on._

Nature, that is, works by what we may call 'intact ideas'. It
co-ordinates every part of the crocus to all the other parts; one
stage of its growth to the whole process; and having framed its
organism to assimilate certain external elements, it does not cheat it
of those elements, soil, air, moisture. Well, if the 'idea' of man is
to be intact, he must be enveloped in a supernatural world; and nature
always works by intact ideas. The spiritual life is the highest
development of the idea of man; there must be a supernatural world
corresponding to it.

One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties in drawing
Coleridge's conclusion. To mention only one of them--the argument
looks too like the exploded doctrine of final causes. Of course the
crocus would not live unless the conditions of its life were supplied.
The flower is made for soil, air, moisture, and it has them; just as
man's senses are made for a sensible world, and we have the sensible
world. But give the flower the power of dreaming, nourish it on its
own reveries, put man's wild hunger of heart and susceptibility to
_ennui_ in it, and what indication of the laws of the world without
it, would be afforded by its longing to break its bonds?

In theology people are content with analogies, probabilities, with the
empty schemes of arguments for which the data are still lacking;
arguments, the rejection of which Coleridge tells us implies 'an evil
heart of unbelief', but of which we might as truly say that they
derive all their consistency from the peculiar atmosphere of the mind
which receives them. Such arguments are received in theology because
what chains men to a religion is not its claim on their reason, their
hopes or fears, but the glow it affords to the world, its 'beau
ideal'. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the
spiritual element in life will evaporate also, that we shall have to
accept a life with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness, harshly
cut off from the springs of life in the past. But what is this
spiritual element? It is the passion for inward perfection, with its
sorrows, its aspirations, its joy. These mental states are the
delicacies of the higher morality of the few, of Augustine, of the
author of the 'Imitation', of Francis de Sales; in their essence they
are only the permanent characteristics of the higher life. Augustine,
or the author of the 'Imitation', agreeably to the culture of their
age, had e