WITHOUT any excessive or groundless Refinement I may complain of the too inclusive meaning of= or the mark of equation. For it may be used in three different senses:
1. One with. The regenerate Will=the Will Divine.
2. Equivalent to. 20 Shillings=1 Sovereign.
3. The same as. 2+2=4.
The difference in the first might be marked by raising the object above the = : thus,
Man = God
in the second by depressing it: thus, s20=
I sovn.
and in the third by retaining both on the same line: 2+2=4. To which we might perhaps add a 4th:
4. The quotient or product of 5+7=12, i.e. is 12. See Kant on the synthetic character of arithmetical and other processes hitherto supposed analytic—Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
MS.
The Natur-Phil[sophen] are apt to mistake the new-naming of a thing per antithesim ex. gr. Raumleben 
Zeitleben1, for additional Insight.
The Followers of Fichte, Baader, Schelling, and Steffens, like those of Plotinus, affect to be Eclectic Philosophers—but as you [J. H. Green] truly remarked, they neglect Logic, or rather do not understand what Logic is. Thus what Kant asserted as an assumption for the purposes of a formal Science, Heinroth asserts as matter of fact. It is a necessary fiction of pure Logic; just as the very contrary is a necessary fiction of pure Somatology.
MS.
Grew, in his Cosmologia Sacra, 1701, writes: As there is no Maximum whereunto we can go, but God only; so there is no Minimum, but a Point: which hath no Dimensions, but only a Whereness, and is next to Nothing.
Coleridge answers, in the margin and then on a front flyleaf: Well and happily expressed! But I should like to see the Partition-Wall between Nothing and Next to Nothing. No Thing, and his next neighbor, Whereness, a strange gentleman who is his own empty House—not admitting even his neighbor Nothing’s next of kin, Any Thing. Neither of the two, however, the Thisbe nor the Pyramus, is left Anonymous.
Then indeed we might question the authenticity of the Narrative. But no! the name of the one is Nothing; and the other was called Point—whether as Surname, or by baptism, is not ascertained. It is clear, however, and abundantly descriptive—the first being a No Thing any where and the second anything that is no thing—or No thing that is nowhere and where that is Nothing. Hue and Cry, the accused accomplices being—a Nothing that is any where, and an any where that is Nothing!—N.B. They are next door Neighbour, the one being the other’s House.
[On the front flyleaf.]
A Nothing that is Nowhere: and a Where only, that is Nothing. Ch. III. p. II. Mem.—The Gentleman last mentioned is called Point; whether as Sirname, or by individual Christening, I have not learnt;—only, that NOTHING and POINT are next door neighbours: and strange to say, the Latter is the other’s empty house, (Bedless, however—and therefore even if the Spelling had been less irreconcileable, not to be confounded with the Ware so celebrated for its great Bed). This House, which is Nothing, tho’ punctual in the extreme is so unhospitable as not to admit the next door Neighbor Nothing’s next of kin, Any thing!
P.S. Where only is Nothing’s Landlord inasmuch as He is at once his own, and his Neighbour’s, house. Tenementum Merum, quod nihil tenet.
Mere Wherenessl Nothing’s Landlord and next Neighbour,
Who art thy own and Nothing’s empty house,
Tenentless Tenement!—pinch gut’s only Where!
Would thou wert No Where! and that thy neighbor, Nothing,
Were Any Thing but what he is and is not!
From a MSS. Poem, 
of Athanasius Sphinx.
Mem. Intended as a Retort, or Tit for Tat courteous, if any of the Doctors of the Mechanic corpuscularian Philosophy, the caloric and choleric Atomists of the Daltonist School should, as most probably they will, crow and cachinnate over my Ens super Ens, Ens vere Ens, and Ens ferè non ens. S. T. C.
[Another note]: It is from admiration of Dr. N. Grew, and my high Estimate of his Powers, that I am almost tempted to say, that the Reasonings in Chapt. III ought to have led him to the perception of the essential phaenomenality of Matter …
[Another note]:… Such must be the sophistic results of every pretence to understand God by the World, instead of the World by God. It is an attempt to see the Sun by Moonlight.
MS.
There are two kinds of logic: 1. Syllogistic. 2. Criterional. How any one can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric.
All syllogistic logic is—1. Seclusion; 2. Inclusion; 3. Conclusion; which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. The first says, this ought to be; the second adds, this is; and the last pronounces, this must be so. The criterional logic, or logic of premisses, is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated.
Table Talk.
This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the time of Charles I. and the Cromwellate. In them the premisses are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premisses are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the University of Oxford, for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it.
Table Talk.
You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose.
Table Talk.
