Coleridge as Philosopher

“The first source of falsehood in Logic is the abuse and misapplication of Logic itself.”—MS. Logic.

WHATEVER changes Coleridge’s philosophical opinions underwent, one thing remained fixed and constant, the guiding star of all his wanderings, namely, the necessity of reaching a view of the world from which it could be grasped as the manifestation of a single principle, and therefore as a unity. The attempt to reach such a view was what he meant by Metaphysics, or philosophy in general. There was nothing that he deplored more than the neglect into which this study had sunk: “the long eclipse of philosophy, the transfer of that name to physical and psychological empiricism, and the non-existence of a learned philosophical class.”¹ If there was one thing more than another which he regarded as his own special mission, taking precedence of any system of opinions, however dear, it was the revival of the philosophical spirit in his fellow-countrymen.

But philosophy in the sense of metaphysics was a large word and fell into various departments. Granted that it meant, as Plato defined it, the contemplation of all time and all existence, it was itself an exercise of thought, and, before the contemplation of time and existence must come the contemplation of thought (itself, after all, the most certain of existences), and the principles of its operation. In other words, it had to be prefaced by a study of Logic. True to this conviction, Coleridge had early become inspired with the idea of a work on Logic which should be a “propaedeutic” to the larger study.

The science of Logic in Coleridge’s time was undergoing a process of change and expansion. The older Aristotelian logic still remained, and was being expounded in England and on the Continent by leading writers.² But new matter had been introduced into it by Kant’s treatment of the categories—new wine, as it was to prove, into old bottles. Whewell’s and Mill’s work on Inductive Logic was still in the future, but the advances in science were making a reconstruction of the whole Science yearly more pressing. What Kant had begun in expanding the field, Hegel was already engaged in completing, and after the appearance of his Logic (1812–16) it was no longer possible to accept the old formal logic as anything but a more or less artificial simplification of the deeper movements of thought.

Here, as in so much else, Coleridge represented a transition stage in the coming transformation. So early as 1803 we have from him, in a letter to William Godwin,³ the intimation that he was engaged on a work which was to be “introductory to a system” and was to include, besides the common system of Logic and an outline of the history of the science, his own “Organon veré Organon”. It was to conclude with considerations as to its practical value in science, medicine, politics, law, and religion. Only fragments of this work remain,⁴ but they are sufficient to indicate his view of the scope of the science, and the answer he was prepared to give some of its main problems at a time when he had not as yet realized what had been done by such writers as Mendelssohn and Kant to advance the science.

He still regards it as chiefly concerned with the syllogism, which is treated from the point of view of classification. “I think it important”, he writes, “to impress the truth as strongly as possible that all logical reasoning is simply Classification, or adding to the common name, which designates the individuality and consequently the differences of things, the Generic name which expresses their resemblances.” He even fails to note the distinction which the ordinary Logic makes between the Singular proposition in which an individual, and the Particular, in which “some” of a class, is the subject.⁵ It is not surprising perhaps that on this basis the ordinary third figure (All M is P; all M is S .·.Some S is P) is rejected as “a mere barren and identical proposition”⁶ From this point of view also the major premise becomes merely a summary of all the individuals that have been found to possess a certain character, among them the individual or group of individuals which is the subject of the conclusion. “In some part or other of every Syllogism we declare or imply the Character of the class, we assume that the Individual belongs to this class, and we conclude therefore that the Individual must have this Character.” He seems to feel that this is to evacuate inference of something which it is usually thought to contain, namely a real advance to some fresh insight, for he goes on to ask, “But is not this merely repeating the same thing in other words? Some have thought so, and in consequence have asserted that all reasoning is made up of Identical Propositions.” He admits that there is repetition, but denies that this is all. “In every Syllogism I do in reality repeat the same thing in other words, yet at the same time I do something more; I recall to my memory a multitude of other facts, and with them the important remembrance that they have all one or more property in common.” It is this “recapitulation and, as it were, refreshment of its knowledge and of the operations by which it both acquires and retains it”, that saves the soul of the syllogism.

The student of Mill’s Logic will recognize an old friend in this proof that the syllogism is in reality a petitio principii: all that the major premise does being to record, as it were in shorthand, the particulars from which it is generalized, and that all inference that is not founded on complete enumeration is by mere analogy. The best that can be said for Coleridge’s attempt at this stage is that he perceived the fundamental importance of the study and was already struggling with what in the succeeding generation were to become real problems. That his answer to one so central as the ground of syllogistic inference should have been that which was afterwards given by a type of philosophy, which he himself was to exert the whole power of his genius to undermine, only shows how much had yet to be done by him in the development and unification of his own thought.

