Anima Poetæ

"The class that ought to be kept separate from all others"—and this said by one of themselves! O what a confession that it is no longer separated! Who would have said this even fifty years ago? It is the howling of ice during a thaw. When there is any just reason for saying this, it ought not to be said, it is already too late. And though it may receive the assent of the people of "the squares and places," yet what does that do, if it be the ridicule of all other classes?

The general experience, or rather supposed experience, prevails over the particular knowledge. So many causes oppose man to man, that he begins by thinking of other men worse than they deserve, and receives his punishment by at last thinking worse of himself than the truth is.

Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which self was only a diagram of the genus, will excite sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among persons who love and esteem you, be remembered and quoted as ludicrous instances of strange self-involution.

Those who think lowliest of themselves, perhaps with a feeling stronger than rational comparison would justify, are apt to feel and express undue asperity for the faults and defects of those whom they habitually have looked up to as to their superiors. For placing themselves very low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of experiences, struggled against for a while, have at length convinced the mind that in such and such a moral habit the long-idolised superior is far below even itself, the grief and anger will be in proportion. "If even I could never have done this, O anguish, that he, so much my superior, should do it! If even I with all my infirmities have not this defect, this selfishness, that he should have it!" This is the course of thought. Men are bad enough; and yet they often think themselves worse than they are, among other causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back to our own lips.

He was grown, and solid from his infancy, like that most useful of domesticated animals, that never runs but with some prudent motive to the mast or the wash-tub and, at no time a slave to the present moment, never even grunts over the acorns before him without a scheming squint and the segment, at least, of its wise little eye cast toward those on one side, which his neighbour is or may be about to enjoy.

Quære, whether the high and mighty Edinburghers, &c., have not been elevated into guardians and overseers of taste and poetry for much the same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the guardian goddess of music, because, forsooth, so far from being able to compose or play herself, she could never endure any other instrument than the jew's-harp or Scotch bag-pipe? No! too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is no anachronism in this. We are informed by various antique bas-reliefs that the bag-pipe was well known to the Romans, and probably, therefore, that the Picts and Scots were even then fond of seeking their fortune in other countries.

"Love is the spirit of life and music the life of the spirit."

Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand sense! Passion and order at once! Imperative power in obedience!

Q. What is the first and divinest strain of music? A.—In the intellect—"Be able to will that thy maxims (rules of individual conduct) should be the law of all intelligent being!"

In the heart, or practical reason, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by." This in the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy neighbour as thyself, and God above all things." For, conceive thy being to be all-including, that is, God—thou knowest that thou wouldest command thyself to be beloved above all things.

[For the motto at the head of this note see the lines "Ad Vilmum Axiologum." P. W., 1893, p. 138.]

From what reasons do I believe in continuous and ever-continuable consciousness? From conscience! Not for myself, but for my conscience, that is, my affections and duties towards others, I should have no self—for self is definition, but all boundary implies neighbourhood and is knowable only by neighbourhood or relations. Does the understanding say nothing in favour of immortality? It says nothing for or against; but its silence gives consent, and is better than a thousand arguments such as mere understanding could afford. But miracles! "Do you speak of them as proofs or as natural consequences of revelation, whose presence is proof only by precluding the disproof that would arise from their absence?" "Nay, I speak of them as of positive fundamental proofs." Then I dare answer you "Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in morality, contradictions in reason. God the Truth, the actuality of logic, the very logos—He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the properties of a triangle by the confusion of all properties! If a miracle merely means an event before inexperienced, it proves only itself, and the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other definition be given of it, or rather attempted (for no other not involving direct contradiction can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls darkness light, and makes Ignorance the mother of Malignity, the appointed nurse of religion—which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculating and conjectural understanding. Seven years ago, but oh! in what happier times—I wrote thus—

And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I love—and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible prophecy!

And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe immortality? Because I ought, therefore I must!

[The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is quoted, were written in August, 1801. [P.W., 1893, p. 159.] If the note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the Courier office in the Strand.]

Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he hath"—that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe the Lapis Infernalis.

Lord of light and fire? What is the universal of man in all, but especially in savage states? Fantastic ornament and, in general, the most frightful deformities—slits in the ears and nose, for instance. What is the solution? Man will not be a mere thing of nature: he will be and shew himself a power of himself. Hence these violent disruptions of himself from all other creatures! What they are made, that they remain—they are Nature's, and wholly Nature's.

Try to contemplate mankind as children. These we love tenderly, because they are beautiful and happy; we know that a sweet-meat or a top will transfer their little love for a moment, and that we shall be repelled with a grimace. Yet we are not offended.