St. John’s logic is Oriental, and consists chiefly in position and parallel; whilst St. Paul displays all the intricacies of the Greek system.
Table Talk.
I am strongly induced to put the? whether the term, universal, might not with advantage be done away with in the terminology of Logic, and the term formal or essential be substituted. In affirming the equality of the rays of a Circle I affirm an essential form of the Circle: or rather the Circle as a total (i.e. seclusive) Form and the equi-radiality as a component (i.e. included) integral part. Even the phrase, true in all cases, is preferable to universal.…
MS.
I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds, and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of facts and personal experiences. Mr. —— is, I suppose, one of the rising young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them, and if you could, you could not arrange them. ‘But then,’ said Mr.——, ‘that principle of selection came from facts!’—‘To be sure!’ I replied; ‘but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for ever,—but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous aim or principle.’ He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon’s Induction: I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps enough for the occasion, to remark, that what he was very evidently taking for the Baconian Induction, was mere Deduction—a very different thing.
Table Talk.
Solger in his Philosophische Gespräche contends that Kant and Fichte wrote in the spirit of their own age, and that their works gained their importance from their practical contemporary application.
Coleridge comments: I cannot admit this without serious limitations even of Fichte, still less of Kant: who thought and wrote for his age not with it—or with it only as far as the form and method extend. Kant had 1. to overthrow, 2nd. to build the best possible temporary Shed and Tool-house, both for those ejected from the old Edifice, and for the Laborers &c. Lastly, in this Shed to give the Hints and great Ideas for the erection of the new Edifice. What since Kant is not in Kant as a Germ at least?
[Another note]: Of all wearisome Cant this Cant of Action, practical Truth, diese in unserem eigenen Berufe and the like, is the most sickening. What, the Devil! does it mean? We must get our bread and therefore for our own sakes and as honorable men, try to do what we do as well as possible. Who does not know this? And what has it to do with a man’s meditations in his leisure Hours? or if he should be a Shoe-maker, &c., even while he is working? Hans Sachs composed 20 folios of Verses, and never made a Shoe the less.
Solger goes on to say that even men of action in state affairs and on the battlefield have Ideas of higher aim and end,
Coleridge: Whoo!—a Wellington stuffed with Ideas!!
MS.
A NOTE ON SOUTHEY’S ‘THE DOCTOR’
Truth and Evidence are distinct terms, the latter implying the former, but not vice versa. Truths equal in certainty, may be of very unequal Evidence. ex. gr. Geometry and the Differential Calculus. Would that Southey could be induced to see, that the Light from Metaphysics, that lumen fatuum, at which he so triumphantly scoffs, is better than the recollection of the Legends and technical Slang of Common-place Sermons! and then instead of ‘the light of mere Reason’, he would have said—‘the inferences of the sensual Understanding imperfectly enlightened by Reason’. There is something shocking to a thoughtful Spirit in the very phrase ‘mere Reason’. I could almost as easily permit my tongue to say, ‘mere God’. I am a Christian of the School of John, Paul, Athanasius, Bull and Waterland, a Church of England Christian and therefore do not say, ‘God is the Supreme Reason’—but this I will and do say, that the Supreme Reason (
, Jehovah, 
) is God. And are there two Reasons, a rational Reason, and an irrational?
MS.
… There are three distinct sources from one or other of which we must derive our arguments whatever the position may be that we wish to support or overthrow.… These sources are, 1. transcendental, or anterior to experience, as the grounds without which experience itself could not have been. 2. Subjective, or the experience acquirable by self-observation and composed of facts of inward consciousness, which may be appealed to as assumed to have place in the minds of other[s] but cannot be demonstrated. Each man’s experience is a single and insulated Whole. 3. Common and simultaneous Experience, collectively forming History in its widest sense, civil, and natural.
MS.
The English public is not yet ripe to comprehend the essential difference between the reason and the understanding—between a principle and a maxim—an eternal truth and a mere conclusion generalized from a great number of facts. A man, having seen a million moss roses all red, concludes from his own experience and that of others that all moss roses are red. That is a maxim with him—the greatest amount of his knowledge upon the subject. But it is only true until some gardener has produced a white moss rose,—after which the maxim is good for nothing. Again, suppose Adam watching the sun sinking under the western horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved by scarce a ray of hope that he shall ever see the glorious light again. The next evening, when it declines, his hopes are stronger, but still mixed with fear; and even at the end of a thousand years, all that a man can feel is, a hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety. Now compare this in its highest degree with the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are together greater than the third. This, demonstrated of one triangle, is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is a truth perceived at once by the intuitive reason, independently of experience. It is, and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may.
Table Talk.
