Part 7

"The first range of hills that encircles the scanty vale of human life is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden in mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all aglow, with colors not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their farthest inaccessible falls, have learned that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who, even in the level streams, have detected elements which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can be learned only by the fact. I might oppose to the question the words with which Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty: 'Should any one interrogate her how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behooves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words.'

"They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its _involucrum_ for _antennæ_ yet to come. They know and feel that the potential works in them, even as the actual works in them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit; though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect. 'Poor man, he is not made for this world.' Oh, herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment, for man must either rise or sink.

"It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the common consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own direction that it is connected with master currents below the surface, I shall merely assume as a postulate _pro tempore_.... On the IMMEDIATE which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition or absolute affirmation of it (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness), all the _certainty_ of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from without. The medium by which spirits understand each other is not the surrounding air, but the _freedom_ which they possess in common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the spirit of a man is not _filled_ with the consciousness of freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as of one struggling in bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. No wonder, then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others. No wonder that in the fearful desert of his consciousness he wearies himself out with empty words to which no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart or the heart of a fellow-being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of _notional_ phantoms, the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths through the distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding! To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling on a like occasion, is honor and a good name before God and man.

"Philosophy is employed on objects of the _inner sense_, and cannot, like geometry, appropriate to every construction a corresponding _outward_ intuition.... Now the inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a third, in addition to the image, is conscious of the conception or notion of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions--he reflects on his own reflections; and thus we may say without impropriety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense than the other....

"The postulate of philosophy, and at the same time the test of philosophical capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF. And this at once practically and speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative nor merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge rests upon the coincidence of an object with a subject. For we can _know_ only that which is true; and the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the object represented."

Coleridge then puts and argues the two alternatives. 1. Either the Objective is taken as primary, and then we have to account for the supervention of the Subjective which coalesces with it, which natural philosophy supposes. 2. Or the Subjective is taken as primary, and then we have to account for the supervention of the objective, which spiritual philosophy supposes. The Transcendentalist accepts the latter alternative.

"The second position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher as for the common-sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM, cannot properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and, separated from the immediate consciousness, loses its whole sense and import. It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the first position--namely, that the existence of things without us, which from its nature cannot be immediately certain--should be received as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only coherent, but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self-consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office and object of his philosophy.

"If it be said that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time and on that very account the truest and most binding realism."

To follow the exposition further is unnecessary for the present purpose, which is to state the fundamental principles of the philosophy, not to give the processes of reasoning by which they are illustrated. Had Coleridge been merely a philosopher, his influence on his generation, by this means, would have been insignificant; for his expositions were fragmentary; his thoughts were too swift and tumultuous in their flow to be systematically arranged; his style, forcible and luminous in passages, is interrupted by too frequent episodes, excursions and explanatory parentheses, to be enjoyed by the inexpert. Besides being a philosopher, he was a theologian. His deepest interest was in the problems of theology. His mind was perpetually turning over the questions of trinity, incarnation, Holy Ghost, sin, redemption, salvation. He meditated endless books on these themes, and, in special, one "On the Logos," which was to remove all difficulties and reconcile all contradictions. "On the whole, those dead churches, this dead English church especially, must be brought to life again. Why not? It was not dead; the soul of it, in this parched-up body, was tragically asleep only. Atheistic philosophy was, true, on its side; and Hume and Voltaire could, on their own ground, speak irrefragably for themselves against any church: but lift the church and them into a higher sphere of argument, _they_ died into inanition, the church revivified itself into pristine florid vigor, became once more a living ship of the desert, and invincibly bore you over stock and stone."

The philosophy was accepted as a basis for the theology, and apparently only so far as it supplied the basis. Mrs. Coleridge declares, in a note to Chapter IX. of the "Biographia Literaria," that her husband, soon after the composition of that work, became dissatisfied with the system of Schelling, considered as a fundamental and comprehensive scheme intended to exhibit the relations of God to the world and man. He objected to it, she insists, as essentially pantheistic, radically inconsistent with a belief in God as himself moral and intelligent, as beyond and above the world, as the supreme mind to which the human mind owes homage and fealty--inconsistent with any just view and deep sense of the moral and spiritual being of man. He was mainly concerned with the construction of a "philosophical system, in which Christianity,--based on the triune being of God, and embracing a primal fall and universal redemption, (to use Carlyle's words) Christianity, ideal, spiritual, eternal, but likewise and necessarily historical, realized and manifested in time,--should be shown forth as accordant, or rather as one with ideas of reason, and the demands of the spiritual and of the speculative mind, of the heart, conscience, reason, which should all be satisfied and reconciled in one bond of peace."

