“In order to the recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself and its laws as the ground of his own existence.”—The Friend.
1. COLERIDGE’S INTEREST IN SCIENCE
IN the Biographia Literaria Coleridge tells us of the powerful effect upon his mind of Schelling’s Natur- Philosophie. But after his disillusionment with Schelling, Nature-Philosophy became for him the suspicious name for a mode of thought that inevitably led to a spiritless pantheism. Yet, if this was to be met, it must be by a more adequate conception of nature as no mere finished and dead product (natura naturata), but as a living and creative principle (natura naturans).
The general intellectual atmosphere seemed favourable for this advance. The materialism with which early Platonists like Cudworth had found themselves confronted in the works of Hobbes and some of the Cartesians, was still a menace, but by the end of the eighteenth century it showed signs of having run its course. Leibnizian conceptions were exercising a powerful influence in the opposite direction. In 1747 appeared Kant’s Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces,1 which had struck the note of a “dynamic” philosophy. His theory of knowledge, in which the material world as known to science was shown to be a construction of the mind, had undermined the ordinary arguments for materialism as a philosophical system. Biology had begun to come to its own, and the doctrine of the dependence of organic structure on a prior principle of life was being taught in high places by Dr. John Hunter (1728–93). In the early years of the new century controversy raged between his followers led by Dr. John Abernethy and their critics.
It was impossible for Coleridge to be a passive spectator of this war of ideas. He had been interested in scientific, and especially in medical investigations from early childhood, first through his brother Luke,2 afterwards through attendance at Blumenbach’s lectures in Germany, and through his friendship with Humphry Davy and his many contacts with members of the medical profession.3 Needless to say, he was an ardent supporter of the Dynamic Philosophy. In it he saw his own dream of finding the material world, not less than the spiritual, the expression of an Idea. For this reason, if it is not quite fair to say with Miss Snyder that his concern with science was merely “the effort of a philosophic partisan to justify his philosophical position”, we may agree that “there can be no adequate account of the making of his metaphysical system—the influences exercised by the Neo-Platonists,. the English divines, the German Natur-Philosophen— that does not recognize his participation in contemporary scientific discussions, and his sense of their philosophic implications”.4
The reader of The Friend is familiar with the illustrations he draws from the views of some of the writers mentioned above; 5 but it is to the posthumous essay, Hints toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life6 that we must go for the most systematic statement of his views. In The Friend he had already expressed dissatisfaction with Hunter’s presentation of the idea of life.7 Hunter seems as a matter of fact to have left it open to suppose that life was merely a superimposed or emergent property of matter, which had reached through purely physical influences a particular degree of refinement and organization.8
Accordingly, at the beginning of the essay, after a reference to “the undeniable obscurities and apparent contradictions” to be found in Hunter’s works, Coleridge defines his aim as “to climb up on his shoulders and look at the same objects in a distincter form, because seen from the more commanding point of view furnished by himself”.
We are now familiar with this “more commanding point of view” in his general metaphysical theory. To what has already been said about it we may here add a reference to one or two manuscript passages (probably of earlier date than the Essay) in which he develops the concept, or, as he prefers to call it, the “Idea” of Nature, with particular lucidity in accordance with it.
