beauty, must not be confounded with the gaiety of transient moods. The sorrowful mood, as well as the cheerful, may find a response in nature. The joy which Coleridge speaks of is rather the permanent serenity underlying the changing affections of a soul which has either resolved, or has never known, the strife of opposing elements.1 This inward harmony of sense and spirit reflects itself in the outward forms of nature; but that harmony once lost, the vision which was its symbol also disappears; or, if it persist, it is now dissevered from the emotion which first engendered it. Thus only those who have both felt and seen the beauty of nature, may afterwards see yet not feel it; to the 'poor loveless, everanxious crowd,' even the sight of it is for ever denied.

In the apprehension of beauty, therefore, the soul projects itself into the outward forms of nature, and invests them with its own life. But it would be an unjustifiable conclusion that beauty is, in Coleridge's opinion, wholly subjective, an arbitrary creation of the mind. This 'beautiful and beauty-making power' is not, in its choice of symbols, entirely free. It is confined to specific forms for the expression of a specific ideal content. And thus arises the question: what is the ground of this sympathy between the natural symbol and the interpretative mind?

To this question one answer inevitably suggests itself. The symbol, and the mind that interprets it, must partake in a common spiritual life. The imaginative interpretation of nature is a heightened consciousness, though still only a mediate consciousness of the presence of that life. It is

1 Cp. Gillman's Life, p. 178, 'Happiness-the state of that person who in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious feeling, has no need of doing wrong, and who in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from judgment.' This is also Schiller's definition of the 'schöne Seele'. In 1804 Coleridge wrote, 'I know not-I have forgotten-what the joy is of which the heart is full.'

to such a spiritual experience that the passage from the 'Lines before Sunrise' gives expression (lines inspired, as Coleridge affirmed, by the solemnity of the Scafell scenery) :

O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou still present to the bodily sense

Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer
I worshipped the Invisible alone.

Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody,

So sweet, we knew not we were listening to it, Thou the meantime wert blending with my thought, Ay, with my life and life's own secret joy.1

Here we have recorded the same process of ascent through the symbol to the symbolized reality, to which the poems of an earlier period bear witness. But Coleridge does not conceive of the imagination as establishing our knowledge of that reality; it only illuminates a knowledge already gained, and gained, as we shall see, through other channels and in other ways.

The relationship of the symbol to the object which it symbolizes may, indeed, be variously conceived. It may have only the subjective validity of a purely accidental association, which points to nothing deeper: this is the symbolism of the fancy. Or the relationship may be objective indeed, but yet mechanical and external-the thing created standing for the creator: this is the symbolism of the intellect. Finally, the symbol, while remaining distinct from the thing symbolized, is yet in some mysterious way interpenetrated by its being, and partakes of its reality. Such symbolism is the work of imagination, and an example of it is found in the poetry of the Hebrews, in which 'all objects have a life of their own, and yet partake of our life. In God . . . they have their being'. And the capacity for such interpretation of

1 Written Sept. 1802. The poem is an adaptation of Frederika Brun's Hymn on Mt. Blanc', but it is none the less original.

nature resides not merely in our whole self, emotional and intellectual, but is dependent on a right condition of that self, and is thus the outcome and expression of a will rationally determined-the reason in nature responding to the reason in man.

If the attempt to gather from Coleridge's poems and correspondence of these years a definite idea of his mental attitude has seemed unnecessarily prolix, some excuse may be found in the especial interest which attaches to this period of his life, as that of his first introduction to German Philosophy--or rather, to one German philosopher in particular. It was early in the year 1801 that the intellect of Kant first took hold of him, as he significantly expresses it, with 'giant hands'. To Kant his obligations (as he was never tired of asserting) were far greater than to any other of Kant's countrymen to him alone could he be said to assume in any degree the attitude of pupil to master. Yet even to Kant his debt on the whole seems to have been more formal than material-to have resided rather in the scientific statement of convictions previously attained than in the acquisition of new truths. It was impossible, indeed, that Coleridge should acquiesce in the reservations of the critical philosophy. To charge Kant with insincerity in their regard (as in the Biographia Literaria he does) was no doubt a wide misapprehension: yet it shows how difficult it was for Coleridge to understand why Kant drew his line where he chose to draw it, and how little Coleridge was himself prepared to accept such a limitation.

In nothing does this appear more clearly than in the distinction of Reason and Understanding. This distinction, as elaborated by Kant, must have been hailed by Coleridge with especial joy; for it gave a rational basis to a presentiment of much earlier date. From the mystics Coleridge had learned that 'the products of the mere

reflective faculty partook of death ';1 and this, in effect, is what Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason. But he was far from committing himself to Kant's system as a whole. That the intellect was competent to deal with phenomena only, and with these as merely interconnected parts of a whole never realized,-this view would meet with ready assent from Coleridge, conscious as he was that to the eyes of the majority of mankind the universe appeared 'merely a mass of little things'; but when Kant spoke of the phenomenal world, with which alone the understanding is concerned, as an alien material whose ultimate source is impenetrable to any function of consciousness, Coleridge must have withheld his assent. The divorce of subject and object, spirit and nature (even in the modified sense that we can have no absolute assurance of their unity), could not but appear to him a contradiction of his deepest intuitions. Thus while agreeing with Kant that the mere intellect cannot grasp the supersensuous, he could not follow him in asserting that the supersensuous cannot be given in experience. The facts of his own conscious life told another tale: and the task still remained for him, of constructing a philosophy with which these facts were in harmony.

All that we can know (says Kant) is the world of phenomena. Hence the Ideas of Reason (God, freedom, and immortality) can never be objects of Knowledge. Moreover, even by reason itself these Ideas are not grasped as realities they remain regulative ideas, hypotheses essential indeed to our construction of experience, yet still hypotheses. But to Coleridge the Ideas are realities : and what he chooses to call the Reason is the organ of our insight into them.

Kant's distrust of the world of sense has its counterpart

1 Biog. Lit. i. 98.

in his distrust of the emotional side of our nature, which, while it leads him to purge the moral consciousness of all elements of inclination, renders it impossible for him to do full justice to the testimony of aesthetic experience. He could not, consistently with his analysis of experience and the human mind, assign a high value to the deliverances of the imagination. If the emotional tinge in moral and religious enthusiasm invalidates their purity, so the imaginative interpretation of nature is more liable to error than the purely scientific. In seeming to pierce to the truth of things, it is in fact creating, out of a world already subjective, one more subjective still. Doubtless Kant would fain have seen, in the sense of certitude which such experiences bring, a pledge of the ultimate unity of sense and spirit: but this would have been to abandon his fundamental position. Thus while he analyses the characteristics of aesthetic consciousness with extraordinary sympathy and power of insight, he is obliged to deny to it the most significant characteristic of all-that of objectivity. But the faith in this objectivity was a prime article of Coleridge's poetic, and therefore of his philosophic, creed.

It is evident, then, that Coleridge's conception of the imagination was not fundamentally affected by his study of Kant. Yet in one direction it was probably enlarged by that study. Hitherto Coleridge had thought of this faculty as a distinct poetic faculty, a gift granted in large measure only to a few minds, and perhaps entirely denied to some. But in Kant he found assigned to it a universal function in the construction of experience—that of mediating between the data of sense and the forms of the understanding. And Kant's analysis of the strictly aesthetic activity of the imagination is based on his conception of this universal function: for, according to him, it is the recognition of the harmony of the faculties of know