His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind--it is an _imaginunculation_. How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_In-eins-bildung!_ Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.
[See _Biog. Lit._, cap. x.; _Coleridge's Works_, iii. 272. See also _Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge.]
[Sidenote: PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SERVICES]
Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War Office, compared to managers of theatres. The numerous absurd claims at length deaden their sense of judgment to real merit, and superinduce in the mind an anticipation of clamorous vanity. Hence the great importance of the public voice, forcing them to be just. This, how illustrated by the life of Nelson--the infamous coldness with which all his claims were received--especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 1795. And no wonder! for such is the state of moral feeling even with the English public, that an instance of credulity to an ingenious scheme which has failed in the trial will weigh more heavily on a minister's character than to have stifled in the birth half-a-dozen such men as Nelson or Cochrane, or such schemes as that of a floating army. Nelson's life is a perpetual comment on this.
Of moral discourses and fine moral discussions in the pulpit--"none of your Methodist stuff for me." And, yet, most certain it is, that never were either ministers or congregations so strict in all morality as at the time when nothing but fine _moral_ discourses (that is calculations in self-love) would have driven a preacher from the pulpit--and when the clergy thought it their pulpit-duty to preach Christ and Him crucified, and the why and the wherefore--and that the soberest, law-obeying, most prudent nation in the world would need Him as much as a nation of drunkards, thieves and profligates. How was this? Why, I take it, those old parsons thought, very wisely, that the pulpit was the place for truths that applied to all men, humbled all alike (not mortified one or two, and sent the rest home, scandal-talking with pharisaic "I thank thee, God, I am not as so and so, but I was glad to hear the parson"), comforted all, frightened all, offended all, because they were all _men_--that private vices depend so much on particular circumstances, that without making the pulpit a lampoon shop, (or, even supposing the genius of him who wrote Isaac Jenkins, without particulars not suited to the pulpit) that it would be a cold generality affair--and that, therefore, they considered the pulpit as _one_ part of their duty, but to their whole congregation as _men_, and that the other part of their duty, which they thought equally binding on them, was to each and every member of that congregation as John Harris, or James Tomkins, in private conversation--and, like that of Mr. Longford, sometimes to rebuke and warn, sometimes to comfort, sometimes and oftener to instruct, and render them capable of understanding his sermon. In short they would _preach_ as Luther, and would converse as Mr. Longford to Isaac Jenkins.