as told in his
_Life of Sterling_, the poet's distinction, in the eyes of the younger
churchmen with philosophic interests, lay in his having recovered and
preserved his Christian faith after having passed through periods of
rationalism and Unitarianism, and faced the full results of German
criticism and philosophy. His opinions, however, were at all periods
somewhat mutable, and it would be difficult to state them in any form
that would hold good for the whole even of his later writings. He was,
indeed, too receptive of thought impressions of all kinds to be a
consistent systematizer. As a schoolboy, by his own account, he was for
a time a Voltairean, on the strength of a perusal of the _Philosophical
Dictionary_. At college, as we have seen, he turned Unitarian. From that
position he gradually moved towards pantheism, a way of thought to which
he had shown remarkable leanings when, as a schoolboy, he discoursed of
Neo-Platonism to Charles Lamb, or--if we may trust his
recollection--translated the hymns of Synesius. Early in life, too, he
met with the doctrines of Jacob Behmen, of whom, in the _Biographia
Literaria_, he speaks with affection and gratitude as having given him
vital philosophic guidance. Between pantheism and Unitarianism he seems
to have balanced till his thirty-fifth year, always tending towards the
former in virtue of the recoil from "anthropomorphism" which originally
took him to Unitarianism. In 1796, when he named his first child David
Hartley, but would not have him baptized, he held by the "Christian
materialism" of the writer in question, whom in his _Religious Musings_
he terms "wisest of mortal kind."

When, again, he met Wordsworth in 1797, the two poets freely and
sympathetically discussed Spinoza, for whom Coleridge always retained a
deep admiration; and when in 1798 he gave up his Unitarian preaching, he
named his second child Berkeley, signifying a new allegiance, but still
without accepting Christian rites otherwise than passively. Shortly
afterwards he went to Germany, where he began to study Kant, and was
much captivated by Lessing. In the _Biographia_ he avows that the
writings of Kant "more than any other work, at once invigorated and
disciplined my understanding"; yet the gist of his estimate there is
that Kant left his system undeveloped, as regards his idea of the
Noumenon, for fear of orthodox persecution--a judgment hardly compatible
with any assumption of Kant's Christian ortho