“Wonderful”, he writes,9 “are the efforts of Nature to reconcile chasm with continuity, to vault and nevertheless to glide, though in truth the continuity alone belongs to Nature, the chasms are the effect of a higher principle, limiting the duration and regulating the retention of the products. From the Vermes to the Mammalia, Organic Nature is in every class and everywhere tending to Individuality; but Individuality actually commences in Man. This and many other problems must find their solution in the right ‘Idea of Nature’ ” Following the sense, but preceding the date of this entry, we have a still fuller statement of the general point of view from which he would have Nature regarded. “The true object of Natural Philosophy is to discover a central Phaenomenon in Nature, and a central Phaen(omenon) in Nature requires and supposes a central Thought in the Mind. The Notional Boundaries or Me plus ultras of Nature are a part that relatively to no minor particles is a Whole, i.e. an Atom: and a Whole, which in no relation is a Part, i.e. a Universe. The System of Epicurus is that a finite Universe composed of Atoms is notionally true. But it expresses the limits and necessities of the human imagination and understanding, not the truth of Nature. An atom and a finite Universe are both alike Fictions of Mind, entia logica. Nevertheless, not the Imagination alone, but the Reason requires a Centre. It is a necessary Postulate of Science. That therefore which can be found nowhere absolutely and exclusively must be imagined everywhere relatively and partially. Hence the law of Bicentrality, i.e. that every Whole, whether without parts or composed of parts, and, in the former, whether without parts by defect or lowness of Nature ( = a material atom), or without parts by the excellence of its Nature ( = a Monad or Spirit), must be conceived as a possible centre in itself, and at the same time as having a centre out of itself and common to it with all other parts of the same System. Now the first and fundamental Postulate of Universal Physiology, comprising both organic and inorganic Nature—or the fundamental position of the Philosophy of Physics and Physiology—is: that there is in Nature a tendency to realize this possibility, wherever the conditions exist: and the first problem of this Branch of Science is, What are the conditions under which a Unit having a centre in the distance can manifest its own centrality, i.e. be the centre of a system and (as, in dynamics, the power of the centre acts in every point of the area contained in the circumference), be the centre and the copula (principium unitatis in unoquoque Toto) of a System. Such a Unit would have three characters:
1. It would be a component part of a System, having a centre out of itself, or, to use a geometrical metaphor, it would be a point in some one of the concentrical lines composing a common circle.
2. It would be itself the centre and copula, the attractive and cohesive force, of a system of its own.
3. For itself (as far as it exists for itself), it would be the centre of the Universe in a perpetual tendency to include whatever else exists relatively to it in itself, and what it could not include, to repel. Whatever is not contained in the System, of which it is the centre and copula, either does not exist at all for it or exists as an Alien, which it resists, and in resisting either appropriates (digestion, assimilation), or repels, or ceases to be, i.e. dies.
These three characters concur in every living body, and hence there necessarily arise two directions of the contemplative act. The Philosopher may either regard any body or number of bodies in reference to a common centre, the action of which centre constitutes the General Laws of the System; in this view all Bodies are contemplated as inanimate—and these, in which he can discover none of the conditions indispensable to the Body’s being contemplated in any other view, he considers as positively inanimate; and the aggregate of these we call inorganic Nature. Or he may contemplate a Body as containing its centre or principle of Unity in itself: and, as soon as he ascertains the existence of the conditions requisite to the manifestation of such a principle, he supposes Life and these bodies collectively are named Organic Nature. In Nature there is a tendency to respect herself so as to attempt in each part what she had produced in the Whole, but with a limited power and under certain conditions. N.B.—In this, the only scientific view, Nature itself is assumed as the Universal Principle of Life, and like all other Powers, is contemplated under the two primary Ideas of Identity and Multeity, i.e. alternately as one and as many. In other words, exclusively of degree, and as subsisting in a series of different intensities.” 10
In this passage Coleridge stops short of naming this principle Will, but in the parallel not less notable passage in MS. B III, he makes it clear that this is what he intends. Corresponding to the criticism of “Epicurus” in the above, we there have a protest against the view that the mind has to be “weaned by aid of the analytic powers” from the natural conception of the whole as preceding the parts, and the reduction of Nature to nothing but “a mere declaration of an alien strength, and that gone ere I can arrest or question it”. “This ignores the individuality of that which is acted upon. Aconite is poison to sheep, nutritious to goats. Even the atoms require to differ in shape.” This difference lies beyond the reach of the reasoning faculty, for it cannot be reduced to cause or relation. It is presupposed in the possibility of cause. We have as our alternatives Chance (i.e. recourse to not thinking at all) or Will “which, if the total sum and result of individualities or simple productive acts be in the highest degree rational, i.e. tending in due proportion to a common unity, must be one with reason, though in the order of necessary connection its co-eternal antecedent”. If this is so, the several individualities must be of the nature of a will, and therefore higher than Nature. The spontaneity we find in Nature is not indeed interpretable as will, but it is “of the nature of will”, and may be conceived of as the offspring of it, as the automatism of habit in a musician’s fingers: “spontaneity in a plant must be referred to some universal will, as the other to a particular will”. From this he again passes to the view of what he calls the “shapes” of Nature, in contrast to the “forms” or “shaping principles”, as a progressive series or scale.
