Poems of Coleridge | Page 3

he expressed a profound truth which
Nietzsche and others have done little more than amplify. There is
nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive virtue: it is a form of life grown
putrid, and it turns into poisonous, decaying matter in the soul. If
Coleridge had been more callous towards what he felt to be his duties,
if he had not merely neglected them, as he did, but justified himself for
neglecting them, on any ground of intellectual or physical necessity, or
if he had merely let them slide without thought or regret, he would have
been more complete, more effectual, as a man, and he might have
achieved more finished work as an artist.
To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but
it was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to
even the most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind
was too fluid for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation
to speculation, often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost
the collector's delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On
one page of his letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in

defence of Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My
Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then
comes the solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan." Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley,
Berkeley by Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob
Behmen had some chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with
systems"; so it seemed to Southey, who could see no better. To
Coleridge all systems were of importance, because in every system
there was its own measure of truth. He was always setting his mind to
think about itself, and felt that he worked both hard and well if he had
gained a clearer glimpse into that dark cavern. "Yet I have not been
altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O, "having in my own
conceit gained great light into several parts of the human mind which
have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most falsely
explained." In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space." "This," he says, "I have done;
but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall be able to
evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the causes of
their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of life and
consciousness." He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works." "My opinion is
this," he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth,
"that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that
all truth is a species of revelation." On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that magnum opus which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first
page to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning."
This magnum opus, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been
Coleridge's dream from the beginning." Only a few months before his
death, we find him writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I
amused myself with, of your residing near me, or in the same house,
and of preparing, with your and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole
system for the press, as far as it exists in any systematic form; that is,
beginning with the Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words,

comprising Logic, as the Canons of Conclusion_, as the criterion of
_Premises, and lastly as the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then
the Methodus et Epochee, or the Disquisition on God, Nature, and
Man), the two first grand divisions of which, from the Ens super Ens to
the Fall, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the
commencement of living organization, containing the whole of the
Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the Powers and Forces, are
complete." Twenty years earlier, he had written to Daniel Stuart that he
was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most important Work,
which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then to be called
"Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on the Logos,
or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine."