“The loftiest poet and the loftiest philosopher deal with the same subject-matter, the great problems of the world and human life, though one presents the symbolism and the other unravels the logical connection of the abstract conceptions.”—LESLIE STEPHEN, “Coleridge”, in Hours in a Library.
IT might seem a natural conclusion to a study like the above to trace the influence of Coleridge’s thought in the technical philosophy of the following generation. I believe that, as compared with its influence in other fields, particularly that of Anglican theology, this as a matter of fact was insignificant. There was, indeed, an apparent exception in the work of Joseph Henry Green. But it was one of those exceptions which prove the rule. Green inherited Coleridge’s philosophical manuscripts, if not his prophetic mantle, and thenceforth conceived it his mission to reduce to order the materials they contained for a complete philosophy. But he felt himself overburdened by the responsibility, and somewhat after the manner of his Master spent the most of the years that remained to him, until his death in 1863, in preparation for a task that he did not live to complete on the large-scale plan he had designed. What we have from his hand in the book Spiritual Philosophy was somewhat hastily put together when he realized how short the available time was likely to be. Even so, it did not see the light till 1865, by which time fresh impulses were coming from Germany, that seemed to put the results of the earlier movement out of date. It was for this, among other reasons, that the book fell dead, and remains to us rather an echo of a bygone day than a uniting link filling the gap between Coleridge’s death in 1834 and the writers of thirty years later.1
But Green was only one, and one of the lesser known of a generation of men, distinguished as few have been for intellectual interest and power to give expression to it, and, if there is little to record of Coleridge’s direct philosophical influence over their thought, all the more may something seem to be required to account for this failure. “There are few middle-aged men of active intelligence at the present day”, wrote H. D. Traill in the ‘eighties,2 “who can avoid a confession of having ‘taken’ Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions not predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgeism at all.” This is true, as many of us, who more or less belonged to Traill’s generation, can remember, but it only raises the same question in the form of the reason for this difference.
The chief reason is not, I believe, to be looked for in any of those which are usually alleged. It did not consist in any radical conflict between the temperament of the poet and the philosopher as such. The example of Coleridge’s great contemporary Goethe is sufficient to prove that the “ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” was a quarrel between friends. Coleridge himself held that the aim and, in a sense, the method of both were essentially the same, namely, “the union of the universal and the particular”. “Plato”, he wrote,3 “was a poetic philosopher, as Shakespeare was a philosophic poet.” Each doubtless had its own medium and mode of expression, and this had to be remembered according to the rôle at the time. Coleridge too often forgot it—the exuberance of his language and the vividness of his imagery were too apt to run away with him, and to lead to his frequent failure to distinguish between metaphor and argument. But a philosophical style like that of Hume or Mill or, in our own time, of Bradley, is a rare accomplishment, and its absence in him was a venial fault, often atoned for in his marginal notes (where he found himself confined within strict limits as to subject and space) by vigorous, condensed expression, which leaves little to be desired.
Nor is more than a partial explanation to be found in lack of purpose or even of will to execute what he purposed. The manuscripts he left show, on the contrary, how indefatigably he laboured in the pain and sickness of his later years to make up for wasted talents. Even his failure to complete and publish the result of these labours was of comparatively little importance. His main ideas, in their essential outlines, were well known to an inner circle of admiring disciples, including, besides Green, men like John Sterling, of whom Carlyle reluctantly records that “in after times he did not complain of Coleridge’s unintelligibility or attributed it only to the abstruse high nature of the topics handled”. After Sterling’s death his master’s ideas could not have had a better sounding-board than the “Sterling Club”, which included among its members J. S. Mill, Alfred Tennyson, and Carlyle himself. Traill touches a deeper reason when he notes the absence in Coleridge of “any moral theory of life”. But this too, as we have seen, was only partially true, and Mill’s estimate on the same subject was a very different one.
The real reason is I believe to be found, in the first place, in a certain unripeness of the time for the acceptance by philosophers of these ideas. It was true that the older empiricism may be said by this time to have run its course, but under the influence of the idea of evolution it seemed possible to revive it in a new form, and at the same time to satisfy the metaphysicians, as Spencer tried to do, with a theory of the Unknowable; while for those who inherited its dislike of metaphysics in any form, Comte’s Positivism seemed to be providing it with deeper roots in a new philosophy of History. Even in Scotland, that genial home of metaphysical speculation, the ground was preoccupied by a form of pseudo-Kantianism 4 which, as bad currency is said to drive out good, obstructed the spread of better knowledge.
In the second place, and even more important, was the innate conservatism, which often prevented Coleridge from following out to the bitter end the principles he had the genius to seize. “He declares great truths and principles with sufficient boldness and clearness”, wrote an anonymous author, “but often fails completely in his deductions from them and his applications of them.”5 Carlyle’s view of the “swimming bladders” and “transcendental life- preservers”, which he threw out to orthodox opinions, is well known, and is not without justification. In general philosophy, in spite of the advance he sought to make on Kant, we have seen how he allowed himself to be too much dominated by the Kantian separation between the material and the spiritual, the causal nexus by which Nature seemed bound and the freedom of the will. In religion this meant that Christianity was made to appear to stand on a different basis, not only of spiritual appeal, but of miraculous revelation, from all other religions. In politics the same conservatism, united with the same philosophical dualism, was responsible for the distinction he drew between classes in respect to their capacity to enter into the full rights of citizenship. No more here than in religion did he ever seem completely to realize that if freedom is the soul of human life, it must have its spring in human nature itself, and must permeate the whole body. True, in Nature there are all degrees of freedom and individuality, corresponding to different natural orders. But the differentia of human life is just that in it first freedom has become a common possession, and none can be really free unless all are free. In science, finally it meant that while he was prepared to welcome the treatment of individual organisms from the point of view of a single principle dominating the life of the parts, he rejected the suggestion of applying the same idea to the evolution of the animal world, including man, as a whole.
