“A mind growing to the last.”—DERWENT COLERIDGE
1. THE NATIVE HUE OF COLERIDGE’S MIND
THE philosophical development of a mind like Coleridge’s, omnivorous, sensitive, growing to the last, is necessarily a tangled tale; in his case rendered more tangled still by apparently contradictory accounts of it in his own writings and conversations. There was no recorded line of thought with which he was unacquainted and with which his soul had not some bond of sympathy. I believe that the chief mistake to be avoided is that of attributing too much to any one of the multitudinous influences that went to the formation of his opinions. Yet one or two things stand clearly out, first in the native hue of his own mind modified and exaggerated in later life by certain morbid traits in his moral experience, secondly in the intellectual currents which stimulated and gave direction to his thought and in the order in which he came under their influence.
His nature was profoundly religious not only in the Platonic sense of belief in the supremacy of Good as an abstract quality, nor in the Spinozistic sense of absorption in the vision of the wholeness of things, but in the sense of a longing for a personal relation with a Mind and Will as at once the source of all reality and a living presence in the soul. However necessary, as concerned with the grounds and conditions of religion, philosophy might be, it could never take its place. Even though philosophy shall have become the habit of referring to the Invisible as the supreme Will revealing itself in reason and pouring forth in life, this is not enough. “This is a constituent of Religion,” he wrote, “but something is still wanting. To be Religion it must be the reference of an intelligent responsible Will Finite to an Absolute Will, and the reference must refer as a Will and a Life, i.e. a Person to a living I am. We may feel from and about a thing, an event, a quality, we can feel toward a Person only. The personal in me is the ground and condition of Religion, and the Personal alone is the Object.”1 It was this and not any mere attachment to a tradition that was the source of his belief in Christianity as “alone reflecting the character of religion”, and in this sense “the only true religion”. It was “Judaism + Greece”. While in Greece the Personality of God is the esoteric doctrine, the infinite whole the exoteric, in Christianity it is the reverse. Personality is the exoteric, the whole of Good the esoteric. That this side of his philosophy obtained exaggerated emphasis in the later years of his life owing to his personal craving for a God who “answers prayer” and forgives is, I think, undoubtedly true and traceable to the morbid bent in his own character. But quite apart from that, it is doubtful whether he could ever have reconciled himself to any form of philosophy which seemed to him to fail to do justice to what he regarded as pivotal in human life—the binding (religio-religatio) of man’s will to a Will that is greater than itself.2
Leaving this for the present as belonging more particularly to his philosophy of religion, we have certain outstanding influences coming from without that mark milestones in his spiritual pilgrimage.
We need not perhaps take too seriously Lamb’s picture3 of the infant metaphysician “unfolding the mysteries of Iamblichus and Plotinus” to admiring school-fellows at Christ’s Hospital. Yet we have his own word for it that while yet at school he began to experience “a rage for Metaphysics occasioned by the essays on ‘Liberty’ and ‘Necessity’ in Cato’s Letters and more by theology”, and that by the time he left he had already, with the aid of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and in spite of the flogging he received for his errancy from the path of scholastic routine, boxed the compass of Christian heresies.4
Of more importance were the influences with which he came in contact when in 1791 he proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge. It was David Hartley’s college, but there were other currents of thought in the University, and, though Cambridge Platonism is usually associated with the earlier seventeenth-century movement, it is important to remember the revival of Platonic studies in that University in these very years through the translations of Thomas Taylor,5 of which Coleridge could hardly have failed to take notice. We shall probably be right also in referring to this period 6 his acquaintance with the Cambridge Platonists, whose writings would harmonize with what he might have learned from Plato and Plotinus, and go to deepen the mystic strain in his thought. But, aided by his intimacy with Frend,7 the attraction of the leading representative of the Lockean tradition was too strong for him, and for the next five years he passed under the influence of David Hartley, described in his poem, Religious Musings, of 1794 as:
“He of mortal kind
The wisest; he first who marked the ideal tribes
Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain.”
