But with all this we have nothing of the promised 'deduction' of the imagination, still less that of the memory and other 'functions of intelligence'. The definition of fancy is founded, apparently, on the psychological discussion of the earlier chapters, not on the theory of --knowledge propounded later on. As to the imagination, it seems at first sight, from the close coincidence of Coleridge's statement with that of Schelling, that he had accepted Schelling's system wholesale and with it his account of that faculty. But the sudden termination of the argument, and the unsatisfactory vagueness of the final summary, in which he does not really commit himself to Schelling's position, suggest that that position was not in fact his own. And this suggestion is confirmed by other evidence.

That Coleridge's attitude from the first to Schelling's philosophy was by no means one of unqualified approval, we have already seen. But in the Transcendental Idealism which he studied at a time when he was deeply engaged in aesthetic problems, he found a peculiar attraction. Here for the first time the significance of 'the vision and the faculty divine' seemed to be adequately realized. At first it appeared to Coleridge that he had met with a systematized statement of his own convictions, the metaphysic of poetry of which he was in search. But he was soon to find that the supposed concurrence did not exist— that the Transcendentalism of Schelling in fact elevated the imagination at the expense of other and more important factors in our spiritual consciousness.

No doubt the feature most unsatisfactory to Coleridge in the Transcendental Idealism and in Schelling's philosophy in general was its vague conception of the ultimate ground of reality. For Schelling's absolute, which is prior to and behind self-consciousness, from which self-consciousness originates, is conceived as mere self-less identity or total indifference, of which all that can be said is that it

is neither subject nor object, but the mere negation of both.1 From such an abstract principle, it is evident, no living bond of union can be derived to hold together the complementary elements in self-consciousness when it is mysteriously generated: hence subject and object, intelligence and nature, appear as parallel lines of co-ordinate value, connected by a merely logical necessity. In such a system there was clearly no place for the God of Coleridge's faith, as a Spirit to whom self-consciousness is essential, a Being 'in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite power'. Thus it is that in his own account in the Biographia Literaria Coleridge is all the time striving to identify Schelling's 'intellectual intuition' of subject and object in their absolute identity withthe religious intuition, the direct consciousness of God.

But this, of course, involves him in contradictions. For the power of intellectual intuition, the philosophic imagination is, as Schelling conceived, a gift confined to a favoured few, not a state of being in which all can, by moral effort, raise themselves: his philosophy cannot therefore take the form of a moral appeal. And here Coleridge, so long as his thoughts are concerned primarily with the imagination and its deduction, is inclined to follow him. The solution of the problem is to discover 'for whom and to whom the philosophical intuition is possible'. For 'there is a philosophic no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection of talent, not by degree, but by kind'. If, however, this intuition of the supersensuous is none other than the consciousness of God, it must

1 In later years Schelling sought to reconcile his system with the idea of a personal God; but with doubtful success. See the Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), and Coleridge's marginal comments thereon (Biog. Lit., 2nd Edition, Vol. I, Appendix). See also Professor Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism.

2 Confession of Faith, 1818.

evidently be regarded as a spiritual condition accessible to all: and in that case its organ must be in a faculty essential to the spiritual constitution of man.

This common organ of spiritual insight Coleridge had long ago recognized and designated. Its name is reason and its objects are not as Kant conceived them, regulative merely, but constitutive; it brings us, that is to say, into direct contact with supersensuous reality. This point of view, as we saw, Coleridge had already adopted in The Friend of 1809; and on his conception of the reason, as subsequently developed, hinges his whole attempt to reconcile religion and philosophy. For it is the same faculty which, as intuitive, grasps the highest truths, and which, as speculative, develops them philosophically. In its speculative direction reason may be regarded as a peculiar gift; but as intuitive it is the highest function of our spiritual nature, man's most glorious prerogative. For an intuition which is at once purely spiritual and yet not common to mankind is a manifest contradiction; and the philosopher who imagines that he is brought into contact with the true ground of all knowledge is really contemplating, as in the case of Schelling's Absolute, the arid abstractions of the speculative intellect. The 'philosophic imagination' does not, in fact, exist for Coleridge; or at least it means to him something very different from the conception of Schelling. And it is significant that in his final definition, in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge does not commit himself to that conception. The 'secondary imagination' is, in all its characteristics, essentially a faculty of mediate vision; and its medium is the sensible world. In this respect the creations of the artist differ from the systems of the philosopher; if the power of embodying the ideal in sensible forms be granted only to a few, yet the capacity to appreciate the concrete embodiment is regarded as universal in man. Only in this sphere can the imagina

tion claim authoritative utterance. Its purely inward direction is, therefore, an impossibility, and the attempt so to apply it but a form of self-deception.

Thus Schelling's spiritual intuition of a spiritual reality becomes the merely intellectual apprehension of a bare abstraction; and nature, deprived of its animating principle, is opposed to intelligence in an absolute antithesis, of which each term precludes and yet necessitates the other. The . materialistic implications of such a conception were bound, sooner or later, to reveal themselves to Coleridge. In later years he wrote of the Transcendental Idealism: 'The more I reflect, the more convinced I am of the gross materialism of the whole system!' The same conviction led him, in 1818, to class Schelling with Spinoza among the Pantheists; and this because 'the inevitable result of all consequent reasoning in which the intellect refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it can itself supply-and weens to possess within itself the centre of its own system-is Pantheism'. In all this Coleridge is but giving definite expression to the implicit convictions of his early years, the same convictions which had weaned him from the empirically-grounded dogmas of Locke and Hartley. The nature of 'this deeper or higher ground of things' had gradually become clearer to him, and at the very time when he was writing the Biographia Literaria a more exact characterization of the higher functions of intelligence was also engaging his thoughts, the outcome of which was embodied in The Statesman's Manual, published in 1817.

In this, the first Lay Sermon, Coleridge is championing the same cause as in the Biographia Literaria, but in another field. His foe is still the spirit of materialism, dominating an age in which 'faith is either to be buried in the dead letter,

1 Marginal note on Schelling's Briefe über Dogmatismus und Criticismus (Biog. Lit., 2nd Edition, Appendix).

2 The Friend, Coleridge's Works, ed. Shedd., ii. 470.

or its name and honours usurped by the counterfeit products of the mechanical understanding'; and here again the distinction between the false religion and the true is typified in the distinction of fancy and imagination. For while the understanding 'in the blindness of its self-complacency' is content with allegories, which are nothing more than 'the translation of abstract notions into a picture-language'; religion, 'the consideration of the individual, as it exists and has its being in the universal,' has need of symbols for its expression. But the faculty of symbols is none other than the imagination, 'the reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporates the reason in images of the sense, and organizes, as it were, the fluxes of the sense by the permanent and self-circling energies of the reason.' To reason, therefore, the organ of 'the intuition and the immediate spiritual consciousness of God', imagination is related as interpreting in the light of that consciousness the symbolism of the visible world. For of the symbol it is further characteristic 'that it always partakes of the reality, which it renders intelligible: and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative'. The symbols of imagination, in fact, are no tokens arbitrarily selected, but the spontaneous expression of the infinite mind in whose being it mysteriously shares.

Thus the imaginative attitude towards nature is indispensable to a true insight into her meaning, and this equally to the poet, the theologian, and the philosopher. For a science which is based on the observations of the mere understanding can give at best 'a knowledge of superficies without substance', a mere classification of phenomena, which regards the unity of things in their limits only. But true natural philosophy 'is comprised in the study of the science and language of symbols', which apprehends its objects 'as an actual and essential part of