“Let me by all the labours of my life have answered but one end and taught as many as have in themselves the conditions of learning, the true import and legitimate use of the term Idea and the incalculable Value of Ideas (and therefore of Philosophy, which is but another name for the manifestation and application of Ideas) in all departments of Knowledge and their indispensable presence in the Sciences which have a worth as well as a Value to the Naturalist no less than to the Theologian, to the Statesman no less than to the Moralist.”—MS. C, p. 33, condensed.
1. COLERIDGE’S CRITICISM OF KANT
KANT, Coleridge held, had introduced new matter into the old logic. He had enlarged its scope, but he had thereby only in the end brought into clearer evidence the limitations imposed upon it by the dualistic assumption of the independence of thought and reality, without himself being able to get beyond them. In effect his work had resulted only in riveting the chains more securely to this dualism. Yet he had indicated a way of deliverance in the hint of a new triadic logic, and Coleridge’s own metaphysics may best be considered as an attempt to carry the dialectic of Kant’s thought a step farther and turn criticism against the Critic. “Kant”, he had said, “had begun again and completed the work of Hume.” He himself aimed, if not at beginning Kant’s work again, at any rate at beginning where Kant had ended and completing what he had begun. In attempting to follow him in what he regarded as the true “Prolegomena to all future Metaphysics”, it will therefore be useful to start from a more detailed account than we had occasion to give in the preceding chapter of his criticism of Kant, before going on to what he regarded as the central point in the advance he sought to make upon him, and the logic by which he endeavoured to justify it.
We have seen how far he assimilated the positive part of Kant’s teaching. Freely stated, this amounted to the claim that not only the sciences, but the very existence of an objective world of fact depended on a natural metaphysic of the mind, demanding, or postulating, necessary connections between the dispersed elements of sensory experience. Thought was not an operation superinduced upon a given world, but was necessary in order that there might be an experiencible world of any kind. But Kant’s teaching had a negative side. Necessary as these forms or postulates were for the constitution of experience, they were only valid within the limits of that experience. They were not applicable to the world of reality, of which our experience presented us with only the appearance or manifestation. That there was such a reality, revealed most decisively in the moral world and the freedom which was its postulate or condition, Kant never doubted. What he denied was the possibility of knowing it, seeing that knowledge was only possible under forms which were inapplicable to it. It was true that beyond the partial unities, which such forms of the understanding as these of causality and substance indicated, the mind was haunted by ideals of a complete unity. It sought to bring the whole that was experienced, whether as object or as subject, or as the union of both, into a form in which it could be grasped as one. But these ideals were not to be taken as corresponding to any reality. They were useful as guiding, “regulative” principles, “ideas of the Reason”, as Kant called them, borrowing so much from Plato, and as such distinguished from the concepts of the Understanding which entered into experience as constitutive of the apparent or phenomenal world; but beyond this they had no validity as a revelation of the real or noumenal world.
Coleridge accepted in the main the positive side of this teaching. But he was by no means satisfied that even here Kant had said the last word, and what he says of the form in which it was left by him is worth referring to, not only as anticipating much later criticism but as containing the germ of his own rejection of the whole Kantian metaphysic. We fortunately possess in his marginal notes upon the text of the Critique an authentic record of his first reactions to it, which fuller knowledge was to confirm. The force with which Kant’s authority weighed upon him at the time these notes were written is indicated by the modest title, “Struggles felt not arguments objected”, which he gives to the chief one. Not the less does it go straight to the weak point of the whole analysis: the relation of the “manifold of sense” to the form- giving work of the understanding: “How”, he asks, “can that be called a mannigfaltiges ὑλή which yet contains in itself the ground why I apply one category to it rather than another? The mind does not resemble an Aeolian harp, not even a barrel-organ turned by a stream of water, conceived as many times mechanized as you like, but rather, as far as objects are concerned, a violin or other instrument of few strings yet vast compass, played on by a musician of genius. The breeze that blows across the Aeolian harp, the stream that turns the handle of a barrel organ, might be called a mannig-faltiges, a mere sylva incondita, but who would call the muscles and purpose of Linley a confused manifold?”
It was for this reason that he finds “a perpetual and unmoving cloud of darkness” hanging over Kant’s work, which he goes on to attribute (surely rightly) to “the absence of any clear account of Was ist Erfahrung? What do you mean by a fact, an empiric reality, which alone can give solidity (Inhalt) to our conceptions? It seems from many passages that this indispensable test is itself previously manufactured by this very conceptive power, and that the whole not of our own making is the mere sensation of a mere manifold—in short, mere influx of motion, to use a physical metaphor. I apply the categoric forms of a tree. Well ! but first what is this tree? How do I come by this tree?”