In the same year he wrote to Southey: “I am a complete necessitarian, and I understand the subject almost as well as Hartley himself, and believe the corporeality of thought, namely that it is motion.”8 That this was the dominant influence in his thought up to 1796 seems proved by his allusion in September of that year to his infant son. “His name”, he writes, “is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of and his heart saturated with the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Philosophy.” It might seem puzzling that in the poem on the Destiny of Nations, written apparently about the same time,9 he should have denounced those who cheat themselves
“With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subde fluids, impacts, essences,
Untenanting creation of its God”,
in words that seem so precisely applicable to Hartley’s materialistic psychology, were it not that in that philosopher’s writings we have a conspicuous illustration of the conflict referred to in the above Introduction.
3. “THE GREAT AND EXCELLENT DR. HARTLEY”
Hartley’s philosophy was, as he tells us himself at the beginning of his chief book,10 a development on the one hand of “what Mr. Locke and other ingenious persons 11 since his time have delivered concerning the influence of associations over our opinions and affections, and its use in explaining those things in an accurate and precise way which are commonly referred to the power of habit and custom in a general and indeterminate one”; and on the other of “hints concerning the performance of sensation and motion which Sir Isaac Newton has given at the end of the Principia and in the questions annexed to his Optics”. The “accuracy and precision” which Hartley claimed to have added to the older doctrine of association consisted in a fuller statement than had hitherto been attempted of its “laws”, and in the application of them to explain: (1) the formation from a simpler of a more complex idea which “may not appear to bear any relation to its compounding parts”; (2) the generation of voluntary action through the connection of a sensation or an idea with a movement; (3) judgments of assent and dissent (i.e. beliefs) as only “very complex internal feelings which adhere by association to such clusters of words as are called propositions”; and (4) the constitution of intellectual pleasures and pains, such as those of imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, “theopathy”, and the moral sense, out of simpler constituents. The development of Sir Isaac Newton’s “hints” was the doctrine of vibrations or “vibratiuncles” residing in the pores of the nerves and causing sensations, which may be said to be the first sketch of a complete physiological psychology. Into the details of this it is not necessary to enter. What concerns us is the theory of mind which in the first place reduces its action to the subconscious one of mechanical association, to the total exclusion of selective attention or imaginative construction,12 and in the second place explains consciousness as a surface play of material movements, “the quick silverplating behind the looking-glass”, as Coleridge learned to call it, enabling us to see what is going on, but contributing nothing to it.
If we ask how such a philosophy could come to be put forward by its author, or find any acceptance with intelligent readers as a satisfactory account of “Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations”, it is only fair to both the author and his public to remember that there was no pretence of this kind. The Second Part of Hartley’s treatise is devoted to an exposition of natural and revealed religion from an entirely different point of view from that of the first part, and enables the writer to pose as the defender of faiths, of which his scientific theory had destroyed the intellectual foundations.
Bearing all this in mind, we wonder less to find the same conflict of principles in Hartley’s ardent disciple. I believe that a close examination of the poems of the period would show that it reflected itself there in the form of a domination of his mind by conceptions derived from a necessitarian philosophy which was in essence antagonistic to the romantic spirit of freedom that was the deepest strain of Coleridge’s own intellectual being. An American critic has said of Religious Musings that “the principles of unity and necessity fairly jostle each other in rivalry for the reader’s attention”.13
“There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind
Omnific”
is the text of the poem and of this whole period of the poet’s life. We have the same note in the invocation in The Destiny of Nations (1796) to the
“All-conscious Presence of the Universe,
Nature’s vast ever-acting Energy!
In will, in deed, Impulse of All to All!”
In the poems of the following years these abstractions are softened and humanized, and in the Ancient Mariner and Christabel they are wholly subordinated to the interest of the characters and incidents. It would be pedantry to look for philosophical doctrines in. their magical lines. Yet the power of the first consists just in the sense it imparts of the sinister and fateful power that works in the events. If we cannot say with Gingerich that the Mariner is “a most engaging Unitarian”, we can agree with him that in this poem “Coleridge has given, in a rarefied etherealized form, the exhalations and aroma of his personal experience of Necessity and Unity, the blossom and fragrancy of all his earlier religious meditations”.14 The fact that in Christabel the religious motive has disappeared the same writer takes as a sign that “in this direction the evolution of Coleridge’s mind has gone as far as possible”, and draws the conclusion that “those who suppose that, if his poetic powers had remained unimpaired, Coleridge would have continued writing Ancient Mariners and Christabels imagine a vain thing”. What was required was a complete reorientation of the shaping spirit of imagination within him to the new view of the world which his studies in philosophy had by this time begun to open before him. It was to this that he proved unequal. No one knew it better than himself or knew better the reason of it in the failure of the fountain within him of the “joy” that alone could bear him through the task.15 The destroyer of this creative joy was not (as literary critics have so often said16) his metaphysical studies (these were his solace for the loss of it), but the fatal drug to which at this time he became addicted.17 What in the ruin of his own poetic hopes he had the genius and the magnanimity to see was that the strength that was denied to him had been so richly bestowed on his friend:
“Currents self-determined, as might seem,
Or by some inner Power.”
As Gingerich has rightly seen, the importance of the poem from which these words are quoted18 in Coleridge’s spiritual history cannot easily be over-estimated. It is with this history and the results for philosophy that we are here concerned.
At what exact time Coleridge became aware of this conflict of principles it is difficult to determine. Different accounts are given by his biographers. Referring to the name of Berkeley which he gave to his second son, born in May 1798, J. D. Campbell19 comments that it was “in honour of the Philosopher, the keystone of whose system was still in his disciples’ eyes indestructible”. He does not tell us what this keystone was, but the context seems to indicate that he had in mind the sensational basis of Berkeley’s earlier thought of which Hartley’s doctrine of association was a development. Turnbull, on the other hand, tells us that he named his second son “after the idealist philosopher who had now displaced Hartley, who had been in the ascendant when the first child was born”.20 This seems to find support in what Southey wrote in 1808, “Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by Spinoza, Spinoza by Plato”,21 and by Coleridge’s own statement that when his earlier philosophy failed him22 and “his metaphysical theories lay before him in the hour of anguish as toys by the bedside of a child deadly sick”, he turned again to “Plato and the mystics, Locke, Berkeley, Descartes, and Spinoza”. The difficulty vanishes if we remember the difference between the earlier empirical Berkeley to whom esse is percipi and the later Platonic to whom esse is concipi, and that the discovery of this difference was itself one of the important steps in Coleridge’s philosophical development. Cottle quotes him in 1796 as having said: “Bishop Taylor, old Baxter, David Hartley, and the Bishop of Cloyne are my men”. By 1798 he may well have discovered the difference between the last two.
At what exact time Berkeley’s star began to wane is uncertain. By the time Derwent was born (September 14, 1800) there were obvious reasons against naming him after the philosophical idol of the moment. We have his own word for it that in these years he found in Spinoza’s idea of God what he describes as an “Ararat”, and as late as December 1799 he could still speak of “my Spinozism”.23 But this could not remain a permanent resting-place for his ark. The Infinite of Spinoza he saw to be the negation of all “the determinations that go to make the individual”. No man, Hegel said, can ever be a philosopher who has not at one time been a Spinozist; but it is also perhaps true that no philosopher who is a man has ever remained one. While the head demands the universal, the heart yearns for the particular. Coleridge saw no way to “reconcile personality” with such infinity. While “his head was with Spinoza his whole heart remained with Paul and John”. The old Pantheism of Spinoza he held to be far better than the new Deism, which is “but the hypocrisy of materialism”. “Did philosophy start with an it is instead of an I am, Spinoza would be altogether true.”24 But its starting-point was wrong.
