iod its essence
changes; it becomes what it was not at its birth, the servant of a
genuine poetic interest, a kind of _vivification_ of nature. Played
upon by those accidents of language, the Greek mind becomes possessed
by the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to
the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an
abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the conception which gives a
unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the
substance of the Hegelian formula: 'Was ist, das ist vernuenftig; was
vernuenftig ist, das ist'--'Whatever is, is according to reason;
whatever is according to reason, that is.' A science of which that
could be the formula is still but an intellectual aspiration; the
formula of true science is different. Experience, which has gradually
saddened the earth's colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it
some blithe and debonair presence, has moderated our demands upon
science. The positive method makes very little account of marks of
intelligence in nature; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that
those incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it
absorbs them in the simpler conception of law. But the suspicion of a
mind latent in nature, struggling for release and intercourse with the
intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a
certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive periods
by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the thought has
seemed paler and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency and
sharpness of outline of other and more positive forms of knowledge.
Still, wherever a speculative instinct has been united with extreme
inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob Boehme, there the old Greek
conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and
sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself, driven from
'life in thought and sensation' to life in thought only, feels in that
dark London school a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely in
him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, and has translated the
hymns of Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Schelling the
flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the
ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be
attained, not by observation, analysis, generalization, but by the
evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort