Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge Samuel Taylor
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Название: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Автор: Coleridge Samuel Taylor

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Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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СКАЧАТЬ I mostly forget.30

* * * * *

      Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity, however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions.

* * * * *

      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.

* * * * *

      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!"

* * * * *

      July 8. 1827

BULL AND WATERLAND.—THE TRINITY

      Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.31

      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.

* * * * *

      The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment, heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived language.

* * * * *

      How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other. They must improve this and that text, and they must do so and so in a prayerful way; and so on. Why not use common language? A young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the marrow of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London upon her marrow-bones only.

* * * * *

      July 9. 1827

SCALE OF ANIMAL BEING

      In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature. There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.32

      July 12. 1827

POPEDOM.—SCANDERBEG.—THOMAS À BECKET.—PURE AGES OF GREEK, ITALIAN, AND ENGLISH.—LUTHER.—BAXTER.—ALGERNON SIDNEY'S STYLE.—ARIOSTO AND TASSO.– PROSE AND POETRY.—THE FATHERS.—RHENFERD.—JACOB BEHMEN

      What a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo, and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian politics.

* * * * *

      Scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for Walter Scott; and so would Thomas à Becket, if it is not rather too much for him. It involves in essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters.

* * * * *

      Observe the superior truth of language, in Greek, to Theocritus inclusively; in Latin, to the Augustan age exclusively; in Italian, to Tasso exclusively; and in English, to Taylor and Barrow inclusively.

* * * * *

      Luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer I know, after the apostles and apostolic men.

* * * * *

      Pray read with great attention Baxter's Life of himself. It is an inestimable work.33 I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter's memory, or even his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity.

* * * * *

      I am not enough read in Puritan divinity to know the particular objections to the surplice, over and above the general prejudice against the retenta of Popery. Perhaps that was the only ground,—a foolish one enough.

      In my judgment Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of Cowley or Dryden. Read Algernon Sidney; his style reminds you as little of books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was!

* * * * *

      Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate.

* * * * *

      Well! I am for Ariosto against Tasso; though I would rather praise Aristo's poetry than his poem.

* * * * *

      I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in the best order.

* * * * *

      I conceive Origen, Jerome, and Augustine to be the three great fathers in respect of theology, and Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Chrysostom in respect of rhetoric.

* * * * *

      Rhenferd possessed the immense learning and robust sense of Selden, with the acuteness and wit of Jortin.

* * * * *

      Jacob Behmen remarked, that it was not wonderful that there were separate languages for England, France, Germany, &c.; but rather that there was not a different language for every degree of latitude. In confirmation of which, see the infinite variety of languages amongst the barbarous tribes of South America.

      July 20. 1827

NON-PERCEPTION OF COLOURS

      What is said of some persons not being able to distinguish colours, I believe. It may proceed from general weakness, which will render the differences imperceptible, just as the dusk or twilight makes all colours one. This defect is most usual in the blue ray, the negative pole.

* * * * *

      I conjecture that when finer experiments have been applied, the red, yellow, and orange rays will be found as capable of communicating magnetic action as the other rays, though, perhaps, under different circumstances. Remember this, if you are alive twenty years hence, and think of me.

      July 21. 1827

RESTORATION.—REFORMATION

      The elements had been well shaken together during the civil wars and interregnum under the Long Parliament and Protectorate; and nothing but the cowardliness and impolicy of the Nonconformists, at the Restoration, could have prevented a real СКАЧАТЬ

<p>30</p>

There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I believe the beginning of Mr. C.'s liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any Ideality, and awarded an unusual share of Locality, to the majestic silver-haired head of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps, since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter faculty.—ED.

<p>31</p>

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.

<p>32</p>

These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar:—

"Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinate thereto,—most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet:—

'Unless above himself he canErect himself, how mean a thing is man!'"

P. 105. 2d ed.—ED.

<p>33</p>

This, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of Mr. Coleridge's text books for English church history. He used to say that there was no substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and that the modern political Dissenters, who affected to glory in Baxter as a leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of it. In a marginal note I find Mr. C. writing thus: "Alas! in how many respects does my lot resemble Baxter's! But how much less have my bodily evils been, and yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be! But verily Baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace."—ED.