en. in, broke upon me from the fountains of the great deep, and fell from the windows of heavThe fontal truths of natural religion and the books of revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat and rested."" About this time he fell in with the works of the German and other mystics - Tauler, Böhmen, George Fox, and William Law, and in them he found the same kind of help which Luther had found in Tauler : Kant's system is not to make the mind out of the senses, as Hume had done, but the senses out of the mind. As Locke and Hume had started from without, so he started from within, making the one fixed truth, the only ground of reality, to consist, not in that which the senses furnish, but in that which the understanding supplies to make sensible knowledge possible. His possible? And this possibility he found in prime question was, How is experience the a priori forms of the sensory time and "The writings of these mystics acted in no space, and in the a priori forms or categoslight degree to prevent my mind from being ries of the understanding, which by their imprisoned within the outline of any single activity bind together into one the multidogmatic system. They helped to keep alive farious and otherwise unintelligized intithe heart within the head; gave me an indis mations of sense. It is sense that supplies tinct yet stirring and working presentiment the understanding with the raw material; that all the products of the mere reflective this the understauding passes through its faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling machinery, and, by virtue of its inherent twigs and sprays in winter into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which concept-f rms, reduces it to order, makes it I had not as yet penetrated, if they were to conceivable and intelligible. But the unafford my soul food or shelter. If they were a derstanding is limited in its operation to moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet were phenomena of experience, and whenever it they a pillar of fire throughout the night, during steps beyond this and applies its categories my wanderings through the wilderness of to super-sensible things, it lands itself in doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without cross-contradictions. It cannot arrive at any ing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief." It was in the company of these men that he first got clear of the trammels of the mere understanding, and learned that there is higher truth than the faculty can compass and circumscribe. The learned seemed to him for several generations to have walked entirely by the light of this mere understanding, and to have confined their investigations strictly within certain conventional limits, beyond which lay all that is most interesting and vital to man. To enthusiasts, illiterate and simple men of heart, they left it to penetrate towards the inmost centre, "the indwelling and living ground of all things." And then he came to this conviction which he never afterwards abandoned, that if the intellect will not acknowledge a higher and deeper ground than it contains within itself, if, making itself the centre of its system, it seeks to square all things by its own laws, it must, if it follows out fearlessly its own reasoning, land in Pantheism or some form of blank unbelief. While his mind was seething with these thoughts it was that he first studied the works of Kant, and these, he says, took possession of him as with a giant's hand. Henceforth his metaphysical creed was moulded mainly by the Kantian principles. This is not the place to attempt to enter on the slightest exposition of these. But, to speak popularly, it may be said that the gist of other truth than that which is valid within man's experience. Ultimate truths, valid for all intelligents, if such there be, are beyond its reach. Had Kant's philosophy stopped here it would not have done much more for Coleridge than Locke's and Hartley's had done. It was because Kant asserted the existence in man of another faculty, distinct from and higher than understanding, namely, Reason, that Coleridge found him so helpful. The term Reason Kant employed in another than our ordinary sense, as the faculty of ultimate truths or necessary principles. He distinguished, however, between Reason in its speculative and in its practical use. Speculative Reason he held to be exclusively a regulative faculty, having only a formal and logical use. This use is to connect our judgments together into conclusions, according to the three forms of reasoning, the categorical, the hypothetical, and the disjunctive. These three methods are the ideas of Speculative Reason by which it strives to produce unity and perfectness among the judgments of the understanding. As long as the ideas of Speculative Reason are thus used to control and bring into unity the conceptions of the discursive understanding, they are used rightly, and within their own legitimate sphere. But whenever Speculative Reason tries to elevate these regulative ideas into objects of theoretical knowledge, whenever it ascribes objective truth to these ideas, it leads to contradiction and falsehood. In other words, Speculative Reason Kant held to be true in its formal or logical, but false in its material application. As the understand ing, with its categories, has for its object and only legitimate sphere the world of sense, so Speculative Reason, with its ideas, has for its exclusive sphere of operation the conceptions of the understanding, and beyond this these ideas have no truth nor validity. It was not, however, by these views, either of understanding or of Speculative Reason, that Kant came to the help of the highest interests of humanity, but by his assertion of the existence in man of the Practical Reason which is the inlet or source of our belief in moral and supersensuous truth. Some have maintained this to be an afterthought added to Kant's system. But, be this as it may, Kant held that the moral law revealed itself to man as a reality through his Practical reason-a law not to be gathered from experience, but to be received as the fundamental principle, of action for man, evidencing itself by its own light. This moral law requires for its action the truth of three ideas, that of the soul, of immortality, and of God. These ideas are the