Philosophy to a few, religion with many, is the friend of poetry, as producing the two conditions of pleasure arising from poetry, namely tranquillity and the attachment of the affections to generalisations. God, soul, Heaven, the Gospel miracles, etc., are a sort of poetry compared with Lombard Street and Change Alley speculations.
In company, indeed, with all except a very chosen few, never dissent from anyone as to the merits of another, especially in your own supposed department, but content yourself with praising, in your turn; the really good praises of the unworthy are felt by a good man, and man of genius as detractions from the worthy, and robberies—so the flashy moderns seem to rob the ancients of the honours due to them, and Bacon and Harrington are not read because Hume and Condillac are. This is an evil; but oppose it, if at all, in books in which you can evolve the whole of your reasons and feeling, not in conversation when it will be inevitably attributed to envy. Besides, they who praise the unworthy must be the injudicious: and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are the natural pay of authors without feeling or genius—and why rob them? Sint unicuique sua præmia. Coleridge! Coleridge! will you never learn to appropriate your conversation to your company! Is it not desecration, indelicacy, and a proof of great weakness and even vanity to talk to, etc. etc., as if you [were talking to] Wordsworth or Sir G. Beaumont?
O young man, who hast seen, felt and known the truth, to whom reality is a phantom and virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent being, do not degrade the truth in thee by disputing. Avoid it! do not by any persuasion be tempted to it! Surely not by vanity or the weakness of the pleasure of communicating thy thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not even by the always mixed hope of producing conviction. This is not the mode, this is not the time, not the place. [Truth will be better served] by modestly and most truly saying, "Your arguments are all consequent, if the foundation be admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But this will be a business for moments of thought, for a Sabbath-day of your existence. Then, perhaps, a voice from within will say to you, better, because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all I can say. But if I felt this to be that day or that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once compel and inspire me to the task of uttering the very truth. Till then I am right willing to bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or self-important juggler, who nods his head and says, 'I could if I would.' But I cannot, I may not, bear the reproach of profaning the truth which is my life in moments when all passions heterogeneous to it are eclipsing it to the exclusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my tranquillity, and in acquiring the passion of proselytism lose the sense of conviction. I might become positive! Now I am certain! I might have the heat and fermentation, now I have the warmth of life."
Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a whole fire-grate of humanity—each, therefore, will legislate for the whole, and spite of the De gustibus non est disputandum, even in trifles—and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all are disposed to [admit] the jus extrinsecum of Spinoza, and recognise that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then revolution, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To reconcile, therefore, is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true Atonement—that is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the permanent.
Do not be too much discouraged, if any virtue should be mixed, in your consciousness, with affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the practice of the good feeling, even though mixed, and it will gradually purify itself. Probatum est. Disapprove, be ashamed of the thought, of its always continuing thus, but do not harshly quarrel with your present self, for all virtue subsists in and by pleasure. S. T. C. Sunday evening, October 14, 1804.
But a great deal of this is constitutional. That constitution which predisposes to certain virtues, the Δωρον Θεων, has this τεμενος Νεμεσεως in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while we are weak and dependent on each other, and each is forced to think often for himself, sympathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who have least of these, have the dregs of other virtues to strain off.
All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that theatrical representations are copies of nature, whereas they are imitations.
When you are harassed, disquieted, and have little dreams of resentment, and mock triumphs in consequence of the clearest perceptions of unkind treatment and strange misconceptions and illogicalities, palpably from bad passion, in any person connected with you, suspect a sympathy in yourself with some of these bad passions—vanity, for instance. Though a sense of wounded justice is possible, nay, probably, forms a part of your uneasy feelings, yet this of itself would yield, at the first moment of reflection, to pity for the wretched state of a man too untranquil and perpetually selfish to love anything for itself or without some end of vanity or ambition—who detests all poetry, tosses about in the impotence of desires disproportionate to his powers, and whose whole history of his whole life is a tale of disappointment in circumstances where the hope and pretension was always unwise, often presumptuous and insolent. Surely an intuition of this restless and no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no sympathy with these passions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient almost, but not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy.
Malta, Friday, Nov. 23, 1804.
