‘How,’ discusses Kant, ‘is Nature in general possible?’ and so asked Hamlet too. With this feeling on his mind, persuasion is useless and argument in vain. Examples gross as earth exhort him, but they produce no effect; but he thinks and thinks the more. ‘Now whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event,— A thought which quarter’d hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward,—I do not know Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do,” Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do ’t.’ Hartley himself well observes that on such a character the likelihood of action is inversely as the force of the motive and the time for deliberation. The stronger the reason, the more certain the scepticism? _Can_ anything be so certain? Does not the excess of the evidence alleged make it clear that there is something behind, something on the other side? Search then diligently lest anything be overlooked. Reflection ‘puzzles the will,’ Necessity ‘benumbs like a torpedo:’ and so ‘The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.’ Why should we say any more? We do but ‘chant snatches of old tunes.’ But in estimating men like the Coleridges—the son even more than the father—we must take into account this peculiar difficulty—this dreamy unbelief—this daily scepticism—this haunting unreality—and imagine that some may not be quite responsible either for what they do, or for what they do not—because they are bewildered, and deluded, and perplexed, and want the faculty as much to comprehend their difficulty as to subdue it. The Oxford life of Hartley is all his life. The failure of his prospects there, in his brother’s words, ‘deprived him of the residue of his years.’ The biography afterwards goes to and fro—one attempt after another failing, some beginning in much hope, but even the sooner for that reason issuing in utter despair. His literary powers came early to full perfection. For some time after his expulsion from Oriel he was resident in London, and the poems written there are equal, perhaps are superior, to any which he afterwards produced. This sonnet may serve as a specimen:—