"Who such things did see,
Even in the tumult that few can arrive
Of all are named from philosophy,
To that high pitch or to such secrets dive."[10]
[Footnote 10: "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 [Greek: propaideia] (Organon) of philosophy
was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards."--_Lit.
Remains_, iii. 416.]