point where Schelling appears to be, and where, with modifications, he, Coleridge, has remained.'

Gemistius Pletho. More properly Gemistus or Pletho, Georgius (the second name was given him for his extraordinary erudition). A native of Constantinople, during the first half of the fifteenth century, he is chiefly memorable for having introduced Platonism to the Western World. In 1438 he paid a visit to Florence, and there succeeded in inspiring Cosimo de Medici with his own enthusiasm for Plato, and finally in depriving Aristotle of the dominion which for eight centuries he had exercised over European thought.

29. the philosopher of Nola. T. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the best known of the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance. His chief metaphysical works were De la causa, principio ed uno and De l'Infinito Universo e Mondi (both published in 1584). The De Immenso, &c., a later work (1591), is of more importance for an estimate of his philosophy. (See Schwegler, Hist. of Phil., 'Bruno'.) Bruno was burnt as a heretic in 1600. Coleridge records that in two days he has read two works of Bruno, In April, 1801 (A. P., p. 16), the De Immenso, &c., and the De Monade, Numero, et Figura. Of the latter he remarks, 'It was far too numerical, lineal, and Pythagorean for my comprehension. Thomas Taylor (i.e. the translator of Plotinus) and Proclus,' &c. It read very much like 'The poems and commentaries in the De Immenso et Innumerabili are,' he adds, ' of a very different description. The commentary is a very sublime enunciation of the dignity of the human soul according to the principles of Plato.'

who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney, &c. Bruno made the acquaintance of Sidney and Fulke Greville during his residence in England in the years 1583-4. See A. P. (ib.): "Sir P. Sidney and Fulke Greville shut the doors at their philosophical conferences with Bruno.' Sidney is introduced in the 'Cena de la Ceneri', or Ash Wednesday Conversation, which was written in these years. (Biog. Lit. 1847, i. 144.)

PAGE 95 1. 1. the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia sum, &c. According to this statement, Coleridge's introduction to the Cartesian philosophy does not fall before 1801. It is not improbable that he studied Descartes, alongside with Kant, during the years of his residence at Keswick. Cp. manuscript note in Southey's copy of Omniana (1812) on the words 'I am that I am', and Southey's comment I am who I am, is better':-'No, the sense of that is because or in that. Affirming myself to be, I am, Causa sui. My own affirmation is the ground of my own existence.'

7. the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behmen. According to Southey's statement in 1808 (Life, p. 165 n.) the succession of Coleridge's philosophical idols was-Hartley, Berkeley, Spinoza, Plato, and Boehme; the last of whom had some chance of coming in' when Southey had last seen Coleridge (i.e. in 1804). But the

study of Boehme and his fellow mystics probably began in the years 1795-8 (see Gutch Memorandum Book, Brit. Museum Library), and was carried on side by side with Coleridge's speculations in necessitarianism, to which (as Coleridge here tells us) it provided an antidote.

Coleridge's various statements as to his debt to Boehme are not entirely reconcilable. To Lady Beaumont he wrote, 'For myself, I must confess I never brought away from his (Boehme's) works anything I did not bring to them' (Memorials of Coleorton, Jan. 1810). On the other hand, Crabb Robinson reports (Diary, &c., May 29, 1812) that, speaking of Schelling, Coleridge declared that 'all Schelling had said he (Coleridge) had thought out for himself, or found in Jacob Boehme'. See also Biog. Lit. i. 103: 'My obligations to Boehme have been more direct.' In the Coleorton letter just quoted, Coleridge adds: 'The most beautiful and orderly development of this philosophy (which endeavours to explain all things by an analysis of consciousness, and builds up a world in the mind out of materials furnished by the mind itself, is to be

found in the Platonic Theology of Proclus.' From this passage, and our knowledge of his early study of Proclus, we may perhaps conclude that it was Proclus who prepared Coleridge for Boehme, as Boehme prepared him for Schelling. A critical account of Boehme was one of the subjects proposed by Coleridge for The Friend of 1809-10 (Memorials of Coleorton, ii. 107), but abandoned owing to the untimely decease of that journal. See Aids to Reflection, Bohn's Library, p. 258.

