"I began," says he, "to ask myself, Is a system of philosophy, as differing from mere history and classification, possible? If possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to recollect, and to classify. Christianity however is not a theory, or a speculation, but a life--not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." [10] Spinoza being one of the writers which Coleridge, in his passage from Socinianism to Christianity, had studied, the reader will probably be interested with the following note, written by himself on the subject: "Paradoxical, as it assuredly is, I am convinced that Spinoza's innocence and virtue, guarded and matured into invincible habit of being, by a life of constant meditation and of intellectual pursuit, were the conditions or temptations, 'sine quibus non' of his forming and maintaining a system subversive of all virtue. He saw so clearly the 'folly' and 'absurdity' of wickedness, and felt so weakly and languidly the passions tempting to it, that he concluded, that nothing was wanting to a course of well-doing, but clear conceptions and the 'fortitudo intellectualis'; while his very modesty, a prominent feature in his character, rendered him, as it did Hartley, less averse to the system of necessity. Add to these causes his profound admiration of pure mathematics, and the vast progress made in it so unspeakably beneficial to mankind, their bodies as well as souls, and souls as well as bodies; the reflection that the essence of mathematical science consists in discovering the absolute properties of forms and proportions, and how pernicious a bewilderment was produced in this 'sublime' science by the wild attempt of the Platonists, especially the later (though Plato himself is far from blameless in this respect,) to explain the 'final' cause of mathematical 'figures' and of numbers, so as to subordinate them to a principle of origination out of themselves; and the further comparison of the progress of this SCIENCE, ('pura Mathesis') which excludes all consideration of final cause, with the unequal and equivocal progress of those branches of literature which rest on, or refer to final causes; and that the uncertainty and mixture with error, appeared in proportion to such reference--and if I mistake not, we shall have the most important parts of the history of Spinoza's mind. It is a duty which we owe to truth, to distinguish Spinoza from the Voltaires, Humes, and the whole nest of 'popular' infidels, to make manifest how precious a thing is the sincere thirst of truth for the sake of truth undebased by vanity, appetite, and the ambition of forming a sect of 'arguescents' and trumpeters--and that it is capable, to a wonderful