Impressive, however, as these displays may have been, it is impossible to suppose that their direct didactic value as discourses was at all considerable. Such as it was, moreover, it was confined in all probability to an extremely select circle of followers. A few mystics of the type of Maurice, a few eager seekers after truth like Sterling, may have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinct dogmatic instruction from the Highgate oracles; and no doubt, to the extent of his influence over the former of these disciples, we may justly credit Coleridge's discourses with having exercised a real if only a transitory directive effect upon nineteenth-century thought. But the terms in which his influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as far as one can judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatly exaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are--or were--accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle, is to subject it to an altogether inappropriate comparison. It is not merely that Coleridge founded no recognisable school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that the former can show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of power which enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the youthful minds of his time--minds of the most disparate orders and associated with the utmost diversities of temperament, and detain them in a captivity which, brief as it may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave its marks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared to receive them Coleridge's teachings no doubt exerted power, but he led no soul captive against its will. There are few middle-aged men of active intelligence at the present day who can avoid a confession of having "taken" Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions not predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at all. There is indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the Understanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple sorrowful away. His natural impulse is to urge the oracle to tell him whether there be not some one moral attitude which he can wisely and worthily adopt towards the universe, whatever theory he may form of his mental relations to it, or without forming any such theory at all. And it was because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an answer, such as it was, to this universal question, that his train of followers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent and temporary, has been so large.