Coleridge meant by an idea in this place may be
expressed
in various
ways out of his own works.
ways out of his own works.
Coleridge - Table Talk
HAMOND. Lady, hold off!
EDITH. No! hew 'em;
Hew off my innocent hands, as he commands you!
They'll hang the faster on for death's convulsion. --
Thou seed of rocks, will nothing move thee, then?
Are all my tears lost, all my righteous prayers
Drown'd in thy drunken wrath? I stand up thus, then,
Thou boldly bloody tyrant,
And to thy face, in heav'n's high name defy thee!
And may sweet mercy, when thy soul sighs for it,--
When under thy black mischiefs thy flesh trembles,--
When neither strength, nor youth, nor friends, nor gold,
Can stay one hour; when thy most wretched conscience,
Waked from her dream of death, like fire shall melt thee,--
When all thy mother's tears, thy brother's wounds,
Thy people's fears, and curses, and my loss,
My aged father's loss, shall stand before thee--
ROLLO. Save him, I say; run, save him, save her father;
Fly and redeem his head!
EDITH. May then that pity," &c. ]
* * * * *
Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a
thousand other things,--that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many
terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations
would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost
their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has
happened to the Spanish.
* * * * *
I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of
the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them
I mostly forget. [1]
[Footnote 1:
There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general
conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have
sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide
through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician
about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other
peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned
and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate
notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I
believe the beginning of Mr. C. 's liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty
good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the
presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any _Ideality_, and
awarded an unusual share of _Locality_, to the majestic silver-haired head
of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded
the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps,
since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter
faculty. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its
rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been
observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity,
however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered
for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or
significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher
intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions.
* * * * *
Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in
company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time;
but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards
the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and
my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with--"Them's the
jockies for me! " I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head.
* * * * *
Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first
looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express
my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same
time, said:--"How majestic! "--(It was the precise term, and I turned round
and was saying--"Thank you, Sir! that _is_ the exact word for it"--when he
added, _eodem flatu_)--"Yes! how very _pretty_! "
* * * * *
_July_ 8. 1827.
BULL AND WATERLAND. --THE TRINITY.
Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity. [1]
In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may
express the formula thus:--
God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The
Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was
very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae,
using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome.
He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's
work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he
felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of
Rome. --ED. ]
* * * * *
The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment,
heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination
in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which
Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not
holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and
Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting,
which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived
language.
* * * * *
How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think
it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token
to each other. They must _improve_ this and that text, and they must do so
and so in a _prayerful_ way; and so on. Why not use common language? A
young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the
_marrow_ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to
London upon her marrow-bones only.
* * * * *
_July_ 9. 1827.
SCALE OF ANIMAL BEING.
In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is
an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is
almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is
apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the
animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature.
There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect
state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting. [1]
[Footnote 1:
These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage,
transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of
the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar:--
"Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves
death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute
prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it
crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides
into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive
motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is
differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free
wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability,
the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is
subordinate thereto,--most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in
the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically
rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and
charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious
week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before
the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and
earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. " And
who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the
vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and
loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above
all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and
confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in
their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy
instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to
himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from
behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their
highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better.
All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man
alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward
life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that
grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it,
in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are
yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear
as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be
a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your
proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith
the moral poet:--
'Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how mean a thing is man! '"
P. 105. 2d ed. --ED. ]
July 12. 1827.
POPEDOM. --SCANDERBEG. --THOMAS A BECKET. --PURE AGES OF GREEK, ITALIAN, AND
ENGLISH. --LUTHER. --BAXTER. --ALGERNON SIDNEY'S STYLE. --ARIOSTO AND TASSO. --
PROSE AND POETRY. --THE FATHERS. --RHENFERD. --JACOB BEHMEN.
What a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to
have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo,
and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and
office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian
politics.
* * * * *
Scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for Walter Scott; and so would
Thomas a Becket, if it is not rather too much for him. It involves in
essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters.
* * * * *
Observe the superior truth of language, in Greek, to Theocritus
inclusively; in Latin, to the Augustan age exclusively; in Italian, to
Tasso exclusively; and in English, to Taylor and Barrow inclusively.
