Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/210

200 sense, is a tonic to the mind; it quickens the activity of thought and facilitates its processes because it assumes the mastery of the universe, and makes reality pliable to its hand. This may or may not be lawful, but it generates a feeling of command and of liberty highly favorable to spiritual development. To some men impressionable on that side of their nature Coleridge was the giver of this freedom, and this has been the case especially with members of the clergy who are closely attached to theological dogma. Such persons found in Coleridge's mind the rare and curious coexistence of fixed dogma with incessant speculation: he afforded the sense of untrammeled investigation without once disturbing the certainty of the pre-judged cause. This phantom of liberalism was a very quieting tutelar genius to some educated men, who thus kept up a semblance of thinking ; but influence of this sort is necessarily transitory. His Scriptural renderings of philosophy give place to those of other theologians, who rationalize on new grounds of scientific knowledge instead of German metaphysics, while the stimulation that was furnished by his idealism may be more simply and directly derived from less