aught the conservative to
think, and thus opened the eyes of the aristocrats without exciting their
fears or unduly arousing their wrath.

Self-preservation prompts men to move in the line of least resistance. And
that any man should ever have put his safety in peril by questioning the
authority of those able and ready to confiscate his property and take away
his life is very strange. Such a person must belong to one of two types.
He must be either a revolutionist--one who would supplant existing
authority with his own, thus knowingly and willingly hazarding all--or he
is an innocent, indiscreet individual, absolutely devoid of all interest
in the main chance.

Coleridge belonged to the last-mentioned type. Genius needs a keeper. Here
was a man so absorbed in abstract thought, so intent on attaining high and
holy truth, that he neglected his friends, neglected his family, neglected
himself until his body refused to obey the helm. It is easy to find fault
with such a man, but to refuse to grant an admiring recognition of his
worth, on account of what he was not, is an error, pardonable only to the
rude, crude and vulgar. The cultivated mind sees the good and fixes
attention on that.

Coleridge formulated no system, solved no complex problems, made no
brilliant discoveries. But his habit of analysis enriched the world
beyond power to compute. He taught men to think and separate truth from
error. He was not popular, for he did not adapt himself to the many. His
business was to teach teachers--he conducted a Normal School, and taught
teachers how to teach. Coleridge went to the very bottom of a subject, and
his subtle mind refused to take anything for granted. He approached every
proposition with an unprejudiced mind. In his "Aids to Reflection," he
says, "He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed
by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and then end in
loving himself better than all."

The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to
bolster his opinion. Every observer must have noticed the tenuous, cobweb
quality of reasons that are deemed sufficient to the person who thinks he
knows, or whose interests lie in a certain direction. The limitations of
men seem to make it necessary that pure truth should come to us through
men who are stripped for eternity. Kant, the villager who never traveled
more than a day's walk from his birthplace, and Coleridge, the