postulates of the practical reason, and are true and certain, because, if they are denied, morality and free-will, man's highest certainties, become impossible. They are, however, to man truths of moral certainty of practical faith though Kant did not use that word, rather than objects of theoretical contemplation. This distinction between the understanding and the Reason Coleridge adopted from Kant, and made the ground-work of all his teaching. But the distinction between Speculative and Practical Reason, which was with Kant radical, Coleridge did not dwell on, nor bring into prominence. He knew and so far recognized Kant's distinction, that he spoke of Speculative Reason as the faculty of concluding universal and necessary truths, from particular and contingent appearances, and of Practical Reason, as the power of proposing an ultimate end, that is, of determining the will by ideas. He does not, however, seem to have held by it firmly. Rather he threw himself on Kant's view of Practical Reason, and carried it out with a fulness which Kant probably would have disallowed. Kant's strong assertion that there was at least one region of his being in which man came into contact with super-sensible truth, with the reality of things, this, set forth not vaguely, but with the most solid reasoning, was that which so attracted Coleridge. But in the use which Coleridge made of this power, and the range he assigned it, he went much beyond his master. He speaks of Reason as an immediate beholding of super-sensible things, as the eye which sees truths transcending sense. He identifies Reason in the human mind, as Kant perhaps would have done, with Universal Reason; calls it impersonal; indeed, regards it as a ray of the Divinity in man. In one place he makes it one with the Light which lighteth every man, and in another he says that Reason is "the presence of the Holy Spirit to the finite understanding, at once the light and the inward eye.' "It cannot be rightly called a faculty," he says, "much less a personal property of any human mind." We cannot be said to possess Reason, but rather to partake of it; for there is but one Reason, which is sbared by all intelligent beings, and is in itself the Universal or Supreme Reason. "He in whom Reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air, or make an enclosure in the cope of heaven." Again, he says of Reason, that "it has been said to be more like to sense than to understanding; but in this it differs from sense: the bodily senses have objects differing from themselves; Reason, the organ of spiritual apprehension, has objects consubstantial with itself, being itself its own object, — that is, self-contemplative." And again, 66 Reason substantiated and vital, not only, yet manifold, overseeing all, and going through all understanding, without being either the sense, the understanding, or the imagination, contains all three within itself, even as the mind contains its own thoughts, and is present in and through them all; or as the expression pervades the different features of an intelligent countenance." In much of the above, Coleridge has not only gone beyond Kant's cautious handling of Practical Reason, but has given to the German's philosophical language a religious, and even a Biblical colouring of his own. Nay, in regarding Reason as the power of intuitive insight into moral and spiritual truths, he has approached nearer to some of the German philosophers who came after Kant. Though Coleridge made so much of this distinction between Reason and understanding, and of Reason as the organ of spiritual truth, and though throughout his later works he is continually and at length insisting on it, he cannot be said to have made it secure against all the technical objections. It would be impossible here to with man's deepest aspirations in all time. It was a thorough and profound protest against the philosophy judging according to sense, with which England, and, pace Reid be it said, Scotland too, had so long been deluged. It opened up once more a free passage for man's thoughts to that higher world of truth which philosophy had so long barred against them; opened up to the human spirit a path which it might travel, undisturbed by technical objections of the understanding, toward that spiritual region which is its natural home. Man's deepest heart, his inmost being, from depths beyond all conscious thought, cry out for such access. And it is the business of a true philosophy, not, as has been often done, to bar the way and to break down the bridges that span the gulfs, but cautiously, yet resolutely, to make ready a way by which the weary hearts of men may pass over in safety. Honour be to the spiritual engineers who have laboured to build up such a highway for humanity! follow him into all the ramifications of this abstruse subject, and to show minutely the relation in which he placed Reason to understanding. We may, however, notice one scoff against the whole system. It has been represented as a device to enable a man to believe that what is false to his understanding may be true to his Reason. This, though it may be a smart sneer, is nothing more. What Coleridge did maintain was that the material of moral and spiritual truth which comes to man through his Reason, must, before it can be reduced to definite conceptions and expressed in propositions, first pass through the forms of the understanding. In so passing, the truths of Reason and the moral will suffer some loss, because the conceptions of the understanding are not adequate to give full expression to them; so that it was to him no argument against a truth whose source lies in Reason, if, in passing through the understanding, or being reduced to logical language, it issued in propositions which seem illogical, or even contradictory. And what When Coleridge had made his own the more is this than to say that man's logical distinction between reason and understandunderstanding is not the measure of all ing, he found in it not only a key to many truth? a doctrine surely which did not of the moral and religious questions which had originate with Coleridge. But whatever perplexed himself, and were working confudifficulties there may be in this philosophy sion among his contemporaries, but he seemof the reason, it is an attempt to vindicate ed to find in it a truth, which, however and