n, have become dead to religion.
How often do we have to look for some feature of the ancient religious
life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern artist or philosopher!
For those who have passed out of Christianity, perhaps its most
precious souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.
Where shall we look for this ideal? In Spinoza; or perhaps in Bentham
or in Austin.

Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism--as, for
instance, Theodore Parker--have rejected more or less entirely the
dogmas of the Church. Coleridge's instinct is truer than theirs; the
two classes of principles are logically connected. It was in defence
of the dogmas of the Church that Coleridge elaborated his unhappy
crotchet of the diversity of the reason from the understanding. The
weakness of these dogmas had ever been, not so much a failure of the
authority of Scripture or tradition in their favour, as their conflict
with the reason that they were words rather than conceptions. That
analysis of words and conceptions which in modern philosophy has been
a principle of continual rejuvenescence with Descartes and Berkeley,
as well as with Bacon and Locke, had desolated the field of scholastic
theology. It is the rationality of the dogmas of that theology that
Coleridge had a taste for proving.

Of course they conflicted with the understanding, with the common
daylight of the mind, but then might there not be some mental faculty
higher than the understanding? The history of philosophy supplied many
authorities for this opinion. Then, according to the 'philosophy of
nature', science and art are both grounded upon the 'ideas' of genius,
which are a kind of intuition, which are their own evidence. Again,
this philosophy was always saying the ideas of the mind must be true,
must correspond to reality; and what an aid to faith is that, if one
is not too nice in distinguishing between ideas and mere convictions,
or prejudices, or habitual views, or safe opinions! Kant also had
made a distinction between the reason and the understanding. True,
this harsh division of mental faculties is exactly what is most
sterile in Kant, the essential tendency of the German school of
thought being to show that the mind always acts _en masse_. Kant had
defined two senses of reason as opposed to the understanding. First,
there was the 'speculative reason', with its 'three categories of
totality', God, the soul, and the universe--three mental fo