Premising that the shapes may be of three kinds— (1) those formed by languescence in the shaping power, e.g. an arrow or a rocket; (2) those imposed from without, e.g. the fluid in a containing vessel; (3) those which are owed to an inner energy, opposed to (2) as pure energy to pure receptivity— we have these variously blended in an infinite number of proportions, but the higher in the scale the greater the proportion of the last kind. Thus in the higher animals sensibility passes into muscular power and irritability, in order to return again upon itself and become a new sensibility; so that in all instances the influence of the external is mediated by and dependent upon the degree and state of development, and we have a scale in which “the maximum of each lower kind becomes the base and receptive substrate, as it were, of a higher kind, commencing through the irradiation and transfiguration by the higher power, the base of which it has become.” “In man this law of proportions becomes fully manifest, and, in the strivings of the will (to rise), the excess of impressibility and receptivity of impressions from without (rises) not only above spontaneity, not only above impulse determined by the anticipation of outward objects, but even above that direction of the power more properly called voluntary, which itself predetermines the object of its own knowledge, and the previous reflection of that object in relation to itself, but still supposes a prior state of receptivity in overbalance during the impressions made on the senses. Man must have an object in himself, an object which he himself has constituted, which is at one and the same moment the subject and the legislator, the law and the act of obedience.” In man therefore so conceived all is energy, and the second of the above kinds of shape (in fact shape itself) ceases, ascending into form when the soul receives reason and “reason is her being”.
It is this view of Nature as a progressive system of embodied and individualizing activities that in the essay is applied to the idea of Life. After stating and rejecting some current definitions of life, such as that it is “the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted”, and that it consists in “assimilation, growth, and reproduction”, Coleridge defines it himself as simply “the principle of individuation”. Wherever you have this, you have something that goes beyond mere mechanism. He does not deny the existence of mechanism, but distinguishes it from what he calls life, as organization from without; as he epigrammatically puts it, “whatever is organized from without is a product of mechanism; whatever is mechanized from within is a production of organization”.11 So defined, he finds life to be a property of matter throughout the entire gamut of its forms, beginning with elements or metals,12 and going on through ever higher forms of crystals, the great vegetable and animal deposits, vegetables and animals as we know them, up to man, in whom “the whole force of organic power has attained an inward and centripetal direction”. Thus, “in the lowest forms of the vegetable and animal world we perceive totality dawning into individuation, while in man, as the highest of the class, the individuality is not only perfected in its corporeal sense, but begins a new series beyond the appropriate limits of physiology. The tendency to individuation, more or less obvious, constitutes the common character of all classes, as far as they maintain for themselves a distinction from the universal life of the planet; while the degrees, both of intensity and extension, to which this tendency is realized, form the species and their ranks in the great scale of ascent and expansion”.13
We are apt to think of individuation as a process of separation and detachment, but Coleridge insists throughout on the opposite tendency to interconnection as an inseparable element in it, just as centripetal power is necessarily presupposed in centrifugal. It is this productive power that makes life incapable of mathematical treatment. But this does not exclude it from science, as Kant would have it, for whose aphorism that science ends with mathematics Coleridge would substitute as the truer one: “the full applicability of abstract science ceases the moment reality begins”.
