Biographia Literaria

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[31] It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to pass
over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez, a gentleman equally
well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who demands
notice on the present occasion as the author of "A new System of
Physiology" in two volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of "An
Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy which
now prevail" in one volume octavo, entitled, "The Principles of
physiological and physical Science." The latter work is not quite
equal to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater
necessity of distinguishing the principles of the author's philosophy
from his conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter,
comets, etc. which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means
necessary consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department
of this volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior work, the
reasonings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an
infinite power in any finite substance are the offspring of no common
mind; and the experiment on the expansibility of the air is at least
plausible and highly ingenious. But the merit, which will secure both
to the book and to the writer a high and honourable name with
posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the
copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my
opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology;
established not only the existence of final causes, but their
necessity and efficiency to every system that merits the name of
philosophical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the
contradictory inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as
the first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The
author's views, as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and
completely his own, as he neither possessed nor do his writings
discover, the least acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the
germs of the philosophy exist: and his volumes were published many
years before the full development of these germs by Schelling. Mr.
Saumarez's detection of the Braunonian system was no light or ordinary
service at the time; and I scarcely remember in any work on any
subject a confutation so thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at
this time to have stated the fact; as in the preface to the work,
which I have already announced on the Logos, I have exhibited in
detail the merits of this writer, and genuine philosopher, who needed
only have taken his foundation somewhat deeper and wider to have
superseded a considerable part of my labours.

[32] But for sundry notes on Shakespeare, and other pieces which have
fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe; that
discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call
discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of
generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus,
Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry is always and
essentially intuitive.

[33] Revelation xx. 3.

[34] See Laing's History of Scotland.--Walter Scott's bards, ballads,
etc.

[35] Thus organization, and motion are regarded as from God, not in
God.

[36] Job, chap. xxviii.

[37] Wherever A=B, and A is not=B, are equally demonstrable, the
premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the conclusion
legitimate--the result must be, either that contraries can both be
true, (which is absurd,) or that the faculty and forms of reasoning
employed are inapplicable to the subject--i.e. that there is a
metabasis eis allo genos. Thus, the attributes of Space and time
applied to Spirit are heterogeneous--and the proof of this is, that by
admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated
true--i.e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not
true.--That the world had a beginning in Time and a bound in Space;
and That the world had not a beginning and has no limit;--That a self
originating act is, and is not possible, are instances.

[38] To those, who design to acquire the language of a country in the
country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable
advantage which I derived from learning all the words, that could
possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the
intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my
morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg,
to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the
cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call every,
the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces, jest
books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with them,
contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the
language than I could have acquired from works of polite literature
alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound
sense in Luther's German Letter on interpretation, to the translation
of which I shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German,
yet are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this
heroic reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original.
"Denn man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der Lateinischen Sprache fragen
wie man soll Deutsch reden: sondern man muss die Mutter in Hause, die
Kinder auf den Gassen, den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte, darum fragen:
und denselbigen auf das Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach
dolmetschen. So verstehen sie es denn, und merken dass man Deutsch mit
ihnen redet."

TRANSLATION.

For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to
speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children
in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning
this; yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are
talking, and thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark
that one talks German with them.

[39] This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne, is by no
means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic merit.
There is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines (at
the conclusion of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation will
not, I flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. Ottfried is
describing the circumstances immediately following the birth of our
Lord.

She gave with joy her virgin breast;
She hid it not, she bared the breast,
Which suckled that divinest babe!
Blessed, blessed were the breasts
Which the Saviour infant kiss'd;
And blessed, blessed was the mother
Who wrapp'd his limbs in swaddling clothes,
Singing placed him on her lap,
Hung o'er him with her looks of love,
And sooth'd him with a lulling motion.
Blessed; for she shelter'd him
From the damp and chilling air;
Blessed, blessed! for she lay
With such a babe in one blest bed,
Close as babes and mothers lie!
Blessed, blessed evermore,
With her virgin lips she kiss'd,
With her arms, and to her breast
She embraced the babe divine,
Her babe divine the virgin mother!
There lives not on this ring of earth
A mortal, that can sing her praise.
Mighty mother, virgin pure,
In the darkness and the night
For us she bore the heavenly Lord!

Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are
wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious,
while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and
poetry strike deepest.

