keeping with its surroundings when we hear it thundered out anew forty
years later by the raw Scotch preacher-philosopher in the chapter he
calls "Organic Filaments" in his odd but strangely stirring mystical
rhapsody, _Sartor Resartus_.

It is on this belief of oneness, this interrelationship and
interdependence that all Burke's deepest practical wisdom is based. It
is on this he makes his appeal for high principle and noble example to
the great families with hereditary trusts and fortunes, who, he says, he
looks on as the great oaks that shade a country and perpetuate their
benefits from generation to generation.

This imaginative belief in the reality of a central spiritual life is
always accompanied, whether definitely expressed or not, with a belief
in the value of particulars, of the individual, as opposed to general
statements and abstract philosophy. The mystic, who believes in an
inward moulding spirit, necessarily believes that all reforms must come
from within, and that, as Burke points out in the _Present Discontents_,
good government depends not upon laws but upon individuals. Blake, in a
characteristic phrase, says: "He who would do good to another must do it
in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the hypocrite,
flatterer, and scoundrel." This sums up the essence of the social
philosophy of these three thinkers, as seen by Burke's insistence on the
value of concrete details in Coleridge's use of them in his Lay Sermon,
and in Carlyle's belief in the importance of the single individual life
in history.

It is easy to see that Coleridge's attitude of mind and the main lines
of his philosophy were mystical. From early years, as we know from
Lamb, he was steeped in the writings of the Neo-platonists and these,