Into the midst of these speculative doubts we may imagine coming his closer intercourse with Wordsworth and the co-operation which issued in the famous experiment of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. His generous enthusiasm for his friend’s work is a matter of literary history. He had the insight to see in it an excellence of the creative imagination, a vision of the faculty divine, which was an entirely new thing in poetry. But it was not merely to him a new fact. It was a summons to new thought. “This excellence”, he tells us, “I no sooner felt than I sought to understand.”25 But where to find the clue to the understanding of it? There was clearly no help to be looked for in the Associationist psychology. This might account for the vagaries of fancy, though even here the images had to be formed so as to cohere in a new whole. Before the brooding spirit of imagination and the revelation of new significance in the common things of life it was helpless. Between this and merely fanciful creations there was a distinction, not of degree, but of kind. Equally helpless was the soulless pantheism which he had found in Spinoza. The clue, if clue there were, must be sought elsewhere.
It was at this point that a new chapter of his intellectual history opened. His own account in “Satyrane’s Letters”26 of the visit which, accompanied by the Wordsworths, he paid to Germany in 1798 is familiar to students of literature. Together they visited Klopstock, the author of the once celebrated Messiah.27 For the rest the difference between the two men in the use which they made of their opportunity was characteristic. To Wordsworth, with his essential insularity, it was simply a “change of sky”. He was content to remain for the most part at Goslar wandering “among unknown men” and writing “home thoughts from abroad”.28 To Coleridge the journey was a pilgrimage of the spirit—an opportunity “to finish his education”. He fared first to Ratzeburg, then to Göttingen, where he settled for the best part of a year, with the aim of “a more thorough revolution in his philosophical principles and a deeper insight into his own heart”. His philosophical orientation had for the time to be postponed to a mastery of the language, to attendance on Blumenbach’s lectures on physiology, and to literary studies, more particularly of Lessing,29 that bore only indirectly upon it. But before returning to England in the following July he provided himself with the means for such a study by the purchase of thirty pounds’ worth of books, chiefly metaphysics.
We get an interesting glimpse of the state of Kantian study in England at this time from the Essay of De Quincey,30 in which he pours contempt on editors and reviewers for their failure to throw any light on the dark places of Kant’s philosophy, promises something better, but for the present contents himself with stigmatizing it as sceptical in religion and reactionary in politics. Elsewhere 31 he finds no words strong enough to denounce the “Apollyon mind” and “the ghoulish creed” of the “world-shattering Kant”. On the other hand, his long Essay on the “Last Days of Immanuel Kant”32 and his translation of the Sketch of Universal History on a Cosmopolitan Plan did much to stimulate the sympathetic study of Kant in the generation immediately following.
At what precise date Coleridge began the minuter examination of contemporary German philosophy it is difficult to say. At the end of 1796 he refers to Mendelssohn as Germany’s profoundest metaphysician, with the exception of “the most unintelligible Immanuel Kant”.33 In his letters of 1800 there are allusions to the light he has gained on “several parts of the human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most falsely explained”, to prolonged meditations on “the relations of thought to things”, and to his “serious occupation” in metaphysical investigation of the laws by which our feelings form affinities with each other and with words.34 Yet in connection with an unpublished memorandum of February 1801, Leslie Stephen tells us that “Coleridge writes as though he had as yet read no German philosophy . . There is none of the transcendentalism of the Schelling kind . . He still sticks to Hartley and to the Association doctrine . . He is dissatisfied with Locke but has not broken with the philosophy generally supposed to be in the Locke line. In short, he seems to be at the point where a study of Kant would be ready to launch him in his later direction, but is not at all conscious of the change.” 35
It is probably to March of this year (1801) that we must refer the crisis. In a letter of the 16th he tells Thomas Poole that after a period of “most intense study”, if he does not delude himself, he has “not only completely extricated the notions of time and space but overthrown the doctrine of association as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels—especially the doctrine of necessity”. A week later he thinks he has unmasked the fallacy that underlies the whole Newtonian 36 philosophy, namely, that the mind is merely “a lazy Looker-on on an external world”: if this be not so, “if the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s image, the Image of the Creator, there is ground for the suspicion that any system built on the passiveness of mind must be false as a system”.
