D
Note to Line 34 of the Joan of Arc Book II. 1796, pp. 41, 42.
Line 34. Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the last edition of his Optics supposes that a very subtile and elastic fluid, which he calls aether, is diffused thro' the pores of gross bodies, as well as thro' the open spaces that are void of gross matter: he supposes it to pierce all bodies, and to touch their least particles, acting on them with a force proportional to their number or to the matter of the body on which it acts. He supposes likewise, that it is rarer in the pores of bodies than in open spaces, and even rarer in small pores and dense bodies, than in large pores and rare bodies; and also that its density increases in receding from gross matter; so for instance as to be greater at the 1/100 of an inch from the surface of any body, than at its surface; and so on. To the action of this aether he ascribes the attractions of gravitation and cohœsion, the attraction and repulsion of electrical bodies, the mutual influences of bodies and light upon each other, the effects and communication of heat, and the performance of animal sensation and motion. David Hartley, from whom this account of aether is chiefly borrowed, makes it the instrument of propagating those vibrations or configurative motions which are ideas. It appears to me, no hypothesis ever involved so many contradictions; for how can the same fluid be both dense and rare in the same body at one time? Yet in the Earth as gravitating to the Moon, it must be very rare; and in the Earth as gravitating to the Sun, it must be very dense. For as Andrew Baxter well observes, it doth not appear sufficient to account how the fluid may act with a force proportional to the body to which another is impelled, to assert that it is rarer in great bodies than in small ones; it must be further asserted that this fluid is rarer or denser in the same body, whether small or great, according as the body to which that is impelled is itself small or great. But whatever may be the solidity of this objection, the following seems unanswerable:
If every particle thro' the whole solidity of a heavy body receive its impulse from the particles of this fluid, it should seem that the fluid itself must be as dense as the very densest heavy body, gold for instance; there being as many impinging particles in the one, as there are gravitating particles in the other which receive their gravitation by being impinged upon: so that, throwing gold or any heavy body upward, against the impulse of this fluid, would be like throwing gold thro' gold; and as this aether must be equally diffused over the whole sphere of its activity, it must be as dense when it impels cork as when it impels gold, so that to throw a piece of cork upward, would be as if we endeavoured to make cork penetrate a medium as dense as gold; and tho' we were to adopt the extravagant opinions which have been advanced concerning the progression of pores, yet however porous we suppose a body, if it be not all pore, the argument holds equally, the fluid must be as dense as the body in order to give every particle its impulse.
It has been asserted that Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy leads in its consequences to Atheism: perhaps not without reason. For if matter, by any powers or properties given to it, can produce the order of the visible world and even generate thought; why may it not have possessed such properties by inherent right? and where is the necessity of a God? matter is according to the mechanic philosophy capable of acting most wisely and most beneficently without Wisdom or Benevolence; and what more does the Atheist assert? if matter possess those properties, why might it not have possessed them from all eternity? Sir Isaac Newton's Deity seems to be alternately operose and indolent; to have delegated so much power as to make it inconceivable what he can have reserved. He is dethroned by Vice-regent second causes.
We seem placed here to acquire a knowledge of effects. Whenever we would pierce into the Adyta of Causation, we bewilder ourselves; and all that laborious Conjecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of imagination. We are restless, because invisible things are not the objects of vision—and philosophical systems, for the most part, are received not for their Truth, but in proportion as they attribute to Causes a susceptibility of being seen, whenever our visual organs shall have become sufficiently powerful.
E
DEDICATION[1113:1]
Ode on the Departing Year, 1796, pp. [3]-4.
[Vide ante, p. [160].]
To Thomas Poole, of Stowey.
My Dear Friend—
Soon after the commencement of this month, the Editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer (a newspaper conducted with so much ability, and such unmixed and fearless zeal for the interests of Piety and Freedom, that I cannot but think my poetry honoured by being permitted to appear in it) requested me, by Letter, to furnish him with some Lines for the last day of this Year. I promised him that I would make the attempt; but almost immediately after, a rheumatic complaint seized on my head, and continued to prevent the possibility of poetic composition till within the last three days. So in the course of the last three days the following Ode was produced. In general, when an Author informs the Public that his production was struck off in a great hurry, he offers an insult, not an excuse. But I trust that the present case is an exception, and that the peculiar circumstances which obliged me to write with such unusual rapidity give a propriety to my professions of it: nec nunc eam apud te jacto, sed et ceteris indico; ne quis asperiore limâ carmen examinet, et a confuso scriptum et quod frigidum erat ni statim traderem.[1113:2] (I avail myself of the words of Statius, and hope that I shall likewise be able to say of any weightier publication, what he has declared of his Thebaid, that it had been tortured[1113:3] with a laborious Polish.)
