The fourth chapter follows the ramifications of this investment in a Platonizing imagination of learning and knowledge into the discipline of philology, showing how such a template interacted with the tensions inherent in philology as a practice. If it is the case that the demands of an increasingly specialized scientific philology and the expectation of a fully personal and individualized formation of the self (Bildung) were increasingly drifting apart, I want to show that philology in its self-descriptions still tried to keep those poles together, especially through maintaining a rhetoric of philological feeling. The authors this chapter focuses on are Friedrich Creuzer, Friedrich Thiersch, August Boeckh, Friedrich Ritschl, and Hermann Usener.