nothing but Style.”  For, what is Style in its true and broadest sense save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect balance in the clothing of them? '