This explains the interest which young and enthusiastic minds in the English Church took in Coleridge, the verses just quoted from Aubrey de Vere, one of the new school of believers, the admiring discipleship of Frederick Denison Maurice, the hearty allegiance of the leaders of the spiritual reformation in England. Coleridge was the real founder of the Broad Church, which attempted to justify creed and sacrament, by substituting the ideas of the spiritual philosophy for the formal authority of traditions which the reason of the age was discarding.

The men who sympathized with the same movement in America felt the same gratitude to their leader. Already in 1829 "The Aids to Reflection" were republished by Dr. James Marsh. Caleb Sprague Henry, professor of philosophy and history in the University of New York in 1839, and before that a resident of Cambridge, an enthusiastic thinker and eloquent talker, loved to dilate on the genius of the English philosopher, and was better than a book in conveying information about him, better than many books in awakening interest in his thought. The name of Coleridge was spoken with profound reverence, his books were studied industriously, and the terminology of transcendentalism was as familiar as commonplace in the circles of divines and men of letters. At present Hegel is the prophet of these believers, Schelling is obsolete, and Coleridge, the English Schelling, has had his day. The change is marked by an all but entire absence of the passionate enthusiasm, the imaginative glow and fervor, that characterized the transcendental phase of the movement. Coleridge was a vital thinker; his mind was a flame; his thoughts burned within him, and issued from him in language that trembled and throbbed with the force of the ideas committed to it. He was a divine, a preacher of most wonderful eloquence. At the age of three or four and forty Serjeant Talfourd heard him talk.

"At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it; but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions tinted with ethereal colors, was lost at airy distance in the horizon of fancy." At five-and-twenty William Hazlitt heard him preach.

"It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. _Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux temps de ma jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire._ When I got there the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text. 'He departed again into a mountain himself alone.' As he gave out this text his voice 'rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes;' and when he came to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey. The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war, upon church and state, not their alliance, but their separation; on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore. He made a poetical and pastoral excursion, and to show the effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock as though he should never be old; and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood.

'Such were the notes our once loved poet sung;'

and for myself I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied."

The influence of Coleridge was greatly assisted by contemporary magazines, which helped by their furious efforts to crush him, and won sympathy for him by their attempts to laugh and hoot him down. Jeffrey handled the "Biographia Literaria" in the Edinburgh Review, August, 1817; "as favorable to the book _as could be expected_," the editor quietly says. The numberless varieties of judgment were represented in the Dublin University Magazine, British and Foreign Quarterly, Fraser, Blackwood, Christian Quarterly, Spectator, Monthly Review, Eclectic, Westminster, most of which contained several articles on different aspects of the subject. In America, Geo. B. Cheever wrote in the North American Review, F. H. Hedge in the Christian Examiner, D. N. Lord in Lord's Theological Journal, H. T. Tuckerman in the Southern Literary Messenger, Noah Porter in the Bibliotheca Sacra. The New York Review, the American Quarterly, American Whig Review, all made contributions to the Coleridgian literature,[2] and exhibited the extensive reaches of his power. The readers of Lamb, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Southey and the brilliant essayists that made so fascinating the English literature of the first third of our century must perforce be introduced to Coleridge. The "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel," which lay on every table, excited interest in the man from whom such astonishing pieces proceeded; so that many who understood little or nothing of his philosophical ideas, appropriated something of the spirit and tone of them. He had disciples who never heard him speak even in print, and followers who never saw his form even as sketched by critics. His thoughts were in the air; the mental atmosphere of theological schools was modified by them. They insensibly transplanted establishments and creeds from old to new regions.

[2] See for references. Poole's Index to Periodical Literature.