In the vital series thus depicted as a “grand scale of ascent and expansion”, each higher stage is conceived of as not merely superimposed on the lower, e.g. life on mechanism, nor as merely employing it, but as assimilating it to itself by a process which “presupposes the homogeneous nature of the thing assimilated”. On any other supposition we should have a miracle comparable to that of transubstantiation—”first annihilation, then creation out of nothing”.
Inquiring further through what forces this individuating principle acts, Coleridge points to magnetism, electricity, chemistry or constructive affinity as the highest that science has as yet succeeded in discovering; but he holds it conceivable that these may be found to be reducible to some other which will be more akin to life.14 Meantime, he notes, all of them illustrate what he regards as the most general law governing the action of life in every one of its forms—the law of polarity or “the essential dualism of nature”, for it is always in the identity of two counter powers that “life subsists; in their strife it consists; in their reconciliation it at once dies, and is born again into new forms, either falling back into the life of the whole, or starting anew in the process of individuation”.15
The author goes on to pursue this hypothesis into minute details, most of which would probably have been rejected even by the science of his own time. But his treatment of time, space, and motion, as “the simplest and universal, but necessary symbols of all philosophic construction, the primary factors and elementary forms of every calculus, and of every diagram in the algebra and geometry of scientific philosophy”, is of particular interest in view of recent developments of philosophy in the direction of defining the fundamental concepts of physical science. Needless to say, the emphasis in Coleridge is not upon these forms as containing the substance of the real world in any sense that can be taken as the ground of their explanation, but upon the active principle or nisus towards individuality which expresses itself through them.
The idea of an actual evolution of species (“forms”, as Coleridge called them) in time by the laws of natural selection, as conceived by Charles Darwin, was still in the future; but theories of their natural origin and development in the struggle for existence had been familiar to philosophers from the time of Lucretius. In Coleridge’s own day Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), in holding that “one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the course of all organic life”, had (in the words of his more famous grandson) “anticipated . . the views of Lamarck”. Coleridge’s omnivorous reading had familiarized him also with Giordano Bruno’s doctrine that the Earth was “a complete ether-born animate being”, which, by its union with the Sun, “successively conceives and brings to the birth from all parts of its body; so that, if the whole Earth were by some planetary accident or revolution depopulated (of its inhabitants), the Soul of the Earth would replace them: Parens perfecta Animantum Absque ministerio coitus
He even goes out of his way to defend “the Philosopher of Nola” against the charge of Atheism brought against him on this ground, seeing that he everywhere considers the Earth and similar planetary souls throughout the Universe, though the “immediate maternal fount” of life, “as merely ministerial powers, and Nature, their collective name, as the Delegate, Servant, and Creature of one Supreme Being, and all-originating Opifex”.
