“Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing. It is so. Its object is truth—not individual and local, but general and operative. Not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion: truth which is its own testimony; which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal[91]”. Wordsworth remains still on the hither side of the gap, as does Goethe in suggesting that “The beautiful is the manifestation of secret laws of nature which, but for this disclosure, had been for ever concealed from us[92]”. But Coleridge, from whom Wordsworth probably heard about Aristotle, takes the step into mysticism unhesitatingly:— “If the artist copies the mere nature, the _natura naturata_, what idle rivalry!—if he proceeds only from a given form which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty—what an emptiness, what an unreality, there always is in his productions. Believe me, you must master the essence, the _natura naturans_, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man[93]”. But Coleridge held many mystical views, not always easy to reconcile with one another. In the same Essay he continues:— “In the objects of nature are presented as in a mirror all the possible elements, steps and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act; and man’s mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now so to place these images, totalised and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from and to superinduce upon the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought and thought nature—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts.”