Coleridge has been criticized alternately for misunderstanding Kant and for accepting without demur the whole formal apparatus of the Kantian categories, but in criticisms like the above he shows that he has a better understanding of him than many of his later critics, and that we have something that goes deeper than any objection he might have taken to the form of Kant’s exposition. They amount to an arraignment of the whole Kantian analysis on the ground that the “indispensable test” of truth is not there found in anything objective, but in something “previously manufactured” by the conceptive faculty, and that the only thing that is “not of our making” is a “mere sensation which may be anything or nothing”.
If we compare what is here said with the passage in the Logic already referred to, in which he indicates the chasm which the Kantian analysis of judgment left between subject and object, we can see in it the germ of his conviction that Kant had failed to solve this fundamental contradiction, and that the source of his failure lay in his denial of the power of the reason to pass beyond the distinctions of the understanding to the unity that underlies them and gives to them such reality as they possess. Kant saw rightly that the forms of the understanding with the abstractions they involved failed to give us the truth of things. But he did human reason an injustice in placing that truth in a noumenal reality which was wholly beyond its grasp, thus leaving it a prey to an unsolved contradiction. And the reason was that he had failed to follow the clue which his idea of a trichotomic logic had put into his hands. Had he followed this out, he would have reached a point of view from which he might have seen subject and object, not as contradictions, but as complementary aspects of a being which unites them, because more than either.
It was this step that Coleridge was himself prepared to take, as he goes on in the same passage to explain, basing it on that which we must take as the definition of mind as subject. “There are many kinds of subject; mind is that kind which is its own object.” Yet, if we confine ourselves to mind as we know it in ourselves, the contradiction remains, seeing that the subject which we know as thus object to itself is no self-subsistent being, as idealists like Fichte1 would have it. We have therefore still to ask for the ground of its being. Descartes’s method had been to start from the existence of the self, and show that on it rested all other truth: “as surely as I am, so surely this is”. But this was to confuse the principle of knowledge with the principle of being, and contradictorily to assign absoluteness to the finite. Just as little can the principle of objective being be found in all subjects. Coleridge would have had nothing to say to the modern doctrine of “trans-subjective intercourse” as the ground of the object world. Percipient subjects, one and all, he held with the naïvest of realists, imply a perceptum. He goes beyond ordinary realism in demanding a real ground or ground-reality in the light of which both percipient and the perceived world shall have justice done to them, and which shall explain that strangest and most challenging of all facts, the power of the first to respond to the second and of the second to satisfy the demands made upon it by the first in the name of coherence and unity. Was it possible to find any such ground and to justify it to the reason?
It was here that he found help in the older, and as he thought deeper, Platonic tradition, which Kant had erred by forsaking. The difference between them was that, while the emphasis in Kant was upon the conceptions of the understanding, into which the ideas of the reason entered only as regulative principles bereft of any substantiating power, in Plato the ideas were the underlying basis of the whole structure of knowledge, being not merely constitutive, but “productive”. Hence, while to Kant philosophy meant the undermining of their influence over the mind, as guides to a real world beyond the phenomenal, to Plato all education was the preparation of the mind for their entrance into it and its domination by them.2 Negative as the result of many of the Dialogues was, negative on the whole as older Platonism, in Coleridge’s opinion, was, as compared with the later Neo-Platonism, everything in it was a training in the art of rising from the conceptions of the abstracting intelligence to the Ideas which are the real objects of knowledge. As he puts it:3 “Kant supposed the Ideas to be oscillations of the same imagination, which, working determinately, produces the mathematical intuitions, line, circle, etc., a sort of total impression made by successive constructions, each denied or negatived so soon as made, and yet the constructive power still beginning anew. Whereas, according to the true Platonic view, the Reason and Will are the Parent … and the Idea itself, the transcendent Analogon of the Imagination or spiritual intuition.”
It was in this way that the true meaning of Ideas and the application of that meaning to the solution of the problems first of the nature of the ultimate reality in the World, secondly of man’s relation to it in the different departments of human life was to Coleridge the chief occupation of philosophy. “The true import and legitimate use of Ideas” he declared to be “the most important lesson that philosophy has to teach”; philosophy itself he defines as “but another name for the manifestation and application of Ideas”.
Confining ourselves meantime to the first of these two questions, there is none which Coleridge’s readers ask themselves oftener than what his “ideas of the Reason” really are. He was himself keenly alive to the difficulty, which his own distinction between them and conceptions of the Understanding seemed to have made insoluble, of finding a definition. How, he asks, teach the import without a definition? and how define without conceptions, which, just because they are conceptions, must fail to convey the reality of the thing? To ask for a conception of an idea is like asking “for an image of a flavour or the odour of a strain of music”. It is even worse; for between the different senses there is at least an analogy;4 “but Ideas and Conceptions are utterly disparate, and Ideas and Images are the negatives of each other”.5 Even language, as Pythagoras and Plato had found, fails us for the expression of ideas. The early English Platonists had a standing resource in the contrast between the physical and the mathematical sciences, the former occupied with the temporary and contingent, the latter with the eternal and necessary. But Coleridge with truer insight (doubtless aided by Kant) saw that mathematical ideas, based as they were on sensory intuition, and depending on imaginative constructions, remained infected with the weakness of their origin, and offered no easy gradus ad philosophiam. In this difficulty the only resource was to try to define ideas: first, negatively by what they are not; second, positively by marking the function they all perform, as something at least which they have in common; and for the rest to trust to concrete examples.
Negatively they are distinguished, not only from images and isolated conceptions, but from the systematized conceptions we call theories, which, as dependent on sense-given material, must always be liable to change as new sensory facts are disclosed. Nevertheless, scientific theory, in proportion to its advance, as illustrated in his own time by electric science, contrasted with “the vagaries of the magnetists”, or modern chemistry, as contrasted with the older atomists, might approximate to the Idea by dropping all sensory imagery and taking the form of algebraic equations.6
Positively, and with reference to the common function of all Ideas, we have, as a distinguishing mark, the union in them of particular and universal. In their light the particulars are seen as the different individualized forms of a pervading identity or universal, which is the soul or individualizing principle of the particulars. Coleridge had not yet heard of Hegel’s “concrete universal”, or, if he had, does not refer to it; but he has the same thing in view. Seeking for a word to indicate the objective counterpart of such an identity or universal, he can find nothing better than “Law”, which is itself defined as no mere synopsis of phenomena, but as “constitutive” of them, and “in the order of thought necessarily antecedent” to them—revealing fragments of the ideal world, which is thus distinguished “not from the real, but from the phenomenal”.
But it is from the illustrations he here and elsewhere gives, particularly those from human life, that we get the clearest indication of his meaning. Life itself was a favourite illustration. “Take as an instance of an idea the continuity and coincident distinctness of nature: . . vegetable life always striving to be something that it is not, animal life to be itself.”7 In the history of human life, seeing that its aim is “to present that which is necessary as a whole consistently with the moral freedom of each particular act”, he finds the “directing idea” to be the weaving of “a chain of necessity, the particular links of which are free acts”. There is no reason to suppose that Coleridge was familiar with Kant’s Idea of a Universal History, still less with Hegel’s conception of History as the “realization of freedom”, but, apart from ambiguous details, he would have welcomed these as illustrations on a grand scale of what he meant by a “directing Idea”. But there was no need to go to general history to see ideas in being in human life. “You may see an Idea working in a man by watching his tastes and enjoyments, though he may hitherto have no consciousness of any other reasoning than that of conception and facts.” For “All men live in the power of Ideas which work in them, though few live in their light”.
Particularly illuminating, as we might expect, are the illustrations he draws from the field in which he was an acknowledged master. How interpret a poem, he asks, but by reference to the “charioteering genius” of the author, “the mens poetae, or rather mens poeta; the vis vitae organica”?8 From the point of view of language itself “A man of genius, using a rich and expressive language (Greek, German, or English), is an excellent example of the ever individualizing process and dynamic being of Ideas. What a magnificent history of acts of individual minds, sanctioned by the collective mind of the country, a language is!”
Illuminating as these instances are, the reader is still inclined to ask what, after all, is the evidence for the existence of the object of the idea. If it is to come neither from sensory experience directly nor from the generalizations we make from its data and the inferences drawn from them, whence does it come? We seem to have only one alternative left, the old device of an appeal to innateness. That this was not Coleridge’s solution ought by this time to be obvious. The doctrine of innate ideas was no part of the Platonic tradition to which he adhered. By the great Cambridge writers of the seventeenth century to whom, in spite of what he regarded as their limitations,9 he owed so much, it had been expressly repudiated.10 So far from being established by Descartes, he held that it had been reduced to absurdity, by being connected with the “fanciful hypothesis” of “configurations of the brain which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world”.11 In so far as it seemed to be supported by Kant, it was just that which allied him to the form of idealism against which Coleridge’s “spiritual realism” was directed. Yet the theory was so far right that it pointed to the configuration of the mind itself as endowed with “instincts and offices of Reason”, which were essential elements in all experience, forcing it “to bring a unity into all our conceptions and several knowledges. On this all system depends; and without this we could reflect connectedly neither in nature nor on our own minds.”12 None the less the unifying idea has to be found as something rising out of experience and not something superimposed upon it.
The important point is that it is not to be found in any single object given to sense and reproducible in imagination, nor again in any generalization from selected aspects of the sense-given material. On the contrary, images and abstractions of this kind, if adhered to, may be obstructions to the rise in the mind of the unifying principle. Images have to be dissolved in the alembic of thought, and the abstractions of thought have themselves to be united and thus surmounted. What is required is openness of mind to the witness of the whole experienced fact, which is at the same time the witness of the whole experiencing mind. It is thus that such ideas as those above enumerated, life, the mind of the writer, the movement towards freedom in history, our own deeper purposes, rise in the mind, as something which is neither merely given from without nor as something merely imposed from within, but as something in which outer and inner are united, deep calling to deep in the self-evolution of truth.
But all that Coleridge says of the meaning, the source and the operation of ideas in general only leads up to what he has to say of the idea of the ens realissimum—that in the light of which, as the ground of all other realities, all other ideas must be seen, if we are to see them in their unity and therefore in their truth. What is this Idea? and by what logic can we establish the existence of the object corresponding to it?
“The grand problem”, he wrote in The Friend, “the solution of which forms the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (that is, the existence of which is inconceivable except under the conditions of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditioned and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system”. That we have the idea of such a ground Coleridge held to be indisputable, seeing that in addition to the permanent relations, which we call laws, and which it is the aim of the sciences to discover as the ground of phenomena, we have the idea of a permanent relation between the world and ourselves, a “ground common to the world and man”, forming “the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific and the sciences philosophical”.13 It is further indisputable that this idea is constantly finding support in experience, and in the coincidence of what we seek with what we find—in other words of reason with experience. But the question remains of the nature of this ground and the nature of the reasoning, by which it can be proved to possess that nature.
Needless at this stage to say, it is not anything that we can reach by induction. “If we use only the discursive reason we must be driven from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the moment we pressed in it. We either must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite series, thus making our reason baffle the end and purpose of all reason, namely unity and system, or we must break off the series arbitrarily and affirm an absolute something which is causa sui.”14 What those who adopt this line of argument fail to see is that causality is a subordinate form of the human understanding under the more comprehensive one of reciprocal action, and therefore inadequate as a description of the supreme reality.15 The idea of a causa sui sets us indeed on the right track, for this means a break with the logic of the understanding; but, interpreted as this was by Spinoza and others, it turns out to be no cause at all, seeing that we know nothing of anything that is causative of reality except self-conscious will.16 It is thus the presence and priority of the will both in human and in the universal consciousness that Coleridge becomes more and more concerned to demonstrate, and it is for the additional light which his manuscript remains throw upon what he says of this in his published works 17 that they possess their chief philosophical value.
“It is at once the distinctive and constitutive basis of my philosophy”, he writes in a singularly direct passage,18 that I place the ground and genesis of my system, not, as others, in a fact impressed, much less in a generalization from facts collectively, least of all in an abstraction embodied in an hypothesis, in which the pretended solution is most often but a repetition of the problem in disguise. In contradiction to this, I place my principle in an act—in the language of grammarians I begin with the verb—but,” he adds emphatically, “the act involves its reality.” How can this implication of reality be proved?
4. HOW THE IDEA CAN INVOLVE REALITY
Kant denied that there was any passage by way of the speculative or logical reason from one to the other; but Coleridge had already fought his way by his principle of trichotomy beyond the limitations of Kantian logic. The defect, he writes,19 of Kant’s doctrine was that it failed to apply trichotomy to the attributes of the ὑπερούσιον, and did not see that these were united and realized in the idea of an absolute will. He was thus prepared to appeal to a wider and, as he thought, a deeper logic. In a note upon the criticism which the Kantian historian Tennemann passes upon Plotinus, he comes to the defence of the Neo-Platonist, and attributes to him “the statement in his most beautiful language of the only possible form of philosophic Realism”, along with “the demonstration of it by one of the most masterly pieces of exhaustive logic found in ancient or modern writings”.20 The principle, he has to explain, of this “Plotinian Logic”, which Tennemann, in his blind adherence to Kant, had “so cavalierly kicked out of the ring”, is the simple one that whatever is necessary to the possibility of a given reality must itself be real. More formally and fully stated: “If A relatively to X is known to be = W; and if no cause or reason actual or conceptual can be assigned why it should not be the same (i.e. = W) relatively to Y and Z; and if, supposing A = W in reference to Y and Z, the consequences in reason are found in exact correspondence to several important phenomena, which without this supposition must remain anomalies and inexplicable, can the assumption that A = WX is likewise equal WYZ be justly declared altogether groundless and arbitrary?”
Coleridge has been constantly accused of appealing to “intuition” in support of his metaphysical conclusions. It is all the more significant that in this crucial passage he expressly rejects what appears in Plotinus to be an appeal to “intellectual intuition”, if that is interpreted to mean “gazing in imagination upon Being as a vast Panorama”. But this, he holds, is not the essence of his teaching. What Plotinus really meant was that “a knowledge of Ideas is a constant process of involution and evolution, different from the concepts of the understanding in this respect only that no reason can be brought for the affirmation, because it is reason. The soul (for example) contemplates its principle (which is) the universal in itself, as a particular, i.e. knows that this truth is involved and vice versa evolves itself from its principle.” Accepting then this “evolutionary” logic, the whole question resolves itself into that of filling in the terms of the formula: finding, that is, the reality (X), what knows it (A), and what it knows it as (W), finally what is involved in the known reality X (Y + Z).
Though rejecting Kant’s logic, Coleridge had long ago accepted what was the basis of his ethics, and his point of contact with noumenal reality, namely, the categorical imperative, as the sense of responsibility to something beyond the self, made known to us in conscience. What dissatisfied him in Kant was first the treatment of this as merely a mode of our volitional consciousness, instead of as the foundation of all consciousness, and presupposed in it; and secondly the attempt to isolate it from other elements and interests of human nature, coupled with the refusal to admit it as the basis of a speculative argument. His own spiritual realism, on the other hand, depended precisely on the power to get beyond these limitations.
It is in disproof of the former of these mistakes that he tries to show at a critical point of the argument in MS. B II, and in closely reasoned sequence (i) that consciousness in the proper sense of the word involves self-consciousness; (ii) that this in turn involves the consciousness of an other than self—a thou, a he, or an it; (iii) that, in distinguishing between self and other, we also unite or identify them, not, indeed, in the sense of obliterating the numerical difference, but in the sense of assigning them equal rights; (iv) that “the becoming conscious of a conscience” partakes of the nature of an act—”an act, namely, in which and by which we take upon ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of Fealty”; and finally that “the equation of the ‘thou’ with the ‘I’ by means of a free act, by which we negative the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of the conscience”.
It is on the ground of the existence of this “fealty”, as a fundamental fact in human nature, alone that Coleridge believes it possible to bridge the gulf which separated the finite from the Infinite. “From whichever of the two points the reason may start: from the things that are seen to the One Invisible, or from the Idea of the absolute One to the things that are seen, it will find a chasm, which the moral being only, which the spirit and religion of man alone, can fill up or overbridge.”21 All other arguments either, like that from design, assume moral attributes in the Infinite,22 or, like that from the existence of law in Nature, leave them out of it and so deprive it of any religious significance. It was for this reason, he held, that “all the sounder schoolmen and the first fathers of the Reformation with one consent place the origin of the Idea in the Reason, the ground of its reality in the conscience, and the confirmation and progressive development (of it) in the order and harmony of the visible world”. He would have admitted (he elsewhere constantly does) that there still was a “leap”, but he would have insisted that it was open to demonstration that the leap was not an irrational one in the sense of leaving us with open contradiction, and therefore with mystery. On the contrary he held that we find in it the solution of the mystery which the world would otherwise be. “The world”, in fact, “in its relation to the human soul is a mystery of which God is the only solution.”23 Returning to the Plotinian formula, we can now see the ground on which Coleridge was prepared to fill in the terms and claim it as not only the foundation stone, but the only possible one of “philosophic Realism”. “Let A”, he goes on in continuation of the former quotation, “represent the Reason in Man, speculative and practical, let W stand for a knowledge, both the form and contents of which the Reason derives from itself; let X signify the Categorical Imperative of Kant; Y the absolute W, and Z the universal Reason (Y + Z = God). Then A has W, for it is realized in X. But W in X would be W (i.e. the rational knowledge would be irrational) without Y and Z. The Idea X therefore involves the Ideas Y and Z, and the knowledge of the reality of X gives an equivalent knowledge of the reality of Y and Z.”
5. COLERIDGE’S THEOLOGICAL PLATONISM
Formal, even pedantic, as it may seem, there can be no doubt as to the central importance Coleridge attaches to this argument. In the passage from which the above quotations are taken he repeats it in several forms, and, as if to leave no mistake, adds a Synopsis of it, as “an argumentum ad hominem” in reply to Tennemann’s criticism of it. With regard to its general form, we may be prepared to share some of Coleridge’s enthusiasm for it, if we are prepared to find in it an anticipation of the principle, of which later idealists, notably Bradley, have made so much, that “what is necessary and at the same time possible must be real”. On the other hand, subtle and I believe original as his application of the argument is, as an attempt to establish a voluntaristic form of idealism, or as he preferred to call it “spiritual realism”, at a level which similar modern attempts seldom attain, as stated by him it raises obvious difficulties not only from the formal side, but from the side of the material conclusion.
(1) After all that he has said to discredit the appeal to Logic upon final issues, why, we might ask, this anxiety to make his peace with her when it comes to real business? Without attempting to defend all that he anywhere says of the relation between truths of the reason and logical reasoning, I believe that the question is capable of an answer consistent with his general view of the relation between them. Though distinguishable as higher and lower, there was in Coleridge’s view no break of continuity between reason and understanding. As the laws of gravitation held as much for living as for dead things, the laws of thought hold as much for “productive” reason as for the merely “constitutive” understanding. The union of apparent opposites, which it is the function of the higher power to effect, is itself inspired by the demand for a “consistent” view of the object. These have to be united so as to escape contradiction. So far from real and logical truth being different, all truth in the end must be logical truth. Coleridge would have agreed with Bosanquet’s aphorism that “logical exactitude in the full sense of the word is not a deadening but a vitalizing quality”. What was required in the case of the establishment of the above ultimate metaphysical truth was not to break away from fact and its logical implications and appeal to a non-logical intuition, but to give fuller recognition first to the actual fact (the reality of the moral law in man’s mind), and secondly to what was logically implied in it (the existence of a moral law, and therewith of a Lawgiver, in the world at large). The reconciliation of the existence of such a Lawgiver with other facts of the world—physical necessity, the existence of evil, individual responsibility—raised further questions which it was the business of philosophy to try to answer, and which it could only answer satisfyingly by the elimination of logical contradiction between these facts and the alleged ground of them.
(2) The difficulty raised by the material conclusion of the priority of Will to Existence—more generally of Act to Being—is a more serious one. Can will be conceived of except in relation to a world already there? Must not “act” be an effluence from being and not vice versa? Coleridge was himself keenly alive to this difficulty, and in MS. B tries to meet it, first by defining the priority which is claimed for the Will as purely a logical one; and secondly by showing that logical priority follows from the idea of the will itself.
Temporal relations, he insists, are inapplicable to the Absolute. Even though we conceive of will as a cause, causality itself transcends time, seeing that it merges, as we have seen, in the idea of interaction, in which cause and effect must be conceived of as contemporaneous. Attributed to the Supreme Reality, causality must therefore mean co-eternity. But he adds that it is a co-eternity in which will must be conceived of as the more fundamental factor, seeing that its very essence is to be causative of reality; to reverse this and make it a product is to destroy it as will. On the other hand, there is nothing in the conception of being which is exclusive of that of product. “So far, indeed, is the idea of co-eternal consequent from involving any rational inconceivability, that all the ancient philosophers, who, like Aristotle, asserted a Deity, but denied a creation in time, on the ground that communicativeness is an essential attribute of the Deity, admitted this in a far harsher form, for they asserted the world to be a co-eternal effect.”
For himself he denies the adequacy of the whole conception of causality to express the idea of the Will, and, falling back again on Plotinus, but with a difference, goes on to explain what has to be substituted for it. This he finds in the idea of “an infinite fullness poured out into an infinite capacity … a self wholly and adequately repeated, yet so that the very repetition contains the distinction from the primary act, a self which in both is self-subsistent and is not the same, because the only ‘only’ is self-originated”.
Coleridge’s relation to the New Platonic philosophy has often been discussed, and as often misrepresented. We have seen how early and deeply he was impressed with its affinity to the speculative ideas, and particularly to the doctrine of the Trinity, which had become part and parcel of Christian theology. In the passages just quoted from MS. B we have a clear indication of the extent both of his agreement and of his disagreement with it. But the question is put beyond all doubt by a passage in the Huntington Library manuscript, in which he institutes a direct comparison between the Neo-Platonic scheme and his own.24
While prepared, as we have just seen, to adopt the Plotinian conception of the Absolute as an infinite power pouring itself forth like the sun as from an inexhaustible fullness, he could not accept the details of the emanation theory as an adequate counterpart, far less as the source of the Christian doctrine, and submits it to a trenchant and, so far as his own views are concerned, an illuminating criticism. He is careful at the outset to separate it from anything that could be attributed to Plato, who, he had convinced himself, does not expound, and never intended to expound, his own esoteric philosophy in the Dialogues. It was developed by the later Platonists in defiance of the express warning of Plato’s own immediate successor Speusippus, that the true order of the process of the Absolute was not The Good, Reason, and Soul, each identical in essence with the other, but The One, Reason, and the Good, each with a nature of its own.25
Passing over this difference of order, he finds a deeper objection to it in the attempt to define the supreme reality by a string of negatives as that which neither “acts”, nor “thinks”, nor even “is”. Coleridge had thought much on the logical principle of negation,26 and saw clearly that all intelligent negation presupposes a positive idea. Yet this is what seems to be denied in the Plotinian scheme, with the result that the idea of the Good is left quite indeterminate as a “reverential epithet”, instead of being seen necessarily to involve intelligence and action, not to speak of being. But the chief speculative defect of the scheme is the attachment of inferiority to reason and soul as more distant emanations of the Good. Whence the inferiority? If the First be an Infinite, it must have infinite effects. In a word, Emanation assumes the possibility of a fragmentary Deity, a diluted Godhead.
Serious finally as are the speculative difficulties, the moral consequences are more serious still. For in this scheme good and evil lose all qualitative distinction, and appear as mere differences in degree of being. Either the idea of guilt and responsibility is altogether denied, or crime and evil (as mere facts) increase as guilt or the sense of them (by the degradation of Reason) diminishes.
While the modern reader would have been sorry to miss this criticism and the light it throws upon Coleridge’s own doctrine of the supreme Will and its “alterity” as equivalent respectively to God the Father of the Filial Word, he will be apt to find in this theological extension of Coleridge’s metaphysics a revival of what is most mediaeval, and perhaps repulsive, in English Platonism. It is, indeed, impossible to disguise in Coleridge’s metaphysics the use of language that seems to subordinate philosophical doctrine to theological dogma. “The doctrine of Ideas”, he writes in connection with the above exposition of it, “is antecedent, but only because ancillary, to the more important truths, by which religion rises above philosophy.” But we should show an imperfect appreciation of the power of speculative truth to break through the swaddling-bands of theological dogma if we were to exaggerate the extent to which apologetic interests at this point vitiate Coleridge’s results.
The stream of Greek philosophy, starting from Socrates and Plato in an atmosphere of open and untrammelled thought, had flowed for five centuries, gaining in depth, if not in clarity, from the religious interest which more and more mingled with it, and finally made itself felt in its full force in Plotinus, its “second founder”. It was impossible that any one, who had inherited its leading constructive ideas and even a small portion of its free spirit, should seek merely to adapt particular parts of it, least of all what to Plato at least was only a myth or at best a “probable story”, to dogmatic matter imported from alien sources. These in moments of weakness or in an atmosphere of conservative tradition might claim from Coleridge undue consideration, and even tempt him to what looks like compromise. But in a mind like his, in which speculative truth was the dominant and absorbing intellectual interest, it was these dogmas, we may believe, and not the great ideas to which it had committed itself for guidance, that had to submit to purification and reconstruction; and it is not surprising that to the most penetrating of his critics in the succeeding generation, among them John Henry Newman,27 this should have appeared to be the result. Even in the above passage, while severely critical of Neo-Platonism, he shows himself anxious to save the reputation of Plato himself, and he would have distrusted any gloss upon his thought that seemed to depart from the essential sanity of the Master.
However this may be, we find Coleridge under no delusion as to what he was trying to accomplish in the exposition of the metaphysical basis of his system which we have been considering. He states it in so many words to be the offering of proof, first that it is possible to form an idea, consistent with all other truths, respecting the Supreme reality; secondly that such an idea is found in that of an Absolute Will; and thirdly that we have here something from which we are free to advance and to show, if we can, the sufficiency of the account to satisfy the demands made on it in the name of reason and experience. The main issue raised by his metaphysics is not Plotinus versus Kant, still less philosophy versus Christian mysticism, but the sufficiency of a theory that founds itself on the idea of the Absolute as Will. If the central line of English idealistic thought in the nineteenth century, under Hegel’s influence, was destined for two generations to move in an apparently different direction, the fact of the somewhat violent reaction against it and all its works, which marks the present time, bears witness to the vitality and inherent attractiveness of the voluntaristic form of idealistic philosophy, of which Coleridge was the founder, and remains to this day the most distinguished representative.
