the moral and political necessity of limiting the equal division of inheritance beneath, as of restoring the law of primogeniture. Equally false is his prognostic with regard to gold, which Coleridge pronounces

a mere temporary and conditional necessary that in England has already been proved to be dispensable, but, in the progression of the commercial system, will fall into the class of luxuries.

The word schein, as used by the Schelling school, especially annoys Coleridge. He confesses that he cannot understand it :

colic?

Is this that Steffens? or der heilige Stephanus? not stoned, but boned to death. Mea sidera! But the resurrection is past with H. St., and I have got a crick in the neck with gazing at his ascension. Where can the meaning be gone to? A cloud, a black crow in a schoolboy There seems to me a confusion of schein drawing X a speck-'tis gone! and naught with præterience or impermanence. How can remains but my eye and the Dutchman's blue a man seem to himself to have a fit of the breeches !! It is a doleful consideration, which Steffens seems to have overlooked, that in consequence of the excess of phosphate of lime, the human bones have the worst chance of all bones of remaining for the Resurrection Trumpet! But in serious earnest, my dear G., is it not melancholy to hear a man like Steffens somniloquize in such a mystifying cant of Hylozoism, of Pickism, a hodge-podge of the grossest materialism, and the most fantastic yet maudlin moonery?

Neither does Coleridge like Steffens's remarks, written in the servile spirit that strove to curry favor with the German courts, also current in his day.

To hear Steffens talk, one would imagine that by some pre-established harmony, some new refinement of predestination, a boorly soul was born a boor, and that all calm and lofty souls entered with the features of future Serene Highnesses. Oh fie! fie! What other equality but that which Steffens himself demands do the German patriots themselves require? the equality of power to develop powers subject to no other checks than the necessity of unequal possessions brings with it. These, God knows! are numerous enough, without any wanton additions on the part of the laws and Government. In short, I do not know what or whom Steffens is combating. A peasant does not wish to be a lord-no, nor perhaps does he wish to be a parson or a doctor; but he would have the soul of a slave if he did not desire that there should be a possibility of his children or grandchildren becoming such.

An incidental remark on the laws of property has been mutilated by the binder. So far as it is legible, it is interesting as showing that Coleridge's prophecy on this subject with regard to France has been falsified:

With exception of a few fanatics, who has ever doubted the expediency and even necessity of hereditary property in a civilized country? And the French nation will soon see

It would have been supposed prima facie that Coleridge would be in mental harmony with Herder, whose eclectic sympathies, conflicting elements of nature, restless tendencies towards the new doctrines and strong clingings to the old, had so much in common with Coleridge's own. To judge from the notes before us, this was, however, far from being the case. Unhappily Coleridge's notes to Herder's "Kalligone," which would appear to have been most entertaining, have had their life-thread cut short by the shears of Atropos the bookbinder. What would one not give to have the end of one where he speaks of Herder protruding his glossy-green-and-gold-flesh-fly sting against the cuticle of the Königsberg sage? Some amusing words of Kant's, supposed to be thus stung, seem to follow, but they are too mutilated to be made out. A note, written on a sheet of notepaper, and bound into the volume, has happily escaped the Vandal bibliopegist. It is one of the few notes that are dated, and treats of Herder's unfortunate and illconsidered attack upon Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason:"

MALTA, Dec. 19, 1804.

And thus the book impressed me, to wit, as being rank abuse, drunken self-conceit, that, kicking aud sprawling in the six-inch deep gutter of muddy philosophisms from the drainings of a hundred sculleries, he dreams that he is swimming in the translucent and the profound. I never read a more disgusting work, scarcely so disgusting a one, except the "Metacritik" of the same author. I always, even in the perusal of his better works, "Verm. Blätter," the "Briefe des Stud. Theol.," and the "Ideen zur Gesch. der Mensch.,"

- the

thought him a painted mist, with no sharp outline; but this is mere steam from a heap of man's dung.

