TABLE TALK.

September 12. 1831.

MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM OF PHILO

SOPHY.

My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt I know, ever made, to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, because it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was,

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indeed, but under another light and with different relations;-so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never could, discover the truth that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish in short to connect by a moral copula natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism.

I never from a boy could under any circumstances feel the slightest dread of death as such. In all my illnesses I have ever had the most intense desire to be

released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish, namely, to be able to finish my work on Philosophy. Not that I have any author's vanity on the subject: God knows that I should be absolutely glad, if I could hear that the thing had already been done before me.

Illness never in the smallest degree affects my intellectual powers. I can think with all my ordinary vigour in the midst of pain; but I am beset with the most wretched and un. manning reluctance and shrinking from action. I could not upon such occasions take the pen in hand to write down my thoughts for all the wide world.

October 26. 1831.

KEENNESS AND SUBTLETY.

FEW men of genius are keen; but almost every man of genius is subtle. If you ask me the difference between keenness and

subtlety, I answer that it is the difference between a point and an edge. To split a hair is no proof of subtlety; for subtlety acts in distinguishing differences-in showing that two things apparently one are in fact two; whereas, to split a hair is to cause division, and not to ascertain difference.

October 27. 1831.

DUTIES AND NEEDS OF AN ADVOCATE.

THERE is undoubtedly a limit to the exertions of an advocate for his client. He has a right, it is his bounden duty, to do every thing which his client might honestly do, and to do it with all the effect which any exercise of skill, talent, or knowledge of his own may be able to produce. But the advocate has no right, nor is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client in foro conscientiæ has no right to do for him