One of the heart-depressing habits and temptations of men in power, as governors, &c., is to make instruments of their fellow-creatures, and the moment they find a man of honour and talents, instead of loving and esteeming him, they wish to use him. Hence that self-betraying side-and-down look of cunning; and they justify and inveterate the habit by believing that every individual who approaches has selfish designs on them.
Days and weeks and months pass on, and now a year—and the sea, the sea, and the breeze have their influences on me, and [so, too, has the association with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct consciousness of the contrary, for I use my faculties, not, indeed, at once, but freely. But, oh! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I know not—I have forgotten—what the joy is of which the heart is full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness of joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient.
The most common appearance in wintry weather is that of the sun under a sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one-third or half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the space that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sun, a mass of brassy light, himself lost and diffused in his [own] strong splendour. Compare this with the beautiful summer set of colours without cloud.
Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator [than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be] suffering, or thinking or talking. I do not recollect [in dreams] that state of feeling, so common when awake, of thinking on one subject and looking at another; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last, perhaps, or by intervals, at least, you only look passively at the prospect.
At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits. Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all drawn by the letters of the text—at once portraits and language. This is a universal particular language—Roman Catholic language with a vengeance.
The beautifully white sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the Spéronara's sailing without a compass—by an obscure sense of time.
So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty—lest men by taking the words for granted never attain the feeling or the true faith. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the communicators deceivers, but do not believe the idea itself. Whereas to doubt has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting-trotters.
The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses.
His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from a foul or impure word.
The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings—as a little bird which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with a desire to kill or imprison it.
That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that came to ask the King of Naples' pardon.
Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they did?
O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804.
Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a thing which enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself, yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations, the imitation, instead of the copy which is illustrated, in very nature Shaksperianised—that Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that likeness not identity—an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk.
Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to know from Shakspere himself who of them is the fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe the meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit, the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, Malone leaps up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter re-echoes the words of the spirit, "Let Malone!" The spirit shudders, then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, "No! no! Let me alone, I said, inexorable boobies!"
O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! Registers, memorandum-books—and that Bill, Jack and Harry, Tom, Walter and Gregory, Charles, Dick and Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But, oh! the importance when half-a-dozen players'-bills can be made to stretch through half-a-hundred or more of pages, though there is not one word in them that by any force can be made either to illustrate the times or life or writings of Shakspere, or, indeed, of any time. And, yet, no edition but this gentleman's name burs upon it—burglossa with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is Malone, Malone, Malone, Μαλων, Μαλων, Μαλων.
[Edmund Malone's Variorum edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.]
It is a remark that I have made many times, and many times, I guess, shall repeat, that women are infinitely fonder of clinging to and beating about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluctantly letting fall any doleful or painful or unpleasant subject, than men of the same class and rank.
A young man newly arrived in the West Indies, who happened to be sitting next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a conversation, "It is a very fine day, sir!" "Yes, sir," was the abrupt reply, "and be damned to it; it is never otherwise in this damned rascally climate."
I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus, "Beautiful Psyche, soul of a blossom, that art visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends whom thou hast left!" Had I forgot the caterpillar? or did I dream like a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was self-love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state refined itself into love? Dec. 12, 1804.
Different means to the same end seem to constitute analogy. Seeing and touching are analogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure, &c.—they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place. The air-vessels of fish and of insects are analogous to lungs—the end the same, however different the means. No one would say, "Lungs are analogous to lungs," and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by analogy of ours—for here, knowing nothing but likeness, we presume the difference from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of considering those pin-points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the phrase "analogy of the past," applied to historical reasoning, nine times out of ten I should say, "by the example of the past." This may appear verbal trifling, but "animadverte quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum hominibus prolabi in errores circa res." In short, analogy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree. There is an analogy between dimness and numbness and a certain state of the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion with magnification, for which we have no name. But between light green and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no analogy.
Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are the means analogous or different only in degree? That is the question! The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no identity of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet, by Napier's tables or the House-keepers' Almanack, I may even arrive at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet, still, reading and reckoning are utterly different things.
