Page:Philosophical Review Volume 28.djvu/159



ESLIE STEPHEN has expressed surprise, felt probably by nearly all readers of Coleridge, at the disproportion between the amount of his "definite services to philosophy and the effect which he certainly produced upon some of the ablest of his contemporaries." That a man who wrote no systematic treatise, whose thought was contained in such unpromising philosophic forms as a history of his literary life and opinions, a volume of religious aphorisms, a popular literary magazine obviously foredoomed to unpopularity and death, some lay sermons, and endless conversations, should have been one of the two most stimulating English thinkers in the early nineteenth century, "the anchor of the intellect of England" in that unsettled period, is indeed striking.

Not so striking and yet, perhaps, not altogether a matter of course, is the fact that so little has been done, especially from the side of philosophy, to define the exact nature of his contribution. The best detailed study is that of F. J. A. Hort in his Cambridge Essays, 1856, but this was before much of the necessary material was available. Mill's Essay is appreciative but not detailed. Benn's account in his History of Rationalism is very detailed but completely unappreciative. Seth's notice in his English Philosophers, is, in the main, just, but not adequate. Shawcross's Introduction to his Oxford Edition of the Biographia Literaria is beyond criticism, but it is concerned primarily with the esthetic theory. There would seem to be a place, therefore, for a more thorough examination of his thought than has yet been made from the point of view of philosophy.

Before such an examination can be made, however, there is need for a preliminary study of origins; for the problem of determining just what his contribution was, is, in the case of a thinker