At the risk of setting up further waves of what Joyce calls the “true scholastic stink” I feel it necessary to add a few more observations to the many already made on the philosophic clarifications of his own aesthetic position that Gerard Manley Hopkins found in Duns Scotus. The attention of critics is becoming more and more absorbed in studying the poetic process itself, the poet's perception of complexity and coherence, and his attempt to express them in terms of aesthetic structure. For such a study Hopkins offers rich materials. His own critical acumen forced him early to coin new terms, “inscape” and “instress”, in order to express more accurately the nature of poetic insight and response. It is apparent, therefore, that the more we can find out about inscape and instress, the more fully we shall grasp the nature of Hopkins' poetic experience, and ultimately the quality of the poems to which it gave rise. It is this purpose which justifies further explorations into fourteenth-century philosophic subtleties.