That we are right in pronouncing Coleridge as the master who has formed this coterie of writers, many passages in the present work would testify; but Archdeacon Hare, the author of the greater portion of it, has very lately, in the plenitude of his years, proclaimed his great veneration, and a sort of allegiance, towards Coleridge the philosopher. To Coleridge the poet be all honour paid—we join in whatever applause may, within reasonable compass, be bestowed upon him; but Coleridge the sage, the metaphysician, the divine, is a very different person; and with all his undoubted genius, the very last man, we humbly conceive, to give a wise and steady direction to the thinking faculty of others. It is thus, however, that Archdeacon Hare, in his late Memoir of John Sterling, speaks of this wilful, fitful, erratic genius:—"At that time it was beginning to be acknowledged by more than a few that Coleridge is the true sovereign of modern English thought. The Aids to Reflection had recently been published, and were doing the work for which they were so admirably fitted; that book to which many, as has been said by one of Sterling's chief friends, 'owe even their own selves.' Few felt the obligation more deeply than Sterling. 'To Coleridge (he wrote to me in 1836) I owe education. He taught me to believe that an empirical philosophy is none; that faith is the highest reason; that all criticism, whether of literature, laws, or manners, is blind, without the power of discerning the organic unity of the object, &c., &c.'" He taught him to believe he had a meaning where he had none, to slight authors as shallow because they were lucid and intelligible, to substitute occasional efforts, and a dogmatism arising out of generous emotions, for the steady discipline of philosophy, and the calm inquiry after truth. The whole intellectual career of Sterling proves how unfortunate he was in having fallen under the dominion of this "true sovereign of modern English thought." With the finest moral temper in the world, we find him never, for two years together, with the same set of opinions, and his set of opinions at each time were such as a Coleridgean only could hold together in harmony.
Let any one not overawed by sounding reputations, examine the Aids to Reflection,—this work which gives a claim to the sovereignty of modern English thought,—the characteristic that will chiefly strike him is the predominance of hard writing, which at first wears the appearance, and is found to be the melancholy substitute, of hard thinking. On closer examination, he will be surprised to find how much space is wasted in verbal quibbles, which the author in vain endeavours to raise into importance; and how often the quotations from Leighton, dignified with the name of aphorisms, are such as any page of any sermon would have supplied him with. Amidst this jumble of crude metaphysics and distorted theology, there is from time to time an admirable observation admirably expressed; and there is also from time to time an absurdity so flagrant, that it requires all the author's skill of composition to redeem it from the charge of utter nonsense.
At the time when Coleridge wrote, what are known especially as German metaphysics had hardly reached our shores. He had studied them, or, like every active mind, had rather studied on them. They had given an impulse and direction to his own trains of thought; and if Coleridge had been capable of a continuous application, and a complete execution of any one work, he might have introduced a body of metaphysics into this country which, though due in its origin to German thinkers, would still have been justly entitled his own. But for this continuous labour he was not disposed: we have, therefore, a mere dim broken outline of a system of philosophy (intelligible only to those who have studied that system in other works) applied, in a very strange manner, to the dogmatic tenets of theology. This forms the basis of the Aids to Reflection; and very much of aid or assistance it must bring! We venture to say, that no one unacquainted, from any other source, with the speculations of Kant or Schelling,—let him give what attention, or bring what brains he may to his task,—can understand the refracted and partial representation of their tenets which Coleridge occasionally gives. Take, for instance, a long note, which every reader of the book must remember, upon Thesis and Antithesis, and Punctum Indifferens. With all the assistance of scholastic and geometrical terms, and that illustration abruptly enough introduced of "sulphuretted hydrogen," the reader, we are persuaded, if he comes fresh to the subject, must be utterly at a loss for a meaning. We have diagram and tabular view, and algebraic signs, and chemical illustration, and all the paraphernalia of a most desperate development of thought, and not one sentence of lucid explanation.
On the great subject of the existence of God, Coleridge appears to us to assume a most unsatisfactory and a somewhat perilous position. To oppose the school of Locke and Paley—far too simple for his taste—he gives a validity to the ambitious subtleties which made Shelley an atheist. The great argument from design, so convincing to us all, he slights,—it is too vulgar and commonplace for his purpose,—and finds his grounds of belief in the practical reason of Kant, (an afterthought of the philosopher of Kœnigsberg, and evidently at issue with the main tenets of his system,) or in certain ontological dogmas, which of all things are most open to dispute.
"I hold, then, it is true," he says, "that all the (so-called) demonstrations of a God either prove too little, as that from the order or apparent purpose in nature; or too much, namely, that the world is itself God; or they clandestinely involve the conclusion in the premises, passing off the mere analysis or explication of an assertion for the proof of it—a species of logical legerdemain not unlike that of the jugglers at a fair, who, putting into their mouths what seems to be a walnut, draw out a score yards of ribbon, as in the postulate of a First Cause. And, lastly, in all these demonstrations, the demonstrators presuppose the idea or conception of a God without being able to authenticate it; that is, to give an account whence they obtained it. For it is clear that the proof first mentioned, and the most natural and convincing of all (the cosmological, I mean, or that from the order of nature), presupposes the ontological; that is, the proof of a God from the necessity and necessary objectivity of the Idea. If the latter can assure us of a God as an existing reality. the former will go far to prove his power, wisdom, and benevolence. All this I hold. But I also hold, that the truth the hardest to demonstrate, is the one which, of all others, least needs to be demonstrated; that though there may be no conclusive demonstrations of a good, wise, living, and personal God, there are so many convincing reasons for it within and without—a grain of sand sufficing, and a whole universe at hand to echo the decision!—that for every mind not devoid of all reason, and desperately conscience-proof, the truth which it is the least possible to prove, it is little else than impossible not to believe,—only indeed, just so much short of impossible as to leave some room for the will, and the moral election, and thereby to keep it a truth of religion, and the possible subject of a commandment."—(P. 132.)
We are not very partial to this notion of a truth of the reason being a subject for the exercise of moral obedience, and least of all in the case of a truth, the recognition of which must precede any intelligible exercise of the religious conscience. In common with the vast majority of mankind, we hold that the cosmological argument is complete in itself. Ontology, as a branch of metaphysics placed in opposition to psychology, is, by the greater number of reflecting men, regarded as a mere shadow, the region of utter and hopeless obscurity. We know nothing in itself,—only its phenomena; being escapes us, except as that to which the phenomena belong. If we prove, or rather if we see, order and wisdom in the material world, we have all the demonstration of a being, intelligent and wise, that our minds are capable of receiving. We have the same proof for the being of God, as we have for the existence of matter or of mind; we cannot have more, and we have not a jot less.
By way of compensation, our philosopher, when he is once in possession of the Idea of God, evolves from it, by unassisted reason, the most profound mysteries of revealed religion. Mark here the elated step of the triumphant logician:—
"I form a certain notion in my mind, and say, 'This is what I understand by the term God.' From books and conversation, I find that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word. I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the involution and evolution of terms [the conjurer that he is!] and prove, to as many as agree with me in my premises, that the notion God involves the notion Trinity."—(P. 126.)
The further description of this successful process of the involution and evolution of terms is postponed to a future work. It was a strange and somewhat affected position that Coleridge assumed between the philosophical and the religious world. He would belong to both, and yet would be unhappy if you did not regard him as standing apart and alone. He was the Punctum Indifferens, which might be both, or neither. The philosopher among divines, the divine among philosophers, he was delighted to appear to each class in a masquerade drawn from the wardrobe of the other. Even on the most ordinary occasions, he would sometimes eke out, or obscure, his explanations by a little of the dialect of the chapel, or the meeting-house. Near the commencement of the book is the following note:—
"Distinction between Thought and Attention.—By Thought is here meant the voluntary reproduction in our own minds of those states of consciousness, or (to use a phrase more familiar to the religious reader) of those inward experiences, to which, as to his best and most authentic documents, the teacher of moral and religious truth refers us. In Attention, we keep the mind passive; in Thought, we rouse it into activity. In the former, we submit to an impression,—we keep the mind steady in order to receive the stamp. In the latter, we seek to imitate the artist, while we ourselves make a copy or duplicate of his work. We may learn arithmetic or the elements of geometry by continued attention alone; but self-knowledge, or an insight into the laws and constitution of the human mind, and, the grounds of religion and true morality, in addition to the effort of attention, requires the energy of thought."