Wordsworth,it is plain,was at the very opposite pole from the Utilitarians.He came to consider that their whole method meant the dissolution of all that was most vitally sacred,and to hold that the revolution had attracted his sympathies on false pretences.Yet it is obvious that,however great the stimulus which he exerted,and however lofty his highest flights of poetry,he had no distinct theory to offer.His doctrine undoubtedly was congenial to certain philosophical views,but was not itself an articulate philosophy.He appeals to instincts and emotions,not to any definite theory.In a remarkable letter,Coleridge told Wordsworth why he was disappointed with the Excursion .25He had hoped that it would be the 'first and only true philosophical poem in existence.'Wordsworth was to have started by exposing the 'sandy sophisms of Locke,'and after exploding Pope's Essay on Man ,and showing the vanity of (Erasmus)Darwin's belief in an 'ourang-outang state,'and explaining the fall of man and the 'scheme of redemption,'to have concluded by 'a grand didactic swell on the identity of a true philosophy with true religion.'He would show how life and intelligence were to be substituted for the 'philosophy of mechanism.'Facts would be elevated into theory,theory into laws,and laws into living and intelligent powers --true idealism necessarily perfecting itself in realism,and realism refining itself into idealism.'
The programme was a large one.If it represents what Coleridge seriously expected from Wordsworth,it also suggests that he was unconsciously wandering into an exposition of one of the gigantic but constantly shifting schemes of a comprehensive philosophy,which he was always proposing to execute.To try to speak of Coleridge adequately would be hopeless and out of place.I must briefly mention him,because he was undoubtedly the most conspicuous representative of the tendencies opposed to Utilitarianism.The young men who found Bentham exasperating imbibed draughts of mingled poetry and philosophy from Coleridge's monologues at Hampstead.Carlyle has told us,in a famous chapter of his Life of Sterling,what they went out to see:at once a reed shaken by the wind and a great expounder of transcendental truth.The fact that Coleridge exerted a very great influence is undeniable.To define precisely what that influence was is impossible.His writings are a heap of fragments.
He contemplated innumerable schemes for great works,and never got within measurable distance of writing any.He poured himself out indefinitely upon the margins of other men's books;and the piety of disciples has collected a mass of these scattered and incoherent jottings,which announce conclusions without giving the premises,or suggest difficulties without attempting to solve them.He seems to have been almost as industrious as Bentham in writing;but whereas Bentham's fragments could be put together as wholes,Coleridge's are essentially distracted hints of views never really elaborated.
He was always thinking,but seems always to be making a fresh start at any point that strikes him for the moment.Besides all this,there is the painful question of plagiarism,His most coherent exposition (in the Biographia Literaria )is simply appropriated from Schelling,though he ascribes the identity to a 'genial coincidence'of thought,I need make no attempt to make out what Coleridge really thought for himself,and then to try to put his thoughts together,--and indeed hold the attempt to be impossible,The most remarkable thing is the apparent disproportion between Coleridge's definite services to philosophy and the effect which he certainly produced upon some of his ablest contemporaries.That seems to prove that he was really aiming at some important aspect of truth,incapable as he may have been of definitively reaching it.I can only try to give a hint or two as to its general nature.Coleridge,in the first place,was essentially a poet,and,moreover,his poetry was of the type most completely divorced from philosophy.Nobody could say more emphatically that poetry should not be rhymed logic;and his most impressive poems are simply waking dreams,they are spontaneous incarnations of sensuous imagery,which has no need of morals or definite logical schemes.Although he expected Wordsworth to transmute philosophy into poetry,he admitted that the achievement would be unprecedented.Even in Lucretius,he said,what was poetry was not philosophy,and what was philosophy was not poetry.Yet Coleridge's philosophy was essentially the philosophy of a poet,He had,indeed,great dialectical ingenuity --a faculty which may certainly be allied with the highest imagination,though it may involve certain temptations.A poet who has also a mastery of dialectics becomes a mystic in philosophy.Coleridge had,it seems,been attracted by Plotinus in his schooldays.At a later period he had been attracted by Hartley,Berkeley,and Priestley.To a brilliant youth,anxious to be in the van of intellectual progress,they represented the most advanced theories,But there could never be a full sympathy between Coleridge and the forefathers of English empiricism;and he went to Germany partly to study the new philosophy which was beginning to shine --though very feebly and intermittingly --in England,When he had returned he began to read Kant and Schelling,or rather to mix excursions into their books with the miscellaneous inquiries to which his versatile intellect attracted him.