21. While I in part translate, &c. Portions of the two following paragraphs, as far as the words 'William Law', are, as Sara Coleridge (Biog. Lit. 1847) has pointed out, freely translated from Schelling's Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Natur-Philosophie zu der verbesserten Fichte'schen Lehre (Werke, I. vii. 119–20). The question of Coleridge's plagiarisms from Schelling is too complex to be fully entered into here. Those interested in it may consult (for the case against Coleridge) De Quincey's article in Tait's Mag., Jan. 1835; J. F. Ferrier's in Blackwood's Mag., xlvii. 28799, and Mr. J. M. Robertson's Essay on Coleridge in his Essays towards a new critical Method; and (for the defence) Archdeacon Hare's reply to De Quincey in the British Mag. vii (15–27), and Sara Coleridge's Introduction to Biog. Lit. 1847.

I cannot myself feel that Coleridge is guilty either of insincerity or self-deception, when he declares that the similarity of his philosophical standpoint to that of Schelling is a matter of coincidence. 'In the preface to my philosophical works,' Coleridge wrote in 1804, 'I should say—“Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or if you are on the hunt, track me". Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring instances without a lie, for they had been mine formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard of these

writers, because to have fixed on the particular instances in which I have been indebted to these writers would have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others.' (A. P., p. 106.) And in the same spirit he writes (Biog. Lit. i. 105): 'I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible.' To these statements we may add another (in a letter of 1816): 'What I write must be my own to the best of my consciousness-the result of earnest meditation, and an insight into the principles': and, if we do not excuse his habit of plagiarism, we shall at least understand how it could be consistent with originality in the ideas expressed. Of this originality in Coleridge no man was more firmly convinced than his philosophical associate and interpreter J. H. Green, who, moreover, in the following words (Introduction to Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit), gives a striking confirmation of Coleridge's account of himself: For Coleridge truth was impersonal and if he adopted from others it was because it was alien to the habit of his mind to consider the perception or discovery of truth as anything which belongs exclusively and appropriately to the individual.' And in a similar vein Green writes to Sara Coleridge: The unacknowledged use of the quotations from Schelling in the B. L., which have been the pretext for branding him with the opprobrious name of plagiarist, are only evidences, in my humble judgement at least, of his disregard to reputation, and of a selflessness... which caused him to neglect the means of vindicating his claim to the originality of the system, which was the labour of his life and the fruit of his genius.' For the rest, Coleridge in the following pages (pp. 104-5) shows himself willing enough to concede to Schelling the general credit of the ideas which they shared; and elsewhere he acknowledged, what indeed it would be unreasonable to deny, that he is not without real obligations to Schelling. (Cp. Letter to J. H. Green, quoted in note to p. 102, 1. 22.)

PAGE 97 1. 1. De Thoyras. Sara Coleridge (Biog. Lit. 1847, i. 148) substituted Taulerus (the German mystic of the fourteenth century) for de Thoyras, 'having reason to believe that the latter name was a mistake or misprint for the former.' And certainly there is no de Thoyras who could fittingly be classed with Boehme and George Fox.

George Fox (1624-90), the founder of the society of 'Friends', which absorbed the already existing societies of Behmenists, or followers of Boehme.

PAGE 98 1.3. And what he brings, &c. Milton, Par. Reg. iv. 325.

14. William Law (1686–1781), author of the Serious Call, &c.

(1729). His mystical writings are the product of his later years, and owe much to the influence of Boehme, whose works he became acquainted with in 1734. What is commonly known as Law's translation of Boehme's works is really a re-edition of the old translation, undertaken in Law's memory by Ward and Langcake. (Brit. Encycl., ninth edition, art. Boehme.)

PAGE 99 1. 1. The Ethics of Spinoza. Cp. Hazlitt (Spirit of the Age, Coleridge). 'Spinoza became his God, and he took up the vast chain of Being in his hand... but poetry redeemed him from his spectral philosophy.' In 1803 Coleridge wrote of Spinoza : 'If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles untouched, and had not written so powerfully in support of universal toleration, his ethics would never have brought on him the charge of Atheism. His doctrine, in this respect, is truly and severely orthodox in the reformed Church.' Cp. also the marginal notes on his copy of the Ethics (quoted partially in Dr. Martineau's Study of Spinoza, and printed in the Athenaeum, April, 1897), where Coleridge writes: I cannot agree with Jacobi's assertion that Spinosism as taught by Spinoza is Atheism. For though he will not consent to call things essentially disparate by the same name, and therefore denies human intelligence to the Deity, yet he adores his Wisdom, and expressly declares the identity of Love, i. e., perfect Virtue or concentric Will, in the human Being, and that with which the supreme loves himself, as all in all. It is true he contends for Necessity; but then he makes two disparate classes of Necessity, the one identical with Liberty (even as the Christian Doctrine— "Whose service is perfect freedom"), the other Compulsion or Slavery.' See also Crabb Robinson, Diary, &c., Dec. 20, 1810; Biog. Lit. ii. 217. Yet to the end Coleridge classed Spinoza with the pantheists. See The Friend (1818), II. xi (Coleridge, Works, ed. Shedd. ii. 470); Letter to Brabant (1815); Westm. Review, April, 1870; Crabb Robinson, Diary, &c., Nov. 3, 1812; and T. T., March 10, 1827, and April 30, 1830. From a letter to Stuart in 1814 (Letters, p. 632), it appears that Coleridge contemplated a treatise on Spinoza and Spinosism, as part of the opus magnum, to bear the title' Logos Agonistes'.

12. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The works here mentioned were published in the following order :-The Critique of Pure Reason (1781); the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science (1786); the Critique of judgment (1790); Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason (1793). Kant's Werke,

22. the chapter on original apperception. ed. Hartenstein, 1867, Bd. III. s. 114.

PAGE 100 1. 3. the hair-breadth escapes of Wolf. Wolff's teaching at Halle gave offence to his theological colleagues, who secured his expulsion from Prussia in 1723. On the accession of Frederick the Great in 1740, he was reinstated in his chair with every mark

of esteem. Kant, too, came into conflict with the orthodox party in Prussia. In 1792, when his work on Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason had been partly published in the Berlin Journal, the publication of the remainder was forbidden, and he was obliged to bring it out in Königsberg. In consequence a pledge was exacted from him not to write again upon religious subjects, to which he adhered until the death of Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1797.

4. The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples. Coleridge is alluding to Fichte, who in 1798 was driven from Jena on a charge of Atheism, based on his preface to his friend Forberg's essay on the 'Development of the Idea of Religion'. In this paper (entitled 'On the Grounds of our belief in a Divine Government of the Universe'), God is defined as the moral order of the Universe, the eternal law of right which is the foundation of our being; and any other mode of existence is denied to him.

9. In spite therefore of his own declarations. Sara Coleridge (Biog. Lit. 1847, i. 157) aptly compares these remarks upon Kant with Schelling, Abhandlung zur Erläuterung, &c. (Werke, I. i. 405).

16. I entertained doubts likewise. Yet it is on this very point that Coleridge seems most sincerely at one with Kant, except indeed that for him the moral consciousness has a wider scope, and its evidence is more convincing. Cp. Biog. Lit. i. 135, esp. l. 36; ii. 216, and marginal note in Tenneman's Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. viii, where Coleridge complains that the Kanteans 'separate the Reason from the Reason in the Will, or the theory from the Practical man', and adds 'Whether the object given in the Idea belongs to it in its own right as an Idea, or is super-induced by moral Faith, is really little more than a dispute in terms, depending on the Definition of Idea. What more cogent proof (of the objective reality of the Ideas) can we have than that a man must contradict his whole human being in order to deny it?'

PAGE 101 1. 5. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. The theoretical portion of Fichte's system is contained in the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (1794) and Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen d. Wissenschaftslehre (1794), and a general introduction to the whole system in the Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (1794). The practical philosophy is contained in the Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796), and System der Sittenlehre (1798).

6. by commencing with an act instead of a thing, i. e. the original Deed-act, or Thathandlung by which the Ego affirms itself as real. Cp. Letter to J. H. Green, 1817 (Letters, p. 682): Fichte... hath the merit of having prepared the ground for, and laid the first stone of, the dynamic philosophy by the substitution of Act for Thing, Der einführen Actionen (sic) statt der Dinge an Sich

14. a crude egoismus, a boastful... hostility to Nature. Cp. marginal note in Fichte's Bestimmung des Menschen (Brit. Mus. Library copy): 'This man who, page after page, can rant away in