I am persuaded that the chymical technology, as far as it was borrowed from life and intelligence, half-metaphorically, half-mystically, may be brought back again (as when a man borrows of another a sum which the latter had previously borrowed of him, because he is too polite to remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology in many instances, and, above all, [may be re-adapted to] the philosophy of language, which ought to be experimentative and analytic of the elements of meaning—their double, triple, and quadruple combinations, of simple aggregation or of composition by balance of opposition.

Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, and vice versâ. In both of them there is a positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition must take place in the first instance, and then a new composition, in order for innocence to become virtue. It loses a positive, and then the base attracts another different positive, by the higher affinity of the same base under a different temperature for the latter.

I stated the legal use of the innocent as opposed to mere not guilty (he was not only acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to shew the existence of a positive in the former—by no means as confounding this use of the word with the moral pleasurable feeling connected with it when used of little children, maidens, and those who in mature age preserve this sweet fragrance of vernal life, this mother's gift and so-seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends him forth into the world. The distinction is obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and character only as presumptive or illustrative of particular action as to its guilt or non-guilt, or to the commission or non-commission. But our moral feelings are never pleasurably excited except as they refer to a state of being—and the most glorious actions do not delight us as separate acts, or, rather, facts, but as representatives of the being of the agent—mental stenographs which bring an indeterminate extension within the field of easy and simultaneous vision, diffused being rendered visible by condensation. Only for the hero's sake do we exult in the heroic act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero would no longer appear to us heroic. Not, therefore, solely from the advantage of poets and historians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome strike us into admiration, while we relate the very same deeds of barbarians as matters of curiosity, but because in the former we refer the deed to the individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter only to the physical result of a given state of society. Compare the [heroism of that] Swiss patriot, with his bundle of spears turned towards his breast, in order to break the Austrian pikemen, and that of the Mameluke, related to me by Sir Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to plunge in on the French line, turned round and backed it on them, with a certainty of death, in order to effect the same purpose. In the former, the state of mind arose from reason, morals, liberty, the sense of the duty owing to the independence of his country, and its continuing in a state compatible with the highest perfection and development; while the latter was predicative only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unreasoned antipathy to strangers of a different dress and religion.

If, contrary to my expectations—alas! almost, I fear, to my wishes—I should live, it is my intention to make a catalogue of the Greek and Latin Classics, and of those who, like the author of the Argenis [William Barclay, 1546-1605], and Euphormio, Fracastorius, Flaminius, etc., deserve that name though moderns—and every year to apply all my book-money to the gradual completion of the collection, and buy no other books except German, if the continent should be opened again, except Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. The two last I have, I believe, but imperfect—indeed, B. and F. worthless, the best plays omitted. It would be a pleasing employment, had I health, to translate the Hymns of Homer, with a disquisitional attempt to settle the question concerning the personality of Homer. Such a thing in two volumes, well done, by philosophical notes on the mythology of the Greeks, distinguishing the sacerdotal from the poetical, and both from the philosophical or allegorical, fairly grown into two octavos, might go a good way, if not all the way, to the Bipontine Latin and Greek Classics.

I almost fear that the alteration would excite surprise and uneasy contempt in Verbidigno's mind (towards one less loved, at least); but had I written the sweet tale of the "Blind Highland Boy," I would have substituted for the washing-tub, and the awkward stanza in which it is specified, the images suggested in the following lines from Dampier's Travels, vol. i. pp. 105-6:—"I heard of a monstrous green turtle once taken at the Port Royal, in the Bay of Campeachy, that was four feet deep from the back to the belly, and the belly six feet broad. Captain Rock's son, of about nine or ten years of age, went in it as in a boat, on board his father's ship, about a quarter of a mile from the shore." And a few lines before—"The green turtle are so called because their shell is greener than any other. It is very thin and clear, and better clouded than the Hawksbill, but 'tis used only for inlays, being extraordinary thin." Why might not some mariners have left this shell on the shore of Loch Leven for a while, about to have transported it inland for a curiosity, and the blind boy have found it? Would not the incident be in equal keeping with that of the child, as well as the image and tone of romantic uncommonness?

["In deference to the opinion of a friend," this substitution took place. A promise made to Sara Coleridge to re-instate the washing-tub was, alas! never fulfilled. See Poetical Works of W. Wordsworth, 1859, pp. 197, and 200 footnote.]

