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

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      [Footnote 1: "Try to conceive a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth; of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An animal endowed with a memory of appearances and facts might remain. But the man will have vanished, and you have instead a creature more subtle than any beast of the field, but likewise cursed above every beast of the field; upon the belly must it go, and dust must it eat all the days of its life."—Church and State, p. 54. n.]

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      Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice, and you will be convinced at once. After the narrative of the creation of the earth and brute animals, Moses seems to pause, and says:—"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." And in the next chapter, he repeats the narrative:—"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" and then he adds these words—"and man became a living soul." Materialism will never explain those last words.

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      Define a vulgar ghost with reference to all that is called ghost-like. It is visibility without tangibility; which is also the definition of a shadow. Therefore, a vulgar ghost and a shadow would be the same; because two different things cannot properly have the same definition. A visible substance without susceptibility of impact, I maintain to be an absurdity.

      Unless there be an external substance, the bodily eye cannot see it; therefore, in all such cases, that which is supposed to be seen is, in fact, not seen, but is an image of the brain. External objects naturally produce sensation; but here, in truth, sensation produces, as it were, the external object. In certain states of the nerves, however, I do believe that the eye, although not consciously so directed, may, by a slight convulsion, see a portion of the body, as if opposite to it. The part actually seen will by common association seem the whole; and the whole body will then constitute an external object, which explains many stories of persons seeing themselves lying dead. Bishop Berkeley once experienced this. He had the presence of mind to ring the bell, and feel his pulse; keeping his eye still fixed on his own figure right opposite to him. He was in a high fever, and the brain image died away as the door opened. I observed something very like it once at Grasmere; and was so conscious of the cause, that I told a person what I was experiencing, whilst the image still remained.

      Of course, if the vulgar ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows, without substances to cause them, are absurd.

      January 4. 1828.

      CHARACTER OF THE AGE FOR LOGIC.—PLATO AND XENOPHON.——GREEK DRAMA.——KOTZEBUE.—BURKE.—PLAGIARISTS.

      This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the times of Charles I. and the Cromwellate. In them the premisses are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premisses are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the University of Oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it.

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      Negatively, there may be more of the philosophy of Socrates in the

       Memorabilia of Xenophon than in Plato: that is, there is less of what does

       not belong to Socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by,

       Plato, are more Socratic.[1]

      [Footnote 1: See p. 26. Mr. Coleridge meant in both these passages, that Xenophon had preserved the most of the man Socrates; that he was the best Boswell; and that Socrates, as a persona dialogi, was little more than a poetical phantom in Plato's hands. On the other hand, he says that Plato is more Socratic, that is, more of a philosopher in the Socratic mode of reasoning (Cicero calls the Platonic writings generally, Socratici libri); and Mr. C. also says, that in the metaphysical disquisitions Plato is Pythagorean, meaning, that he worked on the supposed ideal or transcendental principles of the extraordinary founder of the Italian school.]

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      In Æschylus religion appears terrible, malignant, and persecuting: Sophocles is the mildest of the three tragedians, but the persecuting aspect is still maintained: Euripides is like a modern Frenchman, never so happy as when giving a slap at the gods altogether.

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      Kotzebue represents the petty kings of the islands in the Pacific Ocean exactly as so many Homeric chiefs. Riches command universal influence, and all the kings are supposed to be descended from the gods.

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      I confess I doubt the Homeric genuineness of [Greek: dakruoen gelaschsa]. [1] It sounds to me much more like a prettiness of Bion or Moschus.

      [Footnote 1: [Greek: hos eipon, alochoio thilaes en chersin ethaeke paid eon hae d ara min chaeodei dexato cholpo, dachruoen gelasasa.]—Illiad. Z. vi. 482]

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      The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. The French Revolution was alone a subject fit for him. We are not yet aware of all the consequences of that event. We are too near it.

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      Goldsmith did every thing happily.

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      You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose.

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      A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool in circumbendibus.

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      Omne ignotum pro magnifico. A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers.

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      Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from—as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.

      January 6. 1823.

      ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL.—CHRISTIANITY—EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.—THE LOGOS.— REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.

      St. John had a twofold object in his Gospel and his Epistles—to prove the divinity, and also the actual human nature and bodily suffering, of Jesus Christ—that he was God and Man. The notion that the effusion of blood and water from the Saviour's side was intended to prove the real death of the sufferer originated, I believe, with some modern Germans, and seems to me ridiculous: there is, indeed, a very small quantity of water occasionally in the præcordia: but in the pleura, where wounds are not generally mortal, there is a great deal. St. John did not mean, I apprehend, to insinuate that the spear-thrust made the death, merely as such, certain or evident, but that the effusion showed the human nature. "I saw it," he would say, "with my own eyes. It was real blood, composed of lymph and crassamentum, and not a mere celestial ichor, as the Phantasmists allege."

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