2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First, where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case per contra. A. takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true, neither proves the truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the whole truth.
3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I can know that this idea—my own invention—is the truth, by which the phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence from the earliest times to the present,—which shall comprehend within it _all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals or effects;—if I show you that such an event or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,—that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there,—that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress of the idea towards realization;—if this idea, not only like a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a perfect birth;—then, I think, I have a right to say that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which ought to be proved,—the ideal truth,—the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.[1]
[Footnote 1: I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the "Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.—ED.]
_April _18. 1833.
CHURCH OF ROME.—CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.
In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the Papacy, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. They might remain in terminis, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them,—such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,—originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth.
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.
The Papal church has had three phases,—anti-Caesarean, extra-national, anti-Christian.
_April _20. 1833.