THE following study was undertaken in the conviction, gathered from a superficial acquaintance with Coleridge’s published works, that as a stage in the development of a national form of idealistic philosophy his ideas are far more important than has hitherto been realized either by the educated public or by professed students of the subject. Closer study of them further convinced me that they formed in his mind a far more coherent body of philosophical thought than he has been anywhere credited with, and that to do fuller justice to this side of his multifarious and miraculous activity a more serious attempt than any with which I was acquainted required to be made to set them in relation to the state of philosophy at the time, and to the great revival of metaphysical study in England which the latter half of the nineteenth century was to witness. There was obvious difficulty, and not less obvious risk in any such attempt.
The difficulty consisted not merely in the wide diffusion of the sources from which, in his published works, his philosophical opinions had to be gathered, but in the popular character of the writings in which the more explicit statements of them were contained. We know in our own time how much injury in respect to depth and coherence may be done by the “occasionalism” of so much of the philosophical writing of England and America. Bradley used to deplore the loss to philosophy caused by William James’s continual occupation with popular exposition in lecture form. In Coleridge’s case his own ardent missionary spirit combined with his straitened circumstances was a constant temptation to dissipate his powers in practical applications instead of in the systematic development of his ideas. If Lamb’s gibe as to his “preaching” was an exaggeration, something like it may be said of his crusading activities against what he considered the secular and materialistic spirit of his time and country.
The risk of such an attempt as is here made is that the brilliant flashes of his innumerable aperçus should be robbed of their delightful element of surprise by being made to appear merely sidelights of a duller if steadier illumination, and that what was the outcome of the poetry within him finding new means of utterance, after it had died out in its proper medium of verse, should be reduced to the prose of doctrinaire philosophy.
“Coleridge suffers”, writes Leslie Stephen,1 “when any attempt is made to extract a philosophical system from his works. His admirers must limit themselves to claims for what he undoubtedly deserves, the honour of having done much to stimulate thought, and abandon any claim to the construction of a definite system.”
Fortunately the light thrown upon the whole subject by the recent direction of attention to important manuscript remains has relieved the student to a large extent both of the difficulty and the risk of such an attempt. It has always been known to scholars that Coleridgean manuscripts on technical subjects existed, but the prejudice against transcendental philosophy in general, and against what was supposed to be largely a plagiarized form of it in particular has until recently caused an unmerited neglect of the matter they contain. Miss Alice D. Snyder, of Vassar College, State of New York, who has been a pioneer in the sympathetic re-exarnination of these manuscripts, has given an account of the chief of them in her recently published book upon Logic and Literature in Coleridge, and some additional details are given in the appendix to the present study. While they are far from satisfying the expectations, which the poet’s own allusions to them in his letters and conversations as practically finished compositions raise, they are sufficient to show that he made a far more serious attempt to work out his ideas into clear and consistent form than is commonly supposed, and enable us to supplement and bind together into something like a real volume the “Sibylline Leaves” he so lavishly scattered in his published utterances.
Even so there will be those to whom all metaphysical philosophy appears to be “transcendental moonshine”, its speculative arguments mere “logical swimming-bladders”. This book is not for them. Others who are still suspicious of “metaphysic” may be reminded that it is one of the ways provided by a kindly Heaven of reaching after the Unseen, and, as Coleridge himself put it, of penetrating to the Ancient of Days under the common forms of temporal life.
It is for the above reason, and because the contents of Coleridge’s published works may be assumed to be fairly familiar to the general reader, that in the more important parts of this study, the stone which the builders rejected has been made the head of the corner, and the old material used chiefly as supplementary to the new. It is unfortunate that it is not yet possible to refer the reader to chapter and verse in all cases. But Miss Snyder has made many of the passages here quoted accessible in the extracts she has printed in her book. Where this has been done I have availed myself of her annotation. For the rest, when the fuller publication, which has been undertaken by the Columbia University Press in America and the Oxford Press in England, under the editorship of Mr. Warren E. Gibbs, has been completed, I trust that the mode of reference here adopted may enable the student without much difficulty to verify the quotations. In giving them direct from the manuscripts, except in condensation for purposes of the context, and the removal here and there of the superabundant capital letters which were the fashion of the time, I have taken no other liberties with the text.
Besides my obligation to the above-mentioned American scholars, I have to express my great indebtedness first to the kindness of the Rev. Gerard H. B. Coleridge, of Leatherhead, in offering me every facility to consult the manuscripts in his possession, as well as for permission to have photographed and reproduced as frontispiece to this volume the fine portrait of the Poet which is in his possession ; and secondly to the Trustees of the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, who have permitted me to quote from the invaluable manuscript chapters of Coleridge’s Opus Maximum it contains. I can only trust that my use of these sources, if it does not repay, may at least not betray their confidence.
What follows was itself intended to form part of a series of studies in the History of British and American Idealism at present in preparation, and to be a link between the earlier seventeenth century and the later nineteenth developments of the great Platonic tradition in England. But for the reason above mentioned it outgrew the limits of a section in the larger book, as a part of which nevertheless I should desire it to be considered. Only so can its manifest shortcomings be in some degree covered and a place assigned to it as an attempt to supply a lost chapter in the historical succession of native forms of idealistic theory. It has had the advantage of being read in proof by Dr. James Bonar amicorum censor amicissimus.
DYKE END
ROTHERFIELD, SUSSEX
May 1930
1 Art. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge” in the Dictionary of National Biography. Cp. Hours in a Library, essay on Coleridge, vol. iv. “Coleridge never constructed a system.”