A passage quoted above shows Coleridge's dis- satisfaction with Kant's Aristotelianism or rather with Kant's lack of Platonism. Coleridge's bon mot that "every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist" 94 is sufficiently well known. He varies it a little elsewhere saying: "There are two essentially different schools of philosophy, the SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 87 Platonic and the Aristotelian. To the latter but with a some- what nearer approach to the Platonic, Emmanuel Kant belonged; to the former, Bacon and Leibnitz, and, in his riper and better years, Berkeley. And to this I profess myself adherent" 9 ^. Kant has demonstrated that our faith in the Ideas is grounded only on Postulates. "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" 96 . In a statement less popular than this letter, Coleridge, however, asserted that this dispute is precisely "the high- est problem of philosophy, and not part of its nomen- clature" 97 . "Both systems are equally true, if only the former abstain from denying universally what is denied individually" or said more bluntly if the Aristotelian is giving up the very point of issue between them. For Cole- ridge the essence of Platonism is that Ideas are constitutive for this belief 98 . They are no mere hypotheses, however morally convincing, they are philosophically evident, as clearly as the intuition of a table or a tree. "Why should I prefer that which is the fallible part of my Nature to that which never deceives me? We live by Faith — it is equally common to all our knowleges (sic) — and cannot therefore affect the plus and minus of Demonstration" 99 . In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge quotes a passage from Kant's Latin dissertation "De Mundi Sensibilis et Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis", which argues against the impossibility of notions which we are unable to imagine. "We cannot", says Kant, "mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things as they really exist." Coleridge comments on the term "Anschauung" and draws attention to Kant's expressive denial of any "intellectual intuition" as he had limited the sense of intuition exclusively to that which can be represented in space and time. But Coleridge sees "no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term", and extends it to all "truths known to us, without a medium"!". While Kant denies the immediate knowledge of any theoretical truth, KANT IN ENGLAND Coleridge opens the door for the "sacred power of self- intuition" 101 which is at the same time the power by which we apprehend Ideas or spiritual truths. No wonder, therefore, that Coleridge cannot be satis- fied with Kant's moral way to God and with the whole tentative approach to metaphysics through ethics which is propounded in the Critique of Practical Reason. Just as on the other main questions he had surmised that Kant did not speak his full mind, he "entertained doubts, like- wise, whether in his own mind he even laid all the stress which he appears to do, on the moral postulate" 102 . This ought not to be interpreted as a denial of Kant's sincerity by Coleridge, but rather as a hypothesis that Kant with- held his real metaphysical wisdom. Coleridge stressed frequently his dissent from the principles of Kant's ethics. Just as he could not agree with Kant's rejection of intel- lectual intuition, Coleridge could not see why our emotional nature should be excluded from the essence of ethics. "I reject Kant's stoic principle, as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his Kritik der praktischen Ver- nunft he treats the affections as indifferent (dckdcpoQa) in ethics, and would persuade us that a man who disliking and without any feeling of love for virtue, yet acted virtuously, because and only because of his duty, is more worthy of our esteem, than the man whose affections were aidant to and congruous with his conscience. For it would imply little less than that things not the objects of the moral will or under its control were yet indispensable to its due practical direction. In other words, it would subvert his own system" 10 3. Undoubtedly Coleridge had read Schiller's "Briefe liber die aesthetische Erziehung", which combat the rigorism of Kant's ethics, but while Schiller tried to soften it with aesthetic ideas, Coleridge's way out was in the love and faith of religion. But Coleridge was not altogether hostile to the character of Kant's ethics, as this statement would seem to imply. He could even defend it when he liked to do so. In a marginal note to Jean Paul's "Paligenesien" (1798), Coleridge protests against Jean SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 89 Paul's misconception of Kant as having abandoned the affection of human love and allowing neither Love to pass for the spring of virtue, nor virtue for the source of Love. "But surely", says Coleridge, "Kant's aim was not to give a full Sittenlehre, or system of practical material morality, but the a priori form — Ethice 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, Eudaemonism. If his followers have stood still in lazy adoration, instead of following up the road thus opened to them, it is their fault not Kant's" 104 . Apparently Coleridge was not even so hostile to Kant's stoicism and his sharp distinction between inclination and duty. Coleridge said once: "Ours is a life of probation, we are to contemplate and obey duty for its own sake, and in order to do this, we in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not merely abstracted from, but in direct opposition to the wish, the inclination. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty, is the ideal which perhaps no human being ever can arrive at, but which every human being ought to try to draw near unto" 105 . But this must have been a change of mood, for in general the criticism against Kant's severance of Love and Will recurs in Coleridge. He commented on a passage in Kant's "Metaphysiche Anfangsgriinde der Tugendlehre" which says that "Liebe 1st eine Sache des Empfindens, nicht des Wollens" : "I doubt this independence of Love on the Will", though he is not able to give a reasoned interpretation of their interrelation and merely asserts Love to be one of the "5 or 6 Magna Mysteria of Human Nature" or even the Mysterium Finale 106 . Elsewhere he asserted Love to be an act of the will and "that too one of its primary and therefore ineffaceable acts" 107 . This sharp distinction between Love and Will was also against Coleridge's conviction as to the idea of God. Kant had denied the possibility of ascribing Will to God, as Will is always dependent on satisfaction of one's willing and this is dependent on the existence of an external object 108 . 90 KANT IN ENGLAND Coleridge objects: "I do not clearly see by what right Kant forbids us to attribute to God Intelligence and Will, because we know by experience no Intelligence or Will but the Human Understanding ( ?) , the human Volition ( ?) and these subsist under relations and limitations not attribut- able to God ; while yet he allows us to attribute to him the notion of a Ground tho' our experience furnishes no instance of an infinite Ground, or an absolute Ground, more than of an infinite Understanding, or an absolute Will. — Not to mention, except by the ? affixed, the petitio principii, in the confusion of all intelligence with that of the Understanding, of Will (arbitrium) with the faculty of Volition (Voluntas), and of all Will with human Voli- tion" 109 . Besides as there is no essential dependence of the Will on the limitation by an external object, this is also no antropomorphic defect in our idea of God 110 . On the whole, Coleridge is dissatisfied with Kant's conception of God which seems to him far too reluctantly admitted and therefore far too empty of real, living con- tent. Though he sympathizes with Kant's "contempt for the affected quality tone (vornehm) of pseudo-mystics as a privileged class, persons of distinction that look down with a smile of nausea at your vulgar operatives in Phi- losophy", he "cannot help startling at a 'Begriff von Gott von uns selbst gemacht' "m. Kant's concept of God is "but an unsuff icing Machwerk, a pretence to an xyz belief — the effective reality of which I doubt, whether it be even possible. I feel the liveliest conviction, that no religious man could retain the distinction between the Divine Will, and the unknown something which is to answer the purpose of a Will — a non-intelligence that performs the func- tions of our Intelligence nor do I see wherein this differs from a moral and modest atheism" 112 . Nevertheless, sur- prisingly enough at first sight though it might appear, Coleridge preserved a great sympathy for Kant's attacks on the validity of the different proofs for the existence of God. Coleridge like Kant, knows that it is impossible to demonstrate God, and the only demonstration he admits, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 91 the ontological proof, does not suffice to establish the existence of a good, omniscient being who cares for the fate of man and the salvation of the race. Nevertheless, Coleridge is far more religious than Kant, at least in the current sense of the term. He simply desires the break- down of human Intelligence in order to substitute pure Faith. In the two different sets of notes with which he annotated Kant's "Einzig moglicher Beweisgrund fur das Dasein Gottes" (1762), Coleridge objects to Kant's onto- logical argument propounded there with reasons which Kant was later to use in his critical writings: "the true objection to the argument is that to demonstrate that if any thing is, either it or something else must always have been, is no demonstration of the existence of God ; i. e. of a holy, self-comprehending, creative and arranging Will. All we can or need to say is, that the existence of a neces- sary Being is so transcendently Rational, that it is Reason itself — and that there is no other form under which this Being is contemplable, but that of a holy and intelligent Will. Admit this and all is solved — deny it, all is dark- ness" 113 . Coleridge does not seem to see that he is merely moving the question away from the jurisdiction of the intellect into the reign of some mystical faculty, which he identifies with Reason. Elsewhere he states bluntly that God cannot be deduced; that only a system which is grounded on God as its very first assumption is reasonable and that there is no conviction in the cosmological proof at all 114 . Another discussion subjects the ontological proof to further searching criticism. "The Question (assuredly among the most interesting of all scholastic Problems) must not rest for its Solution pro or contra on the Fact that we are obliged by the Laws of our human Nature quatenus intellectualis (and therefore not originating in its negations or limits) to identify the undeniable Form of a Reality, as the Ground of all Possibility (= possibili- tatum omnium fons et quasi possibilitas) with its actuality, extrinsical and independent of human Idioms. For any thing to be possible, there must be some thing real — that 92 KANT IN ENGLAND which would destroy all possibility, is itself impossible. This is self -certain." Up till now Coleridge followed simply the argument of the "Einzig moglicher Beweisgrund". But now he parts company with Kant. "But tho' it is necessary, that there should be some thing or things, does it follow that such thing itself should be necessary? That it should be one only?", an argument directly opposed to Kant's assertion that the necessary being is one and simple 115 . "And this again", continues Coleridge with rare insight, "would lead us to the old Question of an infinite series, or the Eternity of each Thing as self -grounded. — Is this merely incomprehensible, in which case it would be neither more or less objectionable than the counter-idea of a First Cause? or is it absurd?" 