* * * * *
Luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer I know, after the apostles
and apostolic men.
* * * * *
Pray read with great attention Baxter's Life of himself. It is an
inestimable work. [1] I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter's memory, or even
his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I
could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity.
[Footnote 1:
This, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of Mr. Coleridge's text
books for English church history. He used to say that there was _no_
substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and
that the modern political Dissenters, who affected to glory in Baxter as a
leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of it. In a
marginal note I find Mr. C. writing thus: "Alas! in how many respects does
my lot resemble Baxter's! But how much less have my bodily evils been, and
yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be! But
verily Baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace. "--ED. ]
* * * * *
I am not enough read in Puritan divinity to know the particular objections
to the surplice, over and above the general prejudice against the _retenta_
of Popery. Perhaps that was the only ground,--a foolish one enough.
In my judgment Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of
Cowley or Dryden. Read Algernon Sidney; his style reminds you as little of
books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was!
* * * * *
Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and
what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate.
* * * * *
Well! I am for Ariosto against Tasso; though I would rather praise Aristo's
poetry than his poem.
* * * * *
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose
and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the
_best_ words in the best order.
* * * * *
I conceive Origen, Jerome, and Augustine to be the three great fathers in
respect of theology, and Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Chrysostom in
respect of rhetoric.
* * * * *
Rhenferd possessed the immense learning and robust sense of Selden, with
the acuteness and wit of Jortin.
* * * * *
Jacob Behmen remarked, that it was not wonderful that there were separate
languages for England, France, Germany, &c. ; but rather that there was not
a different language for every degree of latitude. In confirmation of
which, see the infinite variety of languages amongst the barbarous tribes
of South America.
_July_ 20. 1827.
NON-PERCEPTION OF COLOURS.
What is said of some persons not being able to distinguish colours, I
believe. It may proceed from general weakness, which will render the
differences imperceptible, just as the dusk or twilight makes all colours
one. This defect is most usual in the blue ray, the negative pole.
* * * * *
I conjecture that when finer experiments have been applied, the red,
yellow, and orange rays will be found as capable of communicating magnetic
action as the other rays, though, perhaps, under different circumstances.
Remember this, if you are alive twenty years hence, and think of me.
_July_ 21. 1827.
RESTORATION. --REFORMATION.
The elements had been well shaken together during the civil wars and
interregnum under the Long Parliament and Protectorate; and nothing but the
cowardliness and impolicy of the Nonconformists, at the Restoration, could
have prevented a real reformation on a wider basis. But the truth is, by
going over to Breda with their stiff flatteries to the hollow-hearted King,
they put Sheldon and the bishops on the side of the constitution.
* * * * *
The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men
began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.
_July_ 23. 1827.
WILLIAM III. --BERKELEY. --SPINOSA. --GENIUS. --ENVY. --LOVE.
William the Third was a greater and much honester man than any of his
ministers. I believe every one of them, except Shrewsbury, has now been
detected in correspondence with James.
* * * * *
Berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. So it is with
Spinosa. His premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant.
* * * * *
Genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but
not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious
disposition. Envy is *[Greek: kakistos kai dikaiotatos theos], as I once
saw it expressed somewhere in a page of Stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its
worshippers.
* * * * *
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other
than for the desire of the man. [1]
[Footnote 1:
"A woman's friendship," I find written by Mr. C. on a page dyed red with an
imprisoned rose-leaf, "a woman's friendship borders more closely on love
than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly
acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs, and more signs and expressions of
attachment. "--ED. ]
August 29. 1827.
JEREMY TAYLOR. --HOOKER. --IDEAS. --KNOWLEDGE.
Jeremy Taylor is an excellent author for a young man to study, for the
purpose of imbibing noble principles, and at the same time of learning to
exercise caution and thought in detecting his numerous errors.
* * * * *
I must acknowledge, with some hesitation, that I think Hooker has been a
little over-credited for his judgment.