How far are we justified in concluding that this revolution was the result of his German studies?
6. DEBT TO KANT AND SCHELLING
In support of the view of the dominance of their influence we have the classical passage in the Biographia Literaria in which he describes the general effect upon his mind of his first introduction to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. “The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic, and, I will venture to add (paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen), the clearness and evidence of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Judgment, of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy, and his Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me with a giant’s hand.” While it might have its attraction for a descendant of Scottish Covenanters who had inherited something of their spirit, like Carlyle, Fichte’s was not a philosophy likely to find a congenial soil in the mind of a poet like Coleridge. He gives credit to Fichte for dealing the first mortal blow to Spinozism “by commencing with an act instead of a thing or substance”, but he deplores his “boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo Ordinans which we were permitted exoterice to call God; and his ethics in an ascetic and almost monkish mortification of the natural passions and desires”.37 Schelling was altogether different. “It was in Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie and System des transcendental (en) Idealismus that I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself and a powerful assistance to what I had yet to do . . With exception of one or two fundamental ideas which can not be withheld from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion and the most important victories of this revolution in Philosophy.” “To me”, he adds, “it will be happiness and honour enough should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes.” From the same work we know that there was a period of his life at which he felt himself so much at one with Schelling’s philosophy that he was prepared to risk his reputation for literary honesty by adopting whole portions of its text as the basis of his own theory of poetry.38
All this, combined with the unanimous testimony of his friends as to the impression which his conversations left upon them, would lend countenance to the view that his own philosophy was little more than a transcript from the German of Kant and Schelling, from whom he selected what happened to suit him. But this would be a superficial view of the real state of the case, and one of the first results of a closer study of his philosophical opinions as a whole is the conviction of its entire baselessness.
Leaving this for the present and confining ourselves to the more external evidence, we have in the first place his own reiterated statement that the essential elements of his philosophy were already planted in his mind before he became acquainted with the later German thought.39 While perhaps, considering the audience to which it was addressed, it would be hardly justifiable to appeal to the absence of direct allusion to German influences in the first authoritative sketch of his philosophy in the 1818 edition of The Friend, it is undoubtedly true, as he himself says, that this contains nothing, not even the distinction between Reason and Understanding and the “law of polarity or essential dualism”,40 which is not traceable either to Greek philosophy or to “the great men of Europe from the middle of the fifteenth till towards the close of the seventeenth century”, whose “principles both of taste and philosophy” he upheld.41 But by far the most effective answer from this side to the accusation of the plagiarism of anything that was essential to his own system from Schelling is the running commentary on some of the German’s works that was published by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the 1847 edition of the Biographia Literaria, the general line of which is to convict him of “gross materialism”.42
The precise moment of disillusionment with Schelling is difficult to fix. If we assume that it had not taken place in 1817 (the date of the publication of the Biographia Literaria), a note of August 27, 1818, on Jacob Boehme’s Aurora tells of his own early intoxication with “the vernal fragrance and effluvia from the flowers and firstfruits of Pantheism, while still unaware of its bitter root”, and “pacifying his religious feelings in the meantime with the fine distinction that, though God was = the World, the World was not = God—as if God were a whole composed of parts of which the World was one”. In the same note, after defining two types of error which he had found in Boehme as “the occasional substitution of the accidents of his own peculiar acts of association for processes in universo”, and “the confusion of the creaturely spirit in the great moments of its renascence for (with?) the deific energies in Deity itself”, he goes on to attribute the first to Spinoza and both to Schelling and his followers.43