In all these respects he seemed to be setting himself against the new currents of thought and feeling, into whose deeper spirit he otherwise penetrated further than any of his English contemporaries. That in the field of literary criticism these limitations had less opportunity of showing themselves, or that his own supreme genius in it enabled him to transcend them, is perhaps the reason why it is in this field that fullest recognition has been given by succeeding generations to his greatness as a thinker.
To-day we can afford to separate between his enunciation of principles and his success in carrying them out in detailed application, and the contention of this Study is that we do him wrong if we allow his failure to influence immediately the current of philosophical thought, and the limitations, which were the cause of it, to conceal from us the place he occupies in his own right in the development of idealistic philosophy in England and America. It may perhaps in the end prove to have been in favour of his ultimate influence that there has been a certain “lag” in its power of asserting itself. Certain it is that the present reaction against the logical idealism of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the rise of a more definitely ethical form of that doctrine, offer a more favourable atmosphere than ever before for the recognition of the Voluntarism with which his philosophy is so deeply dyed.
Be that as it may, it is more in the line of the main object of the present Study, neglecting contentious matter, to try in this Conclusion to state more precisely than there has hitherto been the opportunity of doing the place which is likely to be assigned to Coleridge in the history of Anglo- Saxon philosophy, and the feature in his teaching that is the main ground of his title to it.
1. The history in England of what at the present day is known as Idealistic Philosophy still remains to be written.6 When it comes to be written it will, I believe, be found to be not less continuous, and not less characteristic of the English genius, than that which is commonly taken to be its main contribution to philosophy. Centuries before the age of Locke the note of this truer “way of ideas” had been struck by John Scotus Erigena, the last of the Platonists before philosophy passed under the yoke of mediaeval theology.7 At least half a century before Locke wrote, a group of men in Cambridge, representing the best English tradition in religion and politics, revived the same note, and gave expression to it with a fullness and grace unequalled anywhere else in Europe. Though taken up and applied in new ways at the beginning of the next century by their Oxford successors, John Norris and Arthur Collier, it was too remote from the empirical spirit of the time to make way against the “new” way of ideas. Berkeley’s late-born Platonism was only a transient gleam of the old light, and the century closed with the triumphant domination of every field by the ideas inherited from Locke and Hume.
To Coleridge belongs the credit of having been the first to realize, with the sharp pang of the most sensitive mind of his time, the inadequacy of these ideas for the interpretation of the spiritual movements which were most characteristic of the age. Aided by the insight which his own early transference of allegiance from the Hartleian to the Platonic tradition gave him, he was able to develop ideas that were in his own words Semina Rerum 8— seminal principles that, first unconsciously, then more and more consciously as the new century went on, were to dominate men’s minds and be translated into theory and practice.
2. After all that has been already said of them, it is unnecessary to go into detail, but the central idea cannot be too often stated as that of the true meaning and place of Individuality in the world both of nature and of man.
In nature individuality is not to be looked for in any self-sustaining atom or cell, but in the extent to which a structure is able to reach out to and assimilate elements lying beyond the limits of its own space and time existence, and thus to link itself with the whole to which it belongs, while at the same time rounding itself off into a self-maintaining unit within the larger sphere. Towards such individuality, expressing itself in ever high forms, all nature moves, rising on stepping-stones, not of dead but of living selves, each reflecting at its own level and according to its own capacity the glories of the Whole.
In human life the seat of individuality, now become self-conscious personality, is similarly to be sought for not in any centre of isolated and isolating feeling, but in the degree to which a man passes beyond the limits temporal and spiritual within which mere feeling confines him, and identifies himself, in thought, feeling, and action, with the larger life about him while remaining a self-integrating member of it. The infinite whole of which this larger life consists may be the only complete individual, the only completely comprehensive and self-sustaining being—therefore the only Person in the fullest sense of the word. But finite spirits may attain to a share in that fullness, in proportion as they approximate to its all- inclusive life. Life at its best is the will to approximation, perhaps in the end only an aspiration and a prayer, but “he prayeth best who loveth best”, and love means this expansion expressed in terms of feeling.
It does not require any deep acquaintance with the history either of thought or practice in the course of the last hundred years to recognize in this conception of individuality what was to become more and more the chief moulding, epoch-making influence in national life. Coleridge held that while “in the immense majority of men, even in civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita, yet all the epoch-making revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion, and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems”. So far as the above is a correct statement of the central thought in his own system, he has the merit of first formulating the idea whose rise was in his own modest language to “coincide” with the revolutions which have since taken place in all these departments and made our national life what it is to-day.
1 Yet it deserves more notice than it has hitherto received and, as it is somewhat rare, I have added in an Appendix a few further notes upon it as furnishing reliable material for studies like the present.
2 Coleridge, in English Men of Letters Series (1889).
3 Preliminary Treatise on Method.
4 Hamilton’s Essay on the Unconditioned appeared in 1829.
5 The Relation of Philosophy to Theology (London, 1851), p. 15. The same writer probably reflects the general impression of the time when he says: “Coleridge teaches no system, not even his own.” Ibid., p. 7.
6 The series of studies of which this was intended to be one, shortly to be published, is intended as a small contribution to such a history.
7 See Robert Adamson’s article on him in Encyclopedia Britannica, Ninth Edition.
8 His title for MS. C.