Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

This sentence comes from Walter Pater’s famous “Conclusion” to *The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry* (1873), a book that helped define English aestheticism. In the “Conclusion,” Pater draws on post-Kantian and empiricist currents to stress the subjectivity and transience of experience: what we call “reality” reaches us only as fleeting impressions filtered through individual consciousness. The passage reflects Pater’s broader project of grounding criticism and life in refined perception rather than moral or metaphysical certainties—an approach that made the “Conclusion” controversial and influential, and that Pater later revised in subsequent editions.

Pater argues that each person’s life is enclosed within the limits of their own consciousness. What we possess is not the world “as it is,” but experience already broken into impressions and then shaped by the self—our “thick wall of personality.” Because of that barrier, no voice from an external, objective reality can reach us unmediated, and our own inner life cannot pass outward in any direct way. The line underscores Pater’s skeptical epistemology and his aesthetic ethic: since certainty about what lies “without” is only conjectural, the task becomes to attend intensely and discriminatingly to the quality of one’s impressions and moments of perception.