But, in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it.

Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be copresent with all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word being that which had co-existed with the image of the bird so called, I may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect; so too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B. on the mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. I mean time per se, as contradistinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same

8

Senses, and may be called the Imagination in the widest sense.' Transl. S. C.]

8 [Schelling teaches that the most original measure of Time is Space; of Space, Time; and that both are opposed to each other for this reason that they mutually limit one another. Transsc. Id. Tübingen, 1800, pp. 216-17. See also Idem, 325-6. S. C.]

place are two distinct or distinguishable causes; and the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself, by confining and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these are the only Arts of Memory.

9 I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without ambiguity; while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word, intensify; though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.

CHAPTER VIII.

The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes-Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia præstabilita— Hylozoism-Materialism-None of these systems, or any possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable.

To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher, who introduced the absolute and essential heterogeneity of the soul as intelligence, and the body as matter.' The assumption, and the form of speaking, have remained, though the denial of all other properties to matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of Dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability is intelligible only as a mode of resistance, its admission places the essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit ; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To this possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other hand

1 [Principia Philosophiæ, P. I., §§ 52-3, 63-4. S. C.]

2 [Compare with Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre—Philosophische Schriften. Landshut, 1809. (See note infra.) Compare also with what Leibnitz lays down on this point in the last paragraph of his paper De Primæ Philosophiæ Emendatione-which forms Art. xxxiv. of Erdmann's edition of his works, Berol. 1840, and with the Nouveaux Essais (Liv. II., c. xxi., § 2. Erdmann, p. 250), where he says that matter has not only mobility, which is the receptivity or capacity of movement, but also resistance, which comprehends impenetrability and inertia. S. C.]

3

pressed the evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, that is, things having some common property; and cannot extend from one world into another, its contrary. A close analysis evinced it to be no less absurd than the question whether a man's affection for his wife lay Northeast or South-west of the love he bore towards his child. Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony, which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines,' was in its common interpretation too

3 [System des transscendentalen Idealismus, pp. 112–113. See the next note but two. S. C.]

4 [This theory Leibnitz unfolds in his Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances, 1695. Opp. ed. Erdmann, p. 124, in his Eclaircissemens du nouveau système. I. II. and III. Ibid., pp. 131-3, 4. Réplique aux Réflexions de Bayle, &c., 1702. Ibid., 183. He speaks of it also in his Monadologie, 1714, Ibid., 702, and many of his other writings. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was born at Leipzig, June 21, 1646, died Nov. 14, 1716. This great man, whose intellectual powers and attainments were so various and considerable that he has been ranked among the universal geniuses of the world, appears to have been the principal founder of that modern school of philosophy which succeeded to the scholastic. He seems to have united the profundity of a German in the matter of his dis quisitions, with something of the Frenchman's polish and lightness of touch in the manner of them; which may be accounted for, in some measure, by his Teutonic birth on the one hand, and his use of the French language on the other. S. C.]

5[ Specimina Philosophia-Diss. de Meth., § v., pp. 30-3, edit. 1664. Des Cartes thought it a pious opinion to hold that brute creatures are mere automata, set in motion by animal spirits acting on the nerves and muscles-because such a view widens the interval betwixt man and the beasts that perish. Wesley thought it a pious opinion to suppose that they have souls capable of salvation. Leibnitz comments upon the Cartesian notion of this subject, in his essay De Anima Brutorum, wherein he distinguishes admirably between the intelligence of brutes and the reasonable souls of men. (§ 14. Opp. ed Erdman, pp. 464-5.) Mr. Coleridge remarks upon Wesley's opinion in a note printed in the new edition of Southey's Life of Wesley, chap. xx. Des Cartes compares the souls or quasisouls of brutes to a well made watch, arguing from the uniformity, certainty, and limitedness of their actions, that nature acts in them according to the disposition of their organs. Leibnitz―(in his Troisième Eclaircissement, and elsewhere)-compares the body and soul of man to two well made watches, which perfectly agree with one another. It is easy to see how the latter, while he was refuting his predecessor's opinion as a whole, may have

strange to survive the inventor-too repugnant to our common sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence. Even Wolf, the admirer and illustrious systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part of the edifice.

The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that requires a limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplying it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by being told that we have a million of souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher, to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. How the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite itself with it; how being can transform

borrowed something from it. The likeness to Spinoza's doctrine is more recondite, but may be traced in Part II. of the Ethics, on the nature and origin of the mind. S. C.]

[A passage in the Transsc. Id., pp. 112-13-14, contains many thoughts brought forward by Mr. Coleridge in this and the three following pages. A translation of it is subjoined, with the borrowed passages marked in italics. The last sentence is borrowed in chapter ix. of B. L.

"The act, through which the I limits itself, is no other than that of the self-consciousness, at which, as the explanation-ground of all Limitedness (Begräntztseyns) we come to a stand, and for this reason, that how any affection from without can transform itself into a representing or knowing is absolutely inconceivable. Supposing even that an object could work upon the I, as on an object, still such an affection could only bring forth something homogeneous, that is, only an objective determinateness (Bestimmtseyn) over again. Thus how an original Being can convert itself into a Knowing would only be conceivable in case it could be shown that