In view of all this, and of his own theory of the difference between what is merely prior in time and what is prior in reality and worth, and therefore in power, combined with his view of Nature as continually striving towards unity and continuity in spite of apparent “chasms”, we might have expected Coleridge to have a sympathetic ear for speculations of this kind. It is all the more interesting to find him, in a carefully elaborated autograph fragment,16 energetically repudiating them in the Lucretian and Brunian, as well as in the Darwinian form, though, as we might expect, with a pronounced preference for the former more poetic version:
“And here once for all, I beg leave to remark that I attach neither belief nor respect to the Theory, which supposes the human Race to have been gradually perfecting itself from the darkest Savagery, or still more boldly tracing us back to the bestial as to our Larva, contemplates Man as the last metamorphosis, the gay Image, of some lucky species of Ape or Baboon. Of the two hypotheses I should, indeed, greatly prefer the Lucretian of the Parturiency of our Mother Earth, some score thousands years ago, when the venerable Elder was yet in her Teens, and her human Litter sucked the milk then oozing from countless Breasts of warm and genial Mud. For between an hypothetical ἁπαξγινόμενον or single Incident or Event in a state and during an epoch if the Planet presumed in all respects different from its present condition, and the laws of Nature appropriate to the same . . anterior of necessity to all actual experience, and an assertion of a universal process of Nature now existing (since there is the same reason for asserting the progression of every other race of animal from some lower species as of the human race) in contradiction to all experience, I can have no hesitation in preferring the former, that, for which Nothing can be said, to that against which Everything may be said. The History I find in my Bible is in perfect coincidence with the opinions which I should form on Grounds of Experience and Common Sense. But our belief that Man first appeared with all his faculties perfect and in full growth, the anticipation exercised by virtue of the supernatural act of Creation, in nowise contravenes or weakens the assertion that these faculties . . in each succeeding Individual, born according to nature, must be preceded by a process of growth, and consequently a state of involution or latency, correspondent to each successive Moment of Development. A rule abstracted from uniform Results, or the Facet of a Sum put by the Master’s indulgence at the head of the sum to be worked, may not only render the Boy’s Task shorter and easier, but without such assistance he might never have mastered it or attained the experience, from which the Rule might (have been derived?).”
It is easy to seize on the reference here to Biblical authority as witness to the inveterate power of tradition over Coleridge’s mind. But the real emphasis in the above passage is in the absence of proof of natural evolution on “grounds of experience and common sense”. In what was clearly intended as a note to it in the same manuscript he remarks: “When experience is possible, and in points that are the fit subjects of experience, the absence of experimental proof is tantamount to an experimental proof of the contrary. Ex. gr. If a man should seriously assure me that he had in the course of his Travels seen a Tree, that produced live Barnacles as its fruit, I could not in strict logic declare it contrary to all experience; for he would be entitled to reply, ‘No ! for I believe it on my own.’ But if a Theorist should assert such a fact only because in his opinion it would be a rational account of the present parentage and existence of Barnacles, in that case I should have a right to characterize his conjecture as against all experience.”
What Coleridge would have said with the “experimental “ evidence of the Origin of Species before him it is impossible to say. Hutchison Stirling, the leader of the Idealistic revival in the ‘sixties, still treated Darwinism with philosophical contempt. The fact, on the other hand, that Coleridge quotes more than once, and adopts as the motto of the Statesman’s Manual, a fine saying of Bruno’s, altogether relevant to such a situation,17 and that he found it possible to reconcile Bruno’s speculations as to the birth of man, which were not less heretical than Darwin’s, with the divine origin of the whole choir of Heaven and the furniture of Earth:
Auctori laudes decantans atque ministrans,18
and to attribute to him “a Principle, Spirit, and eloquence of Piety and Pure Morality not surpassed by Fénelon”—suggests that he would have had the insight to see the distinction between a biological account of the process in time, and the inner Law or Idea of the Universe as a spiritual Whole, of which the process is only the outward manifestation, and which is the proper subject of a philosophy of Nature. We can see, at any rate, from the above quotations that he was prepared to treat such a hypothesis without the unreasoning prejudice that disfigures the references to it in Carlyle and many others, who ought to have known better, in the next generation. Securely fixed in the conviction, deepened in him by his poetic experience, of the close affinity of Nature with mind, and “with that more than man, which is one and the same in all men”, and of her power of seeming “to think and hold commune with us, like an individual soul”,19 he could afford to leave to biological science the question of the way in which she produced the shapes, among them the shape of man himself, which made this intercourse possible.
