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we are, as speculators, but little more knowing than Aristotle was two 

 thousand years ago, as to the origin of all knowledge and all ideas. 

 While at Cambridge, Coleridge admired more than all other philosophers 

 — Hartley and Berkeley. In after years his admiration of them continued, 

 for he named after them his two eldest boys. But he must have changed 

 afterwards, for when he comes to speak in his Biographia of this year, 

 1797, he says : "After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, 

 Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an 

 abiding place for my reason, I began to ask myself — Is a system of 

 philosophy, as different from mere history and historic classification, 

 possible? If possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a 

 while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit 

 that the sole practicable employment of the human mind was to observe, 

 to collect, and to classify." It might have been well for Coleridge's 

 philosophy, if he had stopped at this point. If instead of dreaming of 

 what cannot be verified, he had turned some of that great genius, and 

 even that splendid imagination, to the work of real science, that which 

 is alone worthy of the name : that of which Bacon is the immortal guide; 

 that which has done more for man, and aided his progress and enlighten- 

 ment and happiness, more than all the philosophies of the past world 

 put together ; that unravelling and reading of the marvellous universe 

 which surrounds us, but of which it may be said we have only just begun 

 to cut the first pages of the mighty and divine book. But Coleridge's 

 longing for mere speculation as to the mind and its workings, was too 

 strong for him ; he fell back into the endless mazes of ontology. Lessing 

 and Kant and Schelling, in his later days, were his most loved and 

 revered audiorities. From the second of these gifted men, he is usually 

 understood to have borrowed that doctrine which is so eminently Cole- 

 ridgean in this country — the distinction between the Reason and the 

 Understanding. Doubtless there were differences between the system 

 which Kant taught on the one hand, and Coleridge on the other ; but 

 in this point they were agreed — "The Understanding is a lower faculty, 

 which only collects ideas, ('disconnected and helpless notions,') and 

 supplies them as materials for the great combining faculty^?/;-^ Reason." 



