of _all_, the positions of pre-eminent importance and interest more than vital; a series which, taken in harmonious counterpart to a prior series drawn from _interior_ history (the history of _man_), the documents of which are to be found only in the archives of each individual's own consciousness, will form a complete _whole_--a system of evidence, consisting of two correspondent worlds, as it were, correlative and mutually potentiating, yet each integral and self-subsistent--having the same correlation, as the geometry and the observations, or the metaphysics and the physics, of astronomy. If I can thus demonstrate the truth of the doctrine of existence after the present life, it is not improbable that some rays of light may fall on the question, what _state_ of existence it may be reasonably supposed to be? At all events, we shall, I trust, be enabled to determine negatively, what it can _not_ be for _any_; and _for whom_ this or that, which does not appear universally precluded, is yet _for them_ precluded. In plainer words, what can _not_ be, universally speaking; second, what may be; third, what the differences may be for different individuals, within the limits prescribed in No. 2; fourth, what scheme of embodied representation of the future state (our _reason_ not forbidding the same) is recommended by the truest analogies; and, fifth, what scheme it is best to combine with our belief of a hereafter, as most conducive to the growth and cultivation of our collective faculties in this life, or of each in the order of its comparative worth, value, and permanence. This I must defer to another letter, for I cannot let another post pass by, without your knowing that we are all thinking of and loving you. S. T. COLERIDGE. T. Allsop, Esq. LETTER 183. TO ALLSOP Highgate, Oct. 11th, 1820. My dear Friend, You will think it childish in me, and more savouring of a jealous boarding-school miss than a friend and a philosopher, when I confess that the "with great respect, your obliged and grateful...," gave me pain. But I did not return from Mr. Cooper's, at whose house we all dined, till near midnight, and did not open the packet till this morning after getting out of bed; and this you know is the hour in which the cat-organ of an irritable viscerage is substituted for the brain as the mind's instrument.