[December 13, 1817.]
My dear Sir,—I thank you for the transcript. The lecture[154] went off beyond my expectations; and in several parts, where the thoughts were the same, more happily expressed extempore than in the Essay on the Science of Method[155] for the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana.” However, you shall receive the first correct copy of the latter that I can procure. I would that I could present it to you, as it was written; though I am not inclined to quarrel with the judgment and prudence of omission, as far as the public are concerned. Be assured, I shall not fail to avail myself of your kind invitation, and that time passes happily with me under your roof, receiving and returning. Be pleased to make my best respects to Mrs. Green, and I beg her acceptance of the “Hebrew Dirge” with my free translation,[156] of which I will, as soon as it is printed, send her the music, viz. the original melody, and Bishop’s additional music. Of this I am convinced, that a dozen of such “very pretty,” and “so sweet,” and “how smooth,” “well, that is charming” compositions would gain me more admiration with the English public than twice the number of poems twice as good as the “Ancient Mariner,” the “Christabel,” the “Destiny of Nations,” or the “Ode to the Departing Year.”
My own opinion of the German philosophers does not greatly differ from yours; much in several of them is unintelligible to me, and more unsatisfactory. But I make a division. I reject Kant’s stoic principle, as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,”[157] he treats the affections as indifferent (ἀδιάφορα) in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking, and without any feeling of love for virtue, yet acted virtuously, because and only because his duty, is more worthy of our esteem, than the man whose affections were aidant to and congruous with his conscience. For it would imply little less than that things not the objects of the moral will or under its control were yet indispensable to its due practical direction. In other words, it would subvert his own system. Likewise, his remarks on prayer in his “Religion innerhalb der reinen Vernunft,” are crass, nay vulgar and as superficial even in psychology as they are low in taste. But with these exceptions, I reverence Immanuel Kant with my whole heart and soul, and believe him to be the only philosopher, for all men who have the power of thinking. I cannot conceive the liberal pursuit or profession, in which the service derived from a patient study of his works would not be incalculably great, both as cathartic, tonic, and directly nutritious.
Fichte in his moral system is but a caricature of Kant’s, or rather, he is a Zeno, with the cowl, rope, and sackcloth of a Carthusian monk. His metaphysics have gone by; but he hath merit of having prepared the ground for, and laid the first stone of, the dynamic philosophy by the substitution of Act for Thing, Der einführen Actionen statt der Dinge an sich. Of the Natur-philosophen, as far as physical dynamics are concerned and as opposed to the mechanic corpuscular system, I think very highly of some parts of their system, as being sound and scientific—metaphysics of Quality, not less evident to my reason than the metaphysics of Quantity, that is, Geometry, etc.; of the rest and larger part, as tentative, experimental, and highly useful to a chemist, zoologist, and physiologist, as unfettering the mind, exciting its inventive powers. But I must be understood as confining these observations to the works of Schelling and H. Steffens. Of Schelling’s Theology and Theanthroposophy, the telescopic stars and nebulæ are too many for my “grasp of eye.” (N. B. The catachresis is Dryden’s, not mine.) In short, I am half inclined to believe that both he and his friend Francis Baader are but half in earnest, and paint the veil to hide not the face but the want of one.[158] Schelling is too ambitious, too eager to be the Grand Seignior of the allein-selig Philosophie to be altogether a trustworthy philosopher. But he is a man of great genius; and, however unsatisfied with his conclusions, one cannot read him without being either whetted or improved. Of the others, saving Jacobi, who is a rhapsodist, excellent in sentences all in small capitals, I know either nothing, or too little to form a judgement. As my opinions were formed before I was acquainted with the schools of Fichte and Schelling, so do they remain independent of them, though I con- and pro-fess great obligations to them in the development of my thoughts, and yet seem to feel that I should have been more useful had I been left to evolve them myself without knowledge of their coincidence. I do not very much like the Sternbald[159] of our friend; it is too like an imitation of Heinse’s “Ardinghello,”[160] and if the scene in the Painter’s Garden at Rome is less licentious than the correspondent abomination in the former work, it is likewise duller.
I have but merely looked into Jean Paul’s “Vorschule der Aisthetik,”[161] but I found one sentence almost word for word the same as one written by myself in a fragment of an Essay on the Supernatural[162] many years ago, viz. that the presence of a ghost is the terror, not what he does, a principle which Southey, too, overlooks in his “Thalaba” and “Kehama.”
But I must conclude. Believe me, dear sir, with unfeigned regard and esteem, your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.
I expect my eldest son, Hartley Coleridge, to-day from Oxford.
CCXIX. TO CHARLES AUGUSTUS TULK.[163]
Highgate, Thursday evening, 1818.