Tremendous as a Mexican god is a strong sense of duty—separate from an enlarged and discriminating mind, and gigantic ally disproportionate to the size of the understanding; and, if combined with obstinacy of self-opinion and indocility, it is the parent of tyranny, a promoter of inquisitorial persecution in public life, and of inconceivable misery in private families. Nay, the very virtue of the person, and the consciousness that it is sacrificing its own happiness, increases the obduracy, and selects those whom it best loves for its objects. Eoque immitior quia ipse tolerat (not toleraverat) is its inspiration and watchword.

A nation of reformers looks like a scourer of silver-plate—black all over and dingy, with making things white and brilliant.

A joint combination of authors leagued together to declaim for or against liberty may be compared to Buffon's collection of smooth mirrors in a vast fan arranged to form one focus. May there not be gunpowder as well as corn set before it, and the latter will not thrive, but become cinders?

A good conscience and hope combined are like fine weather that reconciles travel with delight.

Great exploits and the thirst of honour which they inspire, enlarge states by enlarging hearts.

The rejection of the love of glory without the admission of Christianity is, truly, human darkness lacking human light.

Heaven preserve me from the modern epidemic of a proud ignorance!

Hypocrisy, the deadly crime which, like Judas, kisses Hell at the lips of Redemption.

Is't then a mystery so great, what God and the man, and the world is? No, but we hate to hear! Hence a mystery it remains.

The massy misery so prettily hidden with the gold and silver leaf—bracteata felicitas.

If I have leisure, I may, perhaps, write a wild rhyme on the Bell, from the mine to the belfry, and take for my motto and Chapter of Contents, the two distichs, but especially the latter—

The waggon-horse celsâ cervice eminens clarumque jactans tintinnabulum. Item, the cattle on the river, and valley of dark pines and firs in the Hartz.

The army of Clotharius besieging Sens were frightened away by the bells of St. Stephen's, rung by the contrivance of Lupus, Bishop of Orleans.

For ringing the largest bell, as a Passing-bell, a high price was wont to be paid, because being heard afar it both kept the evil spirits at a greater distance, and gave the chance of the greater number of prayers pro mortuo, from the pious who heard it.

Names of saints were given to bells that it might appear the voice of the Saint himself calling to prayer. Man will humanise all things.

[It is strange that Coleridge should make no mention of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," of which he must, at any rate, have heard the title. Possibly the idea remained though its source was forgotten. The Latin distichs were introduced by Longfellow in his "Golden Legend."

Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the following account in an unpublished letter to his wife. April-May, 1799. "But low down in the valley and in little companies on each bank of the river a multitude of green conical fir-trees, with herds of cattle wandering about almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size. And as they moved, scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of the Sabbath morning, where all the steeples, all at once are ringing for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene and quite new to me."]

CHAPTER VII

This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [that I saw long ago] but it requires only attention, not thought or self-production.

"The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes in everything—the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, at all times, the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank. Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of the middle classes of society in Great Britain.

"Hence (i.e., from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit."—Milton's Review of Church Government, vol. i. p. 2.

It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by proud humility, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the cock (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral, not an intellectual act.

On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being—"Thou art mine and I am thine, and henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against the world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all men, we two will abide together in love and duty."

In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to be a voice that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless and yet for the ear not the eye of the soul, when the winged soul passes over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with the cloud, and passes from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to sun—never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment into union with the beloved.

That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future existence, and the being of God; while even among those who are speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the posse and esse of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved. Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief; but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the same faith as a Deity—"He neither believes God or devil." And yet, while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope and certitude through all things—while a devil is a mere solution of an enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered (and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern with it.

The great change—that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly!

We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening nature is the continuum of two good and wise men. We are now separated. You have combined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you.

Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on the lasses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would grow, as I sow it so plentifully!

[This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.]

A thing cannot be one and three at the same time! True! but time does not apply to God. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for he exists not in time at all—the Eternal!

The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words—O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number—it is infinite! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all forms, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain a by x and then x by a—give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul—ergo, a body to the body—feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the elephant under the tortoise!

But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters—for the means we are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we by witchcraft of slothful association impose on ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act by acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and silver itself—and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the difference is woeful.

The immense difference between being glad to find Truth it, and to find it Truth! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to find it true—not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked!

Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad passions would make even the most improbable charges plausible.

What can he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult task!) all scorn (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit? What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and value me according to the comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling you better to defend before others, or more clearly to onlook (anschauen) in yourselves the truths to which your noblest being bears witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly unconcerned whether my name be attached to these opinions or (my writings forgotten) another man's.

But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the Edinburgh Review? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's and Southey's friend.

The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the selenography of Helvetius.

The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be] compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks and shelves in fury.

Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest certainty—a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced.

Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God is the last and hardest virtue! And wherefore? Because we must first have earned a FAITH in ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce: "Trust in thyself!" Let the whole heart be able to say, "I trust in myself," and those whomever we love we shall rely on, in proportion to that love.

A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying with Falstaff, when Dame Quickly told him "She came from the two parties, forsooth," "The Devil take one party and his Dam the other." John Bull has suffered more for their sake, more than even the supererogatory cullibility of his disposition is able to bear.

Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in his whole congregation, and pitched his sermon to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at or thinks of his looking glass, for the same wise purpose I presume.

Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they are incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned.

The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off soaring and singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and sharper the older he grows.

Let us not, because the foliage waves in necessary obedience to every breeze, fancy that the tree shakes also. Though the slender branch bend, one moment to the East and another to the West, its motion is circumscribed by its connection with the unyielding trunk.

My first cries mingled with my mother's death-groan, and she beheld the vision of glory, ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to Heaven consciously, it was to look up after, or for, my mother.

The two sweet silences—first in the purpling dawn of love-troth, when the heart of each ripens in the other's looks within the unburst calyx, and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a fear of losing hope in certainty; the second, when the sun is setting in the calm eve of confident love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection enjoy each other. "I fear to speak, I fear to hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy your presence, so totally possess you in myself, myself in you. The very sound would break the union and separate you-me into you and me. We both, and this sweet room, its books, its furniture, and the shadows on the wall slumbering with the low, quiet fire are all our thought, one harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still substance of one deep feeling, love and joy—a lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so softly, so unwrinkled, that its flow is life, not change—that state in which all the individuous nature, the distinction without division of a vivid thought, is united with the sense and substance of intensest reality."

And what if joy pass quick away? Long is the track of Hope before—long, too, the track of recollection after, as in the Polar spring the sun [is seen in the heavens] sixteen days before it really rises, and in the Polar autumn ten days after it has set; so Nature, with Hope and Recollection, pieces out our short summer.

N.B.—In my intended essay in defence of punning (Apology for Paronomasy, alias Punning), to defend those turns of words—

Che l'onda chiara,
El'ombra non men cara—

in certain styles of writing, by proving that language itself is formed upon associations of this kind—that possibly the sensus genericus of whole classes of words may be thus deciphered (as has indeed been attempted by Mr. White, of Clare Hall), that words are not mere symbols of things and thoughts, but themselves things, and that any harmony in the things symbolised will perforce be presented to us more easily, as well as with additional beauty, by a correspondent harmony of the symbols with each other. Thus, heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori; Gestern seh ich was gebrechliches brechen, heute was sterbliches sterben, compared with the English. This the beauty of homogeneous languages. So Veni, vidi, vici.

[This note follows an essay on Giambattista Strozzi's Madrigals, together with a transcription of twenty-seven specimens. The substance of the essay is embodied in the text of Chapter xvi. of the "Biographia Literaria," and a long footnote. The quotation is from the first madrigal, quoted in the note, which is not included in those transcribed in Notebook 17.—Coleridge's Works, iii. (Harper & Brothers, 1853), pp. 388-393.]

Important suggestion on 4th March, 1810 (Monday night). The law of association clearly begins in common causality. How continued but by a causative power in the soul? What a proof of causation and power from the very law of mind, and cluster of facts adduced by Hume to overthrow it!

It is proud ignorance that, as a disease of the mind, alone superinduces the necessity of the medium of metaphysical philosophy. The errors into which a sound, unaffected mind is led by the nature of things (Thing as the substratum of power)—no errors at all, any more than the motion of the sun. "So it appears"—and that is most true—but when pride will work up these phenomena into a system of things in themselves, then they become most pernicious errors, and it is the duty of true mind to examine these with all the virtues of the intellect—patience, humility, etc.

"By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, Paine, though an unlearned man, saw the absurdity of the Christian religion." Mother's wit, indeed! Wit from his mother the earth—the earthy and material wit of the flesh and its lusts. One ounce of mother-wit may be worth a pound of learning, but a grain of the Father's wisdom is worth a ton of mother-wit—yea! of both together.

"O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows older." "O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." Grant all this—that they will outgrow these particular actions, yet with what HABITS of feeling will they arrive at youth and manhood? Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should struggle against the boiling passions of youth by means of obedience to their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides, when are the rebukes, the chastisements to commence? Why! about nine or ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a plaything—when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after caresses—when everything is remembered individually, and sense of injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others—a strict schoolmaster—than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward the same person which subverts the very principle of our impulses. Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet always going on—yea! even from a twelvemonth old—at six or seven the child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when, as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to annoy.