In view of all this, there seems to be no reason to question either the sincerity or the truth of the autobiographical statement above quoted. The acceptance of it is quite compatible with the belief, first, that the discovery of the coincidence of the teaching of Kant’s Critique with what he had “toiled out for himself” exercised an immense confirmatory influence on his thought, and gave him a new confidence in the exposition of it; and secondly, that while still in doubt as to the full effect of the new influences, and suffering perhaps from a certain loss of nerve, he came under the spell of Schelling. But that this was only a passing phase of a mind which was “growing and accumulating to the last”, is put beyond all doubt not only by the above quotations, but by his own express criticism of the views put forward in the Biographia, which within a month of his death has something of the solemnity of a testamentary deposition: “The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the Biographia Literaria is unformed and immature; it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to and to be the common sense.”44
If it were worth while at this time of day to defend Coleridge’s work as a whole against the charge of “plagiarism”, one could not do it better than in the words which his disciple J. H. Green uses in reference to the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: “in the case of a work which is an aggregate and not a growth … it would be as just to reclaim, as it would be easy to detach the borrowed fragments; but where the work is the result of a formative principle which gives it unity and totality, where the thoughts and reasonings are the development of a living principle to an organic whole, it may be safely assumed that the author, who interweaves with his own the kindred products of other men’s minds, is impelled only by the sense and pleasurable sympathy of a common intellectual activity, and that he would or might have arrived at the same or similar results where these are potentially contained in the principle that gave birth to his reasonings.”45
In what sense Coleridge’s philosophy is such an organic whole it is our aim in this study more precisely to determine. Meantime the conclusion that emerges from the above review is that in the course of the second decade of the new century Coleridge had passed from the pantheism not only of Spinoza but of Schelling, and was working in the direction of a view which should be a synthesis of the realism which it represented with the idealism of Kant.46 It was on this line that he believed that English philosophy had to be reconstructed if justice was to be done at once to man’s deepest interests and to the outer facts of nature and history.
The work in which already in 1814 he had conceived the idea of developing the view he had reached into a complete system, and which when completed was to revolutionize “all that had been called Philosophy or Metaphysics in England and France since the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at the restoration of the second Charles”,47 has been treated by his biographers48 far too much as a mere vision. Even although it were more visionary than we now know it to have been, his continual mention of it from 1821 onwards is at least proof that he had reached a stable resting-place after his long wanderings, and that whatever he thenceforth wrought out would be as the deepening and expansion of a single principle which he had made his own. If this principle and the synthesis it represented tended in the end to ally him with Fichte rather than with Hegel, it is not the less interesting in view of the recent pronounced reaction of idealist philosophy both in England and America in the direction of Voluntarism.
In what follows no special attempt will be made to trace Coleridge’s mental development further. Our object will rather be to state the broader features of the form of nineteenth-century idealism of which more than any other he was the founder, as these appear in his maturer writings, and to follow the applications he made of his principles in the different fields of philosophy.
1 MS. C, p. 115.
2 There is a certain truth in A. W. Benn’s ironical remark, “One can understand that the sense of sin conceived as an overwhelming fatality should have been particularly active with Coleridge. It is less intelligible that he should have generalized this deep and well-founded consciousness of his own delinquencies into a comprehensive indictment of human nature as such; and that he should have regarded the spirit of the Gospel as a cure for the world at large when it was proving so totally inoperative in his own particular instance” (English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, vol. i. p. 239). But the point is not his desire to convict the human race of its sin but to find a ground of pardon for his own.
3 Essays of Elia, “Christ’s Hospital five-and-thirty years ago”.
4 “At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year. I had bewildered myself in metaphysics and theological controversies.” Works (Shedd’s edition), iii. pp. 152–3, and the biographical fragment in MS. G printed in J. Gillman’s Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1838), p. 23.
5 These deserve more notice in any history of British idealism than they have hitherto received. They include, from Plotinus, Ennead i. book 6, Concerning the Beautiful (1787); An Essay on the Beautiful from the Greek of Plotinus (1792); Five Books of Plotinus (1794); from Plato, the Phaedrus, Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Timaeus (1792–3). If, as Taylor’s biographer said, his critics knew more Greek, he knew more Plato.
6 See Professor C. Howard’s Coleridge’s Idealism (1925), useful as a corrective of the view which exaggerates German influences in Coleridge’s development, but otherwise itself inclined to exaggerate the influence over him of writers whom Coleridge himself brands as a group for “ignorance of natural science; physiography scant in fact and stuffed out with fables; physiology imbrangled with an inapplicable logic and a misgrowth of entia rationalia, i.e. substantial abstractions”. (Notes on English Divines, “Henry More’s Theological Works”, ii. p. 129.)
7 Gillman’s Life, etc., p. 317.
8 Letters, vol. i. p. 113 (1895 ed.). I see no reason to doubt, as Howard does, the sincerity of these words. We have the application of the doctrine of “philosophical necessity” to the ethics of revolution in the Bristol Address, also dated 1794. (See Condones ad Populum, p. 21. “Vice originates not in the man but in the surrounding circumstances, not in the heart but in the understanding.”)
9 See Oxford Edition of the Poems (1912), i. p. 131.
10 Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749).
11 The allusion so precisely fits Hume as to render unlikely W. R. Sorley’s surmise (History of English Philosophy, p. 195) that Hartley had not heard of him at this time. The Treatise of Human Nature had appeared in 1739.
12 Imagination has only five lines devoted to it in the whole treatise and that in a section upon Dreams, where it is distinguished from “reverie” as involving less attention to thoughts and greater disturbance by “foreign objects”. Op. cit, part i. prop. xci.
13 G. F. Gingcrich, in article, “From Necessity to Transcendentalism in Coleridge”, in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xxxv.
14 For the above reason I think this a truer statement of the case than Leslie Stephen’s more comprehensive remark: “The germ of all Coleridge’s utterances may be found—by a little ingenuity—in The Ancient Mariner, though we may well agree that “part of the secret (of the strange charm of the poem) is the ease with which Coleridge moves in a world of which the machinery—as the old critics called it—is supplied by the mystic philosopher.”—Hours in a Library, vol. iv. “Coleridge”.
15 The lines in the Ode to Dejection (1802) are well known:
“Joy, Lady ! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven.”
16 For the most part repeating Wordsworth’s view that “Coleridge had been spoilt for a poet by going to Germany”. His mind, Wordsworth held, had thereby been fixed in its natural direction towards metaphysical theology. “If it had not been so he would have been the greatest, the most abiding poet of his age.” Prose Works, iii. 469.
17 “Poetry”, wrote De Quincey, who knew here what he was talking about, “can flourish only in the atmosphere of happiness. But subtle and perplexed investigations of difficult problems are amongst the commonest resources for beguiling the sense of misery.” De Quincey also recognized that while dejection might stimulate to speculation, it is insufficient to sustain exertion. “Opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished.” Narrative Papers, vol. ii. “Coleridge and Opium-Eating”.
18 To William Wordsworth (1807).
19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 89.
20 Biographia Epistolaris, A. Turnbull (1911), vol. i. p. 162.
21 See Campbell, op. cit., p. 165, n. 1, who quotes it without noting the inconsistency with his own previous statement.
22 It would be a mistake to attribute to this early period the devastating criticism of Hartley which we have in chapters v–vii of Biog. Lit. But the less reason we have to commit the mistake, the more remarkable is the complete mastery he by that time had obtained of the philosophical situation. The critical merits of these and the following two chapters have not been sufficiently recognized by literary critics who have been too ready to allow them to be obscured by the evidences of “plagiarism” in the notorious chapter xii.
23 Letters (1895 ed.), i. p. 319. On his admiration for Spinoza’s great moral qualities as distinguished from “the whole nest of popular infidels” (including Hobbes and Voltaire), see Gillman, op. cit., p. 319 foll.
24 See H. Crabb Robinson’s Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, 2nd ed., 1872, ii. 5, and Letters, i. 209.
25 How he came afterwards to understand it we know from the fine passage quoted, Biographia Literaria, chap. iv, from No. 5 of The Friend.
26 Printed in Biographia Literaria.
27 De Quincey, op. cit., has given a lively account of this visit.
28 C. H. Herford’s Age of Wordsworth.
29 A life of whom, interwoven with a sketch of German literature, “in its rise and present state”, he designed at this time. See letters of January 4 (Letters, i. 270) and May 21, 1799 (Tom Wedgwood, 1903, p. 70), in the latter of which he tells Wedgwood that one of his objects was that “of conveying under a better name than my own ever will be opinions which I deem of the highest importance”. It was unfortunate that later in life, in writing Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, he gave the appearance of having done the opposite with regard to the inspiration of Scripture.
30 Philosophical Writers (1856).
31 Literary Remains, pp. 171–2.
32 Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers (1853).
33 Letters, i. p. 203, n. 2.
34 Campbell, op. cit., p. 119.
35 Letters, i. p. 351 n.
36 Cp. Table Talk. Works (Shedd), vol. vi. p. 351, where he accuses Newton of not being able to conceive the idea of a law: “He thought it a physical thing after all”.
37 As he puts it elsewhere, “Fichte in his moral system is but a caricature of Kant; or rather he is a Zeno with the cowl, rope, and sackcloth of a Carthusian monk. His metaphysics have gone by; but he has the merit of having prepared the ground for the dynamic philosophy by the substitution of act for thing”. Letters, ii. p. 682.
38 See below.
39 The most decisive passage is that in the letter to his nephew of April 8, 1825 (Letters, vol. ii. 735): “I can not only honestly assert but I can satisfactorily prove by reference to writings (Letters, Marginal Notes, and those in books that have never been in my possession since I first left England for Hamburgh, etc.) that all the elements, the differentials, as the algebraists say, of my present opinions existed for me before I had ever seen a book of German Metaphysics later than Wolf and Leibnitz or could have read it, if I had.” Cp. this with Anima Poetae 106 of unrecorded date.
40 The Friend (1844 ed.), i. p. 206 (Shedd, ii. p. 142) foll, and i. p. 121 (Shedd, ii. p. 91), where the latter is defined as the principle that “every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole means and condition of its manifestation; and all opposition is a tendency to reunion” and expressly referred to Heraclitus.
41 The Friend, Appendix A.
42 See Shedd, iii. p. 691 foll., and cp. MS. C. where Schelling is accused of having “failed to make intelligence comprehensible (as the source of definite limitation) instead of assuming it as the ground, as I myself do”.
43 See Alice D. Snyder’s article on “Coleridge on Giordano Bruno.” in Modern Language Notes, xlii. 7, and cp. Letters, ii. p. 683. He thinks the coincidence between Schelling and Boehme “too glaring to be solved by mere independent coincidence in thought and intention”, and in reading the former “remains in the same state, with the same dimly and partially light-shotten mists before his eyes, as when he read the same things for the first time in Jacob Boehme” (Shedd, iii. p. 695).
44 See Works, vol. vi. p. 520.
45 Introduction to op. cit., with which might be compared what Turnbull says, Biographia Epistolaris, vol. ii. p. 146.
46 See Benn, op. cit., p. 244, who compares this synthesis with “the unity of Substance and Subject” that Hegel was working out in these same years.
47 Letter of January 1821 (Allsop, Letters, etc., of S. T, Coleridge, 3rd ed., p. 33).
48 See e.g. Campbell, op. cit., p. 251. For allusions to it as his Magnum Opus, see ibid. Index sub verb.