116 . After citing an imaginary de- bate between a Monist with theistic convictions and a Plural- ist who works with Leibnizian monads, Coleridge reaches the ingenious conclusion that both agree actually in the necessary existence of a To 0e!ov, but differ as Polytheism and Monotheism. The Pluralists contend "for the Dii Im- mortales, anaxeQEq, diiryroeg, dei eovtet;" while the Theists contend for " c O Geo; 6[iovo<;, 6 jravTOjtarriQ". Christianity is to Coleridge a sort of compromise between Monism and Pluralism: "The Christian Faith in all things bearing the marks of the Mediator and Reconciler, unites what is just in both, in the mystery-solving Mystery of Tri-unity" 117 . y The other aet^of juites. contains substantially the same arguments. Again the impossibility of the infinite regress is mentioned as the presupposition from which an argument proving the existence of a necessary being had to start with. "I confess with Occam, that an absolute Demonstra- tion of this I have not yet met with : and unless a necessary Interest of Truth be admitted as a Part of Truth [i. e. a practical reason for its acceptance] in one with the Truth (which I think, may very rationally be demanded) I doubt, whether such a demonstration be possible" 118 . There are, therefore, only two possibilities. Either I must start with God as the ground of all reality. God is then "the universal subject, of which these [necessary things] SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 93 are the Predicates and then I do not see how the latter are things at all, or how I am to separate them (other- wise than by logical abstraction) from the Ground — and thus the World itself is the one necessary Being, the same tho' variously modifiable or self-modified". In one word, starting with God, a system like that of Spinoza seems to be inevitable to Coleridge. Or I might start with the things and then I have to use "the Jacob's ladder. Before I have any better plea for stopping and calling the resting-place the last Round, than my own weakness or weariness, I must prove the impossibility of an infinite Regress — and this is the previous Link of § 3 119 which I complain of missing. If this could be proved, not only the Existence of God, but the Fact of the absolute Creation of the World would be demonstrable and a bona fide beginning of Time . . . Genesis Chap. I, V. 1". Coleridge's intellect says that such a demonstrative proof is impossible, but his religious heart which he calls his Reason, does not doubt it. "And for me and I will venture to add for you, my dear Mr. Green ! who want no stronger demonstration of a thing than the evident and utter unreasonableness of preferring the only, tho' not proveably impossible alternative, the missing link could be easily supplied." The dilemma, which Coleridge sees between pantheism always abhorrent to him and an infinite regress without any solution, he can solve only by cutting the knot with the sword of faith. Obviously Kant himself did not regard the conception of an infinite regress and of an actual mathematical infinite as inherently self-contradictory. There is even a passage in the Dissertation 120 which defends it expressedly. Coleridge and Kant acknowledge that the trespass on theology is not entirely justifiable on grounds of intellect. Kant prefers to mitigate the offense by returning from the foray empty-handed 121 , while Cole- ridge feels that he has finally cleared the ground, beaten the enemy and installed for ever the realm of Reason which is faith. In the last year of his life Coleridge discussed this question again. "Assume the existence of God, — and then ] 94 KANT IN ENGLAND the Harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption ; but to set about proving the existence of God by such means is a mere circle, a delusion. It can be no proof to a good reasoner, unless he violates all syllogistic logic and presumes his conclusion. Kant once set about proving the existence of God, and a masterly effort it was. But, in his later great work, the Critique of Pure Reason, he saw its fallacy, and said of it — that if the existence could be proved at all, it must be on the grounds indicated by him"i22. In general Kant's conception of religion is to Coleridge's mind and heart by far too narrow and intellectual. There is actually only one question on which he expressed a vio- lent dissent from Kant : his rationalist conception of prayer. In a note to Kant's "Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Tugendlehre" 123 he has spoken his mind very clearly indeed. He remarks to Kant's words that "Gebet ist auch nur ein innerlich vor einem Herzenskundiger declarirter Wunsch": "I cannot suffer this to pass uncommented especially as the same is re-asserted at large in the 'Reli- gion innerhalb den (sic) Grenzen der reinen (sic) Ver- nunft'. It takes for granted that Prayer is not an act but a mere wishing. ! who ever prayed that has not more than hundred times felt that scarce an act of Life was so difficult as to determine to pray ? Effective resolve to heart-amend- ment must have commenced before true prayer can be uttered: — and why call words of Hypocrites and Forma- lists Prayers?" In the copy of Kant's "Die Religion inner- halb der Grenzen der bloBen Vernunft" which is preserved with copious marginalia by Coleridge, there is nothing more said on the question of prayer 124 . But in a letter he repeats these objections in even stronger terms: "Likewise Kant's remarks on prayer in his 'Religion innerhalb der reinen Vernunft', are crass, nay vulgar and as superficial even in psychology as they are low in taste" 125 . Coleridge, for whom the fall of Man or as he worded it once 126 "the known, tho' incomprehensible fact of a disease in man as SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 95 a 'Vernunftwesen unter Freiheit's (sic) Gesetzen' " is the rock-base of all religion, Kant's naturalist interpretation of prayer could not but seem superficial. Coleridge had his objections to other sides of Kant's teachings, especially against Kant's Cosmogony. ]\Iiss-A.J3. Snyder Jias shown i n an interesting. paper 127 that Cole- ridge's poetic "world-view" remained identical with that of Kant's speculations and that he even claimed to have seen in early youth, as in a dream, the whole drama of the birth of planets 128 . But the notes on the margin of Kant's "Vermischte Schriften" 129 show that he was not entirely content. His main objection is that "Kant would have made a still more delightful Mechanique Celeste, a far more satis- factory Cosmogony, had he written with the present knowledge of Chemistry". -For instance, "he tells continually of coarser and finer sorts of matter etc. whereas we have reason to believe, that density is the exponent of Cohesion, and Cohesion in inverse proportion to Heat. Gold, Platinum, Chrystal etc. in Mercury may be subtle and mobile Fluids or Gases, which may be animalized into Nerves and Fibres exquisitely permeable by Electricity. One thing I find especially obscure — the first origination of a centre, why in one place rather than another. Nor can I conceive, how the chaotic diffusion could subsist a single hour, if not for ever". We have alluded once before to the paradoxical fact that Coleridge, though siding with Kant against Fichte and Schelling, actually criticizes Kant from a point of view substantially identical with that of the young Schelling. Like Schelling he rejects the things in themselves, like Schelling he suspects the whole dualism between matter and form, between the functions of unity and the confused manifold, like Schelling he understands the "BewuBtsein uberhaupt" as a sort of over-soul — and most strikingly like Schelling he suggests that Kant is not speaking his whole mind in his published writings. Only Coleridge's particular objections against Kant's philosophy of religion seem to be his own or cannot, at least, be paralleled from 96 KANT IN ENGLAND young Schelling. We know that Coleridge studied and used just the writings of the younger Schelling which are nearest to Fichte and which contain his opinions of Kant. The Bio- graphia Literaria contains the statement which need not be doubted that Coleridge has not been "hitherto able to procure more than two of Schelling's books, viz. the 1st volume of his collected Tracts and his System of Trans- cendental Idealism ; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against Fichte" 130 . The small pamphlet against Fichte is the "Darstellung des wahren Verhaltnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserten Fichte'schen Lehre" (1806)i3i, the System of Transcendental Idealism is "Sy- stem des Transcendentalen Idealismus" (1800) which has been called not quite unjustly Kant's system not written by Kant 132 and the Collected Tracts are the only volume which was published of Schelling's "Philosophische Schrif- ten" at Landshut in 1809 133 . It contains the following papers: Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), Philo- sophische Brief e iiber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (1795), Abhandlungen zur Erlauterung des Idealismus der Wissen- schaftslehre (1796/7), early writings which are most relevant to our discussion, the speech "uber das Ver- haltniB der bildenden Kunste zu der Natur" (1807), and finally the important "Philosophische Untersuchungen uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit" (1809). The last paper signifies a turning point in Schelling's career, a de- finite turn towards Jacob Boehme and an increasing approximation to the teachings of Franz von Baader. Cole- ridge admired it particularly 134 and speculated even about its relation to Kant 1 35 . It is well-known since Sara Coleridge's edition of the Notes and Lectures (1849) that Coleridge's paper "On Poesy or Art" borrows extensively from Schel- ling's oration before the Munich Academy. The System of Transcendental Idealism furnished much of the core of Coleridge's speculations in Chapters IX — XII of the Bio- graphia Literaria. put it is less known that the criticism Coleridge launches a'gainst Kant, is substantially the same as Schelling's expressed in the three earlier dissertations SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 97 of these Collected Tracts. The first paper "Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophic" (1795) describes in the preface Schelling's objections to Kant, though Schelling here like Coleridge feels only that he is elaborating and clarifying the very essence of the critical teaching. Schelling criticizes Kant's deduction of the concepts of understanding and the whole division between understanding, sensibility and reason very much more thoroughly than Coleridge would ever have done. He sees clearly that an original synthesis, the syn- thesis of multeity in the unity of consciousness must precede any of the more specific deductions of Kant and that the division between theoretical and practical philosophy is eventually untenable 136 . Already the preface hinted that Schelling thought Kant merely presupposed the higher principles., though he does not teach them express- edly 137 . In the body of the paper Schelling criticizes the concept of the thing in itself as ''self -contradictory even according to Kant's deductions, since thing in itself means no less nor more than a thing, which is no thing" 138 . The theory of Kant's esoteric symbolism pops up again: "Ich glaube aber, daB das, was Kant von Dingen an sich sagt, sich schlechterdings nicht anders, denn nur aus seinem durchgangig beobachteten Herablassungssystem erklaren laBt" 139 . And a general system of condescension is the monstrous insinuation which Coleridge repeated in the Bio- graphia Literaria 140 . The "Philosophische Brief e uber Dogmatismus und Kri- ticismus" (1795) continues in Schelling's criticism of Kant, especially by a very sarcastic mockery at the practical belief in God taught by Kant and its theoretical insuf- ficiency. These passages are also important for Coleridge with their stress on Imagination (Einbildungskraft) and its philosophical possibilities 141 . The conception of Kant is again surprisingly similar to Coleridge's. The Critique of Pure Reason is called merely a negative confutation of dogmatism 1 ^ and even more clearly Schelling asserts that Kant's Critique has proved that the conflict between Real- ism and Idealism cannot be decided on purely theoretical 98 KANT IN ENGLAND grounds 143 . Kant has merely constructed a canon for all systems, a term which will recur in Coleridge's MS Logic 144 . The Critique of Pure Reason tries to deduce the possibility of two mutually contradictory systems from the nature of reason and to establish both a system of criticism (conceived in its perfection) or more precisely a system of Idealism, as well as the contradictory system of dogma- tism or realism 145 . The Critique has taught dogmatism how it can become a self -grounded system of objective realism 146 . As a proof for this curious point of view just the sections on the things in themselves are quoted. "If one believes", Schelling argues, "that the Critique of Pure Reason founded only criticism, then, as far as I can see, it is not possible to save it from the charge of inconsistency. If one, however, presupposes, that the Critique of Pure Reason does not belong exclusively to one system, one will soon have discovered the reason, why it suffered the two systems of Idealism and Realism to remain side by side" 147 . The Critique of Pure Reason is merely the canon of all possible systems. "For the Critique of Pure Reason was the first to prove that no system of whatever name can be in its perfection an object of knowledge, but only an object of a practically necessary, but — infinite action" 148 . These sentences sound almost like a theoretical justification of Coleridge's own procedure: the Logic of Kant remains irrefragable in a most literal sense, while he is * allowed to superimpose on this canon a structure which has little to do witli Kant's starting-point. That is the reason why Coleridge could assert that: "indeed, it is by rebuilding the doctrine of Realism on sure foundations that I hope J to effect what Raymond of Sabunde so nobly attempted" 149 . The scepticism of a Raymond, who found a consolation in " faith, might have appealed to him with its parellel to his own dualism of Intellect and Faith. Or possibly it was simply a reminiscence of Montaigne's "Apologie" in the "Essais", a sort of a convenient masque, an appeal to autho- rity, and at that to a far-fetched authority which Coleridge loved to make. It remains in any case mysterious how SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 99 Coleridge could reconcile this aim with his frequently pro- fessed Idealism which in the late "Aids to Reflection" goes so far astray on the subjective side, that he is even denying the independent subsistence of Ideas 150 . Vine "Abhandlungen zur Erlauterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre" (1796/7) is Schelling's most elabo- rate criticism of Kant. Here again we find numerous con- tacts with Coleridge's conception. Again we have a searching criticism of Kant's artificial distinction of synthetic and analytic judgments 151 , of the deduction of the categories and the validity of space and time as forms of our sensi- bility. Schelling stresses again the role of an original syn- thesis : space and time are forms of this synthesis, actions of the mind and the organ of this synthesis is productive imagination 152 . Here at the meeting of intuition and con- ception is the bright spot of objective knowledge which is open to man. In spite of this there are still people who charge Kant with "an abysmal separation between sensi- bility and understanding" 153 . He ridicules an interpretation of Kant which would conceive a sharp dualism of nature and our mind and this mind as arbitrarily applying its forms to the matter of nature. The real Kant taught — according to Schelling who is here following the Kritik der Urteilskraft — that nature is never anything different from her laws. Nature is nothing but this one necessary way of acting, a continuous action of the infinite spirit 154 . The distinction between conception and intuition, represen- tation and reality is an impossible one, as it would degrade the presentations to mere illusions 155 . The phantom of subjective idealism would be the logical outcome of this opposition. Schelling criticizes also the distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy as unreal and in- conceivable, unless they are both deducable from one prin- ciple, the original autonomy of the human spirit 156 . Schel- ling comes closest to Coleridge's criticism, paralleling the very words of the objection, in a later passage on the things in themselves. Here, like Coleridge, he protests against the literal-mindedness of the Kantians and defends the things 100 KANT IN ENGLAND in themselves as a metaphor or symbol. "Every bold ex- pression in philosophy borders on dogmatism, since it tries to represent what never can be an object of representation. It symbolizes what it cannot make sensuous". "The things in themselves scarcely existed before Kant in the sense in which he speaks of them. They were to be merely the shock which should awake the reader from the slumber of empiricism". "The principle of the sensuous cannot be in the sensuous, but only in the supersensuous, said Kant". "This supersensuous ground of everything sensuous was symbolized by Kant in the expression : things in themselves — which as all symbolical expression contains a contra- diction, because it tries to represent the conditioned by the unconditioned, and to make finite the infinite. Such contra- dictory expressions are, however, the only ones by which we can represent ideas at all" 157 . Schelling quotes a passage from Kant's pamphlet against Eberhard and explains it as proving that things in themselves signify here only the idea of a supersensuous ground of representations 158 . Schelling's further discussion shows that he conceived the things in themselves as a sort of provisional symbol for the unknown, supersensuous X, which then in practical philosophy was replaced by Kant's real and deeper know- ledge, the autonomy of the human will. Fichte is to him the completer of Kant, who has reconciled theoretical and practical philosophy by a principle uniting both in an ori- ginal identity 159 . We see that Coleridge takes substantially the same stand as Schelling, not realizing, it seems to me, that much of what Schelling is saying is actually Fichte's criticism, even if Fichte did not express it so clearly and explicitly. Coleridge's direct acquaintance with Fichte seems to have been slight. Fichte, of course, was the philosopher who most radically rejected the things in themselves — following herein Beck's example — and who resolutely criticized the distinction between form and matter. Already in the first Introduction to the "Wissenschaftslehre" Fichte declared that "the a priori and the a posteriori are not two for a radi- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 101 cal idealism, but absolutely one; they are only looked on from two sides and are only distinguished by the way, in which we approach them" 160 . Already Fichte tried to bridge the gulf by the concept of "intellectual intuition", but he still regarded it as merely a supplement of thought, not as the crowning, highest step of thought — especially as he somewhat inconsistently rejected the idea of an absolute intellect, or intellectus archetypus or an intuitive understanding 161 . Schelling — like Coleridge — whole- heartedly adopts "intellectual intuition" as the solution of the dilemma, as it means for him the concrete unity of intuition and thought, of action, and insight. The doctrine of productive imagination solves the contradiction between form and matter. "Naturphilosophie" tries to overcome objectively, concretely, through a synthesis of reason and sensuous intuition the Kantian distinction of speculation and experience, empty understanding and sensuous intuition, category and idea. Fichte had done this before dialectically and speculatively. Schelling set out to do it concretely. But, like Coleridge, in his thought he remained on the level of Fichte. Both for Schelling and for Coleridge the distinc- tions between consciousness and being, form and matter prove after all unsurmountable. Both of them merely postu- late this synthesis as an ideal, both of them recognize the deficiencies of a Kantian dualism, but they never succeeded in carrying out this synthesis speculatively. Coleridge fled into a deeper and more pernicious dualism, Schelling merely showed Hegel the way to solve it 162 . We have seen that the deep kinship between Coleridge's and Schelling's criticism of Kant extends far beyond the more obvious agreement in explaining Kant's half-way truths by the gratuitous insinuation of wilful symbolism. Merely as a supplementary argument and illustration of this agreement we may point to Coleridge's criticism of Kant's cosmogony which is entirely written from a Schel- lingian point of view. In the notes I have quoted above 163 , Coleridge uses nothing but the terms of Schelling's philo- sophy of nature up to that famous anticipation of Maxwell's 102 KANT IN ENGLAND theory : "the same Ether vibrating = a produces Vision or Light, = p sensation of Heat, = y sound", or similarly: "Not according to the matter is the body even, much less the soul: but according to the chemical, vital, and rational powers, such is the matter. — The air, we breathe, is 4 / 5 th probably, metal volatilized, which some chemical affinity will perhaps render malleable — trace the dirt, and manure by the vegetable powers transformed with the visible parts of Grass or Leaves — then by the vital part turned into flesh, blood, horn, ivory" and so on in the very tone and style of the most phantastic Scheilingian speculations on nature. Having outlined Coleridge's criticism of Kant and shown the source and ground from which this criticism proceeds, we have actually solved our second question : what is Kant's influence on Coleridge's own thought? Obviously the two questions are identical at their root and we can only receive confirmation of what we have said above from a detailed investigation of Coleridge's writings as to their traces of Kantian thought. Not much can be gained from going through all the innumerable recurrences of Kantian ter- minology and phrases throughout the body of Coleridge's various writings. We shall therefore dwell only on some of the most important aspects of the question without any attempt at completeness. Already the Friend 1 ^ shows everywhere how Kant's teaching has become central for Coleridge's thought. One wonders how even quite recently in J. H. Muirhead's Cole- ridge as Philosopher 165 it ever could have been denied, that Kantian thought is determining the essentials of Cole- ridge's theoretical doctrines and coloring even the minutest tags of his terminology. Of course, there is Coleridge's assertion that there is nothing in the book which is not traceable to Greek philosophy or to "the great men of Europe from the middle of the fifteenth till towards the close of the seventeenth century" 1 66. There is some truth in this statement: even Kant's thought has its ancestors. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 103 Nevertheless the Friend could not have been written in the form it stands without a knowledge of Kant. Moreover, in the body of the book 167 ,there is actually a direct acknow- ledgement to Kant at the beginning of the discussion of Reason and Understanding, where Coleridge says: "If further confirmation be necessary, it may be supplied by the following reflections, the leading thought of which I remember to have read in the works of a continental philosopher." The distinction between Reason and Understanding, which plays such an important part throughout the whole Friend and the whole of Coleridge's writings, was un- doubtedly in a sense current before Kant. Coleridge has claimed a great many predecessors for this distinction and a modern writer has tried to show that Coleridge's distinc- tion is really quite independent of Kant's 168 . Harrington, Hooker, Bacon, Hobbes, Jacobi and Hemsterhuis are men- tioned in one essay of the Friend as drawing analogous distinctions 169 . Subsequently Coleridge ascribed this dis- tinction again to Hooker 1 ™, to Jeremy Taylor 1 ? 1 , to Arch- bishop Leighton 172 , and to John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist 173 . But then, there is obviously no use stopping at the English divines, but one can go back as far as Plato or Aristotle or at least as Thomas Aquinas who sharply distinguished between ratio and intellectus, though intel- lectus is for him the higher faculty, while reason is the discursive reason, which Kant and Coleridge call under- standing 174 . But the point of issue is this: Coleridge could not have formulated the distinction as he did it, without Kant, even if his interpretation of the distinction is closer to the meaning of the older writers. Already in the Friend the definitions of understanding in particular show distinct Kantian traces. Understanding is the "faculty by which we generalize and arrange the phenomena of perception; that faculty, the functions of which contain the rules and constitute the possibility of outward experience" 175 . Under- standing "combines these multifarious impressions [of sense] into individual notions, and by reducing these 104 KANT IN ENGLAND notions to rules, according to the analogy of all its former notices constitutes experience" 176 . Or elsewhere: "By the understanding I mean the faculty of thinking and forming judgments on the notices furnished by the sense according to certain rules existing in itself, which rules constitute its distinct nature" 177 , or "rules [of the understanding] abstracted from the objects of senses, and applicable exclu- sively to things of quantity and relation", or "the pheno- mena of time and space under the form of causes and effects" 178 . There is one passage which shows even more clearly a direct acquaintance with the Kantian table of categories: "The moulds and mechanism of the under- standing, the whole purpose and functions of which consist in individualization, in outlines and differencings by quantity, quality, and relation" 179 . All this is Kant and nothing but Kant and cannot be derived from elsewhere. Though as we have shown Coleridge in private had his doubts as to the validity of Kant's distinction between form and matter, a priori and a posteriori, he accepts it here quite wholeheartedly. He speaks, for instance, of the instruments of sensation as furnishing "only chaos, the shapeless elements of sense" 180 . He speaks of the notion of causality, or as he calls it here, the "nexus effectivus" as originating in the mind "as one of the laws under which alone it can reduce the manifold of the impression from without into unity and thus contemplate it as one thing; and could never (as has been clearly proved by Mr. Hume) have been derived from outward experience, in which it is indeed presupposed, as a necessary condition" 181 . Cole- ridge's conception of Reason, on the other hand, varies considerably from Kant's, though even here the influence seems beyond any question. Reason is to him rather "an organ bearing the same relation to the spiritual objects, the universal, the eternal, and the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phaenomena" 182 . In a word, Reason is "the mind's eye", "the organ of inward sense and therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities and spiritual objects." To say it even -n SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 105 clearly, Reason is to Coleridge an organ of faith, / y 3r name for "vision" and "illumination", even