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.

1

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.

2

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

that, the whole of which it represents', and sees in the silent and unconscious processes of nature 'the same power as that of reason-the same power in a lower dignity, and therefore a symbol established in the truth of things'. Thus the vital unity which the poet reads in the outward manifestations of nature, her apparently chance combinations of movement, form, and colour, the philosopher finds in her inward processes and organization; and in either case the unifying principle is the same. As the poet identifies his emotional self with nature, so the philosopher contemplates in the world of natural law the outward expression of man's rational life; for 'that which we find in ourselves is (gradu mutato) the sum and substance of all our knowledge'. The explanation, again, of this intimate sympathy and correspondence is for poet and philosopher the same: to both it appears as 'a mystery of which God is the only solution-God the one before all and of all, and through all!'1

It is thus evident in what sense, and what sense alone, Coleridge can consistently regard the imagination as the organ of philosophy. It is not the power of intellectual intuition (if by that we mean direct spiritual vision) but the faculty of the true apprehension of things sensible as the data and material of philosophical reflection: and herein lies the connecting link of poetry and philosophy. In poetry all effective speculation must begin, for experience must alway be interpreted in the light of an undemonstrable premise: and well for the philosopher, Coleridge would say, to whom imagination, and not fancy, supplies that premise; whose system, like the poet's ideal world, is constructed on 'the heaven descended' 'Know thyself', and on the intuition that in that knowledge he will find a key to the meaning of the universe. 'The genuine naturalist is dramatic poet in his own line.'1

1 First Lay Sermon. Appendix B.

Enough has been said to show that Coleridge's failure to complete his deduction of the imagination is not merely another instance of his habitual lethargy of purpose. How he would have completed it in accordance with his more mature convictions is a question not admitting of solution, for the attempt was never resumed. We are left with his definition of the primary imagination as 'an echo. of the primary act of creation', and of the secondary as a more highly potentialized form of the primary: and the meaning of this figurative language we have to unravel as we may. But of the primary act of creation, as Coleridge conceived it, we know that if it is an act of self-distinction, the subject of it is not to be conceived like Schelling's absolute as a dead identity, but as a spirit of life and love. Existence is an eternal and infinite self-rejoicing, self-loving, with a joy unfathomable, with a love all comprehensive.' It is, then, an analogous impulse which we are to look for in the activity of the human imagination, whether, in its primary form, it unconsciously draws all experience into relation with the self; or, in its secondary form, reflects that self more perfectly in an ideal world. The justice of this conception, as regards the artistic creation, will readily be conceded. If there is one motive common to all genuine poetic impulse, it is surely the desire to objectify, and in this object to know and love, all that in the individual experience has seemed worthy of detachment from the fleeting personal life. It is at least possible that such was Coleridge's meaning, both in the Biographia Literaria, and when, years before, he had spoken of the imagination 'as a dim analogue of creation'.

1

It cannot be said that for that other purpose which Coleridge had in view (the establishment of fundamental principles of criticism) the metaphysical disquisition of the first volume does all that was anticipated of it. At least it

1 Essay XI of The Friend (1818).