sanction those truths which lie deepest, unsystematically, had been held and built and are most vital to human nature. Ques- on by all the masters of ancient wisdom, tions are continually rising within us, whether born of our own thoughts or imported from intellectual systems, asking anxiously whether any thought of man can reach to spiritual realities. The mind is continually getting entangled in a self-woven mesh of sophistry. It is the highest end of all philosophy to clear away these difficulties which philosophy has itself engendered, and to let the mind look out on the truth as uncloudedly as it did before these sophistications to reconcile Plato's view of the Idea as arose; to give back to the race the simpli- lying at the ground of all investigation city of its childhood, with the wisdom of with Bacon's philosophy of induction, and its mature age. Of most metaphysicians, to prove that, though they worked from first and last, the main work has been to opposite ends of the problem, they are not build up between the spirit of man and the really opposed. In all inductive investigaFather of spirits solid walls and high, which tions, Coleridge contends, the mind must no human strength can pierce through, no contribute something, the mental initiative, eye can overlook. To break down and the prudens quæstio, the idea; and this, clear away these walls, which others with when tested or proved by rigorous scientific such pains had reared, this was the ultimate processes, is found to be a law of nature. aim and end towards which Coleridge What in the mind of the discoverer is a laboured. Herein lies the great service prophetic idea, is found in nature to be a which he did to his age and country. He law, and the one answers, and is akin to, was almost the first philosopher for a hun- the other. What Coleridge has there said dred and fifty years, who upheld a meta- of the mental initiative which lies at the physics which was in harmony at once with foundation of induction, Dr. Whewell has the best wisdom of the olden time, and taken up and argued out at length in his whether in philosophy or theology. Especially he seemed to see this truth pervading the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, of Leighton, and of all the best divines of the seventeenth century. A good example of the way in which Coleridge applied his metaphysical principles to philosophic questions will be found in the Essays on Method, in the third volume of The Friend. He there attempts works on Induction. Mr. Mill has as stout- substance of that essay. Hard words and ly redargued it from his own point of view, repulsive these may seem to some, who and their polemic still waits a solution. But we must pass from these pure metaphysical problems to notice some of the ways in which Coleridge applied his principles to moral and religious questions. feel it painful to analyze the faith they live by. And no doubt the simple, childlike apprehension of the things of faith is better and more blessed than all philosophizing about them. They who have good health and light breathing, whose system is so sound that they know not they have a system, have little turn for disquisitions on health and respiration. But, just as sickness and disease have compelled men to study the bodily framework, so doubt and mental entanglement have forced men to go into these abstruse questions, in order to meet the philosophy of denial with a counter philosophy of faith. The philosophy is not faith, but it may help to clear away sophistications that stand in the way of it. For entering into speculations of this kind Coleridge had been branded as a transcendentalist, a word with many of hideous import. But abstruse and wide of practice as these speculations may seem, it was for practical behoof mainly that Coleridge undertook them. "What are my metaphysies?" he exclaims; "merely the referring of the mind to its own consciousness for truths which are indispensable to its own happiness." Of this any one may be convinced who shall read with care his Friend or his Lay Sermons. One great source of the difficulty, or, as some might call it, the confusedness of these works, is the rush and throng of human interests with which they are filled. If he discusses the ideas of the Reason, or any other like abstract subject, it is because he feels its vital bearing on some truth of politics, morality, or religion, the clear understanding of which concerns the common weal. And here is one of his strongest mental peculiarities, which has made many censure him as unintelligible. His eye flashed with a lightning glance from the most abstract truth to the minutest In the Lierary Remains there is a remarkable essay on Faith, which contains a suggestive application of these principles. Faith he defines to be fealty or fidelity to that part of our being which cannot become an object of the senses; to that in us which is highest, and is alone unconditionally imperative. What is this? Every man is conscious of something within him which tells him he ought, which commands him, to do to others as he would they should do to him. Of this he is as assured as he is that he sees and hears; only with this difference, that the senses act independently of the will. The conscience is essentially connected with the will. We can, if we will, refuse to listen to it. The listening or the not listening to conscience is the first moral act by which a man takes upon him or refuses allegiance to a power higher than himself, yet speaking within himself. Now, what is this in each man, higher than himself, yet speaking within him? It is Reason, super-sensuous, impersonal, the representative in man of the will of God, and demanding the allegiance of the individual will. Faith, then, is feality to this rightful superior; "allegiance of the moral nature to Universal Reason, or will of God; in opposition to all usurpation of appetite, of sensible objects, of the finite understanding." of affection to others, or even the purest love of the creature. And conscience is the inward witness to the presence in us of the divine ray of reason, "the irradiative power, the representative of the Infinite." An approving conscience is the sense of harmony of the personal will of man with that impersonal light which is in him, representative of the will of God. A practical detail, and back