Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To know any thing for certain is to have a clear insight into the inseparability of the predicate from the subject (the matter from the form), and vice versâ. This is a verbal definition,—a real definition of a thing absolutely known is impossible. I know a circle, when I perceive that the equality of all possible radii from the centre to the circumference is inseparable from the idea of a circle.

August 30. 1827

PAINTING

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

April 13. 1830

PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.—MESSIAH.—JEWS.—THE TRINITY

If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that stupendous event—the rise and establishment of Christianity—in comparison with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come? What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Buonaparte?

* * * * *

I know that some excellent men—Israelites without guile—do not, in fact, expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone. The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians, the Hindus, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews. But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself.

* * * * *

It has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the Trinity are at variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the Trinity thought of it as I did. To which again humbly, yet confidently, I reply, that my superior light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this,—that I more clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. I may or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more logical terms than some others; but this I say, Go and ask the most ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in and worships a plurality of Gods, and he will start with horror at the bare suggestion. He may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he will tell you that he does believe in one God, and in one God only,– reason about it as you may.

* * * * *

What all the churches of the East and West, what Romanist and Protestant believe in common, that I call Christianity. In no proper sense of the word can I call Unitarians and Socinians believers in Christ; at least, not in the only Christ of whom I have read or know any thing.

April 14, 1830

CONVERSION OF THE JEWS.—JEWS IN POLAND

There is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with the spirit unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches. In the first age, the Jewish Christians undoubtedly considered themselves as the seed of Abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a superior order. Witness the account of St. Peter's conduct in the Acts[36 - Chap. xv.], and the Epistle to the Galatians.[37 - Chap. ii.] St. Paul protested against this, so far as it went to make Jewish observances compulsory on Christians who were not of Jewish blood, and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion on the Mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the Jews would ultimately be restored; and he says,—If the Gentiles have been so blest by the rejection of the Jews, how much rather shall they be blest by the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted to retain their customs.

If Rhenferd's Essays were translated—if the Jews were made acquainted with the real argument—if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to become Christians as of the seed of Abraham—I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject:—"O Sir! make the inhabitants of Hollywell Street and Duke's Place Israelites first, and then we may debate about making them Christians."[38 - Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected, Hyman Hurwitz.—ED.]

In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants. They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand of a large number of Jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews would be the first objects of murder and spoliation?

April 17. 1830

MOSAIC MIRACLES.—PANTHEISM

In the miracles of Moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts, which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3d chapter of the book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby to show to the Jews—the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt— that the same God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the wilderness, was their God also. The manna and quails were ordinary provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove hack the waters; and so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous. Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it was one and the same God who interfered specially, and who governed all generally.

* * * * *

Take away the first verse of the hook of Genesis, and then what immediately follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in the mysteries of Greece; of which the Samothracian or Cabeiric were probably the purest and the most ancient.

April 18. 1830

POETIC PROMISE

In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr. Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey.

April 19. 1830

It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some things he does know better than his physician.

* * * * *

I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death.

* * * * *

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

April 30. 1830

NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS.—BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.—SPINOSA

The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat.

* * * * *

The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was the head of the Realists; Ockham,[39 - John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune, near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1308, at the early age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639.William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1347; but the place and year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's account of these worthies:—"He knew what's what, and that's as highAs metaphysic wit can fly;In school divinity as ableAs he that hight Irrefragable,A second Thomas, or at onceTo name them all, another Dunse;Profound in all the NominalAnd Real ways beyond them all;For he a rope of sand could twistAs tough as learned Sorbonist."HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149.The Irrefragable Doctor was Alexander Hales, a native of Gloucestershire, who died in 1245. Amongst his pupils at Paris, was Fidanza, better known by the name of Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor. The controversy of the Realists and the Nominalists cannot he explained in a note; but in substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. The Realists held generally with Aristotle, that there were universal ideas or essences impressed upon matter, and covëal with, and inherent in, their objects. Plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal forms. On the other hand, Zeno and the old Stoics denied the existence of these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere tenms and nominal representatives of their particular objects. The Nominalists were the followers of Zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. It does not require much reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of Christianity.—ED.] his own disciple, of the Nominalists. Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer.