From the beginning I avoid the false opposition of Real and Ideal which embarrasses Schelling. Idea with me is contradistinguished only from Conception, Notion, Construction, Impression, Sensation.
MS.
It was of incalculable moment to Philosophy and the best interests of Man, that Occam and his Followers disclosed the unproductive nature of Conceptions and Notions, and the dependence of the Understanding on the Sense and Sensibility, in the broadest light. It was of the greatest importance in order to the regeneration of Realism, and its second triumphant Coming in its genuine form, that Nominalism should obtain a decisive Victory, and possess the philosophic Throne long enough to display its character and consequences without disguise. Then Dialectic was soon left behind, and the Logic swam with the tide; and like the pigs, cut its own throat as it advanced—and soon sunk and gave way to the three other Factors, the Sense, the Sensation, and the Senses as the union of both, i.e. to Mathematics and Empiricism, the latter subdivided into Observation and Experiment. For the Learned these were enough as long as History and Authority and above all the empassioned Business of detecting Error and protesting against the old Usurper, Aristotle, and the Papacy furnished full occupation. But the destruction and negative energies hasten to their own extinction, the more successful the shorter their endurance. And in attempting to survive their rightful Objects [Falsehood crossed out] (Error and Imposture) they deteriorated into a heartless Scepticism, and like the Hyena, bit at their own Supports.
Meanwhile for Man as Man, and for the Mass of Society, who were neither Mathematicians, Critics, or Virtuosi, there only remained the Sensations or Sensibility—and there followed an age of Luxury and Dissoluteness—and the names of Vice and Virtue were given to the more or less refined Taste in the same Epicurism.
Then rose the question in the better natures—Surely, these are not all of the Human Being? We have hearts as well as Heads. We can will and act, as well as think, see, and feel. Is there no communion between the intellectual and the moral? Are the distinctions of the Schools separates in Nature? Is there no Heart in the Head? No Head in the Heart? Is it not possible to find a practical Reason, a Light of Life, a focal power from the union or harmonious composition of all the Faculties? Lastly, there is, it is admitted, a Reason, to which the Understanding must convert itself in order to obtain from within what it would in vain seek for without, the knowledge of necessary and universal conclusion—of that which is because it must be, and not because it had been seen. May there not be a yet higher or deeper Presence, the source of Ideas, to which even the Reason must convert itself? Or rather is not this more truly the Reason, and the universal Principles but the Gleam of Light from the distant and undistinguished community of Ideas—or the Light in the Cloud that hides the Luminary? O! let these questions be once fully answered, and the affirmative made sure and evident—then we shall have a Philosophy, that will unite in itself the warmth of the mystics, the definiteness of the Dialectician, and the sunny clearness of the Naturalist, the productivity of the Experimenter and the Evidence of the Mathematician. It was solely from the want of this foundation that Raymond of Sabunde’s grand Attempt was premature, and abortive. Yet how precious the result! It reminds me of the fossile animals in the heart of the mountains according to the bold speculation of Steffens, who holds them for the first studies of [plastic crossed out] the organizing Life of Nature, left imperfect, the divine Artist being called off abruptly to quell a new gathering of the insurgent Titans.
Where’er I find the Good, the True, the Fair,
I ask no names. God’s Spirit dwelleth there!
The unconfounded, undivided Three.
Each for itself, and all in each, to see
In Man, and Nature is Philosophy.1
MS.
The gross errors of the Platonists in Physics which tho’ they do not affect the essential meaning, yet seem to do so to impatient minds—are the secondary cause of the present supercilium toward Platonism. The primary cause is that Impatience itself which characterizes Europe, and in a growing ratio from the days of Verulam to Condillac—occasioning and occasioned by the passion for merely sensuous phænomena. Finger-active, brain-lazy we look with the same arch scorn at ancient philosophy with which a shrewd Rustic grins at an Astronomer’s assertions of the motion and size of the Earth relatively to the Sun, the poor Sage having previously mistaken Oats for Barley, or a Plough for a Harrow. Commonsense, cry the one, Mother-wit, cries the other. S. T. C.
MS.
