the rise of a new school of imaginative art and poetry, in livelier sympathy with the more spiritual side of nature, in eager and often exaggerated ideals of what might be possible to humanity.  Lastly, there remains to notice the very important influence exercised upon English thought by Coleridge, not only by the force of his own somewhat mystic temperament, but by his familiarity with such writers as Kant, Lessing, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, who had studied far more profoundly than any English philosophers or theologians, the relation of man’s higher understanding to matters not cognisable by the ordinary powers of human reason.

But it is time to enter somewhat further into detail on some of the points briefly suggested.  Reference was made to the Cambridge Platonists, for although they belong to the history of the seventeenth century, some of their opinions bear too directly on the subject to be entirely passed over.  Moreover, Cudworth’s ‘Immutable Morality’ was not published till 1731, at which time it had direct reference to the controversies excited by Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees.’  The popularity also of Henry More’s writings continued into the century after his death, and a new edition of his ‘Discourse of Enthusiasm’ appeared almost simultaneously with writings of Lord Shaftesbury, Dr. Hickes, and others upon the same subject.  It might have been well if the works of such men as H. More and Cudworth, J. Smith and Norris, had made a deeper impression on eighteenth-century thought.  Their exalted but restrained mysticism and their lofty system of morality was the very corrective which the tone of the age most needed.  And it might have been remembered to great advantage, that the doctrine of an inner light, far from being only the characteristic tenet of the fanatical disciples of Fox and Muenzer, had been held in a modified sense by men who, in the preceding generation, had been the glory of the English Church—­a band of men conspicuous for the highest culture, the most profound learning, the most earnest piety, the most kindly tolerance.  Cudworth, at all events, held this view.  Engaged as he was, during a lengthened period of intellectual activity, in combating a philosophical system which, alike in theology, morals, and politics, appeared to him to sap the foundations of every higher principle in human nature, he was led by the whole tenour of his mind to dwell upon the existence in the soul of perceptions not derivable from the senses, and to expatiate on the immutable distinctions of right and wrong.  Goodness, freed from all debasing associations of interest and expedience, such as Hobbes sought to attach to it, was the same, he was well assured, as it had existed from all eternity in the mind of God.  To a mind much occupied in such reflections, and nurtured in the sublime thoughts of Plato, the doctrine of an inner light naturally commended itself.  All goodness of which man is capable is a participation of the Divine essence—­an