ted inwardness is barren. Here, too, Coleridge's thoughts
require to be thawed, to be set in motion. He is admirable in the
detection, the analysis, and statement of a few of the highest general
laws of art-production. But he withdraws us too far from what we can
see, hear, and feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is
the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph of the senses
and the emotions; and the senses and the emotions must not be cheated
of their triumph after all. That strange and beautiful psychology
which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies, has not sufficient
corporeity. Again, one feels that the discussion about Hartley,
meeting us in the way, throws a tone of insecurity over the critical
theory which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for the terms in
which that criticism is expressed, the associations of one side in a
metaphysical controversy.

The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge's theological opinions have
been exaggerated through an illusion, which has arisen from the
occasional form in which they have reached us. Criticism, then, has to
methodize and focus them. They may be arranged under three heads; the
general principles of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the
interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second,
Coleridge ranks as a Conservative thinker; but his principles of
Scriptural interpretation resemble Lessing's; they entitle him to be
regarded as the founder of the modern liberal school of English
theology. By supernaturalism is meant the theory of a divine person in
immediate communication with the human mind, dealing with it out of
that order of nature which includes man's body and his ordinary trains
of thought, according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums up in
the doctrines of 'grace' and 'sin'. Of this supernaturalism, the _Aids
to Reflection_ attempts to give a metaphysical proof. The first
necessity of the argument is to prove that religion, with its supposed
experiences of grace and sin, and the realities of a world above the
world of sense, is the fulfilment of the constitution of every man,
or, in the language of the 'philosophy of nature', is part of the
'idea' of man; so that, when those experiences are absent, all the
rest of his nature is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment, the
construction and working of which we cannot surmise. According to
Schelling's principle, the explanation of every phase of life is t