The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2

Bear in mind the Jehovah 'Logos', the {Symbol: 'O "omega N} {Greek: en kolpo patros}—the person 'ad extra',—and few passages in the Old Testament are more instructive, or of profounder import. Overlook this, or deny it,—and none so perplexing or so irreconcilable with the known character of the inspired writer.

S. 50.

Rather anti-solar and terrene nature! For gold, most of all metals, repelleth light, and resisteth that power and portion of the common air, which of all ponderable bodies is most akin to light, and its surrogate in the realm of {Greek: antiph'os}; or gravity, namely, oxygen. Gold is 'tellurian' {Greek: kat exochaen} and if solar, yet as in the solidity and dark 'nucleus' of the sun.

S. 52.

Excellent throughout. The fear of hell may, indeed, in some desperate cases, like the moxa, give the first rouse from a moral lethargy, or like the green venom of copper, by evacuating poison or a dead load from the inner man, prepare it for nobler ministrations and medicines from the realm of light and life, that nourish while they stimulate.

S. 54.

This is plainly confined to such as have had Christ preached to them;—but the doctrine, that salvation is in and by Christ only, is a most essential verity, and an article of unspeakable grandeur and consolation. Name—nomen, that is, {Greek: noumenon}, in its spiritual interpretation, is the same as power, or intrinsic cause. What? Is it a few letters of the alphabet, the hearing of which in a given succession, that saves?

S. 59.

Compare this with s. 11, and the judicious remark there on the mere accommodation in the 'prae' of predestination. But the subject was too tempting for the rhetorician.

Part II. s. 1.

Thus 1,965. But why is the 1, said to be placed below the 965?

S. 7.

It may appear whimsical, but I really feel an impatient regret, that this good man had so misconceived the nature both of faith and reason as to affirm their contrariety to each other.

Ib.

This is most true as far as the imputation of the same is concerned. For where the means of avoiding its consequences have been afforded, each after transgression is actual, by a neglect of those means.

S. 14.

This recalls a sublime thought of Spinosa. Every true virtue is a part of that love, with which God loveth himself.

{Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Wordsworth.—Ed.}

{Footnote 2: A mistake as to Ænesidemus, who lived in the age of Augustus—Ed.}

NOTES ON SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S GARDEN OF CYRUS,

OR THE QUINCUNCIAL, ETC. PLANTATIONS OF THE ANCIENTS, ETC.

Ch. III.

Effects purely relative from properties merely comparative, such as edge, point, grater, &c. are not proper qualities: for they are indifferently producible 'ab extra', by grinding, &c., and 'ab intra', from growth. In the latter instance, they suppose qualities as their antecedents. Now, therefore, since qualities cannot proceed from quantity, but quantity from quality,—and as matter opposed to spirit is shape by modification of extension, or pure quantity,—Paracelsus's 'dictum' is defensible.

Ib.

Written before Harvey's 'ab ovo omnia'. Since his work, and Lewenhock's 'Microscopium', the question is settled in physics; but whether in metaphysics, is not quite so clear.

Ch. IV.

How much did Brown allow for evaporation?

Ib.

This nearly resembles Kant's intellectual 'mechanique'.

The Platonists held three knowledges of God;—first, {Greek: parousia}, his own incommunicable self-comprehension;—second, {Greek: kata noaesin}—by pure mind, unmixed with the sensuous;—third, {Greek: kat epistaemaen}—by discursive intelligential act. Thus a Greek philosopher:—{Greek: tous epistaemonikous logous muthous haegaesetai sunousa t'o patri kai sunesti'omenae hae psuchae en tae alaetheia tou ontos, kai en augae kathara}.—Those notions of God which we attain by processes of intellect, the soul will consider as mythological allegories, when it exists in union with the Father, and is feasting with him in the truth of very being, and in the pure, unmixed, absolutely simple and elementary, splendor. Thus expound Exod. c. xxxiii. v. 10. 'And he said, thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live'. By the 'face of God,' Moses meant the {Greek: idea noaetikae} which God declared incompatible with human life, it implying {Greek: epaphae tou noaetou}, or contact with the pure spirit.

NOTES ON SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S VULGAR ERRORS.

ADDRESS TO THE READER.

Is not this the same person as the physician mentioned by Mrs. Hutchinson in her Memoirs of her husband?

Book I. c. 8. s. 1. The veracity and credibility of Herodotus have increased and increase with the increase of our discoveries. Several of his relations deemed fabulous, have been authenticated within the last thirty years from this present 1808.

Ib. s. 2.