if, of i more another name course, he does not confuse this Reason with a mere passive, ecstatic rapture, but sees it as a heightening and crowning of man's knowing power. Nevertheless this con- ception which really identifies Coleridge rather with "phi- losophers of faith", whose names he is himself quoting as witnesses, than with the historical Kant, shows still traces of its derivation from Kant very clearly. Coleridge even distinguished between two kinds of reason in the fashion of Kant's distinction between theoretical and practical reason. He says that Reason "subordinates both the notions of the understanding and the rules of experience to absolute principles or necessary laws: and thus concerning objects, which our experience has proved to have real existence, it demonstrates moreover, in what way they are possible and in doing this constitutes science. Reason, therefore, in this secondary sense, and used not as spiritual organ but as a faculty (namely, the understanding or soul enlightened by that organ) — reason, I say, or the scientific faculty, is the intellection of the possibility or essential properties of things by means of the laws that constitute them" 183 . Or expressed in more modern terms: there are two reasons according to Coleridge — one which is actually identical with Kant's theoretical Reason and another which takes the name Reason from Kant, but is substantially the "intellectual intuition" of all Platonists and of Schelling. In another connection Coleridge's definition of Reason comes nearer to Kant's: "By the practical Reason, I mean the power by which we become possessed of principles (the eternal verities of Plato and Descartes) and of ideas (N. B. not images) , as the ideas of a point, a line, a circle, in mathematics; and of justice, holiness, free-will etc. in morals" 184 . Reason takes here both the function of Kant's intuition and of Kant's practical Reason which are brought together by their common independence from discursive reasoning. In a true Kantian sense Coleridge asserts Reason to be absolutely equal with all men: "the measure of the 106 KANT IN ENGLAND understanding, and of all other faculties of man, is dif- ferent in different persons; but reason is not susceptible of degree" 185 . Elsewhere Coleridge asserts that "the whole moral nature of man originated and subsists in his reason. From reason alone can we derive the principles which our understandings are to apply, the ideal to which by means of our understanding we should endeavour to approxi- mate" 186 . The relation of Reason to the Will does not become quite clear in the Friend. Once pure reason is "designed to regulate the will" 187 , immediately afterwards faith is a union of reason and will 188 . Elsewhere the "unity of intuitive reason" is absorbing "the antithesis between experience and belief", while all true reality is asserted to have "both its ground and its evidence in the will" 189 . The Kantian use of the term Idea recurs again and again: once in an enumeration which mixes the "ideas of being, form, life, the reason, with the law of conscience, freedom, immortality, God" 190 , once more specifically as an idea "incapable of being abstracted or generalized from any number of phenomena, because it is itself presupposed in each and all as their common ground and condition It is attributed, never derived" 191 . Other parts of Coleridge's speculations also show the direct influence of Kant. The a priori occurs: "The laws of being a priori, that is, from those necessities of the mind or forms of thinking, which, though first revealed to us by experience, must yet have preexisted in order to make experience possible" 192 . Is not this the very terminology of the first sentences of the Critique of Pure Reason? The epistomological problem is once formulated as "what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and expe- rience? Or between the laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect?" The answer which Coleridge gives is called by him Plato's, but it could be also Kant's though more loosely phrased. "It compels reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a super- sensuous essence, which, being at once the ideal of reason and the cause of the material world, is the preestablisher SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 107 of the harmony in and between both" 193 . Similarly "the material world is found to obey the laws as had been deduced independently from the reason" 194 , or the same idea in a more Schellingian form: "the productive power, which is in nature as nature, is essentially one (i. e. of one kind) with the intelligence, which is in the human mind above nature" 195 . Even the Kantian doctrine of the ideality of space and time is adopted : sensibility is defined as the "recipient property of the soul, from the ori- ginal constitution of which we perceive and imagine all things under the forms of space and time" 19 6 or he speaks of reason "arranging these phenomena in time and space under the forms of causes and effects" 197 . Much also of the ethics expanded in the Friend shows traces of characteristically Kantian phrases. Of course, Coleridge is now a firm believer in what he calls the "mysterious faculty of free-will, in the law of conscience, in the ideas of soul, of free-will, of immortality, and of God" 198 . The law of conscience "unconditionally commands us to attribute reality, and actual existence to those ideas" 199 . All the mighty world of eye and ear "presents itself to us now as the aggregated material of duty" 200 . This our obedience to duty is "an act of obedience to a moral law established by the acting being himself" 201 . Coleridge, like Kant, stresses the importance of motives for any moral judgment. "Inward motives and impulses constitute the essence of morality" 202 . Kant's famous distinction between person and thing is repeated even with the comparison between means and end in itself. "The principle which is the groundwork of all law and justice, that a person can never become a thing, nor be treated as such without wrong. But the distinction between person and things consists therein, that the latter may rightfully be used, altogether and merely, as a means ; but the former must always be included in the end, and form a part of the final cause" 203 . Even Kant's maxim occurs: "So act thou mayest be able without involving any contradiction, to will that the maxim of thy conduct should be the law of all 108 KANT IN ENGLAND intelligent beings — is the one universal and sufficient principle and guide of morality" 204 . Nowhere the name of Kant is even as much as hinted at in this connection. Kantian, finally, is also the argument in favor of immor- tality: "one of the most persuasive, if not one of the strongest, arguments for a future state, rests on the belief, that although by the necessity of things our out- ward and temporal welfare must be regulated by our out- ward actions, which alone can be the objects and guides of human law, there must yet needs come a juster and more appropriate sentence hereafter, in which our inten- tions will be considered, and our happiness and misery made to accord with the grounds of our actions" 205 . But the limitation which Coleridge puts on Kant's main argument, shows that his real belief was based on reasons of revelation rather than on moral retribution. Kantian thought and terminology permeates all the reflective parts of the Friend. Everything is there: the threefold division of the mind, space and time as forms, the categories, the Ideas of Reason (though their exact number is not respected) , the a priori, the grounds of coinci- dence between reason and experience, the dictate of practi- cal reason with all the paraphernalia of the maxim, the end-in-itself, the ethics of motives, the moral proof of immortality etc. Still we cannot but feel that a mind very foreign to Kant's has written this book and has given to Kantian ideas an interpretation which is essentially un- Kantian: Reason under Coleridge's hands returned to its old meaning of intellectual intuition, the limits between practical and theoretical reason are erased thereby and the whole flood of traditional metaphysics can again celebrate its triumphant entry. This is due, of course, to Coleridge's inability to decide the actual relation between the theoreti- cal and practical Reason. This problem could not be solved by anyone who had drawn such a sharp dividing line between understanding as reflection and Reason as intel- lectual intuition. Coleridge — and here his agreement with Schelling becomes again very striking — falls back into SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 109 ontological, pre-Kantian metaphysics, unable to hold to Kant's actual starting-point. But Schelling resolutely aban- doned Kant, while Coleridge with a sort of mysterious feeling of gratitude and awe kept Kant's architectonic even if he had his private objections against it. The collection of aphorisms and scraps of criticism by Coleridge and Robert Southey, called Omniana, published in 1812, contains another classification of the mind which shows Kant's influence. Under the heading "The Soul and its Organs of Sense" Coleridge gives a list of powers in a very hodge-podge manner which shows that he could not have understood the actual reasons of Kant's division or did not choose to follow them adopting a merely psycho- logical principle of division. Coleridge distinguishes an ' 'imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagina- tion, 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 scientif ica, 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 ; the will or practical reason ; the faculty of choice (Germanice Willkuhr 200 ) and (distinct 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" 207 . A later note by Coleridge adds a correct explana- tion of the a priori in a Kantian sense as arising by "occasion of experience" and not previously to it 208 . Also Coleridge's aesthetic writings dating from about this time show definite traces of Kant's thought. The lectures of 1808 demonstrate his familiarity with Kant's aesthetics. In a letter to Mrs. Clarkson H. C. Robinson gives an account of some of these lectures and mentions that Coleridge quoted Kant observing "that the Orator treats an affair of business as if it were a thing of imagination while the Poet handles a work of fancy as if it were a matter of business" 200 . This is a rather inadequate para- phrase of a passage in the "Kritik der Urteilskraft" 2 i°. 110 KANT IN ENGLAND Robinson continues his report: "In the same lecture Cole- ridge contrived to work into his speech Kant's admirably profound definition of the naif, that is nature putting art to shame" 211 . This again is a very skilful, aphoristic render- ing of Kant's discussion on naivete in the same work 212 . In 1815 Coleridge was speaking to Robinson about Kant saying that he "would translate his Sublime and Beautiful and thought the Kritik der Urteilskraf t the most astonishing of his works" 213 . Also Schelling and Hegel considered the Kritik der Urteilskraft Kant's profoundest work. The 1812 lectures likewise must have contained some expositions of Kantian thought, though it is not clear from P. Collier's notes how close it was. Robinson reports on the first lecture on Belles Lettres at the Surrey Institution that Coleridge "enlarged on the vagueness of terms and their abuse, and in defining taste, gave the Kantian theory as to the nature of judgments of taste" 214 . We have, however, a fragment of an Essay on Taste, which was dated 1810 by its first editors 215 . It is too short a fragment to allow any very definite conclusions on Coleridge's aesthetic, but it enables us at least to see the direction in which Coleridge's mind was moving. Actually these three pages contain little more than the beginning of a statement of the central problem of the Critique of Judgment. The definition of taste given, paraphrases rather loosely the Critique of Judgment. It is called "an intellectual perception of any object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensibility of pain and pleasure" or in more Kantian terms, it is subjective, but still has an objective reference. It is accompanied by plea- sure, but it is a cognition different from mere passive enjoyment or as Coleridge phrases it, it gives "a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves with the perception of external arrangement" 216 . The word "immediate" is either a translation of the German "unmittelbar", which Kant uses of aesthetic art 217 or it is one of those etymological quibbles so dear to Coleridge, the amateur philologian 218 , who tries to render the German "disinteressiert" as "nothing being in between", or immediate. For obviously the term SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 111 is identical with Kant's disinterested pleasure, that is a pleasure free from any necessary connection with the real existence of the object 219 . But this is all comparatively vague, until we come to Coleridge's explanation of Kant's description of the judgment of taste as rightly claiming everybody's assent. The judgment of taste has what Kant calls an aesthetic quantity of universality, that is, a validity for everybody 220 . The general voice of taste is merely an idea not empirically given, but still implied in every judg- ment. Coleridge has adopted this view literally saying that we "involuntarily claim that all other minds ought to think and feel the same" 221 , "Each man", says Coleridge as did Kant, "does at the moment so far legislate for all men". "Every man does and must expect and demand the uni- versal acquiescence of all intelligent beings." But Coleridge breaks off at this point and did not get so far as to expand Kant's solution which is, as is well known, based on a "common sense". This interrupted discussion was resumed by Coleridge at a different point in a series of papers written in 1814. The essays On the Principles of Genial Criticism con- cerning the Fine Arts were written for Felix Farley's obscure Bristol Journal 222 , originally as a sort of advertise- ment for an exhibition of the American painter Washington Allston. Coleridge once called these essays "the best things he had ever written" 22 3, a rather dubious praise as few of the leading ideas are really Coleridge's own. Again as in the Essay on Taste art is defined as consisting "in the excitement of emotion for the immediate purpose of plea- sure through the medium of beauty" 224 and essay two and three turn around the Kantian distinctions between the Agreeable, the Beautiful, between "Wohlgef alien", which Coleridge translates as complacency, and delight etc. The introductory paragraph with its distinction between the method of philosophy and of mathematics is merely a para- phrase of Kant, this time from the early essay: "Unter- suchungen liber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsatze der natur- lichenTheologie und der Moral" 22 ^. Immediately afterwards 112 KANT IN ENGLAND Coleridge designates rather too hopefully his not very coherent and systematic definition of Art as the "regula- tive idea of all Fine Arts", a Kantian tag which is not used in a critical manner. The meaning of "immediate" is then explained in the sense of the German "disinteres- siert". "Complacency", obviously a rendering of the German "Wohlgef alien", is distinguished from delight which repre- sents the Kantian term "Vergniigen" 226 . The essential difference between the beautiful and agreeable is explained in a Kantian way, and Kant's solution of the problem is hinted at. "A regulative principle, which may indeed be stifled and latent in some, and be perverted and denatural- ized in others, yet is nevertheless universal" 227 is asserted to exist. Kant himself has not called this universal taste a regulative principle, but only the concept of judgment, of purposiveness in nature, is a regulative principle in the third Critique 228 . The universal voice is to him an idea 229 , a term which apparently suggested to Coleridge an applica- tion of the regulative principle to the standard of taste. At the end of the essay Coleridge assigns to taste a position in the scheme of mind intermediary "between the active and the passive powers of our nature, the intellect and the senses ; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former". Taste is then the "harmony of both", intellect and sensi- bility. This sounds very Kantian in the terminology, but ris not actually Kant's own opinion. For Kant aesthetic judgment stands between Reason and Understanding, and not between Sensibility and Understanding 230 . The Cole- ridgean Taste is on the other hand identical with Kant's productive imagination, and Coleridge really did ascribe this mediation to the Imagination in the Biographia Lite- raria 231 . Kant's productive imagination brings into connec- tion the two extreme ends, sensibility and understanding 232 , but in contradistinction to Coleridge, imagination is in Kant a logical function to which the generation of any experience is due 233 and cannot therefore be identified with taste. The third of these somewhat rambling essays returns SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 113 again to the discussion of the Agreeable and Beautiful, using traditional definitions as the one in many etc., discusses the term taste which Coleridge supposes to be derived from the Romans in its metaphorical use 234 and returns to a new definition of the sense of beauty which is little more than a combination of Kant with the old One-in-many formula. "The sense of beauty subsists in simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each, and all to a whole ; ex- citing an immediate and absolute complacency, without inj:ervenence, therefore, of any interest, sensual or intellec- tual" 235 . It rests gratified in the mere contemplation or intuition. The Scholium which is added is, however, closest* to Kant. Here Coleridge adopts Kant's § 9, which argues that the judgment of the object (or as Coleridge phrases it, the contemplation or intuition of its beauty) always * precedes the feeling of pleasure 236 . The anecdote about the iroquois sachem preferring the cook shops to all the sights of Paris, is likewise derived from the Kritik der Urteils- kraft 237 and the further arguments return again to our expectation that others should coincide with our aesthetic judgment. Coleridge stresses here — as he did before 238 — Kant's opinion that this demand or "ought" is after all pro- nounced only conditionally 239 . The concluding remarks touch on the question of the relation between the Good and the Beautiful in an entirely Kantian way, as when Coleridge calls the Good discursive which seems to be an attempt to render Kant's sentence: "Good is what pleases through the medium of reason, through the mere concept" 240 . Finally a last definition of Beauty is attempted which is again in substantial agreement with Kant: "The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive. As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind, which cannot but have complacency in whatever is perceived as pre-configured to its living faculties" 241 . The last sentence, however, and the following quotation from Plotinus show again the fatal weakness in Coleridge's relation to 114 KANT IN ENGLAND : Kant. Instead of taking or developing Kant's ideas in the direction of a dialectical synthesis, at which Kant aims just at the most profound passages of his Critiques and which is also implied in Coleridge's criticisms of Kant, Coleridge falls back into a pre-Kantian point of view, into the mere assumption of a "preestablished harmony", a concept which is after all a simple evasion of the problem and deserts the fundamental newness of Kant's position. It amounts simply to the wisdom which found its classical expression in Goethe's famous verses: ''War' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft Die Sonne konnt' es nie erblicken" 242 . Of the major writings of Coleridge least of Kant's immediate influence can be found in the Biographia Lite- raria (1817), though there Coleridge gave an elaborate account of his relations to German philosophy. Partly the biographical character of the book and partly the predomi- nant influence of Schelling pushed Kantian ideas into the background. Oddly enough, however, Kant has not quite disappeared even at the central points of the arguments. Coleridge uses Kant's moral foundation of a belief in God. Though Coleridge himself believes in a logical necessity of the existence of God, he is with Kant convinced that a proof of his existence is impossible. "I saw", he says, "that in the nature of things such proof is impossible ; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the constitution of the mind itself . . . Still the existence of a being, the ground of all existence, was not yet the existence of a moral creator and governor" 243 . He quotes in support a passage from Kant's "Einzig moglicher Beweisgrund fiir das Dasein Gottes" 244 , a paper which he had annotated before in a very similar sense. Coleridge's objections against the ontological proof seem to be dictated by his strong traditional theism. He could not accept such a depersonalized God as Fichte or Schelling thought suf- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 115 ficiently demonstrable. He really thought about the problem how to reconcile personality with infinity. But he did not succeed in finding a dialectical solution, but merely escaped into belief. He quotes St. Paul and the Book of Job and claims that this guiding light "dawned upon him, even before he met with the Critique of Pure Reason". But the particular terms of this solution must have been derived from Kant: "I am convinced that religion, as both the corner-stone and the keystone of morality, must have a moral origin, so far at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not like the truth of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will" 245 . "The sciential reason [Coleridge's term for Kant's theoretical reason] whose objects are purely theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine. But it then becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally logical." The antinomies are used as allies of reli- gion, "they throw the intellect into confusion and bank- ruptcy and open the way for the moral belief. Our feelings almost necessitate it ; and the law of conscience peremptorily demands it" 246 . In the phrase quoted above, Coleridge in- directly admits the Kantianism of these tenets. But this Kantianism is immediately modified in the conclusions which he draws from these premises. He sees in them a complete justification of any article of belief, however irrational it may seem to the understanding. At least these premises allow to assume the possibility of further myste- ries concerning the divine nature. Coleridge's rejection of Unitarianism, which he had embraced originally with such ardor, finds here its intellectual justification. Kant is put to strange uses : his doctrines on the limits of our knowing power become a sort of back-door through which the whole of traditional theology is admitted. This old dichotomy of reason and faith or in Coleridge's terms of Understanding and Reason has, however, a distinctly Kantian coloring in the stress on the moral foundation of religion. The a priori, 116 KANT IN ENGLAND which elsewhere in the Biographia 247 is defined in a correct Kantian way and carefully distinguished from "innate ideas", is in another passage identified with "organs of the spirit" which are not "developed in all men alike and which disclose their first appearance in the moral being" 248 . Only, we may underline, their first appearance, as there arises somehow beside it a Fichtean "original intuition or absolute affirmation" 249 , an original construc- tion or first productive act of the inner sense 250 , which is neither merely speculative nor merely practical, but both in one 251 . On top of Kant's reluctant affirmations Coleridge put here simply the beginnings of Schelling's system, quoted literally or paraphrased freely, sometimes modified by his own insertions which defend traditional concepts 252 , but on the whole undigested, inorganic and irreconcilable with the Kantian base in a moral belief. The chapters which prepare the unfulfilled promise of a theory of Imagination again use Kant on several points. Coleridge repeats the rather incoherent division of the faculties which we know from the "Omniana" 253 with the Kantian tripartition along- side of a number of psychological faculties. Just before the concluding letter which interrupts Coleridge's discus- sion, Coleridge explains at great length Kant's idea of an application of mathematics to philosophy and transcribes in part the beginning of the early "Versuch den Begriff der negativen GroBen in die Weltweisheit einzufiihren" 254 . Kant's name and thought accompanies as we have seen the whole range of Coleridge's philosophical discussion, but if we except the one idea of a moral foundation of religion which, moreover, does not dovetail with the Schellingian additions, Kant remains a mere accompaniment to a louder music of subjective, objective and their absolute identity 255 . On the other hand, the two-volume MS Logic written or rather dictated between 1822 and 1827 256 is permeated with Kant's thought from the beginning to the end. It has never been printed in full, though it makes quite good, continuous reading, partly because J. H. Green wanted to exercise a "sound discretion" and partly as Miss Snyder SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 117 in her recent book "Coleridge on Logic and Learning" had no room to print more than a few well chosen extracts. Professor Muirhead quoted a few more passages in his "Coleridge as Philosopher". Our own account is based on a new examination of the MS in the British Museum 257 and quotes also freely from the unpublished parts. A full description of the contents can be found in Miss Snyder's book. It is difficult to decide how far Coleridge acknow- ledged his indebtedness as the MS is not in any final shape. A part of the MS was dictated to Coleridge's classes in Logic 258 , where as in every lecturing specific acknowledg- ments of his sources would have been very cumbersome. Some phrases in the MS sound almost like attempts to hide the true derivation of his ideas. Coleridge speaks frequently of himself as of a discoverer, even when he is merely