There is one injurious mistake, that in all ages and countries, our own not excepted, has come more or less into play; but which may be said to have been culminant, the Lord of the Ascendant, from the first appearance of Luther in the Horizon of History even to the Revolution in 1688. This is, the giving to a general truth, the privileges of a universal Law, or in other words the neglect of that golden Adage, Summum Jus summa injuria. Example. It is a general truth, that all Subjects are bound for conscience’s sake to obey the established Powers, passively by submitting to the penalty where they cannot, from motives of conscience, religious, or political, obey actively. The abuse of the sovereignty forms no exception to this general rule, as to enable a Moralist a priori to justify resistance. The Presumption must always be against such an Act. The Caesar, to whom Christ commanded passive obedience, was the Monster, Tiberius: and ‘the Powers that be’ for whom St. Paul exacted submission, were exercised by that Monster, Nero. Neither is this general Rule invalidated, a priori, by the mere co-incidence of Numbers in the same resistance. On the contrary, Treason acquires a worse character when exhibited in a Mob. These are truths. But tho’ abstract Reason neither enables or permits us to allow by anticipation any predefinable rebellion, yet History presents many cases which whoever condemns or does not extol and honor in the retrospect is a slave in soul, a servile Bigot, and in our own instance of James II a Traitor to the British Constitution. Now I pray, in what words is it possible that a Writer should convey this complex position but by affirming an inherent right of resistance in possible circumstances; by predefining these circumstances to be such, in which each individual acts in the feeling and conviction, that the Spirit of the Whole—not the mere majority of Noses, but the sum total of the Will and the Powers employed in the progressive as well as conservative movements of the Body Politic (or Nation) of which he is a member—is truly represented in himself; and finally, to guard him by all known criteria against mistaking his own fancies, turbulent emotions, and private prejudices, for a public Spirit?
This Calvin has done. But might not any man fancy—so and so? Doubtless. Men have fancied themselves made of glass—and if the falsehood of a moral rule is proveable by its not being able to preclude a fanatic, a fool, or a scoundrel from abusing it, all moral rules are false.
No, Calvin’s Error was of the direct contrary kind.… His error lay in this, that he too in another general rule, universalized, admitting neither exceptions nor limitation. The general Rule is: Promote the Truth—and what you know to be the Truth, enforce and realize, at whatever sacrifice of private feeling or interest, in proportion to the importance of that truth to the highest Welfare of Mankind. But alas! He forgot, that in order to this rule being universal, Omniscience is the pre-requisite, and Omnipotence the necessary accompaniment. He forgot, that a man can only believe himself to know that any given position is true in each particular form in which he announces it, or that the means which he takes to realize this position, are the right and fit means. And yet if we were to carry this scepticism into our general conduct, if we acted on no occasion with a sense of certainty, we should do nothing—the whole moral world would stagnate. What then is the reconciling principle? This:—Take care, that your act is proportionate to your faculties, neither forgetting their strength nor their fallibility.
A Surgeon regularly educated performs an amputation, even where only the probability appears to him to be in favor of it, and even tho’ the event should be adverse, he yet stands guiltless before God and Man. The act was not merely the result of his best convictions, but it was duly proportioned to his moral sphere, as an Individual. Marat had a conviction amounting in his own mind to a moral certainty that the death of 200,000 of his Countrymen was indispensible to the establishment of the Liberty and ultimate moral and physical Well-being of France, and therein of all Europe. We will even assume, that events should have confirmed the correctness of this belief. And yet Marat was and will remain either execrable as a remorseless Ruffian, or frightful as an Insane Fanatic. And why? The proposal was frightfully disproportionate to the sphere of a poor fallible Mortal. It was a decisive symptom of an inhuman Soul, that, when the lives of myriads of his fellow-men were in question, the recollection of his necessary fallibility, and the probability of mistake where so many myriads of men possessing the same intellectual faculties with himself entertained different convictions with the same sense of positiveness, did not outweigh any confidence arising from his own individual insight.
Nay, a Marat is every man who on the ground of speculative convictions dares authorize the punishment and subversion of all who hold and act on opposite convictions.
This Calvin did—justifying himself by the example of whom? —Of God: presumptuously forgetting, that he, Calvin, was not God. But was it Calvin alone? No! No! Every Sect of that Age without exception Calvinized in this respect; and it is calumnious in Dr. Kenny to seduce the ignorant into the Notion that Calvin, and not the whole Age including Calvin, was the Culprit.
MS.
It has in its consequences proved no trifling evil to the Christian World, that Aristotle’s Definitions of Nature are all grounded on the petty and rather rhetorical than philosophical Antithesis of Nature to Art—a conception inadequate to the demands even of his Philosophy. Hence in the progress of his reasoning, he confounds the Natura Naturata (that is, the sum total of the Facts and Phaenomena of the Senses) with an hypothetical Natura Naturans, a Goddess Nature, that has no better claim to a place in any sober system of Natural Philosophy than the Goddess Multitudo; yet to which Aristotle not rarely gives the name and attributes of the Supreme Being. The result was, that the Idea of God thus identified with this hypothetical Nature becomes itself but an Hypothesis, or at best but a precarious inference from incommensurate premises and on disputable Principles: while in other passages, God is confounded with (and everywhere, in Aristotle’s genuine works, included in) the Universe: which most grievous error it is the great and characteristic Merit of Plato to have avoided and denounced.