1 The criticism round which his marginal notes on Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen (1800) turn is the ambiguity of the Ego in his system: “the equivoque of the word ‘I’”.
2 Cp. the motto on the title-page above from the Principles of the Science of Method, p. 44. In the passage which there follows he repeats what he says in The Friend of Bacon as the “British Plato”.
3 Note in his copy of Tennemann’s History of Philosophy, vol. vi.
“A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.”
5 See MS. C, p. 33 foll, (partly quoted Snyder, pp. 135–7), with which cp. the less reliable Preliminary Treatise on Method. It was for this reason, he quaintly notes (MS. C, p. 25), that “Plato could make nothing of Aristotle, that intellectual son of Anac (sic), whose understanding was a cloud between him and the Ideas of his great Master”. The well-known Table Talk entry (July 2, 1830), “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist”, etc., was to Coleridge a division into philosophical sheep and goats.
6 Cp. The Friend, Shedd’s edition of Works, vol. ii. p. 436. In the present passage he goes so far as to ask whether the hypothetical atoms of physics are not merely symbols of algebraic relations “representing powers essentially united with proportions or dynamic ratios—ratios not of powers but that are powers”.
7 Table Talk, p. 57.
2 It is for this reason, he adds, that “you may hope to produce an effect by referring (a man) to his own experience and by inducing him to institute an analysis of his own acts and states of being, that will prove the not only insufficing, but the alien nature of all abstractions and generalizations on the one hand, and the limits of the outward light upon the other”.
8 In the Preliminary Treatise on Method, p. 41, he gives Shakespeare as the supreme example in literature of the ideal method. “In every one of his characters we find ourselves communing with the same human nature. Everywhere we find individuality, nowhere mere portraiture. The excellence of his productions is the union of the universal with the particular. But the universal is the Idea. Shakespeare therefore studied mankind in the Idea of the human race, and he followed out that Idea in all its varieties by a method which never failed to guide his steps aright.” On the difference between this and what he says in The Friend (vol. iii. essay 4), see Snyder, op. cit., pp. 34–5.
9 See p. 30, above.
10 See article by the present writer, “The Cambridge Platonists”, Mind, N.S., vol. xxxvi. p. 172 n.
11 Biographia Literaria, ch. v. n.
12 Aids to Reflection, Aphorism XCVIIIc, 5.
13 The Friend, Shedd, vol. ii. p. 420.
14 Biographia Literaria, xii—one of the passages supposed to be plagiarized from Schelling. In proof that here at least Coleridge begged in forma divitis we have the vivacious statement of the same argument in MS. C, p. 45: “What our Priestleian Metaphysics call necessity is but an empirical scheme of destroying one contingency with another which is to be treated in the same manner . . the unconquerable Foe, retreating step by step and still facing the Pursuer . . the contingency playing at leap-frog vaults backwards. As if History could be thus explained; as if the motives of action were not a part of the action. Here comes the head and the neck of the Horse; but what was behind? The Tail: Ergo the Tail pushed the Head and Neck forward.”
15 See MS. H, p. 170 n., where he tells us that the very epithet “first cause,” as applied to the Supreme, is borrowed from the cosmotheism of the Pagans, to whom God was one with the world.
16 Cp. the notes on Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden, where he rejects the latter’s criticism of Spinoza that his God is merely a collective notion: “The defect in Spinoza’s System is the impersonality of God—he makes the only Substance a Thing, not a Will—a Ground solely and at no time a Cause.”
17 E.g. in the Preliminary Treatise on Method: “The first preconception or master-thought of our plan rests on the moral origin and tendency of all true Science”, the first clear statement perhaps in English Philosophy of what might be called Ethical Pragmatism.
18 MS. B III.
19 MS. H, p. 162 n.
20 Marginal note in vol. vi. p. 64 of Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie: “Let the attempt of Plotinus have ended in failure,” he goes on, “yet who could see the courage and skill, with which he seizes the reins and vaults into the chariot of the sun, without sharing his enthusiasm and taking honour to the human mind even to have fallen from such magnificent daring?”
21 MS. B III.
22 Sec below.
23 Lay Sermon, Appendix C.
24 MS. H, p. 151 foll.
25 The passages on which Coleridge seems to have relied are Aristotle, Metaph., bk. vii. ch. 2 (Eng. tr. 1028b), and Stobaeus, Eclogae i. 58. See Ritter and Preller, Historia Graecae Philosophiae, 7th ed., pp. 284–5).
26 See Snyder, op. cit., p. 112.
27 Newman speaks of him as one who “indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian”. Essays, vol. i, p. 269, quoted Benn, Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, i. 270.