ne another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many
of Coleridge's sayings about half truths; and Goethe's device,
"many-sidedness," was one which I would most willingly, at this period,
have taken for mine.

The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political
thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school
in France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their
writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their
speculations. They had not yet dressed out their philosophy as a
religion, nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. They were
just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property. I was
by no means prepared to go with them even this length; but I was greatly
struck with the connected view which they for the first time presented
to me, of the natural order of human progress; and especially with their
division of all history into organic periods and critical periods.
During the organic periods (they said) mankind accept with firm
conviction some positive creed, claiming jurisdiction over all their
actions, and containing more or less of truth and adaptation to the
needs of humanity. Under its influence they make all the progress
compatible with the creed, and finally outgrow it; when a period follows
of criticism and negation, in which mankind lose their old convictions
without acquiring any new ones, of a general or authoritative character,
except the conviction that the old are false. The period of Greek and
Roman polytheism, so long as really believed in by instructed Greeks and
Romans, was an organic period, succeeded by the critical or sceptical
period of the Greek philosophers. Another organic period came in with
Christianity. The corresponding critical period began with the
Reformation, has lasted ever since, still lasts, and cannot altogether
cease until a new organic period has been inaugurated by the triumph of
a yet more advanced creed. These ideas, I knew, were not peculiar to the
St. Simonians; on the contrary, they were the general property of
Europe, or at least of Germany and France, but they had never, to my
knowledge, been so completely systematized as by these writers, nor the
distinguishing characteristics of a critical period so powerfully set
forth; for I was not then acquainted with Fichte's _Lectures on the
Characteristics of the Present Age_. In Carlyle, indeed, I found bitter
denunciations of an "a