It is easy to criticize the theory of Nature here set forth as an undue extension of the concept of life and a hypostatizing of Nature.20 What is philosophically valuable in it, connecting it in a suggestive way with recent physical speculations, is, in the first place, the emphasis on the presence in all phenomena of a principle that goes beyond anything that can properly be called mechanical; secondly, the conception of this principle as operating throughout the whole extent of Nature, manifesting itself in ever higher forms, which constitute real differences of kind, and not merely of degree: Nature, as he puts it, “ascending not as links in a suspended chain, but as the steps in a ladder”, assimilating while transcending what has gone before; thirdly, the interpretation of the law of the universe, in harmony with this idea, as “a tendency to the ultimate production of the highest and most comprehensive unity”; lastly, the clearness with which he insists that the unity must consist of individuals, becoming more and more truly such in proportion as they unite themselves with the whole, and reflect the perfections to which as an embodiment of Will it summons them.
1 Alluded to by Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, “Conclusion”, 14 n.
2 Whose medical books he read and with whom he went round the wards of the London Hospital. See Campbell’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 12.
3 Miss Snyder has given a scholarly account of his relations with these at various periods of his life and of the controversial atmosphere in which his own Theory of Life was written. Op. cit., pp. 16 foll.
4 Loc. cit,30 and 22.
5 E.g. vol. iii, section ii, Essays vi, vii, and ix.
6 Edited by Seth B. Watson, 1848. On the controversy as to the editor’s view of it as the joint production of Coleridge and Dr. Gillman, see Snyder, ibid., pp. 16 and 17.
7 Loc. cit., Essay vii. “In his printed works the one directing thought seems evermore to flit before him, twice or thrice only to have been seized; and after a momentary detention to have been again let go: as if the words of the charm had been incomplete and it had appeared at its own will only to mock his calling.” Cp. what he says of him, Principles of the Science of Method, p. 41.
8 Asked by a pupil whether his theory did not make for the exploded doctrine of equivocal generation, Hunter is said to have replied, “Perhaps it does. I do not deny that equivocal generation happens. There are positive proofs neither for nor against its taking place.” Article John Hunter, End, Brit. (ed. ix), p. 391.
9 MS. G, p. 117.
10 Ibid., p. 108. I have left the capitals as indicating the importance he attaches to the thoughts. The passage has not, so far as I know, been printed before. This and the anticipation it contains of the modern interest of philosophers in the Concept of Nature are perhaps sufficient apology for the lengthy quotation.
11 See p. 385 n. of Miscellanies Aesthetic and Literary, where the Essay will most conveniently be found. With its general teaching should be compared that of J. H. Green in his Hunterian Lecture of 1840 on Vital Dynamics (see passages quoted in Spiritual Philosophy, vol. i. pp. xxv. foll.). Green’s remark that life was to be contemplated “not as a thing, nor as a spirit, neither as a subtle fluid, nor as an intelligent soul but as a law” is of particular interest in view of present- day controversies. Coleridge was not a vitalist in the sense, e.g. of Driesch.
12 The nugget of gold is not life, seeing that its form is accidental and ab extra; but gold itself is life, seeing that it is an organized system of qualities ultimately activities; for “life is an act”. He seemed even prepared to convert this dictum into “all act is life”: “Nature”, he notes in MS. C, p. 117, “(is) always vegetative” and “therefore the vegetable creation could be anterior to the sun.” The resemblance and the difference between this and the theory of monads “that yet seem With various province and apt agency Each to pursue its own self-centring end”, sympathetically sketched in the early poem, The Destiny of Nations, are worth noting.
13 Op. cit., p. 390.
14 Op. cit., p. 400.
15 Op. cit., p. 390.
16 British Museum MS. Egerton 2801. See Miss Snyder’s article, “Coleridge on Giordano Bruno”, Modern Language Notes, vol. xlii. No. 7, where the passage is quoted in full along with other references to Bruno.
17 Ad istaec quaeso vos, qualiacunque primo videantur aspectu, attendite, ut qui vobis forsan insanire videar, saltern quibus insaniam rationibus cognoscatis.
18 From Bruno’s De Immenso et Innumerabilibus.
19 Blackwood’s Magazine, October 1821, p. 258.
20 See Dr. Watson’s Preface to the Essay, op. cit., pp. 356–7.