taking Kantian terms, for instance, of the "primary mental act which we have called the synthetic unity, or the unity of apperception" 259 or of the term category, "the different meaning of which in Aristotle and in our Logic does not appear to warrant to me a change in the name" 260 or of "truths of reason which have their source in the theoreti- cal reason alone and these I have termed principles" 261 . Coleridge uses also such an impersonal reference as to "some Logicians" who have spoken of the "Synthetic Function of the Understanding" 262 and refers even in- nocently to the "writers above mentioned" 263 , though no name is pronounced before. Or Coleridge combines the impersonal passive voice with some, scarcely verifiable or defensible historical reminiscence leading away from the actual source. So he starts to explain the "universal forms of our pure sense". "This knowledge", he says, "has been entitled Transcendental Aesthetic, a term borrowed from a fragment attributed to Palema, the successor of Sceucip- pus who succeeded Plato" 264 . The quotation which Cole- ridge himself gives, reveals that Palema knew merely the term ala^aic, smar\\iaxixr\ t which does not warrant the sug- gestion of borrowing and would, in any case, overrate the extent of Kant's Greek reading. Coleridge continues to 118 KANT IN ENGLAND refer to the word "transcendental" in this impersonal way and even censures Dr. Johnson for his failure to distin- guish between "transcendental" and "transcendent". He claims that this distinction was made by our "own divines and metaphysicians in times past" 265 . But all new research has shown that the two terms were used interchangeably by the schoolmen, by Bacon, Berkeley, Spinoza and others and that Kant apparently fixed the distinction quite arbit- rarily 266 . But Coleridge alludes also to the "present use" of the terms "in the continental schools" 267 . Only a little further he is quite frank in stating that he "deemed it expedient not to have unnoticed or unexplained the terms which the most profound of modern Logicians and the proper Inventor and Founder of Transcendental Analysis has adopted" 268 . Though we have abundant proofs of strange silence, tributes to Kant and references to his name are not at all infrequent throughout the body of the work. Some of them have been quoted in our account of Coleridge's opinions of Kant. An analysis of the volumes shows that Coleridge wanted here to expand his Logic, which being substan- tially identical with Kant's logic, is to him something lower than Metaphysics, a discipline preparatory to it. It clears the ground for a higher view which, as many turns of speech suggest, was to him the same as a Philosophy of Identity in the Schellingian manner. The Logic as such seems to remain somehow undisturbed by the superstruc- ture. As Logic, he expressedly avows, Kant's Critique is irrefragable 269 . Even the categories, which are utterly indefensible on any Schellingian grounds are declared to be "all the stem-conceptions" 276 and their completeness de- fended as assured even against the "higher point of view". "Here", says Coleridge in a note which reveals again his fatal dualism, this time a dualism between logician and man, "it may be well to remind the Student that whatever hypothesis he might adopt as a Man, whether he stands on the higher ground of Philosophy, seen from which Mind and Nature, Subject and Object are one (that is anterior SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 119 to that evolution of the prothesis in which Mind and Nature first appear as the thesis and antithesis) or whether he resolves the former into the latter on the theory of Materialism . . in both cases . . still, as a Logician he must consent Scientiae causa et per hypothesim instrumentalem to receive the several conceptions specified in the table of predicaments and their pure derivations" 271 . This dualism cuts through the whole of Coleridge's philosophy though just this "higher point of view" of identity would serve to resolve it. There is in him a knowledge of the higher combined with a fatal inability to go beyond what he termed the lower view. Once, for instance, he calls "the sphere of Understanding" the only rightful sphere of Logic. "As Logicians, therefore, and even in opposition to our philosophical creed, we may take it as the total sphere of the Human Mind; and we are induced to treat it as such not only because by thus insulating the subject we may contemplate it more distinctly, but likewise and chiefly, because we cannot compel an opponent to admit the contrary by arguments purely speculative or on premises which it is not in his power to deny if it should be his choice" 272 . Coleridge's pussilanimity, his lack of confidence in speculative Reason led him to deny to Reason communi- cability which brings it even more dangerously near to private mystical intuition. He continues to assert this dualism in an even more striking form: "But though we are incompetent to give a scientific proof of any other and higher source of knowledge, it is equally true that no Logic requires us to assert the negative or enables us to disprove that a position which is neither theoretically undeniable nor capable of being logically concluded, may nevertheless be morally convincing and or even philo- sophically evident" 273 . Scientific proof here stands un- reconciled versus a Kantian moral conviction and a Schel- lingian and Platonic "philosophical evidence". This dualism recurs again and again, as in the discussion on the things in themselves upon which we have commented above 274 . The fine idea of truth as an organisation, an organic body, 120 KANT IN ENGLAND which he had hinted at elsewhere is gone 275 and is replaced in practice by the double truth of Logic and of higher Reason. Similarly Coleridge falls back on this dualism, when he discusses the productive unity of the understanding, which he rightly conceives as a dynamical whole which is logically antecedent to its different parts, the individual categories. He feels the difficulty of this conception of a dynamical whole very strongly: "I incur, or at least border closely on a contradiction: for I speak of a whole the constituent parts of which are in no moment all present or all existing. But if sensible of this I substi- tute the phrase of productive unity as that which gives existence I venture on a thought which while it necessarily escapes the notice of the sense, contradicts the first axioms of the Understanding which as imperiously demands the Stuff for the Form, as the Form for the Stuff, and in whose creation a chaos necessarily precedes the world." Instead of rejoicing at the good riddance of the dualism of Form and Matter, of unity and chaos, Coleridge sees only "one way of escaping, viz. by assuming, by willing to assume that the truth passeth all Understanding and that a contradiction exists in the heterogeneity of the faculty, not in the object; or rather in the misapplication of the faculty to an object for which it was neither adopted nor intended" 276 . But here F. H. Bradley's arguments are valid: we cannot attribute discrepancy to reality; and, if we try to take it on ourselves, as Coleridge does here, we have changed one evil for two. Our intellect then has been condemned to confusion and bankruptcy, and the reality has been left outside uncomprehended 277 . But curiously enough, Coleridge is not altogether blind to the possibility of reconstructing Logic on a monist base. He sees that there are weighty objections against Kant's rigid architectonic, but he somehow managed to admit them from afar without really taking account of them. Schelling is always or frequently lurking behind his ex- position of Kant and a knowledge of his arguments pops up sometimes rather unexpectedly. For instance, Coleridge SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 121 sees that the Kantian distinction of Matter and Form is untenable. He sees that phrases like the "many, the mani- fold or multeity" or chaos "ought not at least to be any pretence of determining the nature and character of the external agents considered as powers separate from the mind and having like the mind a principle of subsistence in themselves. For logically, that is as far as the acts and conclusions of Understanding or the Sense are alone con- cerned, the Mind has acquired no right of affirming even the external existence of such agents otherwise than as an affirmation is implied in the act of distinguishing these impressions, or in more appropriate language these stimu- lations and excitements from itself as not belonging to its own self-consciousness" 278 . The back-door to the higher faculty has remained open, but the inadequacy of the divi- sion is at least recognized. Similarly the sharp severance of subject and object is criticized: "when taking our point of view from the Understanding we divided all things into subject and object — we did not disguise ourselves that something far higher was presupposed which was neither subject singly nor object nor a conjunction of both by adding the one to the other : but the identity of both, their common root. But to this we know that time and space are not attributable" 279 . In a quite Schellingian manner this identity is dwelt upon 280 . Coleridge also recognizes that then in the sphere of the identity of the subjective and objective, "the antithesis of the analytic and synthetic disappears likewise and loses all import: for it rises out of the forms of Understanding and of the Sense, that are instruments for the knowledge of true relations and rela- tive not absolute truth, which latter appertains to a higher principle" 28 !. But with these exceptions, Coleridge's Logic is little more than an exposition of Kant with several interesting digressions in addition. But as an exposition of Kant, the Logic ranks high indeed and shows a far better insight into Kant than most of Coleridge's contemporaries could boast of and a much more precise knowledge of Kant's actual 122 KANT IN ENGLAND teachings than one would have expected from the loose phraseology of some of Coleridge's more popular writings. We might draw attention to some of the main points. The distinction between Reason and Understanding appears here in a correctly Kantian sense: Reason as the source of principles, Understanding as the faculty of Rules 282 ; or Reason as the power of Ideas contradistinguished from Understanding as the faculty of conceptions 283 ; or Under- standing is described accurately as the substantiative power "that by which we give and attribute substance and reality to phenomena and raise them from mere affections and appearances into objects communicable and capable of being anticipated and reasoned about" 283 . The contents of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic are reproduced fairly accurately with all the different arguments for the ideality of space and time. The a priori is well defined, the distinc- tion between analytic and synthetic judgments is correctly explained, Kant's arguments against the false subtlety of the four forms of syllogism appear and his theory of judg- ment with the table of judgments is reproduced in full. More unusual at that time is Coleridge's insight into the nature of the a priori as function of unity, in which the act of the understanding consists 284 . The product, he recognizes, is merely an Ens logicum. "By generalizing a continuous act or a series of acts essentially the same and then contemplating this generality as a unity, we form the notion of a power. A power has no scientific sense, no philosophic Genesis or Derivation, where it is not coincident and commutable with a law or introduced confessedly as the surrogate or substitute of a Law not yet discovered— an Ens logicum to be reasoned with not to be reasoned from" 286 , a sort of auxiliary concept which can be very well defended against the criticism of a Herbart directed against the mechanical psychology of powers and faculties. Also in discussing the categories Coleridge remarks judiciously: "we are now speaking of the Mind, not in respect to the quid est or what it is; but to the quo fungitur or what offices does it discharge, in other words not with regard to its SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 123 constitutive but its functional powers" 287 . More correctly than Kant himself, Coleridge shows that the table of judgments can be derived from the table of categories, while Kant adopted rather the opposite procedure which is, however, certainly illegitimate. Coleridge says that "if it have been truly asserted by us that Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality are the sum of the constituent forms or most general and innate (sic) conceptions of the Mind, we shall be able to class all the possible judgments according to one or the other of these" 288 . Curiously enough, Cole- ridge does not recognize the consequence of this judicious reversal of the deduction which is most certainly true to the fundamental teachings of Kant 289 . What principle, we might ask, guarantees the completeness of the table of categories, if it is not derived from the table of judgments? Though unable to answer this question, Coleridge clings to the completeness of the table, which he