er who had more closely approximated the truth.
His mind must have undergone a total revolution when he could write such
words as these: "Spite of all the superior airs of the
_Natur-Philosophie_, I confess that in the perusal of Kant I breathe the
air of good sense and logical understanding with the light of reason
shining in it and through it; while in the Physics of Schelling I am
amused with happy conjectures, and in his Theology I am bewildered by
positions which, in their first sense, are transcendental
(_ueberfliegend_), and in their literal sense scandalous."[145]

Coleridge became firmly settled in theistic faith. Occupying that as his
final position, he is destined to wield a great salutary power over
English thought. Dr. Shedd, in estimating the probable future influence
of his theistic system, says: "Now as the defender and interpreter of
this decidedly and profoundly theistic system of philosophy, we regard
the works of Coleridge as of great and growing worth, in the present
state of the educated and thinking world. It is not to be disguised that
Pantheism is the most formidable opponent which truth has to encounter
in the cultivated and reflecting classes. We do not here allude to the
formal reception and logical defense of the system, so much as to that
pantheistic way of thinking, which is unconsciously stealing into the
lighter and more imaginative species of modern literature, and from them
is passing over into the principles and opinions of men at large. This
popularized Naturalism--this Naturalism of polite literature and of
literary society--is seen in the lack of that depth and strength of
tone, and that heartiness and robustness of temper, which characterize a
mind into which the personality of God, and the responsibility of man
cut sharply, and which does not cowardly shrink from a severe and
salutary moral consciousness.... The intensely theistic character of the
philosophy of Coleridge is rooted and grounded in the Personal and the
Spiritual, and not in the least in the Impersonal and the Natural.
Drawing in the outset, as we have remarked above, a distinct and broad
line between these two realms, it keeps them apart from each other, by
affirming a difference in essence, and steadfastly resists any and every
attempt to amalgamate them into one sole substance. The doctrine of
creation, and not of emanation or of modification, is the doctrine by
which it constructs its theory of the Universe, and