The part that the study of Kant had in that development has been already referred to. By the time the manuscript which bears the name of Logic came to be written, Coleridge had mastered the general teaching of the Critique of Pure Reason, and through it arrived at an extended view of what was involved in the scientific treatment of the functions of thought, and at the same time of the limits of the science of Logic, when taken as concerned with the rules under which the understanding operates, whether considered abstractly or in connection with the concrete matter of experience. Besides the generalizing function of the mind in its commerce with experience, there is intuitive apprehension below it and a unifying organizing function above and beyond it.⁷ By the time of which we are speaking, the distinction between these different forms of the exercise of thought, particularly that between Understanding and Reason, had become to him a fixed “frame of reference”, which he applied to every subject that came within the range of philosophy, and no question goes deeper than that of its origin in his mind, the meaning he attached to it, and the relation of this meaning to that of the similar distinction in Kant. A complete answer to this question can only be given on a review of his philosophy as a whole. Here we are concerned with it as the basis of the scope he assigned to Logic.

2. REASON AND UNDERSTANDING

With regard to its origin, it has been commonly assumed that he took it over from Kant. As a matter of fact it had been before the world since the time of Plato, by whom different functions were assigned to voῦs and διάναια. In English writers, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, and the Cambridge Men,⁸ we have the contrast between discourse of reason and the intuitive exercise of the faculty, and there is no need to question Coleridge’s own statement that he found it there. All that Kant did in this case, as in others, was to confirm and give more definite form to what he had toiled out for himself. More important is the question of what he meant by it.

If we had merely the popular statements of the published works, we might suppose that it was merely an elaboration of the Platonic distinction between discursive and intuitive thought. There the understanding is defined as the “faculty of judging according to sense”, that is of making generalizations from particulars given in perceptual experience, and of drawing inferences from them according to the formal laws of identity and noncontradiction.⁹ As contrasted with this, reason is defined as the power of apprehending “truths above sense and having their evidence in themselves”, among these the law of non-contradiction itself. Whether there ever was a time when this was all that the distinction meant to Coleridge or when he took it to be all that Kant meant, there is no need to inquire. The manuscript on Logic makes it quite clear that by the time it was written he had arrived, by the aid of Kant, at a far deeper apprehension of the relation of sense to understanding, and of understanding to reason in its wider and truer meaning.

Here sense is no longer spoken of as presenting us with the experience of objects from whose qualities abstraction is made, but rather as the undifferentiated background of experience, “the common or neutral boundary”, as he calls it in the Logic, of objective and subjective.¹⁰ Similarly with the Understanding. This is no longer conceived of as engaged in the discursive treatment of objects given by sense, but as a principle entering into the very constitution of the object, without which there could be no experience even of the most elementary kind. It is defined in so many words as “the substantiating power—that by which we attribute substance and reality to phenomena, and raise them from mere affections into objects communicable and capable of being anticipated and reasoned of”. Thought in this sense is constitutive “even of the simplest objects. Points, lines, surfaces are not bodies but acts of the mind, the offspring of intellectual motions, having their canons in the imagination of the geometrician”. Although we cannot say that all entia logica are objects, yet we can say that all objects are entia logica.¹¹ By this time, too, he is familiar with the Kantian doctrine of space and time as a priori forms of sense and of the Categories as the a priori principles of unity in the matter of experience, and finally with Kant’s distinction between these forms and “ideas of the reason”, the one concerned with phenomena, the other pointing to forms of unity that carry us beyond anything that can be verified in experience.

It is on this basis that Coleridge at the beginning of his treatise draws the distinction between Logic, as the science of the understanding on logos, in which everything is relative to the distinction between subject and object, and of objects from one another, Noetic, or the science of Nous, as referring to that which is absolute and irrelative “because the ground of all relations”, finally Mathematics, as standing between them, on the one hand starting from sensory intuition, on the other having a necessity and absoluteness founded on self-made postulates. Coleridge was convinced that in the end Logic, critical though it was itself, must submit to the higher criticism of Noetic, but he thought it possible to allow it provisionally to make its own assumptions as other sciences did—chiefly that of the independence of thought and its object—without raising the question of their ultimate validity.¹²

3. DIVISION OF LOGIC: THE CANON

Taking Logic in this sense and distinguishing it from mathematics as based on concepts rather than sensory intuition, he further distinguishes between a narrower and a wider sense of the term according as it abstracts from the concrete matter of experience, and aims at stating the formal canons of reasoning, or includes a reference to the objects to which thought has to conform. But the important distinction is between both of these and the critical, or as he prefers to call it judicial, treatment of the understanding to which Kant led the way.

It would be manifestly unfair to take an unrevised copy of the manuscript of a portion of Coleridge’s work on Logic as a final statement of his views. But there is sufficient, when taken with the confirmation which is elsewhere supplied, to provide material for an estimate of the extent to which the contents mark an advance in logical doctrine. If we look for any real advance on his own earlier treatment of pure or syllogistic logic, we shall, I think, be disappointed. Propositions are still treated from the side of classification. His division of what he calls “logical acts” into “elusion” or “seclusion” (all men are mortal), “inclusion” (Socrates is a man), and “conclusion” (Socrates is mortal) proceeds on the assumption that the syllogism is concerned with wider and narrower classes. Nor is there anything to indicate that he does not still regard the major premise as a mere appeal to the memory of acts of inclusion.¹³ The best that can be said for this part of his exposition is that he recognizes that, if the analysis of the syllogism is all that logic means, it is but “a hollow science”, and “a thousand syllogisms amount merely to nine hundred and ninety-nine superfluous illustrations of what a syllogism means”.¹⁴

It is only when we come to the section on the “Premises in all Logical Reasoning” in the later part of this section that he begins to throw off the trammels of the traditional scheme and to use his own insight. There is still little word of a logic of induction in the modern sense. The few masterly hints which Aristotle gives in the Posterior Analytics seem to have passed unnoticed by him, and it is another side of Bacon that interests him.¹⁵ But at the point at which logic joins psychology in the act of perception, his unfailing sureness of touch in the latter science comes to his aid, and in the discussion of the question whether nature presents us with objects “perfect and as it were ready made”, apart from any act of our own minds, he gives an answer which contains the root of the matter.¹⁶

After referring to the common experience that there is an education of the senses in perceiving aright, he goes on: “As there is a seeing and a hearing that belongs to all mankind, even so in the different kinds and species of knowledge there is a separate apprenticeship necessary for each. … In order to discuss aright the premises of any reasoning in distinction from the reasoning itself, a knowledge of the matter is the first and indispensable requisite. This may appear a truism, but, though equally certain, it is not equally obvious that the same necessity applies to the very means and acts, with and by which we acquire the materials of knowledge—not only must we have some scheme or general outline of the object, to which we could determine to direct our attention, were it only to have the power of recognizing it, or, as the phrase is, bring it under our cognizance when perceived; but the very senses by which we are to perceive will each again require the aid of a previous scientific insight. … So erroneous would the assertion be that an object of the sense is the same as the impression made on the senses, or that it would be possible to conceive an act of seeing wholly separate from the modification of the judgment and the analogies of previous experience.” From this point of view he goes on to say it may be seen that “the main object of logical investigation is most often the establishment of the object itself, which, once established, contains, or rather is coincident with its inferences”, and “we may therefore readily understand the observations of Lord Bacon respecting the insignificance of common Logic, and its utter inadequacy in the investigations of nature, and he might safely have added in those of the pure reason”.

Readers familiar with the doctrine of appercipient groups in modern psychology, and with the place assigned by modern logic to the system of judgments, into which “facts” are taken up and remoulded in inductive inference, will be prepared to see in such a statement an anticipation of principles that may be said in recent times to have revolutionized both sciences. What was needed was that Coleridge should have brought together what he here says about the scheme or system (the pervading identity, as we might say, or “concrete universal”) underlying all real inference, with what he would fain have said about the major premise, as more than a jog to memory, and the syllogism as more than a petitio principii. That he failed clearly to see its implications as to the true nature of inference, or only accidentally touched upon them in the phrase about the “coincidence of the establishment of the object with its inferences”, is only one of many instances of the unresolved conflict in his mind between what pressed upon him with the weight of tradition and what his own insight was constantly opening up to him.

4. CRITICAL LOGIC: THE PLACE OF JUDGMENT IN GENERAL

The second part of the Logic nominally upon the “Criterion” opens with a discussion of rational and irrational questions,¹⁷ leading to the demonstration that the question of a criterion of truth, as ordinarily put, belongs to the latter class. Truth in the sense of coincidence of thought with thing must always be something particular corresponding to the particularity of the thing, whereas the criterion required must be a universal one. It is senseless to ask for the universal criterion of truth “when all truth is out of the question”.¹⁸ True, there is another sense in which the question might be asked, as referring to the ground of the coincidence as ordinarily assumed—the guarantee of “the identity of thing and thought”. But in the first place “this was not the purpose of the question”, and in the second place, we here introduce a reference to realities which are objects of First Philosophy (his own Noetic) not of Logic, and which “therefore cannot be submitted to a discussion or reasoning purely logical”.¹⁹ If not irrational in an absolute sense, the question is irrational from the point of view of the logic of the understanding.

If this interpretation be correct, what “Coleridge suddenly seems to realize” in this section is not, as Miss Snyder suggests,²⁰ that “he is giving a second criterion instead of the expected Organon”, but that the whole question of a criterion is here out of place, and that what requires to be substituted for it is the proof that this is so, as that is contained in Kant’s Transcendental Analysis, the effect of which has been to undermine the whole distinction between subject and object, as assumed by the ordinary logic. I agree that the retention of the title of the section is in that case highly misleading, but in the state in which the work has come to us we have no reason to believe that these headings met with the author’s final approval. Be this as it may, the interest of the rest of the Logic centres round the sketch that we here have (the first in English philosophy) of the logical bearing of the teaching of the Critique, and the special applications that are made of it to theories still current in contemporary thought, leading to the question of the extent to which the writer seems prepared to accept it as final.

The central points in Kant’s analysis are the place of judgment in the structure of experience, the distinction he draws between analytic and synthetic judgments, and in the latter between synthetic a posteriori and a priori. Whatever doubt may be raised as to the first of these in Coleridge’s popular works, there is no ambiguity here. Locke’s definition of judgment as a comparison of an object with its marks is rejected as assuming the unity in the object, which is itself the result of judgment. “All judgments are functions of unity in our representations—official acts by which unity is effected among them.” More particularly judgment is “the power of determining this or that under the condition of some rule”, and as such the general condition of all rational consciousness. If it be said that this leaves it still doubtful whether Coleridge does not hold that “representations” give us objects, and that all that judgment does is to abstract from them as thus given, this might be true if the above were all he says about it.

We reach a further point when he goes on to explain that underlying all rational consciousness there is a distinction between subject and object, the self and its world; and that “the resolution of any given representation (his word for the modern presentation or content) into the object and the subject and the coexistence of both in one we call a judgment. At least it is the first and most generalized definition of the term judgment which is most happily expressed in the Teutonic language by Urtheil”. It is in this Urtheil that he finds “the Archimedes standing room, from which we may apply the lever of all our other intelligent functions whereby: (1) the mind affirms its own reality; (2) this reality is a unity; (3) the mind has the power of communicating this unity; and lastly all reality for the mind is derived from its own reality”.

Carrying the same thought further in a later passage, he finds in the copula the assertion of a whole of reality beyond the division we make in judgment between the self and the world. “It contains a truth which, being antecedent to the act of reflection and, of course therefore to all other acts and functions of the understanding, asserts a being transcendent to the individual subject in all cases, and therefore to all subjects thinking under the same laws.” He admits that, so interpreted, self-conscious experience seems to imply a contradiction between subject and object. On the one hand we have the judging mind, on the other we have an object which is “assumed to contain the principle of reality in itself exclusive of, nay, in contradiction of, whatever is mind”.²¹ He himself holds that the contradiction is not an insoluble one. But he holds also that to find the clue to its solution we have to pass beyond the limits of the logic which proceeds on the assumption of the dualism of thought and its object.

Leaving this therefore for the present, and returning to the place of judgment in ordinary experience as above defined, Coleridge illustrates it by an acute criticism of Berkeley’s form of idealism (or, as he calls it, his “psilo-phenomenism”). On Berkeley’s view that the sole esse of things is the percipi, and that the percipi consists in the mere impression of the sense, we have no distinction between subject and object. Objects “would exist in the mind, for which they existed, no otherwise differenced from the same than as the waves from the collective sea”. In fact “Berkeley ought to say, not I see a chair, but I see myself in the form of a chair”.²² His mistake consisted, as he elsewhere 3 explains, in failing to distinguish between sensation and developed perception: “As rationally might I assert a tree to be a bird as Berkeley’s perception to be sensation, which is but a minimum—the lowest grade or first manifestation of perception. But the occasion of the error deserves notice, for it applies to many other schemes besides the Berkeleian. Instead of resting at the real minimum, it was carried downward by the imagination, or rather by an act of the will, to the extinction of all degrees, and yet thought of as still existing. The true logic would in this case have been: perception diminishing from its minimum (in which it is called sensation) into an absolute O, sensation becomes = O; but no! this hypothetical subminimal perception, = O, is still somewhat … and this, the proper offspring of the unitive and substantiating function of the Understanding, is, by the imagination, projected into an ens reale, or, still more truly, a strange ens hybridum betwixt real and logical, and partaking of both: namely, it is, yet it is not as this or that, but as sensation per se; i.e. the perceptum, surviving its annihilation, borrows the name by which, in its least degree, it has been distinguished and commences a new genus without species or individual. … The error here noted is only one of a host that necessarily arise out of having only one starting-point, viz. the lowest.”