accepts with all the details of its division. Another point of Coleridge's interpretation of Kant, which shows considerable insight, is his insistence on the unconsciousness of the synthesizing processes. He rightly insists that the "synthetic unity or the unity of apperception is presupposed in, and in order to, all consciousness. It is its condition (conditio sine qua non) or that which constitutes the possibility of consciousness a priori" 290 . Once Coleridge goes so far as to assert in a truly Kantian manner "the unindividual and transcendent charac- ter of Reason" 29 i and to suggest that "data of the Under- standing, made known to us in and by reflection" may be "considered as the offspring of a higher source which for distinction's sake we named the Reason" 292 . On the whole, we see a slavish acceptance and reproduction of many details of Kant's architectonic side by side with a fine insight into the most fruitful teachings of the Critique of Pure Reason. This insight seems to be, however, some- how isolated and contingent, for it is not strong and deep enough to transform Coleridge's speculation in a manner which would go beyond Kant really effectively. The hints of a higher or Schellingian point of view remain un- 124 KANT IN ENGLAND absorbed outside of the main body of the work : the higher synthesis was unable to resolve the Kantian distinctions which pass unchanged into Coleridge's expositions. Some- times they are, it is true, challenged with coherent argu- ments, but even then they are challenged merely theoreti- cally: the new synthesis remains an unfulfilled postulate. Coleridge knows that in the Absolute the "scire" becomes identical with the "esse", but he knows only this Ideal of Reason, without being able to reach it. On Coleridge's philosophy more even than on Kant's we may apply the criticism of Hegel: that it is the very spirit of Kantian philosophy to be conscious of this highest idea, while it is exterminating it expressedly 293 . Of course, we must re- member that Coleridge's Logic is only a fragment, that only its first part containing the Canon and the Dialectic was written while the Organon that he planned, remained one of Coleridge's many dreams. However, Coleridge's later metaphysics are perfectly obvious from his other writings, especially from the "Aids to Reflection". The Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge's book which proved by far the most influential in the England of the nineteenth century, turns around the distinction of Reason and Understanding. Of course, no pretence is here made of an interpretation of Kant, but still Kantian thought is permeating the whole book, however different the deeper motives of Coleridge's thought are. The "mom- entous distinction of Reason and Understanding" 294 recurs again and again in new and new formulas which are, however, substantially identical in their tendency and sense. Still in spite of his acceptance of orthodox Anglican theology, Coleridge is clinging to some of the fundamentals in Kant. It is a truly Coleridgean inconsistency that he still asserts subjective idealism side by side with a belief in the Triune God and the historical creed of Christianity. "Beauty, Order, Harmony, Finality, Law", he even says, "are all akin to the peculia of humanity, are all congenera of Mind and Will, without which indeed they would not only exist in vain, as pictures for moles, but actually not SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 125 exist at all" 295 . Coleridge speaks of the senses as "merely furnishing the materials for comparison" 296 . Space and Time are to him still "a mode or form of perceiving, or the inward ground and condition in the percipient" 297 , merely subjective, in and for the subject alone 298 and he speaks frequently of the "forms of time and space" 299 . Under- standing is still conceived in a Kantian manner, though curiously enough he quotes Bishop Leighton's definition of Reason "as the faculty judging according to sense" as his definition of Understanding 300 . The Understanding is dis- cursive 301 , the faculty of reflection 302 and generaliza- tion 303 . It contains certain inherent forms, that is, modes of reflecting not referable to the objects reflected on, but predetermined by the constitution and (as it were) mecha- nism of the Understanding itself 304 . There are "constituent forms of the Understanding" 305 or "generalific or generific rather than general, and concipiences or conceptive acts rather than conceptions" 306 in the Understanding. The work of realization is the work of Fancy 307 , Coleridge's new name for the Kantian "Einbildungskraft". Under- standing forms entia rationalia, and these in turn are con- versed into entia realia, or real objects by aid of the imagination 308 . Even the categories of Kant return, though not in a systematic manner. The form (or Law) of Cause and Effect is asserted to be only a form or mode of thinking, a law inherent in the Understanding itself 309 and Coleridge speaks blandly of the "preconceptions (con- ceptus anteeedentes et generalissimi) of quantity and relation" 310 . Yes, even the antinomies are there as "two contradictory conceptions, each of which is partially true and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the re- presentative or expression (the exponent) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible" 311 . All this is reasonably close to Kant, though even the conception of the Under- standing is burdened with the slight which Coleridge is putting on it compared to the dazzling glory of Reason. He points out that the "imperfect human understanding can be effectually exerted only in subordination to, and in a 126 KANT IN ENGLAND dependent alliance with, the means and aidancies supplied by the All-perfect and Supreme Reason" 312 . Understanding is even called the "mind of the flesh" 313 and once Coleridge adopts a curious nominalist interpretation of the unifying function of the Understanding: "In all instances it is words, names, or, if images, yet images used as words or names, that are the only and exclusive subjects of Under- standing. In no instance do we understand a thing in itself ; but only the name to which it is referred" 314 . Therefore the proper functions of the Understanding are that of "generalizing the notices received from the senses in order to the construction of names; of referring particular no- tions (that is, impressions or sensations) to their proper names ; and, vice versa, names to their correspondent class or kind of notices" 315 . This nominalism seems to be quite out of harmony with Coleridge's usual insistence on the power and importance of words as the wheels of thought 316 . But actually, an etymological quibble on "nomen" and "numen" enables Coleridge to interpret name as the "noumenon", the intelligible, the very condition of the existence of an object for our mind 317 . Reason has lost almost all its Kantian meaning in the Aids to Reflection. Yet the distinction inside of Reason is still Kantian. There is one reason, the truths of which are only conditional as being applied to the rules and maxims of the Understanding and one absolute, when the subject matter is itself the growth or offspring of the Reason. "Hence arises a distinction in the Reason itself, derived from the different mode of applying it, and from the objects to which it is directed: accordingly as we consider one and the same gift, now as the ground of formal principles, and now as the origin of ideas. Contem- plated distinctively in reference to formal (or abstract) truth, it is speculative reason; but in reference to actual (or moral) truth, as the fountain of ideas, and the light of the conscience, we name it the practical reason" 318 . But Coleridge is unable to make anything of this distinction between practical and theoretical Reason as his conception SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 127 of Reason has actually abolished the barriers between practical and theoretical. A note which was added only in the second edition of the Aids to Reflection, called "a Synoptical Summary of the Scheme of the Argument to prove the diversity in kind of the Reason and the Under- standing" retracts this division: "The Practical Reason alone is Reason in the full and substantive sense. It is reason in its own sphere of perfect freedom ; as the source of Ideas, which Ideas, in their conversion to the responsible will, become Ultimate Ends. On the other hand, Theoretic Reason, as the ground of the Universal and Absolute in all logical conclusion is rather the Light of Reason in the Understanding" 319 . Elsewhere the office of Speculative Reason is defined as a purely negative one 320 . Some of the paraphernalia of Coleridge's doctrine of Reason are still Kantian, and even where Coleridge drifts away from Kant in the actual sense, the terminology is still Kantian. Coleridge's Reason is, first and foremost, dangerously similar to intuition. Coleridge acknowledges this saying that Reason is indeed much nearer to Sense than to Under- standing: for "Reason (says our great Hooker) is a direct aspect of Truth, an inward Beholding" 321 , that is Reason is intellectual intuition similar to Schelling's term or simply identical with the vision of all Platonists and mystics. Else- where Coleridge speaks of "intuition or immediate Behold- ing accompanied by a conviction of the necessity and uni- versality of the truth so beholden not derived from the senses" as one faculty, which only when it is "construed by pure Sense, gives birth to the Science of Mathematics and when applied to objects supersensuous or spiritual is the organ of Theology and Philosophy" 322 . Coleridge has here simply amalgamated the two Kantian faculties of Sensibility and Reason. Therefore he can say: "the knowledge of spiritual truth is of necessity immediate and intuitive: and the World or Natural Man possesses no higher intuition than those of the pure Sense, which are the subjects of mathematical Science" 323 . The Kantian scale which rises from Sense to Understanding and then 128 KANT IN ENGLAND to Reason is changed. Understanding has dropped to the lowest place and the intuitions of sensibility have been put next to the intuitions of Reason, though on a lower plane. But most important, though Reason is still considered to be in a vital relationship to morality, it has lost its ex- clusive application to Morality, or its exclusive practical sense, which is the characteristic of Kant's own meta- physics. Will, it is true, is asserted to be preeminently the spiritual Constituent of our Being 324 , the supernatural in man and the principle of our Personality 325 , and is expres- sedly declared to be "the true and only strict synonyme of the word I or the intelligent Self" 326 . In a manner which reminds us rather of Fichte or young Schelling, Coleridge asserts the dependence of consciousness on conscience. It is "the ground and antecedent of human (or self-) con- sciousness". "Consciousness properly human (that is, Self- consciousness) with the sense of moral responsibility, pre- supposes the Conscience, as its antecedent condition and ground" 327 . We find even an identification of vovq, the Spirit, with Practical Reason 32S . Nevertheless he teaches a "mysterious contradiction in human nature between the will and the reason" 329 , which plays a decisive part in Coleridge's interpretation of the doctrine of original sin. "Man was and is a fallen creature", "diseased in the Will" 330 . Will is here obviously identical with Freewill, and Freewill is according to Coleridge nothing but Conscience or Practical Reason. How these two faculties which are actually identical can ever get into conflict is not explained. The only way of avoiding such a contradiction is by twisting the original sense of the term will and by degrading it to a sort of individual arbitrium which can revolt against superindividual reason. This seems really to have been Coleridge's conclusion: he speaks of reason as "but one reason, one and the same", "only one yet manifold" 331 , lighting in every man's understanding, identical with the divine Logos. The personal will then has the function of "comprehending the idea as a Reason, and giving causative force to the Idea, as a practical Reason" 332 . Here obviously SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 129 again two reasons have been re-introduced, one identical with the Nous, another personal. It is difficult to see how Coleridge could have avoided the conclusions of a Neoplato- nic Pantheism on grounds as these. For obviously this uni- versal Reason is not easily divisible from God. Nevertheless Coleridge, of course, condemns pantheism 333 and accepts all the traditional attributes of God, Intelligence, Self- consciousness and Life included 334 . No wonder that then Morality can appear to him nothing but a pure Mystery 335 . Though there is this individual Reason, mysteriously identi- cal with universal Reason, capable of getting into conflict with the principle of individuation in Sin, Coleridge cannot help looking at Reason also from the point of view of its function in the individual mind. In a way which is a signifi- cant extension of Kant's merely practical approach to the Ideas, Coleridge recognizes a "warrant