nfounded with it, and
denounced under the same name.

I cannot pretend to discuss the subject fully in a mere note, even if I
were otherwise competent to do it. But one or two points may be noticed,
as likely to assist the inquiry, wherever it is worthily entered on.

1st. It is important to bear in mind the distinction which Coleridge
enforces so earnestly between the understanding and the reason. I do not
know whether Mr. Gladstone, in the passage quoted above, uses the word
"understanding" as synonymous with reason, or in that stricter sense in
which Coleridge employs it. But the writer of the Tract seems to allude
to the stricter sense, when he calls it a characteristic of rationalism
"to base its system upon personal experience, on the evidence of sense."
If this be the case, then it would seem that rationalism is the
appealing to the decision of the understanding in points where the
decision properly belongs not to the understanding, but to the reason.
This is a great fault, and one to which all persons who belong to the
sensualist school in philosophy, as opposed to the idealist school,
would be more or less addicted. But then, this fault consists not in an
over-estimating of man's intellectual nature generally, but in the
exalting one part of it unduly, to the injury of another part; in
deferring to the understanding, rather than to the reason.

2d. Faith and reason are often invidiously contrasted with each other,
as if they were commonly described in Scripture as antagonists; whereas
faith is more properly opposed to sight, or to lust, being, in fact, a
very high exercise of the pure reason; inasmuch as we believe truths
which our senses do not teach us, and which our passions would have us,
therefore, reject, because those truths are taught by Him in whom reason
recognises its own author, and the infallible source of all truth.

3d. It were better to oppose reason to passion than to faith; for it may
be safely said, that he who neglects his reason, so far as he does
neglect it, does not lead a life of faith afterwards, but a life of
passion. He does not draw nearer to God, but to the brutes, or rather to
the devils; for his passions cannot be the mere instinctive appetites of
the brute, but derive from the wreck of his intellectual powers, which
he cannot utterly destroy, just so much of a higher nature that they are
sins, and not instincts, belonging to the malignity of diabolic nature,
rather than to the