isting body and a proof, as
against Bentham and Adam Smith, of the advantages of an endowed class
for the cultivation and diffusion of learning. Coleridge, moreover,
though he objected to the Reform Bill, showed himself a better
reformer than Lord John Russell. He admitted what the Whigs refused to
see, the necessity of diminishing the weight of the landowner
interest. Landowners were not to be ultimate sources of power, but to
represent one factor in a reasoned system. In short, by admitting that
all social arrangements in some sense were embodiments of reason, he
admitted that they must also be made to conform to reason.

Coleridge and Bentham, then, are not really enemies but allies, and
they wield powers which are 'opposite poles of one great force of
progression.'[640] The question, however, remains, how the philosophy
of each leader is really connected with his practical conclusions.
Mill's view would apparently be that Coleridge somehow managed to
correct the errors or fill the gaps of the Utilitarian system--a very
necessary task, as Mill admits--while Coleridge would have held that
those errors were the inevitable fruit of the whole empirical system
of thought. The Reason must be restored to its rightful supremacy over
the Understanding, which had been working its wicked will since the
days of Locke and eighteenth century. The problem is a wide one. I
must be content to remark the inevitable antithesis. Whether enemies
or allies, the Utilitarians and their antagonists were separated by a
gulf which could not be bridged for the time. The men of
common-sense, who had no philosophy at all, were shocked by the
immediate practical applications of Utilitarianism, its hostility to
the old order which they loved, its apparent helplessness in social
questions, its relegation of all progress to the conflict of selfish
interests, its indifference to all the virtues associated with
patriotism and local ties. By more reflective minds, it was condemned
as robbing the world of its poetry, stifling the religious emotions,
and even quenching sentiment in general. The few who wished for a
philosophy found the root of its errors in the assumptions which
reduced the world to a chaos of atoms, outwardly connected and
combined into mere dead mechanism. The world, for the poet and the
philosopher alike, must be not a congeries of separate things, but in
some sense a product of reason. Thought, not fact, must be the
ultimate reality.