The criticism throughout, and particularly in the last sentence, is one that goes to the root, not only of Berkeley’s sensationalism, but of all forms of theory which seek to explain the higher and more developed phases, whether of knowledge or existence, in terms of the lower and less developed, and so ranks as a particularly lucid statement of what might be regarded as the fundamental principle of all later idealistic philosophy.

5. SYNTHETIC JUDGMENTS

Equally with what he says on judgment in general, his account of the important distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, and of the existence of the latter in a form underivable from experience, and rightly therefore called a priori, leaves little to be desired. Whether he would himself have admitted the existence of purely analytic judgments is not clear. In his treatment of formal logic he seems to take them for granted. On the other hand, his assertion that “predicates are intermediate marks”, and that “every judgment by intermediate marks is a conclusion”, combined with his rejection of “immediate” inference,²³ seems to point to a different view. But the important point is his recognition that both in mathematics and in physics, not to speak of metaphysics, the existence of these sciences depends on the existence of uniting elements (in the former case equations, in the latter causal connections), which cannot be derived from experience in the sense of being generalizations from it.

The clearest case is in mathematics. The synthesis of mathematics differs from that of physics and metaphysics in being conditioned from first to last by the pre-existing forms of sense, space and time as given to intuition. Coleridge follows Kant closely in his account of these forms, but lays more stress, first, upon the fact that they are given to intuition as infinites, into which, for the interpretation of experience, determinations are introduced by limitation; and, secondly, upon their objectivity, in the sense that they do not depend on the individual peculiarities of our minds. Whether they exist apart from the minds of finite individuals is a question which, as falling to Noetic, he does not here discuss. For the rest, what he regards as important is “to put the student in the way of proving for himself that all Mathematical reasoning is truly Synthetic or composed of synthetic judgments a priori”, and thus to lead him to see that other synthetic judgments have similarly “their condition and ground in the a priori forms of the Understanding”.²⁴ As the doctrine of the place of judgment in general is happily illustrated from the error of Berkeley, so that of synthetic a priori judgments is illustrated not less happily from that of Hume.

Hume’s work in general Coleridge regards as a conspicuous illustration of “the many and important advantages which truth and science derive from strict consequence even in dangerous error”.²⁵ It was the direct outcome of Berkeley: “Berkeley’s remark that we ought to speak of signals not of causes is the essence of Hume’s doctrine, which was a spark that cannot be said to have fallen on incombustible materials. It produced great heat and volumes of smoke, but kindled as little light as the former.” To Hume’s argument it was no use appealing to common sense. Hume was neither more deficient in common sense nor more likely to make himself ridiculous by outraging its dictates than Messrs. Reid, Oswald, Beattie or any other of his opponents on either side of the Tweed.²⁶ His opponents, in fact, had no idea of the depth of the problem. They “came forward not as investigators but as adversaries, who saw nothing in the subject that needed investigation”. Instead of answering Hume, “they set up a Guy Faux (sic)”. What therefore happened was that “the seed which Hume scattered was wafted and tossed about on the winds of literary rumour, or fell unprofitably, till it found at length a well-fitted and prepared soil in Kant”.

Hume saw that “in judgments of causality the assertion of a necessary connection between A and B was not an analytic but a synthetic judgment, seeing that A is different from B; and asked by what right it is affirmed, and further by what right it was transferred from physics to metaphysics. His solution consisted in assigning the origin and ground of the notion and the necessity conceived therein to custom, habit, association.” But this was in the first place to confound the conception of necessity as a positive and essential constituent of the conception of cause with a mere negative inability to do otherwise; in the second place it was to assign, as the cause of causality, phenomena which presuppose the principle; in the third place it was to fail to notice that experience, so far from engendering the conception of causality, rather acts as a check to the application of it, seeing that, with the unwary, it is apt to flow in wherever it is not forbidden. Like breathing, in fact, it requires an express volition to suspend it. “This predisposition may be called into consciousness by occasion, but can no more be given by occasion than the form of oak can be given to the acorn by the air and light and moisture.”

