“I have not a deeper conviction on earth, than that the principles of taste, morals, and religion, which are taught in the commonest books of recent composition, are false, injurious, and debasing.”
—The Friend
THE world into which Coleridge was born may be said to have been intellectually “out of joint”. It was a period to which Hegel’s phrase the “unhappy consciousness” was particularly applicable. All that was best in social and political life, in the poetry and literature of past centuries, in the Christian religion, in science itself, as the pursuit of truth guided by a sense of the essential interrelatedness of the material and the spiritual worlds, seemed to be undergoing eclipse by the application of a method which reduced everything to “disconnection dull and spiritless”. Society was interpreted as the result of organized selfishness, mitigated by natural sympathy, and the transforming associations of habit ; political law as the expression of some individual will, and in the end as resting in force; art and literature as the play of a fancy released from the control of fact, bound only by the formal law of “unities” carved out of the chaotic multiplicity of nature ; religion as either a system of superstition maintained in the interest of the existing form of society and the morality on which it rested, or as a scheme of salvation miraculously superimposed on human life ; the higher science as pledged to the view that the processes of nature and the actions of man are controlled to their inmost depths by undeviating natural law. In all this the human mind seemed to have become estranged from the world which it inhabited. What was highest in it, the impulse to pass beyond itself and enter, through knowledge, feeling and action, into union with what is greater and more enduring than itself, was everywhere checked by the view which the prevalent principles seemed to be forcing upon it. Instead of spiritualizing nature, philosophy had naturalized spirit.
Yet spirit, too, has a nature of its own, and everywhere, even as philosophers were legislating for it, was passing beyond the limits they would fain have imposed upon it. Everywhere new influences were acting upon it, and everywhere it was responding in new uncovenanted ways. Travellers were opening up new areas of the earth’s surface. Historians were familiarizing men’s minds with the wealth of material to be found in the Middle Ages. From two opposite sides the idea of civic society, as the offspring of no mere agreement for the protection of individual liberty and property, but of a corporate will, unconsciously feeling after the conditions of its own moral growth : “a partnership in all art, in every virtue, and in all perfection” was being preached, and already being embodied in new ways of practice in education and government, by the disciples of Rousseau and Edmund Burke. A great Anglo-Saxon republic had risen in the West, which sought to found itself on the idea of the Will of God, with whatever narrowness of vision some of its leaders interpreted the meaning of that Will. In religion there had been a new outburst of the sense that man lives not by bread alone, that there is that in him which seeks for a perfection far beyond anything he can attain by his own individual efforts. Through its great preachers Robert Hall, Thomas Chalmers, and others, it was summoning congregations “to apprehend things in their relations”. From the absentee God of eighteenth-century Deism men were being led to the idea of a Divine Spirit that reveals itself continuously in history and common life. In the physical sciences themselves the rise into importance of anatomy and physiology was forcing into notice the dependence of life in all its forms on a principle which works from within outwards, as a constructive organizing force, and which required an entirely different method for its interpretation from that which was in vogue. Most striking of all were the new uses, to which in the poetry and art of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth imagination was being put, and the new principles of criticism that were required for the interpretation of its work.
There have been many attempts to fix upon the characters which go to make up the spirit of romance. Mrs. Olwen Ward Campbell1 has remarked upon the difficulty of finding a definition that will include all of them. If Scott loved “strange adventure”, Lamb did not. Neither was the priest of “wild nature”. And as to “wonder”, Scott’s happy complacency, and the shallow creed of Byron, seem curiously out of place in an age of wonder. The writer goes on to find the essence of romance in a certain kind of faith in man depending upon some sense of the inherent greatness of his soul—a hope perhaps that he is more than mortal. “If the bend of a sunlit road, a bar of music, or the glimpse of a face suddenly thrills with romance, it is because these things have brought some unexpected revelation of the value of human life;
‘I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die’.”
I think that this is profoundly true, but it requires to be added that what to the romantic spirit is of chief value in human life is the sense of the Infinite which is implicit in it, and is the source of all man’s deepest experiences. Sometimes this presence within him is brought home by what is strange, at other times by what is familiar; sometimes it speaks in the “still sad music of humanity”, and moves to tears; at other times in the oddities of the forms under which this Presence manifests itself in finite life, and moves to kindly laughter. If wit, as has been said, is the sense of the littleness of things that seem great, humour may perhaps be defined as the sense of the greatness of things that seem little. If the one is the mark of the unromantic, the other is the most certain mark of the romantic. Be this as it may, it is from this sense of man’s essential relation to the infinite whole, and from this alone, that the things usually referred to as most characteristic in the art and poetry of the period can be deduced, and it was this relation that the philosophy of the time seemed wholly incapable of justifying to the intelligence. Was it therefore thus unjustifiable?
