The only constancy would be the constant probability of miracles.[862] Freethinkers had not as yet identified themselves with the party of order in physics; and perhaps Godwin was simply carrying out his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science. It was fortunate for himself that he appeared no more in the character of an economist, but left Booth the task of replying to the Edinburgh reviewer.[863] If economical criticism was weak with Godwin, the political philosopher, it was still weaker with Coleridge, the philosophizing poet. The main criticisms of Coleridge[864] are contained in manuscript marginal comments with pen and pencil written on his copy of the second (quarto) edition of the Essay (1803), now in the British Museum. When Malthus writes (in Preface, p. vi) that if he had confined himself to general views, his main principle was so incontrovertible that he could have entrenched himself in an impregnable fortress, Coleridge breaks in: “If by the main principle the author means both the _Fact_[865] (i. e. that population unrestrained should infinitely outrun food) and the deduction from the fact, _i. e._ that the human race is _therefore_ not indefinitely improvable, a pop-gun would batter down the impregnable Fortress. If only the Fact be meant, the assertion is quite nugatory, in the former case vapouring, in the latter a vapour.” (And on p. vii:) “Are we now to have a quarto to teach us that great misery and great vice arise from poverty, and that there must be poverty in its worst shape wherever there are more mouths than loaves and more Heads than Brains?”