[40] Lord Grenville has lately re-asserted (in the House of Lords) the
imminent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the war against
France. I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere; and it must be
flattering to his feelings to believe it. But where are the evidences
of the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? Or must he rest
on an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a passage on the
subject from The Friend. "I have said that to withstand the arguments
of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by
the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light
of the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and
escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated
with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they
themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a
country where there really existed a general disposition to change and
rebellion! Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through France
at the first coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through too
many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have
shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and
opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a
time--(Heaven grant that that time may have passed by!)--when by
crossing a narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of
approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the
meetings and idle rant of such sedition, as shrank appalled from the
sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation
which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only
in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the
wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing Government
defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are
conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm
was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village,
in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move
abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which
his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people;
and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the
side of the government and the established church. But why need I
appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and
seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected
without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or
the monied classes, in any country, in which the influences of
property had ever been predominant, and where the interests of the
proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic
provinces under Philip II; the civil wars of France in the preceding
generation; the history of the American revolution, or the yet more
recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible
not to perceive that in England from 1791 to the peace of Amiens there
were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies,
against which the existing laws had not provided both sufficient
safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property
had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and when it
became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended in
believing their own lie; even as our bulls to Borrowdale sometimes run
mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most
injurious. Our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could
not survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,--even
the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a
perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while
we were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether
the means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to
aid and augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like
children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at
the heels of a vicious war horse." (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.)

[41] I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince without
recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus:

------super ipsius ingens
Instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno;
Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.
Argonaut, I. 29.

[42] Theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada,
Kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos.
Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. I. i. 12.

[43] Paradise Regained. Book IV. I. 261.

[44] Vita e Costumi di Dante.

[45] TRANSLATION.

"With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or
immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty;
even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only
to print, to all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away
through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to
him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere
journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor."

To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm
of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they. too must
be taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-
secreted to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and
to its intellectual offspring.

[46] This distinction between transcendental and transcendent is
observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express
themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson indeed has confounded the two
words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this celebrated
dictionary I will venture to remark once for all, that I should
suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without
respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book, and
hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I confess, that I
should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar
any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. I am not now
alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is (and
perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has noticed, of
our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive labours of
so many giants in learning. I refer at present both to omissions and
commissions of a more important nature. What these are, me saltem
judice, will be stated at full in The Friend, re-published and
completed.

I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till
I saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the
Monthly Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr.
Wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and
English Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten
years ago. But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to
complete it. I cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret,
that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the
republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new
Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English, German, and
French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the
precise individual meaning might be given in an English or German
word; whereas in Latin we must too often be contented with a mere
general and inclusive term. How indeed can it be otherwise, when we
attempt to render the most copious language of the world, the most
admirable for the fineness of its distinctions, into one of the
poorest and most vague languages? Especially when we reflect on the
comparative number of the works, still extant, written while the Greek
and Latin were living languages. Were I asked what I deemed the
greatest and most unmixed benefit, which a wealthy individual, or an
association of wealthy individuals could bestow on their country and
on mankind, I should not hesitate to answer, "a philosophical English
dictionary; with the Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and
Italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes." That the learned
languages might thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but
a part, and not the most important part, of the advantages which would
accrue from such a work. O! if it should be permitted by Providence,
that without detriment to freedom and independence our government
might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue!
There was a time, when every thing was to be done by Government. Have
we not flown off to the contrary extreme?

[47] April, 1825. If I did not see it with my own eyes, I should not
believe that I had been guilty of so many hydrostatic Bulls as bellow
in this unhappy allegory or string of metaphors! How a river was to
travel up hill from a vale far inward, over the intervening mountains,
Morpheus, the Dream weaver, can alone unriddle. I am ashamed and
humbled. S. T. Coleridge.

[48] Ennead, III. 8. 3. The force of the Greek sunienai is imperfectly
expressed by "understand;" our own idiomatic phrase "to go along with
me" comes nearest to it. The passage, that follows, full of profound
sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer more
wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more
correct edition-ti oun sunienai; oti to genomenon esti theama emon,
siopaesis (mallem, theama, emon sioposaes,) kai physei genomenon
theoraema, kai moi genomenae ek theorias taes odi, taen physin echein
philotheamona uparkei. (mallem, kai moi hae genomenae ek theorias
autaes odis). "What then are we to understand? That whatever is
produced is an intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated,
is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth;
which results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a
contemplative nature." So Synesius:

'Odis hiera
'Arraeta gona

The after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that
of the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.

[49] This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in his THIRD
HYMN:

'En kai Pan'ta--(taken by itself) is Spinozism.
'En d' 'Apan'ton--a mere Anima Mundi.
'En te pro panton--is mechanical Theism.

But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of Saint Paul and
Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre-
existence of the soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or deemed
heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, nor Jacob
Behmen ever avowed it more broadly.

