men whom Coleridge detested, or seemed to
detest--Paley, Sir Sidney Smith, Lord Hutchinson, (the last Lord
Donoughmore,) and Cuvier. To Paley it might seem as if his antipathy
had been purely philosophic; but we believe that partly it was
personal; and it tallies with this belief, that, in his earliest
political tracts, Coleridge charged the archdeacon repeatedly with his
own joke, as if it had been a serious saying, viz.--"that he could not
afford to keep a conscience;" such luxuries, like a carriage, for
instance, being obviously beyond the finances of poor men.

With respect to the philosophic question between the parties, as to
the grounds of moral election, we hope it is no treason to suggest
that both were perhaps in error. Against Paley, it occurs at once that
he himself would not have made consequences the _practical_ test in
valuing the morality of an act, since these can very seldom be traced
at all up to the final stages, and in the earliest stages are
exceedingly different under different circumstances; so that the same
act, tried by its consequences, would bear a fluctuating appreciation.
This could not have been Paley's _revised_ meaning. Consequently, had
he been pressed by opposition, it would have come out, that by _test_
he meant only _speculative_ test: a very harmless doctrine certainly,
but useless and impertinent to any purpose of his system. The reader
may catch our meaning in the following illustration. It is a matter of
general belief, that happiness, upon the whole, follows in a higher
degree from constant integrity, than from the closest attention to
self-interest. Now happiness is one of those consequences which Paley
meant by final or remotest. But we could never use this idea as an
exponent of integrity, or interchangeable criterion, because happiness
cannot be ascertained or appreciated except upon long tracts of time,
whereas the particular act of integrity depends continually upon the
election of the moment. No man, therefore, could venture to lay down
as a rule, Do what makes you happy; use this as your test of actions,
satisfied that in that case always you will do the thing which is
right. For he cannot discern independently what _will_ make him happy;
and he must decide on the spot. The use of the _nexus_ between
morality and happiness must therefore be inverted; it is not practical
or prospective, but simply retrospective; and in that form it says no
more than the good old rules hal