In Reimarus on The Instincts of Animals, Tom Wedgwood's ground-principle of the influx of memory on perception is fully and beautifully detailed.
["Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their Industry and their Manners," by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was published in 1770. See Biographia Literaria, chapter vi. and Note, by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge in the Appendix, Coleridge's Works, Harper & Brothers, iii. 225, 717.]
It is often said that books are companions. They are so, dear, very dear companions! But I often, when I read a book that delights me on the whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot object to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for this part and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought. At times I become restless, for my nature is very social.
"Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic religion is better than none." Why, to be sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, Is it a religion? Sugar of lead! better than no sugar! Put oil of vitriol into my salad—well, better than no oil at all! Or a fellow vends a poison under the name of James' powders—well, we must get the best we can—better that than none! So did not our noble ancestors reason or feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this day, or worse, for even they have been made less foolish, in spite of themselves, by others' wisdom.
I have read with wonder and delight that passage of Reimarus in which he speaks of the immense multitude of plants, and the curious, regular choice of different herbivorous animals with respect to them, and the following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion! the sea-fish to the shores and rivers—the land crab to the sea-shore! I would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other of the three instincts—self-preservation, childing, and child-preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal instinct—O mercy! the blindness of the man! and it is imagination, forsooth! that misled him—too much poetry in his philosophy! this abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this superstitious fetish-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this, indeed, deserves to be dwelt on.
Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a real presence of Deity, and compare it with historical traditionary religion. There are two revelations—the material and the moral—and the former is not to be seen but by the latter. As St. Paul has so well observed: "By worldly wisdom no man ever arrived at God;" but having seen Him by the moral sense, then we understand the outward world. Even as with books, no book of itself teaches a language in the first instance; but having by sympathy of soul learnt it, we then understand the book—that is, the Deus minor in His work.
The hirschkäfer (stag-beetle) in its worm state makes its bed-chamber, prior to its metamorphosis, half as long as itself. Why? There was a stiff horn turned under its belly, which in the fly state must project and harden, and this required exactly that length.
The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, thus hollowed, lifts him aloft, and is his boat and cork jacket; the Nautilus, additionally, spreads a thin skin as a sail.
All creatures obey the great game-laws of Nature, and fish with nets of such meshes as permit many to escape, and preclude the taking of many. So two races are saved, the one by taking part, and the other by part not being taken.
Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life! It is related by D. Unzer, an authority wholly to be relied on, that an ohrwurm (earwig) cut in half ate its own hinder part! Will it be the reverse with Great Britain and America? The head of the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it and squirted out its poison, as is related by Beverley in his History of Virginia. Lyonnet in his Insect. Theol. tells us that he tore a wasp in half and, three days after, the fore-half bit whatever was presented to it of its former food, and the hind-half darted out its sting at being touched. Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live six months with his head off, and to wander about, yea, six hours after its heart and intestines (all but the lungs) were taken out! How shall we think of this compatibly with the monad soul? If I say, what has spirit to do with space?—what odd dreams it would suggest! or is every animal a republic in se? or is there one Breeze of Life, "at once the soul of each, and God of all?" Is it not strictly analogous to generation, and no more contrary to unity than it? But IT? Aye! there's the twist in the logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a complete generation? O it is easy to dream, and, surely, better of these things than of a £20,000 prize in the lottery, or of a place at Court. Dec. 13, 1804.
To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the growth and endurancy of language, from the mother talking to the child at her breast. O what a subject for some happy moment of deep feeling and strong imagination!
Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and the pleasure of the voices—one and not one, they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with, strengthen, annihilate each other, awake, enliven, soothe, flatter and embrace each other again, till at length they die away in one tone. There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond lovers, of seeking and finding, of the love-quarrel, and the making-up, of the losing and the yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete recognition, and of the total melting union. Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combatants.
Title for a Medical Romance:—The adventures, rivalry, warfare and final union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. Pocus.
Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order—the true protoplasts—Gods of Love who tame the chaos.
To deduce instincts from obscure recollections of a pre-existing state—I have often thought of it. "Ey!" I have said, when I have seen certain tempers and actions in Hartley, "that is I in my future state." So I think, oftentimes, that my children are my soul—that multitude and division are not [O mystery!] necessarily subversive of unity. I am sure that two very different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word One.
