i. e. to explain, how selfless ("disinterested") feelings may arise. Such feelings are secondary; they arise from the fact that something which is at first capable of exciting pleasure only as a means afterwards becomes an end and then acts as a pleasurable stimulus directly. This is the psychological explanation of the immediacy of conscience. (The best exposition of this theory is given by James Mill in appendix B. of his polemical essay, Fragment on Mackintosh, 1835.)
2. Against these enthusiastic advocates of empirical and analytical psychology and ethics there arose a romantic tendency, under German influence, whose most noted representatives were Coleridge and Carlyle.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) in his early youth was an ardent disciple of the associationist psychology. But he later became an opponent of all analysis and of every effort to explain mental life by elementary principles, and, in adherence to Schelling, he proclaimed the awe-inspiring totality of all things as intuitively apprehended, in opposition to the empiricism which breaks everything to pieces. He however attaches special importance to the Kantian antithesis of "understanding" and "reason." He charged all religious criticism to the account of the pure "understanding," and then refuted it by an appeal to the higher court of "reason," the faculty of ideas and the theory of totality. He not only hurls his polemics against the free-thinkers, but likewise against the theology which has degenerated into barren dogmatic formulas. His great work which was intended to show the agreement of Christianity and philosophy was never written. We gather his ideas from his essays on Church and State (especially the appendix) and from his Biographia Liter aria and his Table Talk.