Aids to Reflection.
Whatever is comprized in the Chain and Mechanism of Cause and Effect, of course necessitated, and having its necessity in some other thing, antecedent or concurrent—this is said to be Natural; and the Aggregate and System of all such things is Nature. It is, therefore, a contradiction in terms to include in this the Freewill, of which the verbal definition is—that which originates an act or state of Being. In this sense therefore, which is the sense of St. Paul, and indeed of the New Testament throughout, Spiritual and Supernatural are synonymous. …
I have already given one definition of Nature. Another, and differing from the former in words only, is this: Whatever is representable in the forms of Time and Space, is Nature. But whatever is comprehended in Time and Space, is included in the Mechanism of Cause and Effect. And conversely, whatever, by whatever means, has its principle in itself, so far as to originate its actions, cannot be contemplated in any of the forms of Space and Time—it must, therefore, be considered as Spirit or Spiritual by a mind in that stage of its Development which is here supposed, and which we have agreed to understand under the name of Morality, or the Moral State: for in this stage we are concerned only with the forming of negative conceptions, negative convictions; and by spiritual I do not pretend to determine what the Will is, but what it is not—namely, that it is not Nature. And as no man who admits a Will at all, (for we may safely presume, that no man <not>1 meaning to speak figuratively, would call the shifting Current of a stream the WILL of the River), will suppose it below Nature, we may safely add, that it is super-natural; and this without the least pretence to any positive Notion or Insight.
Aids to Reflection.
The Pretensions to the Supernatural, pilloried by Butler, sent to Bedlam by Swift, and (on their re-appearance in public) gibbetted by Warburton, and anatomized by Bishop Lavington, one and all have this for their essential character, that the Spirit is made the immediate Object of Sense or Sensation. Whether the Spiritual Presence and Agency are supposed cognizable by an indescribable Feeling or in unimaginable Vision by some specific visual energy; whether seen, or heard, or touched, smelt, and tasted—for in those vast Store-houses of fanatical assertion, the volumes of Ecclesiastical History and religious Auto-biography, Instances are not wanting even of the three latter extravagancies … the assumption of a something essentially supersensual that is nevertheless the object of Sense, i.e. not supersensual.
Aids to Reflection.
Berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. So it is with Spinoza. His premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant.
Table Talk.
Spinoza, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his premiss. His unica substantia is, in fact, a mere notion,—a subject of the mind, and no object at all.
Table Talk.
Coleridge objected to ‘the tone’ of Heinrotli’s writing on the relation of man to Nature:
It is quite characteristic of that mischmasch of Spinosism, Evangelicalism, and abstract Dynamics generalized from the recent experiments of Electro-magnetic chemistry, which make up the newest German Eclecticism, and pietistic Philosophy. Heinroth is a Philosopher, and must not talk altogether like a common Christian: or rather, I think his Conscience twits him, and so it is Geist that works true miracles, and Geist is gegenüber Nature, as the positive Pole.…
[Then on the front fly-leaf he continues]:
All that staid and sober Dignity of logical Arrangement, which Wolf had introduced, all that austere beauty of Method, which Kant added, seem to have deserted the present German Philosophers—who are sinking back rapidly into Miscellany, popular Opinionism, at once superficial and arbitrary; and in short, into the style of oratorical Lectures to [sentimental crossed out] blue Ladies and grown up Gentlemen, who have not time for reading. This degeneracy, is, I grieve to say, too apparent in this work on anthropology, which might more fitly have been entitled—Sketches of all manner of things about men, women and children, Greeks and Romans, & Dr Gall & the New Testament with fag ends of sentimental Sermons!
Self-conceit that christens itself Selb-ständigkeit, and the Vanity that will be an original Thinker and a Headmaster, and tries to establish its claim by criticism, i.e. picking holes in the coat of the Philosopher last in fashion, and lastly that Professorial Auditorensucht—these are the Factors to which the exhausted, effort-shunning yet excitement-craving state of men’s minds, the vast increase in the number of drest people from Shop, Factory and Counting House, who must know something about every thing; and the multisciolous Reviewing spirit of Literature generally, are the Co-efficients. The Effects, Detraction—mixtymaxty. Shall the cold meat of Sunday, Mon. Tues. Wed. Thurs. Friday, [be] warmed up in the Saturday Squab-pie of new terms and new schematisms? Add the petty pietistic cant of the Schleiermacher School and you have the present state of philosophizing in Germany! [last line at bottom of page rubbed out].
MS.