What blinded Hume to all this was not that he had wrongly assumed causal judgments to be synthetic, but that he had wrongly assumed that herein they differed from mathematical judgments, which he took to be purely analytic. Had he seen that these also were synthetic, and not, as he supposed, merely identical propositions, he could hardly have ventured to explain away their necessity as the result of subjective association. It was here that Kant may be said to have “begun anew and completed the work of Hume” by proving that mathematical, as well as physical and metaphysical, judgments involved a synthesis, and that, unless the very existence of the science which “hath made Earth’s reasoning animal her lord” is to be denied, there must be an element in experience that was not derived from experience, as Hume interpreted it.²⁷

6. PARTING WITH KANT: THE PRINCIPLE OF TRICHOTOMY

Freshly put as all this is, neither here nor in his account of the different forms of synthesis in judgment, which Kant had tabulated as the Categories, is there any real advance on the teaching of the Critique. It is only when he comes to the negative side of it, the denial of the power of the speculative reason to transcend the limits of the logical understanding, that Coleridge refuses to follow. He had himself become convinced that logic, as commonly interpreted, was an abstract science in the sense that it was based on an assumption of the relation of subject to object, thought to thing, which it had not the means of examining. The first lesson therefore which it had to learn was to keep within its own limits: “the first source of falsehood in Logic was the abuse and misapplication of Logic itself”.²⁸ It was sure to go wrong if, for instance, it presumed to attack this problem in its own strength, and tried to resolve everything into the object (as in the “Epicurean” philosophy), or again into the subject (as in the Berkeleian), or, still again, if it were dogmatically to deny that any theory was possible, and leave us with an insoluble dualism. It was here that, by the time from which the Logic dates, Coleridge had discovered that the limitations of Kant’s analysis were to be looked for. While therefore, as he puts it, “considered as Logic it (the transcendental analysis) is irrefragable, as philosophy it will be exempt from opposition, and cease to be questionable only when the soul of Aristotle shall have become one with the soul of Plato, when the men of Talent shall have all passed into the men of Genius, or the men of Genius have all sunk into men of Talent. That is Graecis Calendis, or when two Fridays meet.” ²⁹

This is picturesquely expressed, but the meaning is clear, namely, that there is a level of thought beyond the transcendental analysis, to which the genius of Plato had penetrated, but which all the talent of Kant had failed to reach. For more detailed criticism of Kant’s doctrine of experience we have to go elsewhere,³⁰ but he does not leave us in the Logic without a clear indication of what he regards as the source of his failure.

If Coleridge had been asked what he considered the most fatal of the errors of the older logic and the point at which he would begin its reformation, he would have said that it was the dogmatic assumption of the principle of dichotomy. Everywhere in it we have terms standing in stark opposition to each other without any attempt at mediation: affirmative-negative, universal-particular, unity-multiplicity, real-unreal; with the consequence that where one of them is conceived of as denoting something real and objective, the other is set down as denoting something ideal and subjective. But this, he held, is to contradict the very essence of reasoning itself, seeing that “the prime object of all reasoning is the reduction of the many to one and the restoration of particulars to that unity, by which alone they can participate in true being on the principle omne ens mum”. To rely on the principle of dichotomy as final is therefore to leave us “with what is more truly eristic than logic. … If adopted as the only form of Logic, it excites and seems to sanction the delusive conceit of self-sufficiency in minds disposed to follow the clue of the argument at all hazards and whithersoever it threatens to lead them, if only they remain assured that the thread continues entire.” But by its fruit you may know it. One of these is that “the inevitable result of all consequent reasoning, in which the speculative intellect refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it can itself supply, is—and from Zeno the Eleatic to Spinoza ever has been— Pantheism, under one or other of its modes”.³¹ Needless to say that for Coleridge, to whom Pantheism was merely “a live Atheism”,³² this meant utter damnation.

When therefore in the Logic the question of dichotomy occurs, he is prepared to note Kant’s attitude to it. He gives him, indeed, credit for the recognition of the higher principle of trichotomy in the triadic form in which the categories are arranged,’ and even speaks of this as “the prominent excellence of his Critique”. But he denies that it was Kant’s discovery, or that Kant had any true appreciation of its significance. He attributes the discovery of it to Richard Baxter, who in his Methodus Theologiae not only employed it a century before the publication of Kant’s work, but “saw more deeply into the grounds, nature, and necessity of this division as a norma philosophiae”. “For Baxter”, as he elsewhere explains, “grounds the necessity of trichotomy as the principle of real Logic on an absolute Idea presupposed in all intelligential acts, whereas Kant adopts it merely as a fact of reflection, though doubtless as a singular and curious fact in which he suspects some yet deeper Truth latent and hereafter to be discovered”. Unfortunately “the sacred fire remained hid under the bushel of our good countryman’s ample folios” —to be rescued, as Coleridge hoped, from its obscurity and blown into a warming and enlightening flame by himself.³³

For the use which he was prepared to make of the principle we have to go beyond the limits not only of the ordinary but of the critical logic, seeing that the method which trichotomy prescribes is the opposite of that which underlies both. Instead of starting with opposing concepts, in one or other of which, taken separately, we are to find the truth, we have to “seek first for the Unity as the only source of Reality, and then for the two opposite yet correspondent forms by which it manifests itself. For it is an axiom of universal application that manifestatio non datur nisi per alterum. Instead therefore of affirmation and contradiction, the tools of dichotomic Logic, we have the three terms Identity, Thesis, and Antithesis.”³⁴ It is on this principle that he conceived it possible to advance beyond the limitations of Logic or the science of the Understanding to a Noetic, or science of the Reason, which should also be a science of Reality.

