Accepting Mill's view,it is remarkable that the great error of his own school,which professed to be based upon experience,was the rejection of history;and the great merit of the a priori and 'intuitionist'school was precisely their insistence upon history.To this I shall have to return hereafter.Meanwhile,Mill proceeds to show how Coleridge,by arguing from the 'idea'of church and state,had at least recognised the necessity of showing that political and social institutions must have a sufficient reason,and be justified by something more than mere obstinate prejudice.Men like Pitt and Sir Robert Peel,if they accepted Coleridge's support,would have to alter their whole position,Coleridge's defence of his ideal church was at once the severest satire upon the existing body and a proof,as against Bentham and Adam Smith,of the advantages of an endowed class for the cultivation and diffusion of learning.Coleridge,moreover,though he objected to the Reform Bill,showed himself a better reformer than Lord John Russell.He admitted what the Whigs refused to see,the necessity of diminishing the weight of the landowner interest.Landowners were not to be ultimate sources of power,but to represent one factor in a reasoned system.In short,by admitting that all social arrangements in some sense were embodiments of reason,he admitted that they must also be made to conform to reason.
Coleridge and Bentham,then,are not really enemies but allies,and they wield powers which are 'opposite poles of one great force of progression.'31the question,however,remains,how the philosophy of each leader is really connected with his practical conclusions.Mill's view would apparently be that Coleridge somehow managed to correct the errors or fill the gaps of the Utilitarian system --a very necessary task,as Mill admits --while Coleridge would have held that those errors were the inevitable fruit of the whole empirical system of thought.The Reason must be restored to its rightful supremacy over the Understanding,which had been working its wicked will since the days of Locke and the eighteenth century.The problem is a wide one.Imust be content to remark the inevitable antithesis.Whether enemies or allies,the Utilitarians and their antagonists were separated by a gulf which could not be bridged for the time.The men of common-sense,who had no philosophy at all,were shocked by the immediate practical applications of Utilitarianism,its hostility to the old order which they loved,its apparent helplessness in social questions,its relegation of all progress to the conflict of selfish interests,its indifference to all the virtues associated with patriotism and local ties.By more reflective minds,it was condemned as robbing the world of its poetry,stifling the religious emotions,and even quenching sentiment in general.The few who wished for a philosophy found the root of its errors in the assumptions which reduced the world to a chaos of atoms,outwardly connected and combined into mere dead mechanism.The world,for the poet and the philosopher alike,must be not a congeries of separate things,but in some sense a product of reason.
Thought,not fact,must be the ultimate reality.Unfortunately or otherwise,the poetical sentiment could never get itself translated into philosophical theory.Coleridge's random and discursive hints remained mere hints --a suggestion at best for future thought.Mill's criticism shows how far they could be assimilated by a singularly candid Utilitarian.To him,we see,they represented mainly the truth that his own party,following the general tendency of the eighteenth century,had been led to neglect the vital importance of the constructive elements of society;that they had sacrificed order to progress,and therefore confounded progress with destruction,and failed to perceive the real importance in past times even of the institutions which had become obsolete.Social atomism or individualism,therefore,implied a total misconception of what Mill calls the 'evolution of humanity.'