Distinct notions do not suppose different things. When I make a threefold distinction in human nature, I am fully aware that it is a distinction, not a division, and that in every act of mind the man unites the properties of sense, understanding, and reason. Nevertheless it is of great practical importance, that these distinctions should be made and understood, the ignorance or perversion of them being alike injurious; as the first French constitution has most lamentably proved. It was the fashion in the profligate times of Charles II. to laugh at the Presbyterians, for distinguishing between the person and the king; while in fact they were ridiculing the most venerable maxims of English law;—(the king never dies—the king can do no wrong, &c.)—and subverting the principles of genuine loyalty, in order to prepare the minds of the people for despotism.
Under the term ‘SENSE’, I comprise whatever is passive in our being, without any reference to the question of materialism or immaterialism; all that man is in common with animals, in kind at least—his sensations, and impressions, whether of his outward senses, or the inner sense of imagination. This, in the language of the schools, was called the vis receptiva, or recipient property of the soul, from the original constitution of which we perceive and imagine all things under the forms of space and time. By the ‘UNDERSTANDING’, I mean the faculty of thinking and forming judgments on the notices furnished by the sense, according to certain rules existing in itself, which rules constitute its distinct nature. By the pure REASON, I mean the power by which we become possessed of principle, (the eternal verities of Plato and Descartes) and of ideas, (N.B. not images) as the ideas of a point, a line, a circle, in mathematics; and of justice, holiness, free-will, &c. in morals. Hence in works of pure science the definitions of necessity precede the reasoning, in other works they more aptly form the conclusion.
Friend.
I have elsewhere in the present Work, though more at large in the ‘Elements of Discourse’ which, God permitting, will follow it, explained the difference between the Understanding and the Reason, by Reason meaning exclusively the speculative or scientific Power so called, the Nous or Mens of the Ancients. And wider still is the distinction between the Understanding and the Spiritual Mind. But no Gift of God does or can contradict any other Gift, except by misuse or misdirection. Most readily therefore do I admit, that there can be no contrariety between Revelation and the Understanding; unless you call the fact, that the Skin, though sensible of the warmth of the Sun, can convey no notion of its figure, or its joyous light, or of the colours it impresses on the clouds, a contrariety between the Skin and the Eye; or infer that the cutaneous and the optic nerves contradict each other.
Aids to Reflection.
I shall hereafter endeavour to prove, how distinct and different the sensation of positiveness is from the sense of certainty;—the turbulent heat of temporary fermentation from the mild warmth of essential life. Suffice it for the present to affirm, to declare it at least, as my own creed, that whatever humbles the heart, and forces the mind inward, whether it be sickness, or grief, or remorse, or the deep yearnings of love, (and there have been children of affliction for whom all these have met and made up one complex suffering,) in proportion as it acquaints us with the thing we are, renders us docile to the concurrent testimony of our fellow men in all ages and in all nations. From Pascal in his closet resting the arm, which supports his thoughtful brow, on a pile of demonstrations, to the poor pensive Indian that seeks the missionary in the American wilderness, the humiliated self-examinant feels that there is evil in our nature as well as good;—an evil and a good, for a just analogy to which he questions all other natures in vain. It is still the great definition of humanity, that we have a conscience, which no mechanic compost, no chemical combination of mere appetence, memory and understanding, can solve; which is indeed an element of our being;—a conscience, unrelenting yet not absolute; which we may stupify but cannot delude; which we may suspend but cannot annihilate; although we may perhaps find a treacherous counterfeit in the very quiet which we derive from its slumber, or its entrancement.
Of so mysterious a phaenomenon we might expect a cause as mysterious. Accordingly, we find this (cause be it, or condition, or necessary accompaniment) involved and implied in the fact, which it alone can explain. For if our permanent consciousness did not reveal to us our free-agency, we should yet be obliged to deduce it, as a necesssary inference, from the fact of our conscience; or rejecting both the one and the other, as mere illusions of internal feelings, forfeit all power of thinking consistently with our actions, or acting consistently with our thought, for any single hour during our whole lives.
Friend.
Religion therefore is the ultimate aim of philosophy, in consequence of which philosophy itself becomes the supplement of the sciences, both as the convergence of all to the common end, namely wisdom; and as supplying the copula, which, modified in each in the comprehension of its parts in one whole, is in its principles common to all, as integral parts of one system. And this is METHOD, itself a distinct science, the immediate offspring of philosophy, and the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific and the sciences philosophical.
Friend.
The expediency even in a moral sense of not carrying speculation above a certain height uninterruptedly; but there to descend to the practical uses of which it might be capable—like the Indian Fig, which still at a given height declines its branches to earth and takes root anew, forms a new principle.
MS.