That Fichte's manner of thinking annoyed Coleridge is less astonishing Readers of Heine will remember how inimitably that writer ridicules the thinker who demanded that thought was to play the spy on itself while thinking. "This Fichte's" Versuch einer Kritik aller operation," says Heine, "reminds us of Offenbarung" was clearly read more than once. To Fichte's remark that all foundthe monkey seated on the hearth before a copper kettle cooking its own tail, for (iters of religion did not refer to reason, but urged) the true art of cooking consists to supernatural authorities to support not in the mere objective act of cooking, their views, Coleridge writes: but in the subjective consciousness of the

But it is rarely he is thus in accord with
Fichte, who is constantly rousing his
combative spirit. Thus, for example,
Fichte's two favorite expressions, "Der
Trieb" and "Die Empfindung:"-

=

is incredible. He must have understood that

Vernunft as the highest evidence. "Do the | fitness for certain more spiritual parts of his will of my Father, and ye shall know whether system, and therefore, in consistence with his I am of God." To this note I add, ten years principles, withheld them. We must not supafter the above was written, "Nay, Fichte is pose that he made two sweeping divisions of in the right, for Christians appeal even to the his hearers, public and private, so that all were practical reason on the authority and by the included in the second as one class who were command of Christ." not excluded as belonging to the first. I doubt while the oraTov was perhaps intrusted to not there were beside the esoteric οἱ ἐτιεσώτεροι, Speusippus alone. Tennemann was in the same grade as Aristotle; but from a reverence for Plato, which does honor to his moral sense, he unjustly charges the Stagyrite with misI hold in much suspicion, I own, this hy-tion of Plato's doctrine in the very onset, which representation, or rather with a direct falsificapostasis or quasi person yclept Der Trieb Impulse, etc., and still greater this one, every Plato had meant something higher and other where the same thing, called Die Empfindung, than regulative. Of this something he could and these my doubts are highly strength- make nothing out of his own mind but a sort ened by the consequences here declaredof gods and goddesses. This he naturally renamely, that "the activity of the understand-jected as mere fancy-work, so substitutes the ing in thinking, the high views and prospects regulative. How else could his system have which the reason opens out to us," occasion been received as a diverse system in his own the same kind of gratification as apple-pie and times, and controverted as such by the immecustard! I say, I hold the whole tribe of diate successors of Plato? The poor trick Vermögens, graviter suspectum. attributed to Aristotle (that of stealing his be his master's horse because that was piebald) "master's horse, and then swearing it could not succeeded, I own, in the instance of Locke versus Aristotle, and Descartes, and of Horne Tooke versus the Dutch etymologists; and factions in Church and State, and from a genunder a conflux of accidental aidances, from eral aversion to speculative philosophy, which cannot be supposed in Atticus at the period at which the Peripatetic school was founded.

Fichte's "Lectures on Eternal Life," delivered in Berlin in 1806, Coleridge considers a distinct falling off from his best manner :

Oh woful love whose first act and offspring, is self! "I," and this not a present "I am,' but a poor reflection thereof. In his better days, I taught a nobler dogma-viz., the eralization of the I from the thou in all finite minds.

gen

To this volume Fichte appended a petulant chapter, in which he quoted from reviews of his works, and said that he held that such remarks relieved him from the necessity of writing any more.

How girlish! and because a reviewer or two attacked his weakness, therefore he must believe that the reading public have released him from the task and trouble of writing for them. Besides, Fichte's vaunt is downright outrageous. I, at least, should have considered such a review of a work of mine complimentary, however much I might regret that the reviewer had misconceived its scheme, and misrepresented my meaning in certain passages.

Tennemann's voluminous "History of Philosophy" was conscientiously plodded through by Coleridge, who evinces a huge capacity for reading and assimilating all manner of mental food. We have selected a few of his most interesting notes for quotation. In the first, Schlegel's influence is visible, for he it was who divided the world into Platonists and Aristo

It half provokes one to see the sang-froid Tennemann first makes out his own "original and cucumber self-complacency with which religion of Jesus," and the "all that Jesus taught or meant" (poor man, he little thought that a few striking cures in the course of his medical practice would be exaggerated into miracles, or a few unguarded metaphors be condensed into mysteries); secondly, having thus stripped Christianity of all its constituent and peculiar facts and doctrines, as coolly, and with the same mousing gravity, informs us, that "das Christenthum als Göttliche lehre war zu beschränkt als das es den menschlichen

Geist gehörig ausfüllen und beschäftigen konnte !"

etc.

Oh this quiet, prosy way of humming a man out of his religion, by bringing out the most arbitrary and paradoxical assertions as matters too plain and too long settled among stated, and with the air and tone of one into men of sense to need more than to be merely whose brain the very thought, that any one should think of denying or questioning his positions, had never once entered, — verily it is exquisite !

