contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.

These are strange words for an English statesman to address to the English public in the year 1790; the thought they embody seems more in keeping with its surroundings when we hear it thundered out anew forty years later by the raw Scotch preacher-philosopher in the chapter he calls “Organic Filaments” in his odd but strangely stirring mystical rhapsody, Sartor Resartus.

It is on this belief of oneness, this interrelationship and interdependence that all Burke’s deepest practical wisdom is based.  It is on this he makes his appeal for high principle and noble example to the great families with hereditary trusts and fortunes, who, he says, he looks on as the great oaks that shade a country and perpetuate their benefits from generation to generation.

This imaginative belief in the reality of a central spiritual life is always accompanied, whether definitely expressed or not, with a belief in the value of particulars, of the individual, as opposed to general statements and abstract philosophy.  The mystic, who believes in an inward moulding spirit, necessarily believes that all reforms must come from within, and that, as Burke points out in the Present Discontents, good government depends not upon laws but upon individuals.  Blake, in a characteristic phrase, says:  “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the hypocrite, flatterer, and scoundrel.”  This sums up the essence of the social philosophy of these three thinkers, as seen by Burke’s insistence on the value of concrete details in Coleridge’s use of them in his Lay Sermon, and in Carlyle’s belief in the importance of the single individual life in history.

It is easy to see that Coleridge’s attitude of mind and the main lines of his philosophy were mystical.  From early years, as we know from Lamb, he was steeped in the writings of the Neo-platonists and these, together with Boehme, in whom he was much interested, and Schelling, strengthened a type of belief already natural to him.

In spite of his devotion to the doctrines of Hartley, it is clear from his poetry and letters, that Coleridge very early had doubts concerning the adequacy of the intellect as an instrument for arriving at truth, and that at the same time the conviction was slowly gaining ground with him that an act of the will is necessary in order to bring man into contact with reality.  Coleridge believed in a Spirit of the universe with which man could come into contact, both directly by desire, and also mediately through the forms and images of nature, and in the Religious Musings (1794) we get very early a statement of this mystical belief.