and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding
to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life.
Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of its
life become more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of
nature. Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refines
itself into intellect. Man's physical organism is played upon not only
by the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance,
the vibration of long-past acts reaching him in the midst of the new
order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these
conditions he is still not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the
medium of language and current ideas. It seems as if the most opposite
statements about him were alike true: he is so receptive, all the
influences of nature and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so
that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray
word, or glance, or touch. It is the truth of these relations that
experience [68] gives us, not the truth of eternal outlines ascertained
once for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked
conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change--and bids us,
by a constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of
analysis, to make what we can of these. To the intellect, the critical
spirit, just these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything
else. What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of
expression. It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfy
the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the
colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhromatos,
askhematistos, anaphes+--that colourless, formless, intangible,
being--Plato put so high? For the true illustration of the speculative
temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding,
individuality, but one such as Goethe, to whom every moment of life
brought its contribution of experimental, individual knowledge; by whom
no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.

Now the literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against
the relative spirit. With a strong native bent towards the tracking of
all questions, critical or practical, to first principles, he is ever
restlessly scheming to "apprehend the absolute," to affirm i