o be
sought in that next above it. This axiom is applied to three supposed
stages of man's reflective life: Prudence, Morality, Religion.
Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham's
'enlightened principle of self-preservation', is, he says, an
inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is
expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless
prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a
spiritual world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative
language, 'like the main feeder into some majestic lake, rich with
hidden springs of its own, it flows into, and becomes one with, the
spiritual life.' A spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human
nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts which enable
one to live on from day to day, is part of the 'idea' of man.

The second necessity of the argument is to prove that 'the idea',
according to the principle of the 'philosophy of nature', is an
infallible index of the actual condition of the world without us. Here
Coleridge introduces an analogy:

In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which
the component parts are so far from explaining, that they
necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of
their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at
all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each
union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been
customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any
other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose
to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves,
petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent
power or principle in the seed which existed before a single
particle of the matters that constitute the size and
visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the
seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent
unity must here, too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with
the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid
of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a
wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of
various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many
chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.

_Aids to Reflecti