There were doubtless among the representatives of these various fields of thought and practice those who, if they had been asked what help in the defence of the truths, on which they had unconsciously laid hold, against the prevailing secularist spirit of the time they might expect from philosophy, would have rejected its offices as a “Greek gift”, more likely to betray than to bestead them, and who would have been prepared to echo Wordsworth’s appeal to “a few strong instincts and a few plain rules” against “all the pride of intellect and thought”. But they would nevertheless have been wrong. True, if philosophy really was what it then appeared to be, namely, the attempt to reduce everything by “triumphant analysis” to its component elements, and, taking these as the ultimate realities, to treat it as a mere aggregate or mechanical resultant, while poetry, religion, even (as Wordsworth seemed to think) morals and politics were matters of unanalysable feeling, there would have been something to be said for this attitude. But to acknowledge it as the final and only maintainable attitude was to leave man’s mind the victim of a conflict between different “instincts”, in the end equally strong, and different “rules”, equally binding upon it, and exposed to never-ending internal division and unrest.
Fortunately there were some to whom this result seemed fatal and who disbelieved in its necessity. It all depended on the true interpretation of the meaning and method of philosophy. Did it mean the abstraction of the intellectual side of experience from all the others, and the development of the view of the world that concentration on the logic of cause and effect seemed to imply? Or was it not rather the endeavour, starting from the unity of experience as a whole, to bring the different interests of the human spirit together so that it might feel itself at home in all of them? Was it not in reality what Novalis had called it, “the homesickness of the soul”? in more technical language, the effort towards the “self-recognition of that spiritual life of the world which fulfils itself in many ways, but most completely in religion”?2
In England of the time of which we are speaking Coleridge has the merit of being the first to perceive the significance of this problem, and to rouse himself to find an answer to it. He saw that civilization was everywhere entering on a new phase ; that forms of experience were everywhere emerging, of which the popular philosophy, as represented by Locke and Hume and Hartley, was wholly unable to give any intelligible account. This came home to him primarily, and more particularly in the fields of literature and religion, with which education and temperament most closely allied him. But the wide range of his vision enabled him to realize, as none other of his contemporaries in England did, the extent of the problem as embracing besides these the whole spiritual life of man, morals and education, law and politics, science and logic themselves. He was profoundly convinced that, brilliant as were the achievements of the philosophy of the last century, yet owing to the narrowness of its foundations and the defects of its method it failed to represent what was best in philosophical tradition. He found food for this conviction in the older writers of his own country, but he had the openness of mind to feel their limitations, and to be ready to put himself to school in the thought of earlier ages and other countries. More particularly he had the insight and freedom from prejudice to perceive that it was from Germany that the chief light on the problem as set by his own time was coming. Closer acquaintance convinced him that, profound and in some respects decisive as were the contributions of German philosophy, particularly of Kant, to its solution, there was as little finality in them as in those of his own country. Rich as might be the materials he inherited from both, the building itself must be one more precisely fitted to the needs of the time and leaving more room for expansion, as new needs developed or old ones revived with new force. With a courage and persistency for which he has received too little credit, and which was even denied to him by the greatest of his contemporaries,3 almost alone and in spite of the obstructions of his temperamental failings, he pursued the ideal of such a comprehensive and organized system of thought as might at last in his own country merit the name of philosophy.
What is attempted in the following chapters is the story of the influences under which his philosophical convictions were matured, the principles of method he was led to adopt, the view to which these led as to the ultimate reality of which the world of nature and human life is the temporal expression, and the applications he made of it in the various departments of theory and practice. No claim will be made for any sort of finality in his results. On the contrary, fundamental points will be indicated in which he manifestly failed. But whatever be the ultimate judgment upon them, they formed a body of doctrine, which, so far as it was then known, exercised a profound influence on the succeeding generation, and as we now know it, stat sua mole. John Stuart Mill had little enough sympathy with its speculative basis, but it was of Coleridge’s work as a thinker that he wrote in 1840:4 “The name of Coleridge is one of the few English names of our time which are likely to be oftener pronounced and to become symbolic of more important things in proportion as the inward workings of the age manifest themselves more and more in outward fact. Bentham excepted, no Englishman of recent date has left his impress so deeply on the opinions and mental tendencies of those among us who attempt to enlighten their practice by philosophical meditation. If it be true, as Lord Bacon affirms, that a knowledge of the speculative opinions of the men between twenty and thirty years of age is the great source of political prophecy, the existence of Coleridge will show itself by no slight or ambiguous traces in the coming history of our country.”
1 Shelley and the Unromantics (1924), pp. 249 and 250.
2 T. H. Green in “Popular Philosophy in its Relation to Life” (Works, vol. iii. p. 121).
3 “Once more”, wrote Carlyle, “the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient will. The courage, necessary to him above all things, had been denied this man.”—Life of John Sterling.
4 “Coleridge and Bentham,” reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions (1859).