Kant overlooked one fatal difference between the Mathemat: and the Metaphysician, viz. the actual existence of a Mathematical Public, and the non-existence of a Metaphysical—or rather the intrusive existence of an every-body Court of Judicature, the psilosophical Public. I. p. xxxvi.
On the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, 1755. Kant: Denn man siehet ihn die Richtung eines Grössten Cirkels … einnehmen. I. p. 331. [One sees it (the Milky Way) follow the line of a huge circle.]
Coleridge comments: My eyes are perhaps different from those of scientific observers—I can only see a sort of Ribbon with ragged edges and of unequal breadth, stretching in the form of an Arch, and ending in a divarication. And as to its extension over the whole cope of Heaven from Horizon to Horizon (if this be implied in the words, den ganzen Himmel einnehmen,—all I can say is that I never saw it. S.T.C.
[And again on the first blank leaf at the end of the volume:]
Confessio Ignorantiae
p. 331. I am sadly puzzled with this and other descriptions of the Milky Way. I am almost driven to suspect that my eyes are different from other people’s—for I have gazed at it a thousand times, but could never see anything but a sort of Hoop that had sprung from the nails, that had joined its two ends—or a Ribbon of unequal width and with ragged edges, splitting or divaricating at one end into two unequal Legs or Branches—and as to its extending over the whole Cope of Heaven from one point of the Horizon to the opposite—if this be, as I suppose, the meaning of ‘den ganzen Himmel einnehmen—all I can say, is that I never saw it: and I am sure it has not been from want of trying to do so. So again respecting the theory or hypothesis, that the Milky Way forms a system of Suns, each with its dependencies, on the same plane, in the shape of a Platter; and that our Solar System is somewhere near (either on or within) the Rim. How I have longed to have that explained to me on the principles of Perspective! I can readily understand how by disappearance of the Interspaces the distant Fixed Stars would be compressed into a ribbon or hoop; but that Gap at one end, where the Strip splits into two straddling thighs—this I cannot account for on the said hypothesis. S. T. Coleridge.
Nay, worse and worse—for there is no end to my stupidity in these matters—it seems to me that if I suppose a city or a vast Cluster of Houses built concircularly on a perfectly level Plain, and myself on the pavement in one of the Circles, the Houses nearest my eye would shut out the rest. Imagine these to be Suns.
A B C D E F
How is the light from F to reach me placed near the A? That this is mere stupidity I am well convinced: for it was with no mock humility that I superscribed this, Confessio Ignorantiae. Indeed, I now see, where my Blunder lies.
With somewhat greater confidence I dare acknowledge, that this representation of the Starry Universe fails to impress my mind with that super-super[l]ative Sublimity, which Kant (p. 343, and 44) and many other great Men consider it so calculated to inspire. To me it appears an endless repetition of the same Image: nor can I conceive, how the Thought of a blind Mare going round and round in a Mill can derive Sublimity from the assurance, that there are a million of such Mills, each with a dozen or more blind Mares pacing round and round The admirable Variety yet Symmetry of a single Moss or Flower would both raise and gratify my imagination in a far higher degree. N.B. I well remember that (some 20 years ago) a valued and most valuable Old Friend, somewhat subject to sudden tho’ brief explosions of Anger and Impatience, was nearly for shooting me out of a Coach-door for making this same remark—it was, he swore, such a d——n’d impudent Lie, which the very Dæmon of Paradox and Sophistry could alone have inspired.—No wonder that I had pretended to think that one Shakespeare outweighed a score Sir Isaac Newtons—indeed, he expected to hear me profess Atheism in my next flight of bravado! And yet, dear and honored P [oole]! so I did think, and even so I continue to do. S. T. C. 30. Novr 1820.
I. 353. Young as Kant was at the time he composed this work so demonstrative of a grand scientific productive or rather constructive Imagination, still it being posterior to the severely logical critique on the Cartesian and Leibnitzian Controversy, I cannot but be surprized, that he should not have detected the contradiction between his Problem, according to which he engages to construct the system of the material universe out of matter indued merely with the two essential powers, Attraction and Repulsion—and this unendliche Verschiedenheit of the primary particles. For not to say, that there is somewhat of trick in the words, only Attraction and Repulsion, when yet he intended to bargain for aboriginal difference of degrees—by which in fact he includes all possible Powers that can be manifested in the Relations of Space—for what can they be but degrees of retaining, producing and preventing nearness? Yet how is this consistent with primary Atoms? How can we think of comparative Density BUT as paucity of Interspaces in a composite Body?
I. 374. I am really puzzled. In one page K. tells me of endless differences of Density and from this derives his first centers—and in the next page assumes all the matter of all the Planets rarified to 30 million times thinner than the Air of our Atmosphere!’
