Let any one not overawed by sounding reputations, examine the _Aids to Reflection_,--this work which gives a claim to the sovereignty of modern English thought,--the characteristic that will chiefly strike him is the predominance of _hard writing_, which at first wears the appearance, and is found to be the melancholy substitute, of _hard thinking_. On closer examination, he will be surprised to find how much space is wasted in verbal quibbles, which the author in vain endeavours to raise into importance; and how often the quotations from Leighton, dignified with the name of aphorisms, are such as any page of any sermon would have supplied him with. Amidst this jumble of crude metaphysics and distorted theology, there is from time to time an admirable observation admirably expressed; and there is also from time to time an absurdity so flagrant, that it requires all the author's skill of composition to redeem it from the charge of utter nonsense. At the time when Coleridge wrote, what are known especially as German metaphysics had hardly reached our shores. He had studied them, or, like every active mind, had rather studied _on_ them. They had given an impulse and direction to his own trains of thought; and if Coleridge had been capable of a continuous application, and a complete execution of any one work, he might have introduced a body of metaphysics into this country which, though due in its origin to German thinkers, would still have been justly entitled his own. But for this continuous labour he was not disposed: we have, therefore, a mere dim broken outline of a system of philosophy (intelligible only to those who have studied that system in other works) applied, in a very strange manner, to the dogmatic tenets of theology. This forms the basis of the _Aids to Reflection_; and very much of aid or assistance it must bring! We venture to say, that no one unacquainted, from any other source, with the speculations of Kant or Schelling,--let him give what attention, or bring what brains he may to his task,--can understand the refracted and partial representation of their tenets which Coleridge occasionally gives. Take, for instance, a long note, which every reader of the book must remember, upon _Thesis_ and _Antithesis_, and _Punctum Indifferens_. With all the assistance of scholastic and geometrical terms, and that illustration abruptly enough introduced of "sulphuretted hydrogen," the reader, we are persuaded, if he comes fresh to the subject, must be utterly at a loss for a meaning. We have diagram and tabular view, and algebraic signs, and chemical illustration, and all the paraphernalia of a most desperate development of thought, and not one sentence of lucid explanation.