Take as an instance of an idea the continuity and coincident distinctness
of nature; or this,--vegetable life is always striving to be something that
it is not; animal life to be itself. [1] Hence, in a plant the parts, as the
root, the stem, the branches, leaves, &c. remain after they have each
produced or contributed to produce a different _status_ of the whole plant:
in an animal nothing of the previous states remains distinct, but is
incorporated into, and constitutes progressively, the very self.
[Footnote 1:
The reader who has never studied Plato, Bacon, Kant, or Coleridge in their
philosophic works, will need to be told that the word Idea is not used in
this passage in the sense adopted by "Dr. Holofernes, who in a lecture on
metaphysics, delivered at one of the Mechanics' Institutions, explodes all
_ideas_ but those of sensation; whilst his friend, deputy Costard, has no
_idea_ of a better-flavoured haunch of venison, than he dined off at the
London Tavern last week. He admits (for the deputy has travelled) that the
French have an excellent _idea_ of cooking in general; but holds that their
most accomplished _maitres de cuisine_ have no more _idea_ of dressing a
turtle, than the Parisian gourmands themselves have any _real idea_ of the
true _taste_ and _colour_ of the fat. " Church and State, p. 78. No! what
Mr.
Coleridge meant by an idea in this place may be expressed in various
ways out of his own works. I subjoin a sufficient definition from the
Church and State, p. 6. "That which, contemplated _objectively_, (that is,
as existing _externally_ to the mind,) we call a law; the same contemplated
_subjectively_, (that is, as existing in a subject or mind,) is an idea.
Hence Plato often names Ideas, Laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato,
describes the laws of the material universe as the ideas in nature. "Quod
in natura _naturata_ Lex, in natura _naturante_ Idea dicitur. " A more
subtle limitation of the word may be found in the last paragraph of Essay
(E) in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual. --ED. ]
* * * * *
To know any thing for certain is to have a clear insight into the
inseparability of the predicate from the subject (the matter from the
form), and _vice versa_. This is a verbal definition,--a _real_ definition
of a thing absolutely known is impossible. I _know_ a circle, when I
perceive that the equality of all possible radii from the centre to the
circumference is inseparable from the idea of a circle.
_August_ 30. 1827.
PAINTING.
Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.
April 13. 1830.
PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. --MESSIAH. --JEWS. --THE TRINITY.
If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus
our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that
stupendous event--the rise and establishment of Christianity--in comparison
with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the
exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed
among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a
passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal
Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come?
What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Buonaparte?
* * * * *
I know that some excellent men--Israelites without guile--do not, in fact,
expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may
possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a
quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine
of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity
of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone.
The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or
a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians,
the Hindus, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews.
But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still
learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the
light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but
itself.
* * * * *
It has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the Trinity are at
variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or
sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the Trinity thought of it as I
did. To which again humbly, yet confidently, I reply, that my superior
light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this,--that I more
clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity is an absolute truth
transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. I may
or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more
logical terms than some others; but this I say, Go and ask the most
ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in
and worships a plurality of Gods, and he will start with horror at the bare
suggestion. He may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he
will tell you that he _does_ believe in one God, and in one God only,--
reason about it as you may.
* * * * *
What all the churches of the East and West, what Romanist and Protestant
believe in common, that I call Christianity. In no proper sense of the word
can I call Unitarians and Socinians believers in Christ; at least, not in
the only Christ of whom I have read or know any thing.
April 14, 1830.
CONVERSION OF THE JEWS. --JEWS IN POLAND.
There is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with the spirit
unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches.
In the first age, the Jewish Christians undoubtedly considered themselves
as the seed of Abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a
superior order. Witness the account of St. Peter's conduct in the Acts [1],
and the Epistle to the Galatians. [2] St. Paul protested against this, so
far as it went to make Jewish observances compulsory on Christians who were
not of Jewish blood, and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion
on the Mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the
chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the Jews
would ultimately be restored; and he says,--If the Gentiles have been so
blest by the rejection of the Jews, how much rather shall they be blest by
the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to
abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said
that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such
ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they
rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in
Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted
to retain their customs.
If Rhenferd's Essays were translated--if the Jews were made acquainted with
the real argument--if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to
abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to
become Christians _as of the seed of Abraham_--I believe there would be a
Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower
orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty
in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and
exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject:--"O
Sir! make the inhabitants of Hollywell Street and Duke's Place Israelites
first, and then we may debate about making them Christians. "[3]
In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants.