Divide mankind into two very disproportionate parts, the few who have, and who have cultivated, the faculty of thinking speculatively-i.e., by reduction to principles and I have at times almost ventured to suspect the many who, either from original defect or that Plato saw early in Aristotle's mind an un- | deficiencies, or from want of cultivation, do

telians.

not in this sense think at all; and you may same remark applies in a less degree, but yet then, according to my belief, subdivide the very strikingly to medicine; and yet from former class, the illustrious minority, into two Sextus's experience to Hume, these are men species, scarcely less disproportionate in the who find especial favor, excite most interest, comparative number of individuals contained with Tennemann, who seems never to have in each viz., the born conceptionists, the enough of them, and respects the same trashy spiritual children of Aristotle, and the born generalities and vacuities with the sober gout idealists or Ideatæ, the spiritual children of of a lewd Quaker, or Jenny ass. O Kant! Plato. The former system is comprehended Kant! thou hast much to answer for. in the latter, and therefore of admitted truth The imaginative power a multiform power in all it affirms, and false, if false by denial only, of the distinctive tenets of the latter. which, acting with its permeative, modifying, The Aristotelian, therefore, is completely in-unifying might on the thoughts, images, spe telligible to the Platonist, while the Platonist cificates of the poet; the swimming crimson is mere sound· of eve on mountain, lake, river, vale, village, -vox et præterea nihil· to the and village church, the flashing or sleeping Aristotelian. The Ideatæ are but somnilomoonshine in nature's poesy, and which, exerquent Ideotæ. The difference being innate, all controversy is hopeless; and could it be cising the same power, in moral intuitions and ascertained in any particular instance, useless. the representations of work or baseness in Supposing, however, that the Platonist is in action as the essential constituent of what is the right, he alone is the philosopher, and the called a good heart-this power cannot be men of thought might be divided into philos- given or taught. It is always an indigena of the soil. Therefore I ought not to wonder ophers and philologists. and yet, from the sincere respect and good lik ing I bear to Tennemann I cannot help wondering that he could give even the meagre and gritty account that he has given of poor Böhmen, without some sympathy with the strivings and ferment of a genius so compressed and distorted by strait circumstances and the want of all the aids and organs of speculative thought, as that of the visionary, or some admiration of the occasional auroras and streaming lights in his dark heaven. But no! I used the metaphor of a ferment-and truly Tennemann, without looking deep enough to ascertain of what liquor, noticed only the scum, the yeasty froth, and tossing on the surface. The single conception of the sameness of the strangling anguish or bitter source in the dark ground of nature, with the triumph and stringency of the joy in the light and its self-retracings as the condition of consciousness, after its out-sallyings, is physiologically worth a cart-load of Tennemann's favorites the Pyrrhonists and Sceptics. As to Böhmen's ideas of the horology or innate time in all creatures, or the continued existing operation of a miracle by the word in counteracting the influence of the longitude and latitude on human language, which would otherwise be a foreign tongue every half-degree N. or S., these were out of sight and hearing for our critic. But I can forgive all-only not the "verstellte Demuth;" this is the bitterness of a proud priest sneering at the virtues of a sufferer for conscience' sake-this was unworthy of you, friend Tennemann!

Montaigne's Essays are made delightful by their frank, autobiographical vein, by his amiable whimsies, his love and admiration of Plutarch, and by a hundred finenesses that quiver one, and a hundred genialities that make one warm and comfortable. But of Charron, and half-a-score other books of the same sort, from H. C. Agrippa's "De Vanitate" to the last Methodist or monkish sermon, vanity of vanities, I must declare that they are to me almost as dull as obscenity. I have not words to express the chopped straw, lack-spittle, dry, chewing feel I experience in reading them. At one moment I feel a wish to kick the author for lying, and lying stupidly; at another a painful sense of the excessive and yet self-conceitful imbecility displayed in them, as if the absurdity of supposing little lions and young rhinoceroses being born out of warm mud at the same moment that the same spot of earth swelled up into mud-breasts, with warm lion or rhinoceros milk oozing or spurting from the tops, were less an absurdity because Epicurus said so, or threw any doubt it would not otherwise have had on Plato's and Harvey's "Omnia ex ovo;" or as if the elements of geometry were less certain to any one who had demonstrated the propositions, because Hobbes, in his utter ignorance of mathemat ics, was coxcomb enough to attack them. Add, too, the shallow sophistry of hauling together in one drag-net authors of all ages, those who wrote in the infancy of a science with those who flourished in its full manhood, those who wrote in barbarous ages, and before the main discoveries had been made, etc.; and lastly, their wilful blindness to the fact that the dissenting opinions become fewer and of less importance as the science, whatever it be, is more cultivated. Ex gr., the chemical workers in the time of Boerhaave and Stahl, compared with the London, Edinburgh, Parisian, German, Swedish, and Italian chemists under the Davy and Wollaston epoch; the

man philosophers, who are sinking back rapidly into miscellany, and superfluent, and arbitrary-in short, into the style of oratorical lectures to ladies and grown-up gentlemen who have not time for reading.