In 1851, Thomas Carlyle burlesqued Coleridge, took off his solemn oracular manner, made fun of his "plaintive snuffle and sing-song," his "om-m-ject and sum-m-ject," his "talk not flowing anywhither like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it, so that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world." But in his earlier days the "windy harangues" and "dizzying metaphysics" had their charm for him too; the philosophy of the Highgate sage was in essence and fruit his own. He explained at some length and with considerable frequency, as well as much eloquence, the distinction between "understanding," the faculty that observed, generalized, inferred, argued, concluded, and "reason," the faculty that saw the ideal forms of truth face to face, and beheld the inmost reality of things. He dilated with a disciple's enthusiasm on the principles of the transcendental philosophy, painted in gorgeous colors the promises it held forth, prophesied earnestly respecting the better time for literature, art, social ethics and religious faith it would bring in, preached tempestuously against shams in church and state, from the mount of vision that it disclosed. We have already seen how he could speak of Kant, Fichte, Novalis, of Goethe and Jean Paul. Thirty-five years ago Carlyle was the high priest of the new philosophy. Emerson edited his miscellanies, and the dregs of his ink-bottle were welcomed as the precious sediment of the fountain of inspiration. In 1827 he defended the "Kritik of Pure Reason" against stupid objectors from the sensational side, as, in the opinion of the most competent judges, "distinctly the greatest intellectual achievement of the century in which it came to light," and affirmed as by authority, that the seeker for pure truth must begin with intuition and proceed outward by the light of the revelation thence derived. In 1831 he carried this principle to the extreme of maintaining that a complete surrender to the informing genius, a surrender so entire as to amount to the abandonment of definite purpose and will, was evidence of perfect wisdom; for such is the interpretation we give to the paradoxical doctrine of "unconsciousness" which implied that in order to save the soul it must be forgotten; that consciousness was a disease; that in much wisdom was much grief.

Had Carlyle been more of a philosopher and less of a preacher, more a thinker and less a character, more a patient toiler after truth, and less a man of letters, his first intellectual impulse might have lasted. As it was, the reaction came precisely in middle life, and the apostle of transcendental ideas became the champion of Force. His Transcendentalism seems to have been a thing of sentiment rather than of conviction. A man of tremendous strength of feeling, his youth, as is the case with men of feeling, was romantic, enthusiastic, hopeful, exuberant; his manhood, as is also the case with men of feeling, was wilful and overbearing, with sadness deepening into moroseness and unhopefulness verging towards despair.

The era of despair had not set in at the period when the mind of New England was fermenting with the ideas of the new philosophy. Then all was brave, humane, aspiring. The denunciations of materialism in philosophy, formalism in religion and utilitarianism in personal and social ethics, rang through the land; the superb vindications of soul against sense, spirit against letter, faith against rite, heroism and nobleness against the petty expediencies of the market, kindled all earnest hearts. The emphatic declarations that "wonder and reverence are the conditions of insight and the source of strength; that faith is prior to knowledge and deeper too; that empirical science can but play on the surface of unfathomable mysteries; that in the order of reality the ideal and invisible are the world's true adamant, and the laws of material appearance only its alluvial growths; that in the inmost thought of men there is a thirst to which the springs of nature are a mere mirage, and which presses on to the waters of eternity," fell like refreshing gales from the hills on the children of men imprisoned in custom and suffocated by tradition. The infinitely varied illustrations of the worth of beauty, the grandeur of truth, the excellence of simple, devout sincerity in nature, literature, character; the burning insistance on the need of fresh inspiration from the region of serene ideas, seemed to proceed from a soul newly awakened, if not especially endowed with the seer's vision. It was better than philosophy; it was philosophy made vital with sentiment and purpose.

Carlyle early learned the German language, as Coleridge did, and drank deep from the fountains of its best literature. To him it opened a new world of thought, which the ordinary Englishman had no conception of. Coleridge found himself at home there by virtue of his natural genius, and also by the introduction given him by Wm. Law, John Pordage, Richard Saumarez, and Jacob Behmen, so that the suddenly discovered continent broke on him with less surprise; but Carlyle was as one taken wholly unawares, fascinated, charmed, intoxicated with the sights and sounds about him. Being unprepared by previous reflection and overpowered by the gorgeousness of color, the wealth was too much for him; it palled at last on his appetite, and he experienced a reaction similar to that of the sensualist whose delirium first persuades him that he has found his soul, and then makes him fear that he has lost it.