Biographia Literaria

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THESIS I

Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent
reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by
us. To know is in its very essence a verb active.

THESIS II

All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth or
truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its
formula A. A.; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty,
and represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in
A, is attributable to B.

SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived
their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly
allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the
man before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the
least deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for
granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it
were answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite
blindness supplies the place of sight?

Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and
central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the
system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike
us, that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a
surreptitious act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without
our noticing the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and
contemplates the cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc.) as a continuous circle
(A.) giving to all collectively the unity of their common orbit; but
likewise supplies, by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central
power, which renders the movement harmonious and cyclical.

THESIS III

We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of
communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself
borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own
light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because
it is. In order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate,
so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and
repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude
the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an
absurdity.

THESIS IV

That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for
were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its
equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established,
as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by the
principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal
antecedence in its very conception.

SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate
(blue) is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we
affirm of a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is
implied in the definition of the subject; but the existence of the
subject itself is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a
percipient. The same reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of
supposed indemonstrable truths exempted from the profane approach of
philosophic investigation by the amiable Beattie, and other less
eloquent and not more profound inaugurators of common sense on the
throne of philosophy; a fruitless attempt, were it only that it is the
two-fold function of philosophy to reconcile reason with common sense,
and to elevate common sense into reason.

THESIS V

Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it
is in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52]
thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a
sideless triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being
an object which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is
inconceivable without a subject as its antithesis. Omne perceptum
percipientem supponit.

But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject,
contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid
objicitur perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object nor
subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is
conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor
object exclusively, but which is the identity of both.

THESIS VI

This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or I
AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words
spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone,
object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving
and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes
a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but
which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the
very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as a
perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and
subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as
antitheses.

SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only
answer, sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty
having been admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual
person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence,
not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply,
sum quia Deus est, or still more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum.

But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great
eternal I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea,
and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the
knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I
am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I
am.

THESIS VII

If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to
require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness.
Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required
identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the
essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If therefore this
be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality
of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the
spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this
could be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge
would be assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is
its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject
for which all, itself included, may become an object. It must
therefore be an ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed,
incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. Again the
spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some
sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit
alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows therefore that
intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a
will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must
be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from
it.

THESIS VIII

Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily
finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and
as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot
originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming
an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be
conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most
original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the
recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of
production and life.

THESIS IX

This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a
WILL, or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect
principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct
principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental
philosophy alone. For it must be remembered, that all these Theses
refer solely to one of the two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which
commences with, and rigidly confines itself within, the subjective,
leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively objective) to
natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In its very idea
therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective KNOWING,
(scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity of some one highest
principle of knowing, as at once the source and accompanying form in
all particular acts of intellect and perception. This, it has been
shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of self-
consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium
essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started
against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result
of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the
principle of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential
reasons, I have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and
the note subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into
religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with
the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed
from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.

THESIS X

The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground
of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the
last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle
of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be
some thing therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only,
that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle
of all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists
any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us
the form of all our knowing must be decided by the result.

That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all is
mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-
consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being,
perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and
so on in an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may
be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond
the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our
intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness,
does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us,
self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and
that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however
be shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when
the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond
the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be
driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a
ground the moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf
of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end
and purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break
off the series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is
in and of itself at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and
object, or rather the absolute identity of both. But as this is
inconceivable, except in a self-consciousness, it follows, that even
as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same principle from
which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-
consciousness in which the principium essendi does not stand to the
principlum cognoscende in the relation of cause to effect, but both
the one and the other are co-inherent and identical. Thus the true
system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of things in an
ABSOLUTE, which is at once causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator,
uios heautou--in the absolute identity of subject and object, which it
calls nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else than
self-conscious will or intelligence. In this sense the position of
Malebranche, that we see all things in God, is a strict philosophical
truth; and equally true is the assertion of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of
their masters in ancient Greece, that all real knowledge supposes a
prior sensation. For sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the
cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier
power in the process of self-construction.

Makar, ilathi moi;
Pater, ilathi moi
Ei para kosmon,
Ei para moiran
Ton son ethigon!

Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development,
not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all
degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to
kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and
counteracting forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we
may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in
the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in
the object. It will be hereafter my business to construct by a series
of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a
power with such forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human
intelligence. For my present purpose, I assume such a power as my
principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation,
agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing
chapter.

In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in
philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and
when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their
meaning more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention
by their strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege
beyond the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency
of the scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or
rather to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for
instance multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of
correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as
subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of
circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence,
in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the
Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its
derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of
powers. It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts
of justice or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where
there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when
there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its
accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-
coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and
imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system,
which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the
metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an
unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having
substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to
the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear
conception, but what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the
conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc
patet, qui fiat, ut cum irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem
significatus habeantur, conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a
plurimis rejiciantur, quippe quorum, secundum leges cognitionis
intuitivae, repraesentatio est impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e
non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic
non gero, maximi tamen momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore
labi, qui tam perverse argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim
repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod
autem, cum rationis purae sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae
tantummodo non subest, non item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem
sensitivam et intellectualem, (quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil
indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas
abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare
saepenumero non posse. Haec autem reluctantia subjectiva mentitur, ut
plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et incautos facile fallit,
limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus
ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54]

Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and
unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important fact,
that, besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits--
(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of the
latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand the
philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the
philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a
stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent.

Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to
encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there
will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the
concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the
perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all
speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and
immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an
authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon:
non inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est
usus, si ingenia acuant et ordinent.

There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch
as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles,
which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious
tenets defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or
necessitarians; some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to
the denial of the mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines
of Christianity; and others even to the subversion of all distinction
between right and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an
eminent and successful defender of the Christian faith has observed,
that true metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in
fact the writers, who have given them such just offence, were
sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which
the science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians,
a name indeed which those writers were the first to explode as
unmeaning. Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as there are
men in the world to whom the Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a
command from their own nature, so long will there be metaphysicians
and metaphysical speculations; that false metaphysics can be
effectually counteracted by true metaphysics alone; and that if the
reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the truth deduced can never
be the less valuable on account of the depth from which it may have
been drawn.

A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature
to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To
objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main
object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency
of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great
Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to
attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of
a plausible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the
mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that
corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,
who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick
and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever
words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the
least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk
of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every
thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their
ignorance. This alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with
it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an
utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy.
Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or
blame of such men rolls in volleys long after the report from the
original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus:
et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia
et fastidio se offert. [55]

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but
I must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal
of Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the
new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so
consentient with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an
article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and
its organs of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human
faculties) I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as
the eye, the ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power, voluntary and
automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy,
or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the
regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative
reason, vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we
produce or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all
our knowledge by means of principles a priori [56]; the will, or
practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and
(distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of
volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of
single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject
in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power)
Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too
general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine,
belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy." I reply, that if,
by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same
as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I
continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am
disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy
with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may
work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its
share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and
different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that
deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's
subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy
and Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was
writing that preface. He will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet
with many such readers! I will conclude with the words of Bishop
Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things
to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of
spirit." [57]

CHAPTER XIII

On the imagination, or esemplastic power

O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigu'd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,
To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
To intellectual!--give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive. [58]

"Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere."

"Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
intelligibiliter explicari." [59]

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