Meantime, whatever the defects of his own contribution to logic in the narrower sense as it was left by him, he has the undoubted merit of being one of the first to recognize the importance of a method which proceeds, as he expresses it, by “enlargement” instead of by “exclusion”,³⁵ and by inner development instead of by mere external synthesis.³⁶ It was late in life and only to a small extent that he became acquainted with Hegel’s contemporaneous attempt to revolutionize logic precisely on this basis. Short as his marginalia on the Wissenschaft der Logik are,³⁷ they are of the greatest interest as the first real attempt of an English philosopher to grapple with the difficulties of the Hegelian dialectic. They anticipate the judgment that many after him were to repeat that the treatment of the transition Being—Not-Being— Becoming is “not dialectic, but sophistry”. They differ from the kind of comment that was common during the next generation and beyond it, in being founded not on any supposed outrage on the law of non-contradiction (Coleridge’s doctrine of polarity had carried him past all that), but on the abstractness with which he accuses Hegel of treating of the conception of not-being or nothing. “To be (sein, îιναι) is opposed to the ‘Nothing’ (Nichts), whereas the true opposite of ‘To be’ is ‘Not to be’.” Nothing, in fact, is treated as objective, whereas it is “at all times subjective. Objective Nothing is not so truly non-ens and non-sens.” Had Coleridge had the patience to read further, he might perhaps have seen, as no one for a generation was more capable of seeing, that abstraction from the distinction between the objective and the subjective, as something logically later, was of the essence of the Hegelian exposition at this stage. He might have seen also that, whatever else is to be said of the Hegelian philosophy, it was not “Spinozism in its superficial form”, and had far more points of agreement than of conflict with his own.

Be this as it may, the coincidence on the subject of this section is sufficiently remarkable, and tempts one to imagine that there must have been something in the deeper spirit of the time which it was given to these two writers, so entirely different in genius and surroundings, to seize upon and express, each in his own peculiar way. How far Coleridge’s use of the principle differed from Hegel’s, and how far by the consistency of his results his use of it can be justified, it will be part of our occupation in this Study to determine.

¹ Logic MS. (See Snyder, op. cit., p. 121.)

² Coleridge mentions Leibniz, Wolff, Mendelssohn, Condillac; and in England, Hartley, Isaac Watts, William Guthrie.

³ See A. Turnbull’s Biographia Epistolaris, vol. i. p. 270. (Snyder, op. cit., p. 50.) The omission among the names here mentioned of that of Kant is significant.

⁴ For these, see Snyder, op. cit., p. 53 foll.

⁵ “Titius is a red-haired man is a Particular Proposition. Some men are red-haired is another particular.” (Snyder, p. 148.)

⁶ Ibid., p. 146.

⁷ So little truth is there in Hort’s remark (Cambridge Essays, London, 1856, p. 324): “Coleridge seems never to have distinctly asked what is the nature and province of logic”, that his whole system may be said to have rested on the clear convictions he had arrived at with regard to both.

⁸ Aids to Reflection, Aphorism CVc, 9, cviii 3, and passim.

⁹ In this capacity it is made the whipping-boy of prudence in morality, reliance on mere external evidence in theology, and pure expediency in politics.

¹⁰ Long before (see Anima Poetae under date 1800), while his later doctrine was still forming itself in his mind, we have the aphorism, “The dim intelligence sees solute oneness, the perfectly clear intellect knowingly .ceives it, distinction and plurality lie between”. It might have been well if, in his later teaching, he had kept this admirable statement of the continuity of thought in the various levels of experience more clearly before him.

¹¹ Logic, ii. p. 396. (See Snyder, op. cit., p. 100.)

¹² Logic MS., chap. i. We have a similar example of the attempt to work out the principles of Logic independently of a philosophical theory of the nature of truth in F. H. Bradley’s book with that title. The difference is that, while Bradley only discovers in the course of his work that he is making this abstraction, Coleridge starts with the clear consciousness of it.

¹³ The long illustration (Snyder, op. cit., p. 109) from the observation of the calcareousness of the whole of a common to that of a part previously included in it, proceeds on the old assumption as to the meaning of syllogistic inference.

¹⁴ Snyder, op. cit., p. 81.

¹⁵ In his notes on Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden, at the point where the author raises the question of imperfect and perfect Induction, Coleridge has nothing better to suggest than the need of a German word to indicate “my positiveness” as distinguished from objective “certainty”.

¹⁶ Cp. Snyder, pp. 116–18, where the passage is given at length with the comment upon it (p. 89): “Coleridge holds that perception is an art, dependent on the discipline of the senses and the development of organized bodies of knowledge”. In the above quotation I have ventured to underline the important sentences.

¹⁷ Largely taken from Mendelssohn, but leading to a different application. (See Alice D. Snyder, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, October 1921.)

¹⁸ See Snyder, p. 86.

¹⁹ Ibid.,. 87.

²⁰ Op. cit., p. 90.

²¹ The MS. here gives “not mind”, which makes nonsense of the passage.

²² Logic MS., vol. ii, in chapter on “synthetic judgments a priori”, but the illustration from-Berkeley is rather of the place of judgment in general in self-conscious experience.

3 MS. C, p. 10. As the passage is not given in Miss Snyder’s book, I have ventured to quote it at length as illustrative not only of his logical views, but of Coleridge at his best in philosophical criticism.

²³ See Snyder, p. 84.

²⁴ Snyder, p. 94.

²⁵ Logic, ii. p. 300. (Snyder, pp. 93–4.)

²⁶ Logic, ii. 305–6. (Snyder, p. 124.)

²⁷ Logic, vol. ii. p. 281 foll. (Snyder, pp. 91–3.) I venture, however, to doubt the applicability, at this point, of her remark, “Here Coleridge parts company with Kant”. His answer to Hume on the question of the necessity involved in causality is on all fours with Kant’s. Where he might have here parted company with him, but did not, was by noting that Kant directed his criticism to the view Hume puts forward in the Essays, without being aware of the difference between it and that of the Treatise. (See E. Caird’s Critical Philosophy of Kant, vol. i. p. 256.)

²⁸ Snyder, p. 87.

²⁹ Op. cit., xi. pp. 329–30. (Snyder, p. 125.)

³⁰ The most penetrating occurs in a marginal note in his own copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, under the modest heading, “Doubts during a first perusal, i.e. struggles felt, not arguments objected”. See p. 91, below.

³¹ MS. Bill (Snyder, pp. 128–9) and marginal note on Kant’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte. Cp. Anima Poetae, pp. 168–9 for other more immediate consequences in the shattering of “long deeply rooted associations or cherished opinions”.

³² MS. C, p 86.

³³ MS. G. (See Snyder, p. 128 n.) The doctrine of trichotomy is only the logical statement of the metaphysical doctrine of “the law of polarity or essential dualism” which Coleridge conceived of as running through all nature, and in The Friend (vol. i. p. 121 n.) speaks of as “first promulgated by Heraclitus, 2,000 years afterwards republished and made the foundation both of Logic, of Physics, and of Metaphysics by Giordano Bruno”. In a note elsewhere on Baxter he speaks of this law as necessarily involved in the polar logic. (Literary Remains, iv. 141.) That he is quite right in his view of the place of trichotomy in Kant is borne out by the fact, of which Professor H. J. Paton reminds me, that “it is only in the second edition of the Kritique that Kant makes his point about the Categories which reminds one of the Hegelian Dialectic. His other threefold divisions (e.g. sense, imagination, understanding) seem to arise from his tendency to make very sharp distinctions and then invent a third thing to bridge the gulf”—a very different thing from what either Hegel or Coleridge meant.

³⁴ Marginal note on Kant’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, etc. It was part of Coleridge’s exuberance to extend this triad into a tetrad (the Tetractys of Pythagoras) and even into a pentad—an extension which may here perhaps be neglected as belonging to the eccentricities rather than the essentials of his thought.

³⁵ See Anima Poetae, pp. 168 and 301, where he speaks of “the great good of such a revolution as alters not by exclusion but by enlargement”, and of the pleasure he had derived from the adage, “extremes meet”, through which he was able to bring “all problematic results to their solution and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposities … fragments of truth, false only by negation”.

³⁶ A favourite example was of the mathematical point which unfolds itself in the line with its opposite poles. See MS. H, p. 49, where the principle is applied to the idea of Being as the pregnant unevolved point and the identity of the opposite, actual and potential; and pp. 167–8, where he claims as an advantage of his own term “prothesis” over “synthesis” that it emphasizes identity rather than mere union.

³⁷ They cover only the first ninety-one pages. See Snyder, p. 162 foll.