Note 10 — JUNE.

"It would make a most delightful and instructive essay," says Coleridge, "to draw up a critical, and, where possible, biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at Cambridge, from the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II. The greater number were Platonists, so called, at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson (chaplain of Charles I and Vicar of Newcastle upon Tyne), Henry More, John Smith, and some others (Norris, Glanvil). Jeremy Taylor was a Gassendist, and, as far as I know, he is the only exception. They were alike admirers of Grotius, which, in Taylor, was consistent with the tone of all his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and the skeleton half truths of the systematic divines of the synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's Song preachers on the other. What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge,—an examination of the scales and weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine; but he turned abruptly back, and the honor of establishing a complete προπαιδεία (Organon) of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards."—Lit. Remains, iii. 416.