ON THE PROMETHEUS OF ÆSCHYLUS:
An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian, in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of Literature, May 18, 1825.
The French 'savans' who went to Egypt in the train of Buonaparte, Denon, Fourrier, and Dupuis, (it has been asserted), triumphantly vindicated the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of documents that cannot lie;—namely, the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous masses of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according to an inscription 'which cannot lie' the temple of Esne is of eight thousand years standing.
Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an inscription lying; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it; and lastly, the incredibility of a French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples themselves,—the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain astrological theories; or the temples themselves may have been built in the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or significant characters; and these may have been intentionally, or ignorantly, miscopied or mistranslated.
But more than all the preceding,—I cannot but persuade myself, that for a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense—a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generalized from the great mass of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached documents or narrations, of whatever authority the narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the documents—I cannot but persuade myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first book of the Pentateuch,—and which, in perfect accordance with all analogous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to anticipate, conveys to us the rapid progress in civilization and splendour from Abraham and Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh,—will be worth a whole library of such inferences.
I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of Egypt; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this assumption in proof of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological superstitions,—of certain talismans connected with star-magic,—plates and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and influences of celestial bodies,—there doubtless exist hints, if not direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each signifying a several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch; and when I collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired writings subsequent to the Mosaic, I cannot but regard the absence of any such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful assertions, or evident implications, of Egyptian idolatry in the former, both as an argument of incomparably greater value in support of the age and authenticity of the Pentateuch; and as a strong presumption in favour of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will pervade this series of disquisitions;—namely, that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or worship of the world as God.
The reason, or pretext, assigned by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren, the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their sacrifices would be an abomination to the Egyptians, may be urged as inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I reply, first, that the worship of the ox and cow was not, in and of itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment, though a very gross breach of the second;—for it is most certain that the ten tribes worshipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:—secondly, that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the worship of nature, or the {Greek (transliterated): to pan}, as God. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole world,—the positive and negative forces in the science of superstition;—for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be assigned for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes: but the second and the most important step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared under European civilization, the charms of a wandering life have been found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been induced to return, (see the confession in the preamble to the statute respecting the gipsies); {1}—how much greater must have been the danger of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed population? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the priestly kings—(for the priestly is ever the first form of government)—devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege?—For this rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible; in which the flesh of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of mankind; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed population. In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,—for so the consecrated animals were called, {Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,}—became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their gods.
The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and generally expressed in the following 'formula', in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G.
W-G=O;
or the World without God is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse—
G-W=O;
for which the theist substitutes—
G-W=G;
or that—
G=G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to
G+W. {2}
'Before the mountains were, Thou art.'—I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations.
The objects which, on my appointment as Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were,
1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other:—
2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius:—
3rd. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks: and,
lastly from all these,—namely, the mysteries, the sacerdotal religion, their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric poetry and the legendary belief of the people, and from the sources and productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks—to give a juster and more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine providence, than I have hitherto seen,—or rather let me say, than it appears to me possible to give by any other process.
The present Essay, however, I devote to the purpose of removing, or at least invalidating, one objection that I may reasonably anticipate, and which may be conveyed in the following question:—What proof have you of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece? What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic, (such I mean, as the republics of ancient Greece were) could not exist?
I know no better way in which I can reply to this objection, than by giving, as my proof and instance, the Prometheus of Æschylus, accompanied with an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work; of which it may be truly said, that it is more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the idea, than a particular tragic poem; and as a preface to this exposition, and for the twin purpose of rendering it intelligible, and of explaining its connexion with the whole scheme of my Essays, I entreat permission to insert a quotation from a work of my own, which has indeed been in print for many years, but which few of my auditors will probably have heard of, and still fewer, if any, have read.
