To Paley it might seem as if his antipathy
had been purely philosophic; but we believe that partly it was
personal; and it tallies with this belief, that, in his earliest
political tracts, Coleridge charged the archdeacon repeatedly with his
own joke, as if it had been a serious saying, viz.--'That he could not
afford to keep a conscience;' such luxuries, like a carriage, for
instance, being obviously beyond the finances of poor men.
With respect to the philosophic question between the parties, as to the
grounds of moral election, we hope it is no treason to suggest that
both were perhaps in error. Against Paley, it occurs at once that he
himself would not have made consequences the _practical_ test in
valuing the morality of an act, since these can very seldom be traced
at all up to the final stages, and in the earliest stages are
exceedingly different under different circumstances; so that the same
act, tried by its consequences, would bear a fluctuating appreciation.
This could not have been Paley's _revised_ meaning. Consequently,
had he been pressed by opposition, it would have come out, that by
_test_ he meant only _speculative_ test: a very harmless doctrine
certainly, but useless and impertinent to any purpose of his system.
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