Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with—"Them's the jockies for me!" I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head.
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Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said:—"How majestic!"—(It was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying—"Thank you, Sir! that is the exact word for it"—when he added, eodem flatu)—"Yes! how very pretty!"
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July 8. 1827.
BULL AND WATERLAND.—THE TRINITY.
Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.[1]
In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may express the formula thus:—
God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The
Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of Rome.—ED.]