248 Mr. Leslie Stephen [Marcli 9, 



theology, and pure expediency in politics. How the Aristotelians 

 had come to rule the world ever since the opening of the eighteenth 

 century is a question which, so far as I know, he never answered. 

 But the effect of their dominion was equally to dethrone reason as to 

 asj)hyxiate imagination. The two were allies, if not an incarnation 

 of the same faculty. Inversely the Benthamites, till Mill was con- 

 verted by Wordsworth, regarded poetry as equivalent to mere 

 tintinnabulation and lying, or, as Carlyle's friend put it, the *' pro- 

 dooction of a rude age." It was as much in his character of poet as 

 of philosopher, thnt Coleridge hated Political Economy, the favourite 

 science of the Benthamites ; for, according to him, it was an illustra- 

 tion of their destructive method. The economist deals with mere 

 barren abstractions, and then misapx3lies them to the concrete 

 organism, the life of which, according to the common metaphor, has 

 been destroyed by his dissecting knife. Coleridge goes too far in 

 speaking as if analysis were in itself a mischievous instead of an 

 important process, much as Wordsworth thought that every man of 

 science was ready to botanise on his mother's grave. But, on the 

 other hand, the clear conviction that a society could only be explained 

 as an organic and continuous whole enables him to point out very 

 distinctly the limits of the opjiosite school. One indication of this 

 contrast may be found in Colerirlge's theory of Church and State. It 

 is curious that Mill, in his ( ssay upon Coleridge, esj^ccially admires 

 him for taking into account the historical element in which Bentham 

 was deficient. It is curious because it is remarkable that the leader 

 of a school which boasted specially of resting upon exj)erience, should 

 admit that it was weak precisely in not appreciating the historical 

 method on which surely experience should be founded. It seems 

 almost as if the antagonists had changed weapons, like the duellists in 

 Hainlef. The a priori thinker rests upon experience, and the empiricist 

 upon a really a priori method. 



The ambiguity indicates Coleridge's peculiar position towards the 

 opposite school. He regards society as an organism, a something 

 which has grown through long centuries, and therefore to be studied 

 in its vital principle, not to be analysed into a mere mechanism for 

 distributing certain lumps of happiness. In doing so he was saying 

 what had been said by Burke, whoso wisdom he fully apj)reciated and 

 whose real consistency he recognised. To my mind, indeed, Burke as 

 a political j)hilosopher was far greater than Coleridge. But Burke 

 hated the metaphysics in which Coleridge delighted, and therefore 

 with him we seem at best to come upon blank prejudice, or pre- 

 scription, as the ultimate ground of political science. Coleridge 

 feels the necessity of connecting his organic principles with some 

 genuine philosophical principle, and Mill admits that Conservatism 

 in his treatment was something very superior to the mere brute 

 prejudice to which Eldon and Castlereagh appealed, and which was 

 used as a bludgeon by The Quarterly Beview. Unluckily it is here, 

 too, that we find the weakness of Coleridge's character. He tried 



