No doubt the reason why Coleridge as a philosopher won such an influence in England was that he joined to a deep grasp of transcendental metaphysics a somewhat tame acceptance of the orthodox religious position. Here emerges the essential weakness of his philosophy. He accepted as reasonable assumptions the orthodox views of revealed religion. He made no attempt to treat in a critical spirit the sources through which this revelation was made; the result was that the religious writers of the day—and it must be borne in mind that the main current of intellectual interest was in Coleridge’s time religious rather than philosophical—welcomed Coleridge as a man who had sounded the depths of metaphysical and speculative inquiry, and had returned from his quest not a sceptic nor a rationalist, but a convinced Christian. After such a triumph for religious feeling, his lesser heterodoxies were eagerly forgiven. Pater does not dwell upon this side of Coleridge’s influence; but there is no doubt that it deeply affected his own religious thought. He is believed at this time to have cherished the scheme of becoming a Unitarian minister; his metaphysical studies did not in fact destroy his strong religious instinct, but only drew him away for a time from the spell of association and tradition which the Church exercised over him, and to the domain of which he was eventually to return. The essay on Coleridge is mainly interesting, not for its substance, subtle as it is, but for the fact that it reveals the beginnings of Pater’s style. It is clear that he is struggling hard with the German influence; the terminology is technical, and a vague and dreamy emotion seems to be moving somewhat stiffly in the grip of metaphysical ideas; the sentences are long and involved, and there is a great lack of lucidity of construction, combined with a precision of expression, that produces a blurred and bewildering effect upon the mind. It is impossible to believe that one who, like Pater, felt so strongly the sensuous influence of external beauty in art and nature, can have lingered long among abstractions. He never lost his interest in philosophy, but it became for him not so much a region into which he escaped from the actual world, as a region in which he could bring into line the vague suggestions of beauty and the laws of pure thought. He felt that beauty, while it haunted him, also distracted him; and while he could not resist its appeal to his emotional nature, he longed to be able to stand above it as well, and to see how it harmonised with more abstract conceptions; to arrive, indeed, at a certain serenity and tranquillity of thought, in which the perception of beauty might set, as it were, a sweet and solemn descant to the reasonable and sustained melody of the intellectual ideal.