Many, if not most, of these Ctesian fables in Sir J. Mandevill were monkish interpolations.

Ib. s. 13.

'Hoties'—{Greek: hoti s}—'whatevers,' that is, whatever is written, no matter what, true or false,—'omniana'; 'all sorts of varieties,' as a dear young lady once said to me.

Ib. c. ix.

It is not improbable that Heraclitus meant merely to imply that we perceive only our own sensations, and they of course are what they are;—that the image of the sun is an appearance, or sensation in our eyes, and, of course, an appearance can be neither more nor less than what it appears to be;—that the notion of the true size of the sun is not an image, or belonging either to the sense, or to the sensuous fancy, but is an imageless truth of the understanding obtained by intellectual deductions. He could not possibly mean what Sir T. B. supposes him to have meant; for if he had believed the sun to be no more than a mile distant from us, every tree and house must have shown its absurdity.

...

In the following books I have endeavoured, wherever the author himself is in a vulgar error, as far as my knowledge extends, to give in the margin, either the demonstrated discoveries, or more probable opinions, of the present natural philosophy;—so that, independently of the entertainingness of the thoughts and tales, and the force and splendor of Sir Thomas Browne's diction and manner, you may at once learn from him the history of human fancies and superstitions, both when he detects them, and when he himself falls into them,—and from my notes, the real truth of things, or, at least, the highest degree of probability, at which human research has hitherto arrived.

...

Book II. c. i. Production of crystal. Cold is the attractive or astringent power, comparatively uncounteracted by the dilative, the diminution of which is the proportional increase of the contractive. Hence the astringent, or power of negative magnetism, is the proper agent in cold, and the contractive, or oxygen, an allied and consequential power. 'Crystallum, non ex aqua, sed ex substantia metallorum communi confrigeratum dico'. As the equator, or mid point of the equatorial hemispherical line, is to the centre, so water is to gold. Hydrogen is to the electrical azote, as azote to the magnetic hydrogen.

Ib.

It being, indeed, nothing else but pure flint.

C. iii.

That is:—to the twin counterforces of the magnetic power, the equilibrium of which is revealed in magnetic iron, as the substantial, add the twin counterforces or positive and negative poles of the electrical power, the indifference of which is realized in water, as the superficial—(whence Orpheus employed the term 'sprinkled,' or rather affused or superfused)—and you will hear the voice of infant nature;—that is, you will understand the rudimental products and elementary powers and constructions of the phenomenal world. An enigma this not unworthy of Orpheus, 'quicunque fuit', and therefore not improbably ascribed to him.

N. B. Negative and positive magnetism are to attraction and repulsion, or cohesion and dispersion, as negative and positive electricity are to contraction and dilation.

C. vii. s. 4.

There is no doubt of the fact as to a temporary effect; and camphire is therefore a strong and immediate antidote to an overdose of 'cantharides'. Yet there are, doubtless, sorts and cases of {Greek: anaphrodisia}, which camphire might relieve. Opium is occasionally an aphrodisiac, but far oftener the contrary. The same is true of 'bang', or powdered hemp leaves, and, I suppose, of the whole tribe of narcotic stimulants.

Ib. s. 8.

The berries are harmless, but the leaves of the yew are undoubtedly poisonous. See Withering's British Plants. Taxus.

Book III. c. xiii.

'Questuary'—having gain or money for their object.

B. VI. c. viii.

The rivers from Eden were, perhaps, meant to symbolize, or rather expressed only, the great primary races of mankind. Sir T.B. was the very man to have seen this; but the superstition of the letter was then culminant.

Ib. c. x.

Even now, after all the brilliant discoveries from Scheele, Priestley, and Cavendish, to Berzelius and Davy, no improvement has been made in this division,—not of primary bodies (those idols of the modern atomic chemistry), but of causes, as Sir T.B. rightly expresses them,—that is, of elementary powers manifested in bodies. Let mercury stand for the bi-polar metallic principle, best imaged as a line or 'axis' from north to south,—the north or negative pole being the cohesive or coherentific force, and the south or positive pole being the dispersive or incoherentific force: the first is predominant in, and therefore represented by, carbon,—the second by nitrogen; and the series of metals are the primary and, hence, indecomponible 'syntheta' and proportions of both. In like manner, sulphur represents the active and passive principle of fire: the contractive force, or negative electricity—oxygen—produces flame; and the dilative force, or positive electricity—hydrogen—produces warmth. And lastly, salt is the equilibrium or compound of the two former. So taken, salt, sulphur, and mercury are equivalent to the combustive, the combustible, and the combust, under one or other of which all known bodies, or ponderable substances, may be classed and distinguished.

