the inner feelings or in meditations
on life, as a set of problems to be explained by the heart. Elsewhere it
lifts the man of science above the grovelling idea that discoveries must
be sought solely for the purpose of utility. Again, transferring its
perception of the operation of spirit to the world of nature, it not
unfrequently attributes a soul thereto, and induces a subtle pantheism.
Sometimes too by a singular reaction it has a tendency, by the moral
earnestness which it stimulates, to depress intellectual speculation, and
to wear the appearance of fostering the utilitarianism which it combats.

Such is the central principle which characterises our literature, and
which, through the diffusion of reading, has moulded the public judgment,
and, operating in every department of educated thought, has even altered
the form in which unbelief expresses itself.

Probably the successive steps of the growth of this subjective tendency in
literature might admit of easy statement. The meditative school of poetry,
which flourished early in the century(898) among a few refined minds at
the English lakes; which loved to ponder mystically on nature or on the
spiritual world, or to catch the thought excited in the mind by nature,
and follow the series of thoughts which the law of mental association
suggested,(899) was one means of creating a subjective and spiritual taste
among the youth of the generation which succeeded.

Another cause was found in the philosophy which arose. The years following
the general declaration of peace, while the public attention was directed
to the political reforms which were consummated in the Reform act, were
marked by the thorough investigation of the first principles of every
branch of knowledge. Two minds of that period have, more than any other,
affected the succeeding generation; the one a utilitarian philosopher, the
other an intuitional.

Both alike carried out the system which Descartes and Bacon had
inaugurated, of finding the standard of truth in the analysis of the
powers of the human understanding. But Bentham criticised to destroy the
past; Coleridge to rebuild it. The one asked, Is a doctrine true? The
other asked, what men had meant by it who had thought it so?(900) The one
overlooked the truth previously known; the other too boldly strove to
rebuild it from his own consciousness, after surrendering the old proofs
of it. The one, with the practical spirit of the Englishman, looked up