words in common use; and which preclude all explanation for him who has resolved that none is required. Because there is already a falsity in the very phrases, "words in common use;" "the language of common sense." Words of most frequent use they may be, common they are not; but the language of the market, and as such, expressing degrees only, and therefore incompetent to the purpose wherever it becomes necessary to designate the kind independent of all degree. The philosopher may, and often does, employ the same words as in the market; but does this supersede the necessity of a previous explanation? As I referred you before to the botanist, so now to the chemist. Light, heat, charcoal, are every man's words. But fixed or invisible light? The frozen heat? Charcoal in its simplest form as diamond, or as black-lead? Will a stranger to chemistry be worse off, would the chemist's language be less likely to be understood by his using different words for distinct meanings, as carbon, caloric, and the like? But the case is stronger. The chemist is compelled to make words, in order to prevent or remove some error connected with the common word; and this too an error, the continuance of which was incompatible with the first principles and elementary truths of the science he is to teach. You must submit to regard yourself ignorant even of the words, air and water; and will find, that they are not chemically intelligible without the terms, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, or others equivalent. Now it is even so with the knowledge, which you would have me to communicate. There are certain prejudices of the common, i. e. of the average sense of men, the exposure of which is the first step, the indispensable preliminary, of all rational psychology and these can not be exposed but by selecting and adhering to some one word, in which we may be able to trace the growth and modifications of the opinion or belief conveyed in this, or similar words, not by any revolution or positive change of the original sense, but by the transfer of this sense and the difference in the application. Where there is but one word for two or more diverse or disparate meanings in a language (or though there should be several, yet if perfect synonymes, they count but for one word), the language is so far defective. And this is a defect of frequent occurrence in all languages, prior to the cultivation of science, logic, and philology, especially of the two latter and among a free, lively, and ingenious people, such as the Greeks were, sophistry and the influence of sophists are the inevitable result. To check this evil by striking at its root in the ambiguity of words, Plato wrote the greater part of his published works, which do not so much contain his own system of philosophy, as the negative conditions of reasoning aright on any system. And yet more obviously is it the case with the Metaphysics, Analytics, &c. of Aristotle, which have been well described by Lambert as a dictionary of general terms, the process throughout being, first, to discover and establish definite meanings, and then to appropriate to each a several word. The sciences will take care, each of its own nomenclature; but the interests of the language at large fall under the special guardianship of logic and rational psychology. Where these have fallen into neglect or disrepute, from exclusive pursuit of wealth, excess of the commercial spirit, or whatever other cause disposes men in general to attach an exclusive value to immediate and palpable utility, the dictionary may swell, but the language will decline. Few are the books published within the last fifty years, that would not supply their quota of proofs, that so it is with our own mother English. The bricks and stones are in abundance, but the cement none or naught. That which is indeed the common language exists everywhere as the menstruum, and nowhere as the whole-See Biographia Literaria*—while the language complimented with this name, is, as I have already said, in fact the language of the market. Every science, every trade, has its technical nomenclature; every folly has its fancy-words; every vice its own slang-and is the science of humanity to be the one exception? Is philosophy to work without tools? to have no straw wherewith to make the bricks for her mansion-house, but what she may pick up on the high-road, or steal, with all its impurities and sophistications, from the litter of the cattle-market? For the present, however, my demands on your patience are very limited. If as the price of much entertainment to follow, and I trust of something besides of less transitory interest, you will fairly attend to the history of two scholastic terms, OBJECT and SUBJECT, with their derivatives; you shall have my promise that I will not on any future occasion ask you to be attentive, * P. 409.-S. C. what nearer approach to the Platonic, Emanuel Kant belonged; to the former Bacon and Leibnitz, and, in his riper and better years, Berkeley. And to this I profess myself an adherent-nihil novum, vel inauditum audemus; though, as every man has a face of his own, without being more or less than a man, so is every true philosopher an original, without ceasing to be an inmate of Academus or of the Lyceum. But as to caution, I will just tell you how I proceeded myself twenty years and more ago, when I first felt a curiosity about Kant, and was fully aware that to master his meaning, as a system, would be a work of great labor and long time. First, I asked myself, have I the labor and the time in my power? Secondly, if so, and if it would be of adequate importance to me if true, by what means can I arrive at a rational presumption for or against? I inquired after all the more popular writings of Kant-read them with delight. I then read the Prefaces of several of his systematic works, as the Prolegomena, &c. Here too every part, I understood, and that was nearly the whole, was replete with sound and plain, though bold and to me novel truths; and I followed Socrates' adage respecting Heraclitus: all I understand is excellent, and I am bound to presume that the rest is at least worth the trouble of trying whether it be not equally so. In other words, until I understand a writer's ignorance, I presume myself ignorant of his understanding. Permit me to refer you to a chapter on this subject in my Literary Life.* Yet I by no means recommend to you an extension of your philosophic researches beyond Kant. In him is contained all that can be learned, and as to the results, you have a firm faith in God, the responsible Will of Man and Immortality; and Kant will demonstrate to you, that this faith is acquiesced in, indeed, nay, confirmed by the Reason and Understanding, but grounded on Postulates authorized and substantiated solely by the Moral Being. They are likewise mine: and whether the Ideas are regulative only, as Aristotle and Kant teach, or constitutive and actual, as Pythagoras and Plato, is of living interest to the philosopher by profession alone. Both systems are equally true, if only the former abstain from denying universally what is denied individually. He, for whom Ideas are constitutive, will in effect be a Platonist; and in those for whom they are regulative only, Biographia Literaria, chap. xii. p. 322.-S. C. NOTES ON THE PALINGENESIEN OF JEAN PAUL. 401 Platonism is but a hollow affectation. Dryden could not have been a Platonist: Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, Michel Angelo and Rafael could not have been other than Platonists. Lord Bacon, who never read Plato's works, taught pure Platonism in his great work, the Novum Organum, and abuses his divine predecessor for fantastic nonsense, which he had been the first to explode. Accept my best respects, &c. 14 Jan. 1814. Highgate. S. T. COLERIDGE. NOTES ON THE PALINGENESIEN OF JEAN PAUL WRITTEN IN THE BLANK LEAF AT THE BEGINNING. -S ist zu merken, dass die Sprache in diesem Buch nicht sey wie in gewöhnlich Bette, darin der Gedankenstrom ordentlich and ehrbar hinströmt, sondern wie ein Verwüstung in Damm and Deichen.* Preface p. xxxi. Two Revolutions, the Gallican, which sacrifices the individuals to the Idea or to the State, and in time of need, even the latter themselves;-and the Kantian-Moralist (Kantisch-Moralische), which abandons the affection of human Love altogether, because it can so little be described as merit; these draw and station us forlorn human creatures ever further and more lonesomely one from another, each on a frosty uninhabited island: nay, the Gallican, which excites and arms feelings against feelings, does it less than the Critical, which teaches us to disarm and to dispense with them altogether; and which neither allows Love to pass for the spring of virtue, nor virtue for the source of Love.t-Transl. But surely Kant's aim was not to give a full Sittenlehre, or * It is observable that the language in this book is not as in an ordinary channel, wherein the stream of thought flows on in a seemly and regular manner, but like a violent flood rushing against dyke and mole. Zwei Revoluzionen, diè gallische, welche der Idee oder dem Staate diè Individuen, and im Nothsal dièsen selber opfert, und die kantisch-moralische, welche den Affekt der Menschenliebe liegen lässet, weil er so wenig wie Verdienste geboten werden kan, diese ziehen und stellen uns verlassene Menschen immer weiter und einsamer aus cinander, jeden nur auf ein frostiges unbewohntes Eiland; ja die gallische, die nur Gefühle gegen Gefühle bewafnet und aufhezt, thut es weniger als die kritische, die sie entwafnen und entbehren lehrt, und die weder die Liebe als Quelle der Tugend noch dièse als Quelle von jener gelten lassen kan. system of practical material morality, but the à priori formEthice formalis: which was then a most necessary work, and the only mode of quelling at once both Necessitarians and Meritmongers, and the idol common to both, Eudæmonism. If his followers have stood still in lazy adoration, instead of following up the road thus opened out to them, it is their fault, not Kant's. S. T. C. FROM BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, OCT. 1821. LETTER FROM MR. COLERIDGE. DEAR SIR,-In the third letter (in the little parcel) which I have headed with your name, you will find my reasons for wishing these five letters, and a sixth, which will follow in my next, on the plan and code of a Magazine, which should unite the utile and dulce, to appear in the first instance. My next will consist of very different articles, apparently; namely, the First Book of my True History from Fairy Land, or the World Without, and the World Within. 2. The commencement of the Annals and Philosophy of Superstition; for the completion of which I am waiting only for a very curious folio, in Mr. **** s possession. 3. The life of Holty, a German poet, of true genius, who died in early manhood; with specimens of his poems, translated, or freely imitated in English verse. It would have been more in the mode to have addressed myself to the Editor, but I could not give up this one opportunity of assuring you that I am, my dear Sir, With every friendly wish, your obliged, Mr. Blackwood. |