t fugitive part of his work. Let
us take this first; here we shall most clearly apprehend his main
principle.

What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On the whole it may be
described as an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of
fixed laws--to show that the creative activity of genius and the
simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws
of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own unsuccess in dealing
with the greater works of art, has sometimes made too much of those
dark and capricious suggestions of genius which even the intellect
possessed by them is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to
their half-sacred character to look for no link between the process by
which they were produced and the slighter processes of the mind.
Coleridge assumes that the highest phases of thought must be more, not
less, than the lower, subjects of law.

With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines
Schelling's 'Philosophy of Nature' into a theory of art. 'Es giebt
kein Plagiat in der Philosophie' says Heine, alluding to the charge
brought against Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno, and
certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Schelling is of far
earlier origin than the Renaissance. Schellingism, the 'Philosophy of
Nature', is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought; it
embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of
conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may
be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are
two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which appear to bear
the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which
regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing
mind from nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the
pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which regards nature itself
as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, but
vaster than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications of mind
everywhere, dwelling exclusively in its observations on that which is
general or formal, on that which modern criticism regards as the
modification of things by the mind of the observer, adopts the latter,
or pantheistic way, through the influence of the previous mythological
period. Mythology begins in the early necessities of language, of
which it is a kind of accident. But at a later per