This degeneracy is, I grieve to say, too ap; parent in this work on anthropology, and which might more fitly have been entitled sketches of all manner of things about men, women, and children, Greeks and Romans,

and Dr. Gall of the New Testament.

Self-conceit that christens itself Selbständigkeit and vanity-that will be an original thinker and head-master, and tries to establish its claim by criticism-i.e., picking holes in the coat of the philosopher last in fashion, and, lastly, the professional Auditoren-suchtthese are the factors to which the exhausted, effort-shunning, yet excitement-craving state of men's minds the vast increase in the number of dressed people from shop, factory, and country house, who must know something about everything and the multisciolus reviewing spirit of literature generally, are the co-efficients. The effects detraction mixtymaxty, stale and cold meat on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, warmed up in the Saturday squab pie. New terms and new schemations. Add the pietistic cant of the Schleiermacher school, and you have the present state of philosophic thought of the Germans.

But I feel convinced [Coleridge says at last] that I misconceive Steffens and Co.; and therefore, according to my own golden rule, not understanding their ignorance, I conclude myself ignorant of their understanding.

Finally, Hegel's "Logic" evokes from him the following cry:

The two lovers hung over each other as fearfully, as lovingly, as the half-opened yet opening leaves of the moss-rose.

Intensity and extensity combinable only by their fresh state, incapable of fathoming the blessed spirits. Hence it is that lovers in intensity of their feelings, help the thoughts thus think the passion as wide in time as it is out by extension-commute, as it were- - and deep in essence - hence, Auf ewig dein!

With the latter exquisite and penetrating remark we take our leave of Coleridge, wishing that all who deface their books may deface them to such good purpose as he.

From Golden Hours.

A PRISONER'S NOTE-BOOK.

"I HAVE wished to aid in sustaining the courage of persons subjected to misfortune by the recital of the evils I have suffered, and of the consolations which I found might be derived in the greatest afflictions; to bear my testimony that in the midst of prolonged torments I have never found mankind so unjust, so little worthy of esteem, so meagre in excellence as it is usually portrayed; to lead noble minds to love our fellow-mortals, and to hate no one; reserving an inextinguishable detestation only for base deceit, pusillanimity, treachery, and all moral degradation.' So runs the preface to a narrative of ten years' cruel and continuous imprisonment, endured by a man whose only crime was that he loved his country; a man who had neither the inclination nor the energy to become an active conspirator, but whose aspirations for freedom, the marks of a cultivated and poetic intellect, brought upon him, first, the suspicions, and afterwards the dislike, of the despotic government then ruling Lombardy and We have omitted, as not suited to these Venice. For he had done worse than pages, a large number of theological commit theft, or burglary, or murder; he notes, that very specially illustrate the in- had been the projector and promoter of a stability of opinion in Coleridge, to which periodical advocating liberal principles we referred in the commencement. In-Il Conciliatore. True, that politics had deed we have had to omit much more that been excluded from its pages which we should greatly have liked to quote, but dealt only with literary and scientific matwhich the demands of space inexorably ters but the tendency was to a free exexclude. We have culled almost at ran- pression of thought. True, that some of dom a few grains of gold from the treas- the first men of the day were upon its ure-heap. Two" fancyettes," as Cole- staff - Gioja, the political economist; ridge names them, written at the end of a Manzoni, the poet; Romagnosi, the jurisvolume of Fichte, but having no connec- consult; Brechet, Grossi, and Maroncelli. tion with its text, we must, however, still But the higher the ability displayed, the quote. The one was very probably the greater the offence given; and the Ausrough sketch for a poem : trian eagle in the shape of a literary

A treatise concerning synonyms, etc., in any language, if accurate, is highly valuable to those who speak that language. But philosophy ought to be translatable into all languages. But here the definitions are not accurate, even as German! and yet, as German idioms they are plausible to Germans only.

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XXXVII. 1896