For me to discuss the literary merits of this hasty composition were idle and presumptuous. If it be found to possess that impetuosity of Transition, and that Precipitation of Fancy and Feeling, which are the essential excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those from whom alone praise could give me pleasure: and whose minuter criticisms will be disarmed by the reflection, that these Lines were conceived 'not in the soft obscurities of Retirement, or under the Shelter of Academic Groves, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow'.[1114:1] I am more anxious lest the moral spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the Ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you know, that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. Farewell, Brother of my Soul!
——O ever found the same,
And trusted and belov'd![1114:2]
Never without an emotion of honest pride do I subscribe myself
Your grateful and affectionate friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
Bristol, December 26, 1796.
FOOTNOTES:
[1113:1] Published 4to, 1796: reprinted in P. and D. W., 1877, i. 165-8.
[1113:2] The quotation is from an apology addressed 'Meliori suo', prefixed to the Second Book of the Silvae:—'nec nunc eam (sc. celeritatem) apud te jacto qui nosti: sed et caeteris indico, ne quis asperiore limâ carmen examinet et a confuso scriptum, et dolenti datum cum paene sint supervacua sint tarda solatia.' Coleridge has 'adapted' the words of Statius to point his own moral.
[1113:3] Multâ cruciata limâ [S. T. C.] [Silv. lib. iv. 7, 26.]
[1114:1] From Dr. Johnson's Preface to the Dictionary of the English Language. Works, 1806, ii. 59.
[1114:2] Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination (Second Version), Bk. I.
F
Preface to the MS. of Osorio.
[Vide ante, p. [519].]
In this sketch of a tragedy, all is imperfect, and much obscure. Among other equally great defects (millstones round the slender neck of its merits) it presupposes a long story; and this long story, which yet is necessary to the complete understanding of the play, is not half told. Albert had sent a letter informing his family that he should arrive about such a time by ship; he was shipwrecked; and wrote a private letter to Osorio, informing him alone of this accident, that he might not shock Maria. Osorio destroyed the letter, and sent assassins to meet Albert. . . Worse than all, the growth of Osorio's character is nowhere explained—and yet I had most clear and psychologically accurate ideas of the whole of it. . . A man, who from constitutional calmness of appetites, is seduced into pride and the love of power, by these into misanthropism, or rather a contempt of mankind, and from thence, by the co-operation of envy, and a curiously modified love for a beautiful female (which is nowhere developed in the play), into a most atrocious guilt. A man who is in truth a weak man, yet always duping himself into the belief that he has a soul of iron. Such were some of my leading ideas.
In short the thing is but an embryo, and whilst it remains in manuscript, which it is destined to do, the critic would judge unjustly who should call it a miscarriage. It furnished me with a most important lesson, namely, that to have conceived strongly, does not always imply the power of successful execution. S. T. C.
[From Early Years and Late Reflections, by Clement Carlyon, M.D., 1856, i. 143-4.]
APPENDIX V
ADAPTATIONS
For a critical study of Coleridge's alterations in the text of the quotations from seventeenth-century poets, which were inserted in the Biographia Literaria (2 vols., 1817), or were prefixed as mottoes to Chapters in the rifacimento of The Friend (3 vols., 1818), see an article by J. D Campbell entitled 'Coleridge's Quotations,' which was published in the Athenæum, August 20, 1892, and 'Adaptations', P. W., 1893, pp. 471-4. Most of these textual alterations or garblings were noted by H. N. Coleridge in an edition of The Friend published in 1837; Mr. Campbell was the first to collect and include the mottoes and quotations in a sub-section of Coleridge's Poetical Works. Three poems, (1) 'An Elegy Imitated from Akenside', (2) 'Farewell to Love ', (3) 'Mutual Passion altered and modernized from an Old Poet', may be reckoned as 'Adaptations'. The first and third of these composite productions lay no claim to originality, whilst the second, 'Farewell to Love', which he published anonymously in The Courier, September 27, 1806, was not included by Coleridge in Sibylline Leaves, or in 1828, 1829, 1834. For (1) vide ante, p. [69], and post, Read:—p. [1123]; for (2) ante, p. [402]; and for (3) vide post, p. [1118].