"As the representative of the youth and approaching manhood of the
human intellect we have ancient Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,
and the other mythological bards, or, perhaps, the brotherhoods
impersonated under those names, to the time when the republics lost
their independence, and their learned men sank into copyists of, and
commentators on, the works of their forefathers. That we include these
as educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous,
dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects, that in whatever has
a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition of
mankind at large,—that in all which has been manifestly employed as a
co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral world, the
propagation of the Gospel, and in the intellectual progress of mankind
in the restoration of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous arts—it
were irreligion not to acknowledge the hand of divine providence. The
periods, too, join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the
religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the
prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the
mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With
these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets
were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented
polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The
mysteries and the mythical hymns and pæans shaped themselves gradually
into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical
tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that
of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal
theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that
is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by
painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which
did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for
which Greece existed had been completed."{3}
The Greeks alone brought forth philosophy in the proper and contra-distinguishable sense of the term, which we may compare to the coronation medal with its symbolic characters, as contrasted with the coins, issued under the same sovereign, current in the market. In the primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the {Greek (transliterated): ta peri archon}, 'de originibus rerum', as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This, I say, was the offspring of Greece, and elsewhere adopted only. The predisposition appears in their earliest poetry.
The first object, (or subject matter) of Greek philosophizing was in some measure philosophy itself;—not, indeed, as the product, but as the producing power—the productivity. Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between man and beast; a superiority of kind in addition to that of degree; the latter, that is, the difference in degree comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;—even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;—for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of Æschylus, appears, from the few genuine fragments of his writings that are yet extant, to have been deeply impressed,—that the mere understanding in man, considered as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs, indeed, from the intelligence displayed by other animals, and not in degree only; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same subject.
Long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry, that is, while yet poesy, in all its several species of verse, music, statuary, &c. continued mythic;—while yet poetry remained the union of the sensuous and the philosophic mind;—the efficient presence of the latter in the 'synthesis' of the two, had manifested itself in the sublime 'mythus peri geneseos tou nou en anthropois' concerning the 'genesis', or birth of the 'nous' or reason in man. This the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian 'myth', is a philosopheme, the very same in subject matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most characteristically different in tone and conception;—for the patriarchal religion, as the antithesis of pantheism, was necessarily personal; and the doctrines of a faith, the first ground of which and the primary enunciation, is the eternal I AM, must be in part historic and must assume the historic form. Hence the Hebrew record is a narrative, and the first instance of the fact is given as the origin of the fact.
That a profound truth—a truth that is, indeed, the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility—is involved in this characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but distinctly aware. This, hovever, does not preclude us from seeing, nay, as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred historian, it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust, safely consider the narration,—introduced, as it is here introduced, for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by comparison,—as an {Greek (transliterated): eros hierogluphikon},—and as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a 'synthesis' of poesy and philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations.
In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a philosophema {Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon}, —the tree of knowledge of good and evil,—an allegory, a {Greek (transliterated): propaideuma}, though the noblest and the most pregnant of its kind.
The generation of the {Greek (transliterated): nous}, or pure reason in man.
1. It was superadded or infused, 'a supra' to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis;—that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed:
2. The {Greek: nous}, or fire, was 'stolen,'—to mark its 'helero'—or rather its 'allo'-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler animals:
3. And stolen 'from Heaven,'—to mark its superiority in kind, as well as its essential diversity:
4. And it was a 'spark,'—to mark that it is not subject to any modifying reaction from that on which it immediately acts; that it suffers no change, and receives no accession, from the inferior, but multiplies it-self by conversion, without being alloyed by, or amalgamated with, that which it potentiates, ennobles, and transmutes:
5. And lastly, (in order to imply the homogeneity of the donor and of the gift) it was stolen by a 'god,' and a god of the race before the dynasty of Jove,—Jove the binder of reluctant powers, the coercer arid entrancer of free spirits under the fetters of shape, and mass, and passive mobility; but likewise by a god of the same race and essence with Jove, and linked of yore in closest and friendliest intimacy with him. This, to mark the pre-existence, in order of thought, of the 'nous', as spiritual, both to the objects of sense, and to their products, formed as it were, by the precipitation, or, if I may dare adopt the bold language of Leibnitz, by a coagulation of spirit. In other words this derivation of the spark from above, and from a god anterior to the Jovial dynasty—(that is, to the submersion of spirits in material forms),—was intended to mark the transcendancy of the 'nous', the contra-distinctive faculty of man, as timeless, {Greek (transliterated): achronon ti,} and, in this negative sense, eternal. It signified, I say, its superiority to, and its diversity from, all things that subsist in space and time, nay, even those which, though spaceless, yet partake of time, namely, souls or understandings. For the soul, or understanding, if it be defined physiologically as the principle of sensibility, irritability, and growth, together with the functions of the organs, which are at once the representatives and the instruments of these, must be considered 'in genere', though not in degree or dignity, common to man and the inferior animals. It was the spirit, the 'nous', which man alone possessed. And I must be permitted to suggest that this notion deserves some respect, were it only that it can shew a semblance, at least, of sanction from a far higher authority.
The Greeks agreed with the cosmogonies of the East in deriving all sensible forms from the indistinguishable. The latter we find designated as the {Greek: to amorphon}, the {Greek: hudor prokosmikon}, the {Greek: chaos}, as the essentially unintelligible, yet necessarily presumed, basis or sub-position of all positions. That it is, scientifically considered, an indispensable idea for the human mind, just as the mathematical point, &c. for the geometrician;—of this the various systems of our geologists and cosmogonists, from Burnet to La Place, afford strong presumption. As an idea, it must be interpreted as a striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence,—or potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualized. In the language of the mysteries, it was the 'esurience', the {Greek: pothos} or 'desideratum', the unfuelled fire, the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal goddess, the origin and interpretation of whose name is found in the Hebrew root signifying hunger, and thence capacity. It was, in short, an effort to represent the universal ground of all differences distinct or opposite, but in relation to which all 'antithesis' as well as all 'antitheta', existed only potentially. This was the container and withholder, (such is the primitive sense of the Hebrew word rendered darkness (Gen. 1. 2.)) out of which light, that is, the 'lux lucifica', as distinguished from 'lumen seu lux phænomenalis', was produced;—say, rather, that which, producing itself into light as the one pole or antagonist power, remained in the other pole as darkness, that is, gravity, or the principle of mass, or wholeness without distinction of parts.
And here the peculiar, the philosophic, genius of Greece began its f¦tal throb. Here it individualized itself in contra-distinction from the Hebrew archology, on the one side, and from the Ph¦nician, on the other. The Ph¦nician confounded the indistinguishable with the absolute, the 'Alpha' and 'Omega', the ineffable 'causa sui'. It confounded, I say, the multeity below intellect, that is, unintelligible from defect of the subject, with the absolute identity above all intellect, that is, transcending comprehension by the plenitude of its excellence. With the Phoenician sages the cosmogony was their theogony and 'vice versa'. Hence, too, flowed their theurgic rites, their magic, their worship ('cultus et apotheosis') of the plastic forces, chemical and vital, and these, or their notions respecting these, formed the hidden meaning, the soul, as it were, of which the popular and civil worship was the body with its drapery.
The Hebrew wisdom imperatively asserts an unbeginning creative One, who neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world out of himself by emanation, or evolution;—but who willed it, and it was! {Greek: Ta athea egeneto, kai egeneto chaos,}—and this chaos, the eternal will, by the spirit and the word, or express 'fiat',—again acting as the impregnant, distinctive, and ordonnant power,—enabled to become a world—{Greek: kosmeisthai.} So must it be when a religion, that shall preclude superstition on the one hand, and brute indifference on the other, is to be true for the meditative sage, yet intelligible, or at least apprehensible, for all but the fools in heart.
The Greek philosopheme, preserved for us in the Æschylean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z,—(I take these letters in their algebraic application)—an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent to the matter of the world, {Greek: hulae akosmos}—no less than to the {Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.} In this point, likewise, the Greek accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician—that it held the antecedent X Y Z to be super-sensuous and divine. But on the other hand, it coincides with the Ph¦nician in considering this antecedent ground of corporeal matter,—{Greek: ton somaton kai tou somatikou,}—not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion and the still continuing substance. 'Maleria substat adliuc'. The corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its corporeity. Matter, as distinguished from body, was a 'non ens', a simple apparition, 'id quod mere videtur'; but to body the elder physico-theology of the Greeks allowed a participation in entity. It was 'spiritus ipse, oppressus, dormiens, et diversis modis somnians'. In short, body was the productive power suspended, and as it were, quenched in the product. This may be rendered plainer by reflecting, that, in the pure Semitic scheme there are four terms introduced in the solution of the problem,
1. the beginning, self-sufficing, and immutable Creator;
2. the antecedent night as the identity, or including germ, of the light and darkness, that is, gravity;
3. the chaos; and
4. the material world resulting from the powers communicated by the divine 'fiat'. In the Phoenician scheme there are in fact but two—a self-organizing chaos, and the omniforrn nature as the result. In the Greek scheme we have three terms, 1. the 'hyle', {Greek: hulae}, which holds the place of the chaos, or the waters, in the true system; 2. {Greek: ta somata}, answering to the Mosaic heaven and earth; and 3. the Saturnian {Greek: chronoi huperchonioi},—which answer to the antecedent darkness of the Mosaic scheme, but to which the elder physico-theologists attributed a self-polarizing power—a 'natura gemina quæ fit et facit, agit et patitur'. In other words, the 'Elohim' of the Greeks were still but a 'natura deorum', {Greek: to theion}, in which a vague plurality adhered; or if any unity was imagined, it was not personal—not a unity of excellence, but simply an expression of the negative—that which was to pass, but which had not yet passed, into distinct form.
