An anonymous article (written by John Stuart Mill) published in the Westminster Review of 1840 noted that "the Romantic philosophy of Coleridge pervaded the minds and hearts of a significant portion of British intellectuals.
Without the benefit of the organizing idea involving a higher cognitive faculty, science will tend to deal with secondary aspects of nature instead of the primary, essential properties.
As Richard Saumarez, a contemporary of Coleridge, and the creator of a dynamic understanding of physiology, wrote: An example of this is the difference between Newton's approach to understanding color as seen via light bent through a prism (secondary event) and Goethe's approach which involved the direct observation (in the original sense of participation using that faculty of mind Coleridge called for) as set out in his Chromatology (Farbenlehre).
Without it, sense perception will amount to pure empiricism, which may lead to a compass (technology), but no advance in science (Idea and Law), but also without it, experiment becomes arid and without foundation in reality.
Thus, the method of inquiry that Coleridge develops 'is a holistic, relational metaphysic that is perpetually self-correcting'[8] and this ongoing metaphysical/scientific inquiry has two defining features: a leading thought and a progression or advancement, that it 'cannot...otherwise than by abuse, be applied to a mere dead arrangement, containing in itself a distinct science, the immediate offspring of philosophy, and the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific and the sciences philosophical'.