of revelation, of the Law of Conscience, and the interests and necessities of my Moral Being" 336 . Revelation has become the essence of religion: "religion not revealed is, in my judgment, no religion at all" 337 . But as Revelation obviously contains statements which are not only practical but also eminently theoretical, Coleridge's reason has lost its limitation to the Kantian ideas and has become the instrument of faith. The dualism of faith and reason or as Coleridge would say of reason and understanding, goes sometimes to amusing lengths in the Aids to Reflection. We do not exaggerate saying that Coleridge sometimes teaches the old adage: credo quia absurdum est, even if he asserts over and over again that the religious truths are the only rational truths. But the identification of reason and faith is merely a begging of the question. The vicious circle: "Reason is the same as faith, therefore everything which is believed by faith is reasonable", occurs again and again. A pernicious teaching of double truth pervades Coleridge's acquiescence in all the doctrines of the Anglican church. The Preface asserts that the Mysteries of Religion are Reason 33 ^ Later the perfect Rationality of all the main Christian doctrines, such as Trinity and the origin of Evil is asserted 339 and 130 KANT IN ENGLAND Jeremy Taylor is quoted as saying: "In no case can true reason and right faith oppose each other" 34 °. That "spiri- tual truths can only spiritually be discerned" 341 is the leading motive of the whole book. Reason and Ideas are considered simply as identical with the Biblical Spirit and Truths spiritually discerned 342 . Ideas which we conceive on moral grounds need not be coherent and logical, yes they "may not, like theoretical or speculative positions, be pres- sed onward into all their possible logical consequences" 343 . The law of conscience and not the canons of discursive reasoning must decide in such cases. At least, the latter have no validity, which the simple veto of the former is not sufficient to nullify. "The most pious conclusion is here the most legitimate" 344 . Objections wholly speculative, however plausible on speculative grounds such objections may appear, are invalid, if only the result is repugnant to the dictates of conscience, and irreconcilable with the in- terests of morality 345 . The safe circle of religion and practi- cal reason is simply unassailable, a fortress of safety, a haven of peace. Coleridge avows himself that it has been his purpose "to provide a Safety-lamp for religious in- quirers" 346 . Philosophy ought to be as during the Middle Ages "the servant and pioneer of faith" 347 . He confesses rather naively: "In order to non-suit the infidel plaintiff, we must remove the cause from the faculty, that judges according to sense, and whose judgments, therefore, are valid only of objects of sense, to the superior courts of conscience and intuitive reason" 348 . Coleridge's whole idea can be summed up in the sentence: "Reason, of which spiritual Faith is even the blossoming and the fructifying process" 349 or a little differently phrased: "there is a dif- ference in kind between religious truths and the deductions of speculative science. The former are not only equally rational with the latter, but they alone appeal to reason in the fulness and living reality of their power" 35 *). "Every interpretation which pretends to explain the mysteries of Christian religion into comprehensible notions, does by its very success furnish presumptive proof of its failure" 351 . SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 131 All controversy is simply closed and mankind has to receive the revelation of God in a spirit of humility. Coleridge does not mind that this amounts to a formal abdication of Philo- sophy, a declaration of bankruptcy, a final surrender to a view of the universe which is fundamentally incoherent as it contains the stupendous contradiction between our understanding and the reason imposed upon us. The Aids to Reflection contains other traces of Kantian thought beneath the heavy layer of resignation to tradition. The distinction between Prudence and Morality is, for in- stance, definitely Kantian. So is the concept of a "System of intelligent and selfconscious beings", of a "great commu- nity of Persons" 352 , which appears only once without being used as Kant's realm of ends for further purposes. The distinction between persons and things recurs again and again 353 , an d the closely connected idea of the person as a thing in itself appears again 354 as it did in the Friend, seventeen years before. Also the Kantian stress on motives recurs. "The man", says Coleridge, "makes the motive and not the motive the man" 355 , and Ethics or the Science of Morality is, as in Kant, a purely formal doctrine. It does not "exclude the consideration of action; but it contemplates the same in its originating spiritual source, without refe- rence to space or time or sensible existence" 356 . This spiri- tual force is obviously Free-will, which is as Kant conceived it to be "opposed to Nature, as Spirit, and raised above Nature as self -determining Spirit — this namely, that it is a power of originating an act or state" 357 . Again Cole- ridge uses Kant's views on the proofs of the existence of God. He argues like Kant, that the most natural and con- vincing proof of all, the Cosmological, presupposes the Ontologicai. But again Coleridge admits that "there may be no conclusive demonstrations of a good, wise, living, and personal God. It is just so much short of impossible, as to leave some room for the will and the moral election, and thereby to keep it a truth of religion and the possible subject of a Commandment" 358 . Also the argument on ori- ginal sin shows strong traces of Coleridge's reading of 132 KANT IN ENGLAND Kant's "Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloBen Ver- nunft", even in such details as the reference to the Brah- mins 359 . Of course, the actual drift of Coleridge's argument is entirely different from Kant's rationalist explanation. Again as in Coleridge's older writings Kant is praised as the founder or at least renewer of the dynamic philosophy in the physical sciences "from the time, at least, of Gior- dano Bruno" 300 . As in the MS Logic, Coleridge praises Kant's first paper: "Gedanken von der wahren Schatzung der lebendigen Krafte" (1747), which he seems to accept at its face-value as a successful reconciliation of Newton's mechanical view of nature and absolute view of space with the Leibnizian tenets. Coleridge does not seem to have known that Kant's paper is invalidated in part by his igno- rance of D'Alembert's formula for kinetic energy and that Kant himself saw later the inadequacy of his early reason- ings on this subject and definitely embraced quite contra- dictory views 301 . Schelling, who was so important for the Biographia Literaria and decided also the "higher point of view" in the MS Logic, seems to have dropped out of Coleridge's sight. There are some traces of Schelling in a long note on the Subjective and Objective and the Idea as the in- difference of the two 302 ; possibly also the interest in the myth of man as an originally bi-sexual being may have been derived through Schelling 303 , though the idea is gene- ral in German romanticism 3 04 ;fBut on the whole, the Aids to Reflection seems more like an attempt at a reconstruction of Kant for the purposes of a philosophy of faith. Actually Criticism is completely deserted and so are also the funda- mental conceptions of the line of development which goes from Kant to Hegel. But terminologically Coleridge cannot get away from Kant, though Kant seems almost superfluous in such a philosophy. Here Coleridge comes nearest to Ja- cobi, whose book "Von den gottlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung" (1811) might have contributed to Coleridge's anti-speculative turn of thought 305 . These findings can be only confirmed by an examination SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 133 of Coleridge's posthumous Essay on Faith^e which again expands a point of view diametrically opposed to Kant's own aims in terms which still are Kantian in origin. Again we find numerous Kantian tags : the categorical imperative appears 367 and also the maxim that my actions "should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising there- from, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings" 368 . Again the distinction between thing and person is asser- ted 369 and conscience is again conceived as being supposed in all consciousness 370 as the "root of all consciousness — a fortiori, the precondition of all experience" 371 . Again the Kantian triad of powers recurs, significantly enough in an altered order: first, as the lowest faculty Understanding, then Sensibility, then Reason. Sensibility is defined as the "pure act of the sensuous imagination, in the production of the forms of space and time abstracted from all corpo- reity", which is still apparently ascribed to some formless matter. Understanding "reduces the confused impressions of sense to their essential forms — quantity, quality, rela- tion, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the like" 372 . It "raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations into objects of reflection and so makes experience possible" 373 . "Without it man's representative power would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes, and it is therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or the substantiative faculty" 374 . Reason, on the other hand, has like in the Aids to Reflection lost any contact with Kant's carefully restricted faculty. Reason is first super-sensual and super-sensuous. Reason is in- tuitive and is even called "the irradiative power and the representative of the infinite" 375 , a rather dubious mystical terminology. Reason, besides, is one with the absolute Will, the Logos, the certain representative of the will of God in opposition to the individual will. Again it is quite un- certain in what relation this individual will stands to Rea- son. The obedience of the individual will to reason is assert- ed to be the very essence of faith; faith is even rather obscurely called a "synthesis of Reason and the individual 134 KANT IN ENGLAND Will" 376 . But how this superindividual Reason is still acting in individuality and constituting its very best part is not consistently thought through. The revolution in sin of the individual will remains a mystery from which Coleridge can only appeal to the truth of revelation. Coleridge's last writings have shown us that he has gone a long way from his speculative beginnings. Origi- nally Coleridge had tried to arrive at a system of meta- physics wishing to construct an ontology in the old sense of the term, combined, however, with an idealistic tech- nique. In vain he attempted to reconcile his aims and his method. When he failed, he took refuge in a paraphrase of Schelling's thought which seemed to come nearest to his final intentions. It was as if his conscience troubled him that he found his aims and ambitions irreconcilable with his intellect. The contradiction of method and aim remained unsolved or proved unsolvable to Coleridge. Fi- nally he gave up any attempts at a solution and came to take for granted the dualism of speculation and life, of the head and the heart. The monistic aim demanded precisely the solution Qf these dualisms. However, they resisted Coleridge's speculative power, although he saw that they must ultimately prove unsatisfactory. At length, he seduced the struggling spirit to acquiesce in immediate knowledge and faith, he lured it to enjoy a mere feeling of mystery and to give up the labor of thinking penetration into prob- lems. With his intellect Coleridge is still on the side of the systems of ontology. But his spirit has outgrown these systems and was reaching out beyond them. But he could not succeed: he simply did not seem to have the ability to conceive in thinking what he felt he should confess and preach as a person. He made a philosophy out of this in- capacity, a philosophy of the dualism of the head and the heart 377 . With a serene indifference to the inconsistency involved, he kept much of the architectonic of the mind as it was laid out by Kant, preserving only the negative part of Kant, his sceptical confinement of metaphysics in narrow bounds. The positive side of his teachings became SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND KANT 135 stranger and stranger to him. He fell back into an ontology which is fundamentally the same as the ontology of the great systems of the seventeenth century and from there he fell into a mere philosophy of faith. Light was in his heart, but as soon as he carried it into the intellect, it began to flicker in twilight and dusk. Coleridge stands again where most of the Kantians of his time landed. Like Ha- milton he preaches "learned ignorance''. Like Carlyle he preaches divine faith. And though he is more speculative than either, he became as they did, a defender of orthodoxy, of resignation, a prophet of the end and failure of Reason^
Sunday, April 19, 2020
H. P. Grice reads Ariskant to Coleridge
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