The difference between a great mind's and a little mind's use of history is this. The latter would consider, for instance, what Luther did, taught, or sanctioned: the former, what Luther,—a Luther,—would now do, teach, and sanction. This thought occurred to me at midnight, Tuesday, the 16th of March, 1824, as I was stepping into bed,—my eye having glanced on Luther's Table Talk.

If you would be well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of you;—if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable opinion of himself.

It is not common to find a book of so early date as this (1658), at least among those of equal neatness of printing, that contains so many gross typographical errors;—with the exception of our earliest dramatic writers, some of which appear to have been never corrected, but worked off at once as the types were first arranged by the compositors. But the grave and doctrinal works are, in general, exceedingly correct, and form a striking contrast to modern publications, of which the late edition of Bacon's Works would be paramount in the infamy of multiplied unnoticed 'errata', were it not for the unrivalled slovenliness of Anderson's British Poets, in which the blunders are, at least, as numerous as the pages, and many of them perverting the sense, or killing the whole beauty, and yet giving or affording a meaning, however low, instead. These are the most execrable of all typographical errors. 1808.

{The volume from which the foregoing notes have been taken, is inscribed in Mr. Lamb's writing—

'C. Lamb, 9th March, 1804. Bought for S.T. Coleridge.' Under which in Mr. Coleridge's hand is written—

'N.B. It was on the 10th; on which day I dined and punched at Lamb's, and exulted in the having procured the 'Hydriotaphia', and all the rest 'lucro apposita'. S.T.C.'

That same night, the volume was devoted as a gift to a dear friend in the following letter.-Ed.}

10th, 1804,

Sat. night, 12 o'clock.

My dear—,

Sir Thomas Brown is among my first favorites, rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits, contemplative, imaginative; often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though doubtless too often big, stiff, and hyperlatinistic: thus I might without admixture of falsehood, describe Sir T. Brown, and my description would have only this fault, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of Charles II. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure by saying,—that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast with a strong tinge of the fantast,—the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne, but from no other than the general circumstances of an egotism common to both; which in Montaigne is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing,—but which in Sir Thomas Brown is always the result of a feeling heart conjoined with a mind of active curiosity,—the natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other men as himself, gains the habit, and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceived himself, with quaint and humourous gravity a useful inquirer into physical truth and fundamental science,—he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men's, that they too were curiosities, and so with a perfectly graceful and interesting ease he put them too into his museum and cabinet of varieties. In very truth he was not mistaken:—so completely does he see every thing in a light of his own, reading nature neither by sun, moon, nor candle light, but by the light of the faery glory around his own head; so that you might say that nature had granted to him in perpetuity a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read his 'Hydriotaphia' above all:—and in addition to the peculiarity, the exclusive Sir-Thomas-Brown-ness of all the fancies and modes of illustration, wonder at and admire his entireness in every subject, which is before him—he is 'totus in illo'; he follows it; he never wanders from it,—and he has no occasion to wander;—for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that 'Hydriotaphia' or Treatise on some Urns dug up in Norfolk—how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh-bone, now a scull, then a bit of mouldered coffin! a fragment of an old tombstone with moss in its 'hic jacet';—a ghost or a winding-sheet—or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind! and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or gilt 'Anno Domini' from a perished coffin top. The very same remark applies in the same force to the interesting, through the far less interesting, Treatise on the Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients. There is the same attention to oddities, to the remotenesses and 'minutiæ' of vegetable terms,—the same entireness of subject. You have quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, and quincunxes in the water beneath the earth; quincunxes in deity, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in bones, in the optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in petals, in every thing. In short, first turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out aloud to yourself the last seven paragraphs of Chap. v. beginning with the words 'More considerables,' &c. But it is time for me to be in bed, in the words of Sir Thomas, which will serve you, my dear, as a fair specimen of his manner.—'But the quincunx of heaven—(the Hyades or five stars about the horizon at midnight at that time)—runs low, and 'tis time we close the five ports of knowledge: we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations,—making tables of cobwebbes, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' Think you, my dear Friend, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight;—to wit, that if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes! And then 'the huntsmen are up in America.'—What life, what fancy!—Does the whimsical knight give us thus a dish of strong green tea, and call it an opiate! I trust that you are quietly asleep—

And that all the stars hang bright above your dwelling, Silent as tho' they watched the sleeping earth!

S. T. COLERIDGE.

FINIS.