It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity resided. He was what J.S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In theology, in philosophy, in political thought and literary criticism he set currents flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of criticism, for example, is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions--such as that between genius and talent, between wit and humor, between fancy and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but which he first introduced or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we meet every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_.
The Broad Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent exponents have been W. Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, F.D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_, to his writings and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a national clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In politics, as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the reaction against the destructive spirit of the 18th century and the French Revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism.