" He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works.
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works.
Coleridge - Poems
When
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an
artist.
To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it
was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the
most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid
for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation,
often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's
delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his
letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of
Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if
Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the
solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan. " Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by
Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some
chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed
to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of
importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He
was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked
both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark
cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O,
"having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the
human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most
falsely explained. " In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space. " "This," he says, "I have
_done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall
be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the
causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of
life and consciousness.
" He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works. " "My opinion is this,"
he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that
deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all
truth is a species of revelation. " On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page
to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning. "
This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's
dream from the beginning. " Only a few months before his death, we find him
writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of
your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your
and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it
exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the
Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons
of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as
the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or
the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of
which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization,
containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the
Powers and Forces, are complete. " Twenty years earlier, he had written to
Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most
important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then
to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on
the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine. " Of
this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the
Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of
metaphysical and theological speculation. " But out of those fragments no
system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green,
devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the
_magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind
"thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by
crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape.
Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an
absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love,
friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him
seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed
in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each
supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher
are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the
philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing.
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an
artist.
To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it
was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the
most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid
for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation,
often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's
delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his
letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of
Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if
Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the
solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan. " Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by
Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some
chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed
to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of
importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He
was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked
both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark
cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O,
"having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the
human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most
falsely explained. " In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space. " "This," he says, "I have
_done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall
be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the
causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of
life and consciousness.
" He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works. " "My opinion is this,"
he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that
deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all
truth is a species of revelation. " On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page
to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning. "
This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's
dream from the beginning. " Only a few months before his death, we find him
writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of
your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your
and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it
exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the
Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons
of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as
the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or
the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of
which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization,
containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the
Powers and Forces, are complete. " Twenty years earlier, he had written to
Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most
important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then
to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on
the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine. " Of
this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the
Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of
metaphysical and theological speculation. " But out of those fragments no
system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green,
devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the
_magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind
"thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by
crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape.
Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an
absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love,
friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him
seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed
in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each
supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher
are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the
philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing.
