t the man of
science--the 'fingering slave' who would 'peep and botanise upon his
mother's grave'--are one version of his feeling. The whole scientific
method tended to materialism and atomism; to a breaking up of the
world into disconnected atoms, and losing the life in dissecting the
machinery. His protest is embodied in the pantheism of the noble lines
on Tintern Abbey, and his method of answering might be divined from
the ode on the 'Intimations of Immortality.' Somehow or other the
world represents a spiritual and rational unity, not a mere chaos of
disconnected atoms and fragments. We 'see into the heart of things'
when we trust to our emotions and hold by the instincts, clearly
manifested in childhood, but clouded and overwhelmed in our later
struggles with the world. The essential thing is the cultivation of
our 'moral being,' the careful preservation and assimilation of the
stern sense of duty, which alone makes life bearable and gives a
meaning to the universe.

Wordsworth, it is plain, was at the very opposite pole from the
Utilitarians. He came to consider that their whole method meant the
dissolution of all that was most vitally sacred, and to hold that the
revolution had attracted his sympathies on false pretences. Yet it is
obvious that, however great the stimulus which he exerted, and however
lofty his highest flights of poetry, he had no distinct theory to
offer. His doctrine undoubtedly was congenial to certain philosophical
views, but was not itself an articulate philosophy. He appeals to
instincts and emotions, not to any definite theory. In a remarkable
letter, Coleridge told Wordsworth why he was disappointed with the
_Excursion_.[634] He had hoped that it would be the 'first and only
true philosophical poem in existence.' Wordsworth was to have started
by exposing the 'sandy sophisms of Locke,' and after exploding Pope's
_Essay on Man_, and showing the vanity of (Erasmus) Darwin's belief in
an 'ourang-outang state,' and explaining the fall of man and the
'scheme of redemption,' to have concluded by 'a grand didactic swell
on the identity of a true philosophy with true religion.' He would
show how life and intelligence were to be substituted for the
'philosophy of mechanism.' Facts would be elevated into theory, theory
into laws, and laws into living and intelligent powers--true idealism
necessarily perfecting itself in realism, and realism refining itself
into idealism.'

The programme was a la