208 



He found here the assurance that man's reasoning — or rather, under- 

 standing — powers, are not man himself, and that he may rise above their 

 impotence, and have direct faith in unseen reaHties. He seems to have 

 differed from the German philosopher in denying that the Reason is, as 

 it is with him, only a faculty of individual men, and not rather a divine 

 nature of which all are partakers, and that equally. 



The Reason instructs by intuition — divine insight; it is in the 

 same region, and allied to his Imagination, which sees in the things of 

 the external world only symbols of the unseen. It does many other 

 wonderful things ; but it is difficult to feel quite sure, when you are 

 treading this ground, that you are not dealing only with ingenious 

 inventions and fanciful conceits. Some minds have but Uttle taste for 

 speculations which can never be profitable, and are always conflicting. 

 There are as many systems, indeed, of mental philosophy, as there have 

 been teachers and professors of it. Hardly two have thought alike. Let 

 us admire their courage and their ingenuity. I can hardly ask you to 

 follow me through any more of Coleridge's speculative teaching ; the 

 very phraseology becomes wearisome to our ears ; the perpetually 

 recurring ego and non-ego — the object and the subject — the real and 

 ideal — the identity of knowledge and being, and much more, all 

 conveying to the ordinary mind very little meaning, and to the instructed 

 mind only the idea of endless intellectual battle-fields. 



Coleridge at last thought he saw in Schelling's writings a coincidence 

 with his own imperfect results. The teaching of both was Objective 

 Idealism, which term will certainly want interpreting. So far as I can 

 interpret it, it means, divested of technicalities, something of this sort — 

 Beside the Subject, there must exist an Object ; the two are identical in 

 a third, which is the Absolute. This Absolute is neither Ideal nor Real 

 — neither mind nor Nature — but both. The Absolute is God. He is 

 the All in All : the eternal source of all existence. He realises Himself 

 under one form as Objectivity, and under a second form as Subjectivity. 

 He becomes conscious of Himself in man ; and thus man, under the 

 highest form of his existence, manifests Reason ; and by this Reason 

 God knows Himself. 



