little fruit at the time, are yet worthy of note; for they show how early the habit was formed in him of applying philosophical principles to his criticism of poetry and art. Especially interesting is it to observe, in view of the later distinction between the fancy and the imagination, that he at this time busied himself with investigations of 'the faculty or source from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived', as a criterion of the merits of the poem in question.1 In the years following his matriculation at Cambridge, Coleridge's interests were too many and too diverse to allow of remarkable achievement in any particular direc tion. Poetry, politics, theology, science, and metaphysics all engaged him in their turn. His predominant interest, especially after the meeting with Southey and the maturing of the scheme of Pantisocracy, lay no doubt in political and social reform-a discouraging atmosphere, as Goethe says, for the poet, and equally so for the philo. sopher. Yet his unbounded mental activity could embrace all these pursuits. At Cambridge he joined a literary society, wrote essays (unfortunately lost) to vindicate Shakespeare's art, and projected works of literary criticism. Meantime his speculations maintained their twofold character. It is probably in these years that to the study of Plato and the Neo-platonists was added that of Jacob Boehme and other of the Christian mystics: while on Voltaire, in rapid succession, followed Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley. Of these philosophers the last appears to have influenced him most: and for some years he was an avowed Hartleian, claiming to go even farther than Hartley himself as a necessitarian, inasmuch as he believed the corporeality of thought, namely, that it is motion'. To this effect he wrote to Southey in 1794: and 2 Ib. i. 93. 1 Biog. Lit. i. 14. 3 Letters, i. 113. 3 two years later he named his eldest child after this same 'great master of Christian Philosophy'. The power which Hartley's theories thus undoubtedly exercised over him must no doubt, as in the case of Voltaire, be ascribed to Coleridge's inability at this time to test the validity of the premises which they involved, and to the convincing power which (the premises once granted) would lie in the logical coherence of the arguments and the consistency with which the same principle is applied throughout the system. A further attraction lay in the fact that Hartley, with all his materialism, was a profound believer, and that Coleridge at this time was unable to divine the contradiction involved in such a state of mind, which was indeed his own. For never for one moment, when once his early access of infidelity had passed away, did Coleridge waver in his religious faith. 'The arguments (of Dr. Darwin) against the existence of a God and the evidences of revealed religion, he writes in 1796, 'were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty':1 and his correspondence with the atheist John Thelwall, before and during the Stowey period, is animated by a deep religious fervour. The claims of his heart and intellect thus became diametrically opposed; but it was impossible that Cole ridge should continue to offer an equal allegiance to both. Nor could it be long doubtful on which side the victory would lie. To minds such as his, the vividness of any conscious experience is the measure of its truth: and as the conclusions of his intellect, while they remained intellectually irrefutable, failed to satisfy his spiritual needs, Coleridge was driven to question the trustworthiness of the intellect as a universal guide. This attitude of distrust was fostered by the writings of the Mystics, who gave him 1 Letters, i. 162. Yet it was many years before Coleridge embraced any definite form of doctrine. See Biog. Lit. i. 136, 1. 30 and note. 'an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that ,the products of the more reflective faculty partook of death', and so enabled him 'to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of unbelief'. Hence it is that when, during the years of his retirement at Stowey (the Pantisocratic enthusiasm now dead), he devoted his thoughts to 'the foundations of religion and morals', the doubts which assailed him were directed against the human intellect as an organ of final truths, not against those truths themselves. 'I became convinced,' he writes, 'that the evidence of the doctrines of religion could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will.' 'If the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration that no legitimate argument could be drawn from the intellect against its truth." It is significant to note that in thus turning the intellect against itself, and causing it to assign bounds to the sphere of its own validity, Coleridge, still a stranger to Kant, is adopting the critical attitude. For Kant he is further preparing himself by his recognition of the importance of the Will, of self-activity, in the attainment of truth-the conviction that a moral act is indispensable to bring us into contact with reality. This conviction, if he owed it partly to his training in idealism, was also forced upon him by experiences whose very strength was the testimony of their truth-the experiences of his religious, his moral, and also of his imaginative self, in all of which he was conscious that his will was not merely active, but in a sense even originative. 3 To the record of his mental state during this period contained in the Biographia Literaria may be added the 1 Biog. Lit. i. 98. 2 Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey on Dec. 30, 1796. 3 evidence of the poems which belong to it. These of themselves are sufficient to show us that his professed adherence to the necessitarian doctrines of his day was by no means the genuine conviction of his whole being. The Religious Musings, completed before his retirement to Stowey, breathe (in spite of their rhetoric and tentative metaphysics) a spirit of more settled faith than he was to know again for many a year. Not by any process of reasoning, but by a direct intuitional act, the poet feels himself brought into communion with a reality itself emotional, the 'one omnipresent mind' whose 'most holy name is Love'. To this Love the soul must be 'attracted and absorbed '. Till by exclusive consciousness of God All self-annihilated, it shall make God its identity! God all in all! In later years Coleridge was to assign to this 'exclusive consciousness' a distinct faculty of the soul: what concerns us here is that he regards the attainment of this highest consciousness as consequent upon an act, a volitional effort, in which the finite mind is brought into direct contact with an infinite whose essence, as Love, is itself activity. It is in this faith that he denounces the futile endeavours and the inevitable tendencies of a philosophy which seeks in physical manifestations a complete solution of the questionings of the soul-the attempts of those who (as he wrote in another poem of this period)" 1 1 Religious Musings, 11. 42-4. The Destiny of Nations, pub. 1797, 11. 27 ff. It seems not improbable that Coleridge, both in this poem and in the Religious Musings, has in mind (among a mixture of theories) the central notion of Boehme's philosophy, in which he anticipates Schelling that of self-distinction as the essence of spiritual life. Cp. letter to Thelwall, Dec. 1796, 'I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere apparition, a naked spirit, and that life is, I myself I' (Letters, i. 211). No doubt he was also influenced by the Hebrew conception of Deity. Within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thoughts, scoffing ascent, Untenanting creation of its God; and his sense of the inadequacy, if not impiety, of all speculations of the intellect, the 'shapings of the unregenerate mind', is expressed in a letter written at the end of 1796 to Benjamin Flower, 'I found no comfort till it pleased the unimaginable high and lofty one to make my heart more tender in regard of religious feelings. My metaphysical theories lay before me in the hour of anguish as toys by the bedside of a child deadly sick.'1 But it was not through his religious, nor his moral feelings alone, that Coleridge received assurance of a reality transcending that of the senses. This sensible world itself, impenetrable as its meaning remained to the mere 'sciential reason', might yet, if viewed under another aspect and by another faculty, confirm the witness of morality and religion. It is of this faculty that Coleridge is thinking when, in the letter to Poole above quoted, he remarks that those educated through the senses 'seem to want a sense which I possess. The universe to them is but a mass of little things'. And with the same thought he writes to Thelwall in the autumn of 1797, 'The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?... My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of that, that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sub ... 1 The same expression occurs in one of the manuscript notebooks of this period. |