They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They
never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand of a large number of
Jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would
become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within
their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a
popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews
would be the first objects of murder and spoliation?
[Footnote 1: Chap. xv. ]
[Footnote 2 : Chap. ii. ]
[Footnote 3:
Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in
this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of
thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed
of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention
here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected,
Hyman Hurwitz. --ED. ]
April 17. 1830.
MOSAIC MIRACLES. --PANTHEISM.
In the miracles of Moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts,
which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should
still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3d chapter of the
book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the
Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby
to show to the Jews--the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt--
that the _same_ God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by
miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the
wilderness, was _their_ God also. The manna and quails were ordinary
provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities
annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was
effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove hack the waters; and
so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous.
Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it
was _one and the same God_ who interfered specially, and who governed all
generally.
* * * * *
Take away the first verse of the hook of Genesis, and then what immediately
follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in
the mysteries of Greece; of which the Samothracian or Cabeiric were
probably the purest and the most ancient.
_April_ 18. 1830.
POETIC PROMISE.
In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens,
however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather
a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious
imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But
genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr.
Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic
excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey.
_April 19. 1830. _
It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some
things he _does_ know better than his physician.
* * * * *
I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death.
* * * * *
Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
_April 30. 1830. _
NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS. --BRITISH SCHOOLMEN. --SPINOSA.
The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being
a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat.
* * * * *
The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and
most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and
both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which
truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was
the head of the Realists; Ockham,[1] his own disciple, of the Nominalists.
Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer.
[Footnote 1:
John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune,
near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity
at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he
went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1308, at the early
age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time
to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons
edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639.
William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1347; but the place and
year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible
Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's
account of these worthies:--
"He knew what's what, and that's as high
As metaphysic wit can fly;
In school divinity as able
As he that hight Irrefragable,
A second Thomas, or at once
To name them all, another _Dunse_;
Profound in all the Nominal
And Real ways beyond them all;
For he a rope of sand could twist
As tough as learned Sorbonist. "
HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149.
The Irrefragable Doctor was Alexander Hales, a native of Gloucestershire,
who died in 1245. Amongst his pupils at Paris, was Fidanza, better known by
the name of Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor. The controversy of the
Realists and the Nominalists cannot he explained in a note; but in
substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. The Realists
held _generally_ with Aristotle, that there were universal _ideas_ or
essences impressed upon matter, and coveal with, and inherent in, their
objects. Plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the
divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both
maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal
forms. On the other hand, Zeno and the old Stoics denied the existence of
these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere tenms and
nominal representatives of their particular objects. The Nominalists were
the followers of Zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of
conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. It does not require much
reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have
upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of Christianity. --ED. ]
* * * * *
It is remarkable, that two thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of British
birth. It was the schoolmen who made the languages of Europe what they now
are. We laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these
quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected;
whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily
use.
* * * * *
One of the scholastic definitions of God is this,--_Deus est, cui omne quod
est est esse omne quod est:_ as long a sentence made up of as few words,
and those as oligosyllabic, as any I remember. By the by, that
_oligosyllabic_ is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, _ex
opposito_.
* * * * *
Spinosa, 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.
* * * * *
Plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. He leads you to see,
that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are
nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic--
that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which
is the instrument of the understanding. I have read most of the works of
Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. In
fact, I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a
consummate genius. [1]
[Footnote 1:
"This is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (--a truth of the
reason, an Idea)--that in its own proper form it is _inconceivable_. For to
_conceive_, is a function of the understanding, which can he exercised only
on subjects subordinate thereto. And yet to the forms of the understanding
all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection,
and to be rendered _expressible_. And here we have a second test and sign
of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the
understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each
of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes
the representative or _expression_ (--the _exponent_) of a truth beyond
conception and inexpressible. Examples: _before_ Abraham WAS, I AM. God is
a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference no
where. The soul is all in every part. " Aids to Reflection, n. 224. n. See
also _Church and State_, p. 12. --ED. ]
* * * * *
My mind is in a state of philosophical doubt as to animal magnetism. Von
Spix, the eminent naturalist, makes no doubt of the matter, and talks
coolly of giving doses of it. The torpedo affects a third or external
object, by an exertion of its own will: such a power is not properly
electrical; for electricity acts invariably under the same circumstances. A
steady gaze will make many persons of fair complexions blush deeply.
