The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“Take it away! I am a Unitarian, because I am a Trinitarian; you have hitherto at least adopted a misnomer.” Twenty-five years since the Unitarians were of two creeds; one class materialists, the other immaterialists, but both agreeing that Christ was only an inspired ‘man’. If I am rightly informed, they are not more orthodox at the present day.
When Coleridge was among the Unitarians, his deeper course of reasoning had not yet commenced. During his school education he became a Socinian; the personality of the Trinity had staggered him, and he in consequence preached for a short time at different Unitarian meetings; but in the course of examination, he found that the doctrines he had to deliver were mere moral truths, while he was “craving for a ‘faith’,” his heart being with Paul and John, though his head was with Spinoza. In after life, speaking of his conversion to Christianity, he often repeated — He did not believe in the Trinity, because to him at that time, the belief seemed contradictory to reason and scripture. “What care I,” said he, “for Rabbi Paul, or Rabbi John, if they be opposed to moral sense.” This was going a step beyond the Socinians, but this step was the means of his being reclaimed from error, for having by his course of reasoning gradually diminished “even this faith,” that which remained with him was so small, that it altogether sank into unbelief; and he then felt compelled to retrace his steps from the point whence he had started. Led by further enquiries after truth, deeper meditation revealed to him the true value of the scriptures; and at the same time his philosophic views enlarging, he found that the doctrine of the Trinity was not contrary to reason — to reason in its highest sense; and he then discovered how far he had misbelieved, or had been, as he stated, puffed up by Socinian views. On quitting Shrewsbury and returning to Bristol, he seceded from the Unitarians, and observed, that if they had attempted to play the same tricks with a neighbour’s will, which they had done with the New Testament, they would deserve to be put in the pillory. He continued attached to the writings of St. John and St. Paul, for thirty-four years of his life, and having grown in strength with increase of years, he died in the faith of these apostles. And yet but lately did it appear in print, that “he was ever shifting his opinions.”
When at Cambridge, his acquaintance with Mr. Frend led him to study the philosophy of Hartley, and he became one of his disciples. Perhaps the love of Coleridge for his college, “the ever honoured Jesus,” might have had some share in the cause of his early predilection in favour of Hartley. He too was the son of a clergyman, was admitted to Jesus at the age of fifteen, and became a fellow in 1705. According to the account given of him by his biographer, Coleridge in several respects seems to have resembled him. All his early studies were intended to fit him for the church, but scruples arose in his mind, because he could not conscientiously subscribe to the thirty-nine articles: he therefore gave up all thoughts of the clerical profession, and entered the medical, for which, as Coleridge himself states, he also had had the most ardent desire. Hartley, when he had taken his degree, practised physic; and his knowledge, his general acquirements, his sensibility, and his benevolence, made him an ornament to the profession. In this profession too, Coleridge, had circumstances allowed him to enter it, must have been preeminent. Hartley, like Coleridge, was formed for sympathy and all the charities of life — his countenance was benign — his manners were gentle — and his eloquence pathetic and commanding. He first practised at Newark, and afterwards removed to Bury St. Edmonds, where he ended his career, dying in 1757, at the age of fifty-two. He was much afflicted with stone, and was in part the means of procuring from the government five thousand pounds for Mrs. Stevens, as a reward for the secret of preparing the solvent, sold and advertised in her name. In 1740, he published the work on which his fame rests, under the title of ‘Observations on Man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations.’ In it he expounded his doctrine of vibrations, and attempted by reasoning to explain the origin and propagation of sensation, built on gratuitous assumption of certain vibrations of the brain and nerves, coupled by association. Coleridge on his visit to Germany, soon made himself master of this subject. In his Biographia Literaria, he devotes a chapter to the examination of the work, and having seen the hollowness of the argument, abandoned it. While in Germany, Coleridge also studied Des Cartes, and saw the source of Locke’s Theory, from which he entirely differed. He next turned his attention to Spinoza, but with a mind so logically formed, and so energetic in the search after truth, it was impossible for him to dwell long on a philosophy thus constructed — and Coleridge was still left to yearn for a resting place on which to base his faith. After he had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in one of them an abiding place for his reason;
“I began,” says he, “to ask myself, Is a system of philosophy, as differing from mere history and classification, possible? If possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to recollect, and to classify. Christianity however is not a theory, or a speculation, but a life — not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.”
Spinoza being one of the writers which Coleridge, in his passage from Socinianism to Christianity, had studied, the reader will probably be interested with the following note, written by himself on the subject:
“Paradoxical, as it assuredly is, I am convinced that Spinoza’s innocence and virtue, guarded and matured into invincible habit of being, by a life of constant meditation and of intellectual pursuit, were the conditions or temptations, ‘sine quibus non’ of his forming and maintaining a system subversive of all virtue. He saw so clearly the ‘folly’ and ‘absurdity’ of wickedness, and felt so weakly and languidly the passions tempting to it, that he concluded, that nothing was wanting to a course of well-doing, but clear conceptions and the ‘fortitudo intellectualis’; while his very modesty, a prominent feature in his character, rendered him, as it did Hartley, less averse to the system of necessity. Add to these causes his profound admiration of pure mathematics, and the vast progress made in it so unspeakably beneficial to mankind, their bodies as well as souls, and souls as well as bodies; the reflection that the essence of mathematical science consists in discovering the absolute properties of forms and proportions, and how pernicious a bewilderment was produced in this ‘sublime’ science by the wild attempt of the Platonists, especially the later (though Plato himself is far from blameless in this respect,) to explain the ‘final’ cause of mathematical ‘figures’ and of numbers, so as to subordinate them to a principle of origination out of themselves; and the further comparison of the progress of this SCIENCE, (‘pura Mathesis’) which excludes all consideration of final cause, with the unequal and equivocal progress of those branches of literature which rest on, or refer to final causes; and that the uncertainty and mixture with error, appeared in proportion to such reference — and if I mistake not, we shall have the most important parts of the history of Spinoza’s mind. It is a duty which we owe to truth, to distinguish Spinoza from the Voltaires, Humes, and the whole nest of ‘popular’ infidels, to make manifest how precious a thing is the sincere thirst of truth for the sake of truth undebased by vanity, appetite, and the ambition of forming a sect of ‘arguescents’ and trumpeters — and that it is capable, to a wonderful degree, of rendering innoxious the poisonous pangs of the worst errors — nay, heaven educing good out of the very evil — the important advantages that have been derived from such men. Wise and good men would never have seen the true basis and bulwark of the right cause, if they had not been made to know and understand the whole weight and possible force of the wrong cause; nor would have even purified their own system from these admissions, on which the whole of Spinozism is built, and which admissions were common to all parties, and therefore fairly belonging to Spinoza. — Now I affirm that none but an eminently pure and benevolent mind could have constructed and perfected such a system as that of the ethics of Spinoza. Bad hearted men always ‘hate’ the religion and morality which they attack — but hatred dims and ‘inturbidates’ the logical faculties. There is likewise a sort of lurking terror in such a heart, which renders it far too painful to keep a steady gaze on the being of God and the existence of immortality — they dare only attack it as Tartars, a hot valiant inroad, and then they scour off again. Equally painful is self-examination, for if the wretch be ‘callous’, the ‘facts’ of psychology will not present themselves — if not, who could go on year after year in a perpetual process of deliberate self-torture and shame. The very torment of the process would