Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[116] This passage appears as here in the first edition of the 'Aids,' 1825.—Ed.

[117] The same, slightly different, appears in Coleridge's 'Literary Remains,' 1838, v. iii., p. 328.—Ed.

[118] If the Law worked on the Will, it would be the working of an extrinsic and alien force, and, as St. Paul profoundly argues, would prove the Will sinful.

[119] For a specimen of these Rabbinical dotages I refer, not to the writings of mystics and enthusiasts, but to the shrewd and witty Dr. South, one of whose most elaborate sermons stands prominent among the many splendid extravaganzas on this subject.

APHORISM XI.

In whatever age and country it is the prevailing mind and character of the nation to regard the present life as subordinate to a life to come, and to mark the present state, the World of their Senses, by signs, instruments, and mementos of its connexion with a future state and a spiritual world;—where the Mysteries of Faith are brought within the hold of the people at large, not by being explained away in the vain hope of accommodating them to the average of their understanding, but by being made the objects of love by their combination with events and epochs of history, with national traditions, with the monuments and dedications of ancestral faith and zeal, with memorial and symbolical observances, with the realizing influences of social devotion, and above all, by early and habitual association with Acts of the Will, there Religion is. There, however obscured by the hay and straw of human Will-work, the foundation is safe. In that country, and under the predominance of such maxims the National Church is no mere State-Institute. It is the State itself in its intensest federal union; yet at the same moment the Guardian and Representative of all personal Individuality. For the Church is the Shrine of Morality; and in Morality alone the citizen asserts and reclaims his personal independence, his integrity. Our outward acts are efficient, and most often possible, only by coalition. As an efficient power, the agent, is but a fraction of unity: he becomes an integer only in the recognition and performance of the Moral Law. Nevertheless it is most true (and a truth which cannot with safety be overlooked) that morality as morality, has no existence for a people. It is either absorbed and lost in the quicksands of prudential calculus, or it is taken up and transfigured into the duties and mysteries of religion. And no wonder: since morality (including the personal being, the I am, as its subject) is itself a mystery, and the ground and suppositum of all other mysteries, relatively to man.

APHORISM XII.

Paley not a Moralist.

Schemes of conduct, grounded on calculations of self-interest; or on the average consequences of actions, supposing them general; form a branch of Political Economy, to which let all due honour be given. Their utility is not here questioned. But however estimable within their own sphere, such schemes, or any one of them in particular, may be, they do not belong to Moral Science, to which both in kind and purpose, they are in all cases foreign, and, when substituted for it, hostile. Ethics, or the Science of Morality, does indeed in no wise exclude the consideration of action; but it contemplates the same in its originating spiritual source, without reference to space or time or sensible existence. Whatever springs out of the perfect law of freedom, which exists only by its unity with the will of God, its inherence in the Word of God, and its communion with the Spirit of God—that (according to the principles of Moral Science) is good—it is light and righteousness and very truth. Whatever seeks to separate itself from the Divine Principle, and proceeds from a false centre in the agent's particular will, is evil—a work of darkness and contradiction. It is sin and essential falsehood. Not the outward deed, constructive, destructive, or neutral,—not the deed as a possible object of the senses,—is the object of Ethical Science. For this is no compost, collectorium or inventory of single duties; nor does it seek in the multitudinous sea, in the pre-determined waves, and tides and currents of nature that freedom, which is exclusively an attribute of spirit. Like all other pure sciences, whatever it enunciates, and whatever it concludes, it enunciates and concludes absolutely. Strictness is its essential character: and its first Proposition is, Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. For as the Will or Spirit, the Source and Substance of Moral Good, is one and all in every part; so must it be the totality, the whole articulated series of single acts, taken as unity, that can alone, in the severity of science, be recognised as the proper counterpart and adequate representative of a good Will. Is it in this or that limb, or not rather in the whole body, the entire organismus that the law of life reflects itself?—Much less, then, can the law of the Spirit work in fragments.