1888.] on S. T. Coleridge. 249 



to put together his views at a time when his mind had been hope- 

 lessly enervated ; when he could guess and beat about a principle, 

 but could never get it fairly stated or see its full bearings. He is 

 struggling for utterance, still clinging to the belief that he can 

 elaborate a system, but never getting beyond prolegomena and 

 fruitful hints. He says that to study politics with benefit we must 

 try to elaborate the " idea " of Church and State, and the " idea," as 

 he explains, is identical with what scientific people call a law. 

 But how the law or laws of an organism are to be determined by 

 some transcendental principle overruling and independent of ex- 

 periences, is just the point which remains inexplicable. He seems 

 to appreciate what we now call the historic method. He uses the 

 sacred phrase 'evolution,' which is simply the general formula of 

 which the historic method is a special application. But we find 

 that by evolution he means some strange process suggestive of his 

 old mystical employment, and even at times talks of heptads and 

 pentads and the " adorable tetractys," which is the same with the 

 Trinity; and connects chemical laws of oxygen and hydrogen gas 

 with the logical formulfe about prothesis, and antithesis, and meso- 

 thesis. To state the theory of evolution in verifiable and scientific 

 terms was reserved for Darwin ; when we meet it in Coleridge we 

 seem to be going back to Pythagoras ; and yet it is the same thought 

 which is struggling for an utterance in singular and bewildering 

 terms, and moreover it was just the the®ry which Mill required. 



But, to come to a conclusion, though I cannot think that Cole- 

 ridge ever worked with his mind clear, or was, indeed, capable of 

 the necessary concentration and steadiness of thought by which 

 alone philosophical achievements are possible ; though I hold, again, 

 that if he had succeeded he would have found that he was not so 

 much refuting his opponents as supplying a necessary complement to 

 their teaching, I can still believe that he saw more clearly than any 

 of his contemporaries what were the vital issues ; that in his de- 

 tached, and desultory, and inconsistent fashion he was stirring the 

 thoughts which were to occupy his successors ; and that a detailed 

 examination would show in how many directions a certain Coleridgian 

 leaven is working in later fermentations. 



Besides the able and zealous disciples who acknowledged his 

 leadership, we might find many affinities in Carlyle's masculine if 

 narrow teaching; or again, in a school which diverged in a very 

 opposite direction, for the theory of Church authority sanctioned by 

 the Oxford disciples of Cardinal Newman is, in spite of its different 

 result, closely allied to Coleridge's ; while the modern Hegelians — 

 though they regard him as a superficial dabbler — must admit that he 

 rendered the service (of doubtful value, perhaps) of infecting English 

 thought with the virus of German metaphysics, and will perhaps 

 admit that, in principle, he anticipated some of their most cogent 

 criticisms of the common enemy. Coleridge never constructed a 

 system. If a philosophy, or its creator, is to be judged by the 

 Vol. XII. (No, 82.) s 