Mystas de Noos,
Ta te kai ta legei,
Buthon arraeton
Amphichoreuon.
Su to tikton ephus,
Su to tiktomenon;
Su to photizon,
Su to lampomenon;
Su to phainomenon,
Su to kryptomenon
Idiais augais.
'En kai panta,
'En kath' heauto,
Kai dia panton.

Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical;
though it may be taught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with
Synesius in calling God Physis en Noerois, the Nature in
Intelligences; but he could not subscribe to the preceding Nous kai
noeros, i.e. Himself Intelligence and intelligent.

In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I
mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from
the Greek into English Anacreontics before my fifteenth year.

[50] See Schell. Abhandl. zur Erlaeuter. des Id. der
Wissenschafslehre.

[51] Des Cartes, Diss. de Methodo.

[52] The impossibility of an absolute thing (substantia unica) as
neither genus, species, nor individuum: as well as its utter unfitness
for the fundamental position of a philosophic system, will be
demonstrated in the critique on Spinozism in the fifth treatise of my
Logosophia.

[53] It is most worthy of notice, that in the first revelation of
himself, not confined to individuals; indeed in the very first
revelation of his absolute being, Jehovah at the same time revealed
the fundamental truth of all philosophy, which must either commence
with the absolute, or have no fixed commencement; that is, cease to be
philosophy. I cannot but express my regret, that in the equivocal use
of the word that, for in that, or because, our admirable version has
rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded interpretation in the
mind of common readers or hearers, as if it were a mere reproof to an
impertinent question, I am what I am, which might be equally affirmed
of himself by any existent being.

The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum is objectionable, because either the
Cogito is used extra gradum, and then it is involved to the sum and is
tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then
it is subordinated to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather
as a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre-
ordinated as the arguments seem to require. For Cogito is Sum
Cogitans. This is clear by the inevidence of the converse. Cogitat,
ergo est is true, because it is a mere application of the logical
rule: Quicquid in genere est, est et in specie. Est (cogitans), ergo
est. It is a cherry tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo
cogitat, is illogical: for quod est in specie, non NBCESSARIO in
genere est. It may be true. I hold it to be true, that quicquid vere
est, est per veram sui affirmationem; but it is a derivative, not an
immediate truth. Here then we have, by anticipation, the distinction
between the conditional finite! (which, as known in distinct
consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by Kant's followers
the empirical!) and the absolute I AM, and likewise the dependence or
rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom "we live,
and move, and have our being," as St. Paul divinely asserts, differing
widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir J. Newton,
Locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and with
it life and the powers of life.

[54] TRANSLATION.

"Hence it is clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the
continuous and the infinite. They take, namely, the words
irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same meaning; and,
according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion of the
continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. I am not now
pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few schools have thought
proper to explode, especially the former (the law of continuity). But
it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader, that those,
who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a grievous
error. Whatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding and
the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is
therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it
is exclusively an object of pure intellect. For this non-coincidence
of the sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which I shall
presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot
always adequately represent to the concrete, and transform into
distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But
this contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an
incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity
or impossibility in the object (i.e. the notions themselves), and
seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human
faculties for the limits of things, as they really exist."

I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the
term intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anschauen) for
which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for
that which can be represented in space and time. He therefore
consistently and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual
intuitions. But as I see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense
of the term, I have reverted to its wider signification, authorized by
our elder theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term
comprehends all truths known to us without a medium.

From Kant's Treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et
principiis. 1770.

[55] Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM.

[56] This phrase, a priori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood,
and as absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve. By
knowledge a priori, we do not mean, that we can know anything
previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but
that having once known it by occasion of experience (that is,
something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have
existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By
experience only now, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces
me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.

[57] Jer. Taylor's Via Pacis.

[58] Par. Lost. Book V. I. 469.

[59] Leibnitz. Op. T. II. P. II. p. 53.--T. III. p. 321.

[60] Synesii Episcop. Hymn. III. I. 231

[61] 'Anaer morionous, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek
monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have
said, that I have reclaimed, rather than borrowed, it: for it seems to
belong to Shakespeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.

[62] First published in 1803.

[63] These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the
Madrigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593,
by his sons Lorenzo and Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their
paternal uncle, Signor Leone Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di
Santa Chiesa. As I do not remember to have seen either the poems or
their author mentioned in any English work, or to have found them in
any of the common collections of Italian poetry; and as the little
work is of rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few specimens. I have
seldom met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of
that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner
to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with the
tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they
are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal
we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort.
To a cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own
sake, independently of the material in which it is manifested, that
none but a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate.

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