On the great subject of the existence of God, Coleridge appears to us to assume a most unsatisfactory and a somewhat perilous position. To oppose the school of Locke and Paley--far too simple for his taste--he gives a validity to the ambitious subtleties which made Shelley an atheist. The great argument from design, so convincing to us all, he slights,--it is too vulgar and commonplace for his purpose,--and finds his grounds of belief in the _practical reason_ of Kant, (an afterthought of the philosopher of Kœnigsberg, and evidently at issue with the main tenets of his system,) or in certain ontological dogmas, which of all things are most open to dispute. "I hold, then, it is true," he says, "that all the (so-called) demonstrations of a God either prove too little, as that from the order or apparent purpose in nature; or too much, namely, that the world is itself God; or they clandestinely involve the conclusion in the premises, passing off the mere analysis or explication of an assertion for the proof of it--a species of logical legerdemain not unlike that of the jugglers at a fair, who, putting into their mouths what seems to be a walnut, draw out a score yards of ribbon, as in the postulate of a First Cause. And, lastly, in all these demonstrations, the demonstrators presuppose the idea or conception of a God without being able to authenticate it; that is, to give an account whence they obtained it. _For it is clear that the proof first mentioned, and the most natural and convincing of all (the cosmological, I mean, or that from the order of nature), presupposes the ontological; that is, the proof of a God from the necessity and necessary objectivity of the Idea._ If the latter can assure us of a God as an existing reality. the former will go far to prove his power, wisdom, and benevolence. All this I hold. But I also hold, that the truth the hardest to demonstrate, is the one which, of all others, least needs to be demonstrated; that though there may be no conclusive demonstrations of a good, wise, living, and personal God, there are so many convincing reasons for it within and without--a grain of sand sufficing, and a whole universe at hand to echo the decision!--that for every mind not devoid of all reason, and desperately conscience-proof, the truth which it is the least possible to prove, it is little else than impossible not to believe,--only indeed, just so much short of impossible as to leave some room for the will, and the moral election, and thereby to keep it a truth of religion, and the possible subject of a commandment."--(P. 132.)