CONSCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY
From what reasons do I believe in continuous and ever-continuable consciousness? From conscience! Not for myself, but for my conscience, that is, my affections and duties towards others, I should have no self—for self is definition, but all boundary implies neighbourhood and is knowable only by neighbourhood or relations. Does the understanding say nothing in favour of immortality? It says nothing for or against; but its silence gives consent, and is better than a thousand arguments such as mere understanding could afford. But miracles! "Do you speak of them as proofs or as natural consequences of revelation, whose presence is proof only by precluding the disproof that would arise from their absence?" "Nay, I speak of them as of positive fundamental proofs." Then I dare answer you "Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in morality, contradictions in reason. God the Truth, the actuality of logic, the very logos—He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the properties of a triangle by the confusion of all properties! If a miracle merely means an event before inexperienced, it proves only itself, and the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other definition be given of it, or rather attempted (for no other not involving direct contradiction can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls darkness light, and makes Ignorance the mother of Malignity, the appointed nurse of religion—which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculating and conjectural understanding. Seven years ago, but oh! in what happier times—I wrote thus—
O ye hopes! that stir within me!
Health comes with you from above!
God is with me! God is in me!
I cannot die: for life is love!
And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I love—and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible prophecy!
And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe immortality? Because I ought, therefore I must!
[The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is quoted, were written in August, 1801. [P.W., 1893, p. 159.] If the note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the Courier office in the Strand.]
THE CAP OF LIBERTY
Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he hath"—that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe the Lapis Infernalis.