All this will seem strange and obscure at first reading,—perhaps fantastic. But it will only seem so. Dry and prolix, indeed, it is to me in the writing, full as much as it can be to others in the attempt to understand it. But I know that, once mastered, the idea will be the key to the whole cypher of the Æschylean mythology. The sum stated in the terms of philosophic logic is this: First, what Moses appropriated to the chaos itself: what Moses made passive and a 'materia subjecta et lucis et tenebrarum', the containing {Greek: prothemenon} of the 'thesis' and 'antithesis';—this the Greek placed anterior to the chaos;—the chaos itself being the struggle between the 'hyperchronia', the {Greek: ideai pronomoi}, as the unevolved, unproduced, 'prothesis', of which {Greek: idea kai nomos}—(idea and law)—are the 'thesis' and 'antithesis'. (I use the word 'produced' in the mathematical sense, as a point elongating itself to a bipolar line.) Secondly, what Moses establishes, not merely as a transcendant 'Monas', but as an individual {Greek: Henas} likewise;—this the Greek took as a harmony, {Greek: Theoi hathanatoi, to theion}, as distinguished from {Greek: o Theos}—or, to adopt the more expressive language of the Pythagoreans and cabalists 'numen numerantis'; and these are to be contemplated as the identity.
Now according to the Greek philosopheme or 'mythus', in these, or in this identity, there arose a war, schism, or division, that is, a polarization into thesis and antithesis. In consequence of this schism in the {Greek: to theion}, the 'thesis' becomes 'nomos', or law, and the 'antithesis' becomes 'idea', but so that the 'nomos' is 'nomos', because, and only because, the 'idea' is 'idea': the 'nomos' is not idea, only because the idea has not become 'nomos'. And this 'not' must be heedfully borne in mind through the whole interpretation of this most profound and pregnant philosopheme. The 'nomos' is essentially idea, but existentially it is idea 'substans', that is, 'id quod stat subtus', understanding 'sensu generalissimo'. The 'idea', which now is no longer idea, has substantiated itself, become real as opposed to idea, and is henceforward, therefore, 'substans in substantiato'. The first product of its energy is the thing itself: 'ipsa se posuit et jam facta est ens positum'. Still, however, its productive energy is not exhausted in this product, but overflows, or is effluent, as the specific forces, properties, faculties, of the product. It reappears, in short, in the body, as the function of the body. As a sufficient illustration, though it cannot be offered as a perfect instance, take the following.
'In the world we see every where evidences of a unity, which the
component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily
presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those
parts, or even of their existing at all. This antecedent unity, or
cause and principle of each union, it has since the time of Bacon and
Kepler, been customary to call a law. This crocus, for instance, or
any flower the reader may have in sight or choose to bring before his
fancy;—that the root, stem, leaves, petals, &c. cohere as one plant,
is owing to an antecedent power or principle in the seed, which
existed before a single particle of the matters that constitute the
size and visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the seed? Here
too the same necessity meets us, an antecedent unity (I speak not of
the parent plant, but of an agency antecedent in order of operance,
yet remaining present as the conservative and reproductive power,)
must here too be supposed. Analyze the seed with the finest tools, and
let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses,—what do you
find?—means and instruments, a wondrous fairy-tale of nature,
magazines of food, stores of various sorts, pipes, spiracles,
defences,—a house of many chambers, and the owner and inhabitant
invisible.'{4}
Now, compare a plant, thus contemplated, with an animal. In the former, the productive energy exhausts itself, and as it were, sleeps in the product or 'organismus'—in its root, stem, foliage, blossoms, seed. Its balsams, gums, resins, 'aromata', and all other bases of its sensible qualities, are, it is well known, mere excretions from the vegetable, eliminated, as lifeless, from the actual plant. The qualities are not its properties, but the properties, or far rather, the dispersion and volatilization of these extruded and rejected bases. But in the animal it is otherwise. Here the antecedent unity—the productive and self-realizing idea—strives, with partial success to re-emancipate itself from its product, and seeks once again to become 'idea': vainly indeed: for in order to this, it must be retrogressive, and it hath subjected itself to the fates, the evolvers of the endless thread—to the stern necessity of progression. 'Idea' itself it cannot become, but it may in long and graduated process, become an image, an ANALOGON, an anti-type of IDEA. And this {Greek: eidolon} may approximate to a perfect likeness. 'Quod est simile, nequit esse idem'. Thus, in the lower animals, we see this process of emancipation commence with the intermediate link, or that which forms the transition from properties to faculties, namely, with sensation. Then the faculties of sense, locomotion, construction, as, for instance, webs, hives, nests, &c. Then the functions; as of instinct, memory, fancy, instinctive intelligence, or understanding, as it exists in the most intelligent animals. Thus the idea (henceforward no more idea, but irrecoverable by its own fatal act) commences the process of its own transmutation, as 'substans in substantiato', as the 'enteleche', or the 'vis formatrix', and it finishes the process as 'substans e substantiato', that is, as the understanding.
If, for the purpose of elucidating this process, I might be allowed to imitate the symbolic language of the algebraists, and thus to regard the successive steps of the process as so many powers and dignities of the 'nomos' or law, the scheme would be represented thus {N^1 represents N superscript 1, i.e. N to the power of 1. text Ed.}:—
Nomos^1 = Product:
N^2 = Property:
N^3 = Faculty:
N^4 = Function:
N^5 = Understanding;—
which is, indeed, in one sense, itself a 'nomos', inasmuch as it is the index of the 'nomos', as well as its highest function; but, like the hand of a watch, it is likewise a 'nomizomenon'. It is a verb, but still a verb passive.
On the other hand, idea is so far co-essential with 'nomos', that by its co-existence—(not confluence)—with the 'nomos' {Greek: hen nomizomenois} (with the 'organismus' and its faculties and functions in the man,) it becomes itself a 'nomos'. But, observe, a 'nomos autonomos', or containing its law in itself likewise;—even as the 'nomos' produces for its highest product the understanding, so the idea, in its opposition and, of course, its correspondence to the 'nomos', begets in itself an 'analogon' to product; and this is self-consciousness. But as the product can never become idea, so neither can the idea (if it is to remain idea) become or generate a distinct product. This 'analogon' of product is to be itself; but were it indeed and substantially a product, it would cease to be self. It would be an object for a subject, not (as it is and must be) an object that is its own subject, and 'vice versa'; a conception which, if the uncombining and infusile genius of our language allowed it, might be expressed by the term subject-object. Now, idea, taken in indissoluble connection with this 'analogon' of product is mind, that which knows itself, and the existence of which may be inferred, but cannot appear or become a 'phænomenon'.
By the benignity of Providence, the truths of most importance in themselves, and which it most concerns us to know, are familiar to us, even from childhood. Well for us if we do not abuse this privilege, and mistake the familiarity of words which convey these truths for a clear understanding of the truths themselves! If the preceding disquisition, with all its subtlety and all its obscurity, should answer no other purpose, it will still have been neither purposeless, nor devoid of utility, should it only lead us to sympathize with the strivings of the human intellect, awakened to the infinite importance of the inward oracle {Greek: gnothi seauton}—and almost instinctively shaping its course of search in conformity with the Platonic intimation:—{Greek: psuchaes phusin haxios logou katanoaesai oiei dunaton einai, haneu aes tou holou phuseos}; but be this as it may, the ground work of the Æschylean 'mythus' is laid in the definition of idea and law, as correlatives that mutually interpret each the other;—an idea, with the adequate power of realizing itself being a law, and a law considered abstractedly from, or in the absence of, the power of manifesting itself in its appropriate product being an idea. Whether this be true philosophy, is not the question. The school of Aristotle would, of course, deny, the Platonic affirm it; for in this consists the difference of the two schools. Both acknowledge ideas as distinct from the mere generalizations from objects of sense: both would define an idea as an 'ens rationale', to which there can be no adequate correspondent in sensible experience. But, according to Aristotle, ideas are regulative only, and exist only as functions of the mind:—according to Plato, they are constitutive likewise, and one in essence with the power and life of nature;—{Greek: hen log'o z'oae aen, kai hae z'oae haen to ph'os t'on anthr'op'on}. And this I assert, was the philosophy of the mythic poets, who, like Æschylus, adapted the secret doctrines of the mysteries as the (not always safely disguised) antidote to the debasing influences of the religion of the state.
But to return and conclude this preliminary explanation. We have only to substitute the term will, and the term constitutive power, for nomos or law, and the process is the same. Permit me to represent the identity or 'prothesis' by the letter Z and the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' by X and Y respectively. Then I say X by not being Y, but in consequence of being the correlative opposite of Y, is will; and Y, by not being X, but the correlative and opposite of X, is nature,—'natura naturans', {Greek: nomos physikos}. Hence we may see the necessity of contemplating the idea now as identical with the reason, and now as one with the will, and now as both in one, in which last case I shall, for convenience sake, employ the term 'Nous', the rational will, the practical reason.
We are now out of the holy jungle of transcendental mataphysics; if indeed, the reader's patience shall have had strength and persistency enough to allow me to exclaim—
Ivimus ambo
Per densas umbras: at tenet umbra Deum.
Not that I regard the foregoing as articles of faith, or as all true;—I have implied the contrary by contrasting it with, at least, by shewing its disparateness from, the Mosaic, which, 'bona fide', I do regard as the truth. But I believe there is much, and profound, truth in it, 'supra captum {Greek: psilosoph'on}, qui non agnoscunt divinum, ideoque nec naturam, nisi nomine, agnoscunt; sed res cunctas ex sensuali corporeo cogitant, quibus hac ex causa interiora clausa manent, et simul cum illis exteriora quæ proxima interioribus sunt'! And with no less confidence do I believe that the positions above given, true or false, are contained in the Promethean 'mythus'.
In this 'mythus', Jove is the impersonated representation or symbol of the 'nomos'—'Jupiter est quodcunque vides'. He is the 'mens agitans molem', but at the same time, the 'molem corpoream ponens et constituens'. And so far the Greek philosopheme does not differ essentially from the cosmotheism, or identification of God with the universe, in which consisted the first apostacy of mankind after the flood, when they combined to raise a temple to the heavens, and which is still the favored religion of the Chinese. Prometheus, in like manner, is the impersonated representative of Idea, or of the same power as Jove, but contemplated as independent and not immersed in the product,—as law 'minus' the productive energy. As such it is next to be seen what the several significances of each must or may be according to the philosophic conception; and of which significances, therefore, should we find in the philosopheme a correspondent to each, we shall be entitled to assert that such are the meanings of the fable. And first of Jove:—
Jove represents
1. 'Nomos' generally, as opposed to Idea or 'Nous':
2. 'Nomos archinomos', now as the father, now as the sovereign, and now as the includer and representative of the 'nomoi ouoanioi kosmikoi', or 'dii majores', who, had joined or come over to Jove in the first schism:
3. 'Nomos damnaetaes'—the subjugator of the spirits, of the {Greek: ideai pronomoi}, who, thus subjugated, became '{Greek: nomoi huponomioi hupospondoi}, Titanes pacati, dii minores', that is, the elements considered as powers reduced to obedience under yet higher powers than themselves:
4. 'Nomos {Greek: politikos}', law in the Pauline sense, '{Greek: nomos allotrionomos}' in antithesis to '{Greek: nomos autonomos}'.
{Footnote 1: The Act meant is probably the 5. Eliz. c. 20, enforcing the two previous Acts of Henry VIII. and Philip and Mary, and reciting that natural born Englishmen had 'become of the fellowship of the said vagabonds, by transforming or disguising themselves in their apparel,' &c.—Ed.}
{Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge was in the constant habit of expressing himself on paper by the algebraic symbols. They have an uncouth look in the text of an ordinary essay, and I have sometimes ventured to render them by the equivalent words. But most of the readers of these volumes will know that—means 'less by', or,' without'; + 'more by', or,' in addition to'; = 'equal to', or, 'the same as'.—Ed}.
{Footnote 3: Friend, III. Essay, 9.}
{Footnote 4: Aids to Reflection. Moral and Religious Aphorisms. Aphorism VI. Ed.}