At any rate, Coleridge, as his imaginative impulse flagged, passed into the reflective stage; and, as was natural, his mind dwelt much upon those principles of art which he had already discussed with Wordsworth in his creative period. In saying that Coleridge was primarily a poet, I did not mean to intimate that he was not also a subtle dialectician. There is no real incompatibility between the two faculties. A poetic literature which includes Shakespeare in the past and Browning in the present is of itself a sufficient proof that the keenest and most active logical faculty may be combined with the truest poetical imagination. Coleridge's peculiar service to English criticism consisted, indeed, in a great measure, in a clear appreciation of the true relation between the faculties, a relation, I think, which he never quite managed to express clearly. Poetry, as he says, is properly opposed not to prose but to science. Its aim, he infers, is not to establish truth but to communicate pleasure. The poet presents us with the concrete symbol; the man of science endeavours to analyse and abstract the laws embodied. Shakespeare was certainly not a psychologist in the sense in which Professor Bain is a psychologist. He does not state what are our ultimate faculties, or how they act and react, and determine our conduct; but, so far as he creates typical characters, he gives concrete psychology, or presents the problems upon which psychology has to operate. Therefore, if poetry, as Coleridge says after Milton, should be simple, sensuous, passionate, instead of systematic, abstract, and emotionless, like speculative reasoning, it is not to be inferred that the poet should be positively unphilosophical, nor is he the better, as some recent critics appear to have discovered, for merely appealing to the senses as being without thoughts, or, in simpler words, a mere animal. The loftiest poet and the loftiest philosopher deal with the same subject-matter, the great problems of the world and of human life, though one presents the symbolism and the other unravels the logical connection of the abstract conceptions.