used any distinct or steady daylight. His
favourite position, for example, of the distinction between the Reason
and the Understanding is always coming up and being enforced with the
strongest asseverations of its importance. That he had adopted it more
or less from Kant is obvious, though I imagine it to be also obvious
that he did not clearly understand his authority.[635] To what,
precisely, it amounts is also unintelligible to me. Somehow or other,
it implies that the mind can rise into transcendental regions, and,
leaving grovelling Utilitarians and the like to the conduct of the
understanding in matters of practical expediency, can perceive that
the universe is in some way evolved from the pure reason, and the mind
capable of ideas which correspond to stages of the evolution. How this
leads to the conclusions that the Christian doctrines of the Logos and
the Trinity are embodiments of pure philosophy is a problem upon which
I need not touch. When we have called Coleridge a mystic, with flashes
of keen insight into the weakness of the opposite theory, I do not see
how we are to get much further, or attribute to him any articulate and
definite scheme.

Hopelessly unsystematic as Coleridge may have been, his significance
in regard to the Utilitarians is noteworthy. It is indicated in a
famous article which J. S. Mill contributed to the _Westminster
Review_ in March 1840.[636] Mill's concessions to Coleridge rather
scandalised the faithful; and it is enough to observe here that it
marks the apogee of Mill's Benthamism. Influences, of which I shall
have to speak, had led him to regard his old creed as imperfect, and
to assent to great part of Coleridge's doctrine. Mill does not discuss
the metaphysical or theological views of the opposite school, though
he briefly intimates his dissent. But it is interesting to observe how
Coleridge impressed a disciple of Bentham. The 'Germano-Coleridgian
doctrine,' says Mill, was a reaction against the philosophy of the
eighteenth century: 'ontological,' 'conservative,' 'religious,'
'concrete and historical,' and finally 'poetical,' because the other
was 'experimental,' 'innovative,' 'infidel,' 'abstract and
metaphysical,' and 'matter-of-fact and prosaic.' Yet the two
approximate, and each helps to restore the balance and comes a little
nearer to a final equilibrium. The error of the French philosophers
had been their negative and purely critical tendency. They had thought
that it w