II. On a blank leaf at the front of Volume II.
It is an interesting fact in philosophical History i.e. the History of Speculative Philosophy, that the ‘De Mundi sensib. et intell. Form et Prin.’ that Masterwork of profundity and precision, that model of steady investigation, clear Conception and (as the Cambridge Mathematicians say) elegant Demonstration, was published 15 years before the Critique der reinen Vernunft— and produced no sensible effect on the philosophic Public. The former work contains all the main principles of the Latter, and often more perspicuously expressed—yet all remained silent. The Critique der r. V. appeared—and the Universities of Germany exploded! What was the cause of this difference? Is it, that the same Thoughts appeared less strange, less paradoxical, in Latin than in the vernacular Tongue? Or that the ordinary proofs of the higher psychology are exposed more openly and expressly in the Crit. d. r. V. than in the former work? Or lastly, that one’s mother tongue however philosophical and technical still produces on us a liveliness of impression which a dead Language cannot produce? However this be, the former work should always be studied and mastered previously to the study of the Critique d. r. V. and the works that followed it. The student will find it a better auxiliary than 50 Vol. of Comments, from Reinhold, Schmidt, Schulz, Beck, Tieftrunk &c. &c. &c.
II. 344. On the Träume eines Geistersehers, 1766.
Kant:… Enthält das Herz des Menschen nicht unmittelbare sittliche Vorschriften, und muss man um ihn allhier seiner Bestimmung gemäss zu bewegen, durchaus die Maschinen an eine andere Welt ansetzen? [Does the heart of man contain no direct moral prescripts? Must his moral nature derive its motive power from another world?]
Let the heart answer in silence to these Questions—a cultivated Heart, to which Vice in its ordinary shape is hateful on its own account. Will it not say—True! What I do, I would fain do well. It is not any Hope of future Reward that impels me, nor any Fear of future Punishment which keeps me in the Road—but the thought, that all I can do is but a dream, and that not myself only but that all men and all things are but Dreams, that nothing is permanent—which makes the mortality of man a stupefying thought to me. I cannot conceive a supreme moral Intelligence unless I believe in my own immortality—for I must believe in a whole system of apparent means to an end, which end had no existence—my Conscience, my progressive faculties, &c. But give up this and Virtue wants all reason. Away with Stoic Hypocrisy! I know that in order to the idea of Virtue we must suppose the pure good will or reverence for the Law as excellent in itself—but this very excellence supposes consequences, tho’ not selfish ones. Let my maxim be capable of becoming the Law of all intelligent Being—well! but this supposes an end possessible by intelligent Beings. For if the Law be barren of all consequences, what is it but words? To obey the Law for its own sake is really a mere sophism in any other sense: you might as well put abracadabra in its place. I can readily conceive that I have it in my nature to die a martyr, knowing that annihilation followed Death, if it were ever possible to believe that all other human Beings were immortal and to be benefit[t]ed by it; but any benefit that could affect only a set of transitory Animals, what I could not deem myself worthy of any exertion in my behalf, how can I deem others of the same lot? Boldly should I say—O nature! I would rather not have been—let that which is to come so soon, come now—for what is all the intermediate space, but sense of utter Worthlessness? Far, far below animals—for they enjoy a generic immortality having no individuation. But man is truly and solely an immortal series of conscious Mortalities, and inherent Disappointments.
II. 426 f.n. On the Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 1764.
Kant: Der Fanaticism muss von Enthusiasmus jederzeit unterschieden werden. [Fanaticism must be distinguished at all times from enthusiasm. He goes on to say that fanaticism believes it participates in some supernatural power, whereas enthusiasm remains on a human level.]
Coleridge comments:
I dissent from Kant in this, and think that Fanaticism is only a species of Superstition, distinguished by its passion for proselytism—it is born and lives only in a crowd of Sympathists. And what if one gives a false character to an Image, the other to a feeling? This is enough to make a species, not a genus.
There is no way of arriving at any sciential End but by finding it at every step. The End is in the Means: or the Adequacy of each Mean is already its End. Southey once said to me: You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get sight of the Hare, and Flash—strait as a line! he has it in his mouth!—Even so, I replied, might a Cannibal say to an Anatomist, whom he had watched dissecting a body. But the fact is—I do not care two pence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle I make myself acquainted with. I follow the Chamois-Hunters, and seem to set out with the same Object. But I am no Hunter of that Chamois Goat; but avail myself of the Chace in order to [pursue] a nobler purpose—that of making a road across the Mountain in which Common Sense may hereafter pass backward and forward, without desperate Leaps or Balloons that soar indeed but do not improve the chance of getting onward.
MS.