* * * * *

It is remarkable, that two thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of British birth. It was the schoolmen who made the languages of Europe what they now are. We laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected; whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily use.

* * * * *

One of the scholastic definitions of God is this,—Deus est, cui omne quod est est esse omne quod est: as long a sentence made up of as few words, and those as oligosyllabic, as any I remember. By the by, that oligosyllabic is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, ex opposito.

* * * * *

Spinosa, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his premiss. His unica substantia is, in fact, a mere notion, —a subject of the mind, and no object at all.

* * * * *

Plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. He leads you to see, that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic— that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which is the instrument of the understanding. I have read most of the works of Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. In fact, I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a consummate genius.[40 - "This is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (—a truth of the reason, an Idea)—that in its own proper form it is inconceivable. For to conceive, is a function of the understanding, which can he exercised only on subjects subordinate thereto. And yet to the forms of the understanding all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection, and to be rendered expressible. And here we have a second test and sign of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the representative or expression (—the exponent) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible. Examples: before Abraham WAS, I AM. God is a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference no where. The soul is all in every part." Aids to Reflection, n. 224.n. See also Church and State, p. 12.—ED.]

* * * * *

My mind is in a state of philosophical doubt as to animal magnetism. Von Spix, the eminent naturalist, makes no doubt of the matter, and talks coolly of giving doses of it. The torpedo affects a third or external object, by an exertion of its own will: such a power is not properly electrical; for electricity acts invariably under the same circumstances. A steady gaze will make many persons of fair complexions blush deeply. Account for that.[41 - I find the following remarkable passage in p. 301. vol. i. of the richly annotated copy of Mr. Southey's Life of Wesley, which Mr. C. bequeathed as his "darling book and the favourite of his library" to its great and honoured author and donor:—"The coincidence throughout of all these Methodist cases with those of the Magnetists makes me wish for a solution that would apply to all. Now this sense or appearance of a sense of the distant, both in time and space, is common to almost all the magnetic patients in Denmark, Germany, France, and North Italy, to many of whom the same or a similar solution could not apply. Likewise, many cases have been recorded at the same time, in different countries, by men who had never heard of each other's names, and where the simultaneity of publication proves the independence of the testimony. And among the Magnetisers and Attesters are to be found names of men, whose competence in respect of integrity and incapability of intentional falsehood is fully equal to that of Wesley, and their competence in respect of physio- and psychological insight and attainments incomparably greater. Who would dream, indeed, of comparing Wesley with a Cuvier, Hufeland, Blumenbach, Eschenmeyer, Reil, &c.? Were I asked, what I think, my answer would be,—that the evidence enforces scepticism and a non liquet;—too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of imposture or casual coincidence;—too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a correspondent faculty in the human soul. And nothing less than such an hypothesis would be adequate to the satisfactory explanation of the facts;—though that of a metastasis of specific functions of the nervous energy, taken in conjunction with extreme nervous excitement, plus some delusion, plus some illusion, plus some imposition, plus some chance and accidental coincidence, might determine the direction in which the scepticism should vibrate. Nine years has the subject of Zoo-magnetism been before me. I have traced it historically, collected a mass of documents in French, German, Italian, and the Latinists of the sixteenth century, have never neglected an opportunity of questioning eye-witnesses, ex. gr. Tieck, Treviranus, De Prati, Meyer, and others of literary or medical celebrity, and I remain where I was, and where the first perusal of Klug's work had left me, without having moved an inch backward or forward. The reply of Treviranus, the famous botanist, to me, when he was in London, is worth recording:—'Ich habe gesehen was (ich weiss das) ich nicht würde geglaubt haben auf ihren erzählung,' &c. 'I have seen what I am certain I would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on mine.'"—ED.]

May 1. 1830

FALL OF MAN.—MADNESS.—BROWN AND DARWIN.—NITROUS OXIDE

A Fall of some sort or other—the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight.