'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances[8] 'to an imperative, an invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy and all religion,--to a feeling which lets man become aware of and alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls _Vernunft_ (Reason) and distinguishes from _Verstand_ (Understanding). 'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in English) in the _Friend,_ 'is an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding' in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which it affirms and even _is._ It apprehends the _me_ and the _thee,_ it apprehends above all the great _Thee,_ God: apprehends, and we may even say appropriates[9]. And it apprehends them at one bound--in one _salto mortale_--because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle[10].' And yet the asseveration rings false--it shows a womanish wilfulness and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.' He yearns with passionate longing to find the living and true: he feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute': the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage--a pre-supposition--of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it: 'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains, 'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows--and Coleridge repeats--'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only possible in an understanding.'