again from this to condemning conscience is the sense of dis- the abstract principle. This makes that, cord or contrariety between these two. when once his mental powers begin to Faith, then, consists in the union and in- work, their movements are on a vastness of terpenetration of the Reason and the indi-scale, and with a many-sidedness of view, vidual will. Since our will and moral nature enter into it, faith must be a continuous and total energy of the whole man. Since reason enters into it, faith must be a light seeing, a beholding of truth. Hence faith is a spiritual act of the whole being; it is "the source and germ of the fidelity of man to God, by the entire subjugation of the human will to Reason, as the representative in him of the divine will." Such is a condensation, nearly in Coleridge's own words, of the which, if they render him hard to follow, make him also stimulative and suggestive of thought beyond all other modern writers. a When Coleridge first began to speculate, the sovereignty of Locke and his followers in English Metaphysics was not more supreme than that of Paley in Moral Philosophy. Both were Englishmen of the round, robust English stamp, haters of subtilties, abhorrent of idealism, resolute to warn off any ghost of scholasticism from the domain of common-sense philosophy. | founds morality, which looks to the inward And yet both had to lay down degmatic motive, with law, which regards only the decisions on subjects into which, despite the outward act. Indeed, the need of a judg burliest common sense, things infinite and spiritual will intrude. How resolute was Coleridge's polemic against Locke and all his school we have seen. Not less vigorous was his protest against Paley as a moralist, and that at a time when few voices were raised against the common-sense Dean. 66 ment of actions according to the inward motive, forms one of the strongest arguments for a future state. For in this world our outward actions, apart from their motives, must needs determine our temporal welfare. But the moral nature longs for, and Scripture reveals, a more perfect judgFor completely rounded moral systems ment to come, wherein not the outward act Coleridge indeed professed little respect, but the inward principle, the thoughts and ranking them for utility with systems of intents of the heart, shall be made the casuistry or auricular confession. But of ground of judgment. Again, this criterion vital principles of morality, penetrating to is illusory, because evil actions are often the quick, few men's writings are more turned to good by that Providence which fruitful. A standing butt for Coleridge's brings good out of evil. If, ten, conseshafts was Paley's well-known definition of quences were the sole or chief criterion, virtue as "the doing of good to mankind, then these evil actions ought to be, because in obedience to the will of God, and for the of their results, reckoned good. Nero persake of everlasting happiness." Or, as secuted the Christians and so spread ChrisPaley has elsewhere more broadly laid tianity: is he to be credited with this good down the same principle, we are obliged result? Again, to form a notion of the to do nothing, but what we ourselves are to nature of an action multiplied indefinitely gain or lose something by, for nothing else into the future, we must first know the can be a violent motive." Against this nature of the original action itself. And if substitution, as he called it, of a scheme of we already know this, what need of testing selfish prudence for moral virtue, Coleridge it by its remote consequences? If against was never weary of raising his voice. Mo- these arguments it were urged that general rality, as he contended, arises out of the consequences are the criterion, not of the Reason and conscience of man; prudence agent but of the action, Coleridge would out of the understanding, and the natural reply, that all actions have their whole wants and desires of the individual; and worth and main value from the moral printhough prudence is the worthy servant of ciple which actuates the agent. So that, if morality, the master and the servant can- it could be shown that two men, one acting not rightly be confounded. The chapter from enlightened self-love, the other from in The Friend, in which he argues against pure Christian principle, would observe the Utilitarian system of ethics, and proves towards all their neighbours throughout life that general consequences cannot be the exactly the same course of cutward concriterion of the right and wrong of particu- duct, yet these two, weighed in a true moral lar actions, is one of the best-reasoned and balance, would be wide as the poles asunder. most valuable which that work contains. By these and suchlike arguments Coleridge The following are some of the arguments opposes the Paleyan and every other form with which he contends against "the inade- of Utilitarian ethics. Instead of confoundquacy of the principle of general conse- ing morality with prudence, he everywhere quences as a criterion of right and wrong, bases morality on religion. "The widest and its utter uselessness as a moral guide." maxims of prudence," he asserts," are arms Such a criterion is vague and illusory, for without hearts, when disjoined from those it depends on each man's notion of happi- feelings which have their fountain in a ness, and no two men have exactly the living principle." That principle lies in same notion. And even if men were agreed the common ground where morality and as to what constitutes the end, namely, religion meet, and from which neither happiness, the power of calculating conse- can be sundered without destruction to quences, and the foresight needed to secure the means to the end, are just that in which men most differ. But morality ought to be grounded on that part of their nature, namely, their moral convictions, in which men are most alike, not on the calculating understanding, in which they stand most widely apart. Again, such a criterion con both. The moral law, every man feels, has a universality and an imperativeness far transcending the widest maxims of experience; and this because it has its origin in Reason, as described above, in that in each man which is representative of the Divine Will, and connects him there with. Out of Reason, not from experience, all pure prin |