Account for that. [1]
[Footnote 1:
I find the following remarkable passage in p. 301. vol. i. of the richly
annotated copy of Mr. Southey's Life of Wesley, which Mr. C. bequeathed as
his "darling book and the favourite of his library" to its great and
honoured author and donor:--
"The coincidence throughout of all these Methodist cases with those of the
Magnetists makes me wish for a solution that would apply to all. Now this
sense or appearance of a sense of the distant, both in time and space, is
common to almost all the _magnetic_ patients in Denmark, Germany, France,
and North Italy, to many of whom the same or a similar solution could not
apply. Likewise, many cases have been recorded at the same time, in
different countries, by men who had never heard of each other's names, and
where the simultaneity of publication proves the independence of the
testimony. And among the Magnetisers and Attesters are to be found names of
men, whose competence in respect of integrity and incapability of
intentional falsehood is fully equal to that of Wesley, and their
competence in respect of physio- and psychological insight and attainments
incomparably greater. Who would dream, indeed, of comparing Wesley with a
Cuvier, Hufeland, Blumenbach, Eschenmeyer, Reil, &c. ? Were I asked, what
_I_ think, my answer would be,--that the evidence enforces scepticism and a
_non liquet_;--too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be
satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of
imposture or casual coincidence;--too fugacious and unfixable to support
any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain
conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a
correspondent faculty in the human soul. And nothing less than such an
hypothesis would be adequate to the _satisfactory_ explanation of the
facts;--though that of a _metastasis_ of specific functions of the nervous
energy, taken in conjunction with extreme nervous excitement, _plus_ some
delusion, _plus_ some illusion, _plus_ some imposition, _plus_ some chance
and accidental coincidence, might determine the direction in which the
scepticism should vibrate. Nine years has the subject of Zoo-magnetism been
before me. I have traced it historically, collected a mass of documents in
French, German, Italian, and the Latinists of the sixteenth century, have
never neglected an opportunity of questioning eye-witnesses, _ex. gr. _
Tieck, Treviranus, De Prati, Meyer, and others of literary or medical
celebrity, and I remain where I was, and where the first perusal of Klug's
work had left me, without having moved an inch backward or forward. The
reply of Treviranus, the famous botanist, to me, when he was in London, is
worth recording:--'Ich habe gesehen was (ich weiss das) ich nicht wurde
geglaubt haben auf _ihren_ erzahlung,' &c. 'I have seen what I am certain I
would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I
can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on _mine_. '"--ED. ]
_May_ 1. 1830.
FALL OF MAN. --MADNESS. --BROWN AND DARWIN. --NITROUS OXIDE.
A Fall of some sort or other--the creation, as it were, of the non-
absolute--is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without
this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is
explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight.
* * * * *
Madness is not simply a bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit with
certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals. During
this sleep, or recession of the spirit, the lower or bestial states of life
rise up into action and prominence. It is an awful thing to be eternally
tempted by the perverted senses. The reason may resist--it does resist--for
a long time; but too often, at length, it yields for a moment, and the man
is mad for ever. An act of the will is, in many instances, precedent to
complete insanity. I think it was Bishop Butler who said, that he was "all
his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of his senses," which
would have maddened him, if he had relaxed the stern wakefulness of his
reason for a single moment.
* * * * *
Brown's and Darwin's theories are both ingenious; but the first will not
account for sleep, and the last will not account for death: considerable
defects, you must allow.
* * * * *
It is said that every excitation is followed by a commensurate exhaustion.
That is not so. The excitation caused by inhaling nitrous oxide is an
exception at least; it leaves no exhaustion on the bursting of the bubble.
The operation of this gas is to prevent the decarbonating of the blood;
and, consequently, if taken excessively, it would produce apoplexy. The
blood becomes black as ink. The voluptuous sensation attending the
inhalation is produced by the compression and resistance.
_May_ 2.