The drollest explanation of instinct is that of Mylius, who attributes every act to pain, and all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders, caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or paroxysms of dry belly-ache!
This Tarantula-dance of repetitions and vertiginous argumentation in circulo, begun in imposture and self-consummated in madness!
While the whole planet (quoad its Lord or, at least, Lord-Lieutenancy) is in stir and bustle, why should not I keep in time with the tune, and, like old Diogenes, roll my tub about?
I cannot too often remember that to be deeply interested and to be highly satisfied are not always commensurate. Apply this to the affecting and yet unnatural passages of the Stranger or of John Bull, and to the finest passages in Shakspere, such as the death of Cleopatra or Hamlet.
Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent distance from the shore, a thing of itself—no substrate cloud or even mist visible—but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin semi-transparent hoop.
To be and to act, two in Intellect (that mother of orderly multitude, and half-sister of Wisdom and Madness) but one in essence = to rest, and to move = □ and a ○! and out of the infinite combinations of these, from the more and the less, now of one now of the other, all pleasing figures and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid, that base of stedfastness that rises, yet never deserts itself nor can, approaches to the ○. Sunday. Midnight. Malta. December 16th, 1804.
I can make out no other affinity [in the pyramid] to the circle but by taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained a melting of the radii in the circumference [by proceeding to] look it into the object. Extravagance! Why? Does not everyone do this in looking at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the inner vision, a triangle? However, this is in art; but the prototype in nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or [such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from activity and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or straight, yet here, in nature, is motion—motion in its most significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to express motion in general, hieroglyphical from pre-eminence, [and by this very pre-eminence, in the particular instance, made significant of motion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by that emblem. For here the line [in contra-distinction to the line in art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing Figurite of rest and solidity. But I will study the wood-fire this evening in the Palace.
I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or convexity, for the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very soul of the loveliest curve—it does not need its body as it were. Its sharpest point is, however, rounded, and besides it is cased within its own penumbra.
How beautiful a circumstance, the improvement of the flower, from the root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental—the womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden!
Quisque sui faber—a pretty simile this would make to a young lady producing beauty by moral feeling.
Nature may be personified as the πολυμηχανος εργανη, an ever industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever weaving what she has unravelled.
Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea, with all its hollows and swells, and cut-glass surfaces—oh, what an ocean of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence sounded like a play of words! That it was not—the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the individual unity in which they subsisted.
A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the alive sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and had flown up—the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky, that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like plain—what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is, at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity; but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim sense of the non-resistance—it is not exactly the feeling given to the organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock].
One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to make Wordsworth sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale! Would I repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon the broad level vale. Would it act? it darts up into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a chamois-goat runs along the ridge—or like a boy that makes a sport on the road of running along a wall or narrow fence!
One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent, that we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of one in being the confusion of all.
Mem.—Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same instant.
How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume, of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I want the German unübersekbar!) [untranslatable]—the pretended sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again, subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the icht-punct in the indivisible undivided duration.
See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow—even as you might place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804.
There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an idea—that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other smashy matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the difference of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common [between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who would have thought that he had been a poet! "O, a very wretched poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c.
How far might one imagine all the theory of association out of a system of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo? One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once in ten years, you have ample time.
My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming—you can't think of living less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream! Oh!
The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is, that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others, looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a stimulus to new experiments to support, and to a more severe repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to confute [arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin.
In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say—"Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring resemblances without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others—and, lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know that much of the matter remains my own, and that the soul is mine. I fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a compiler.
Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation.
If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself—nay, even that in a contradiction—as a passive ○ among Nothings?
How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and muscles! O that it were the prudential soul of all I love, of all who deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? Distinct means to distinct ends! With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of yours....)—in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself, and when you have done it—even as when you have pared, sliced, vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cucumber, you are directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window—so, dear friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter—your cucumber argument, that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with passion and sharpness—then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears (a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the fire—unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow more than one side of a sheet of paper) the distinct end for which you conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the distinct means! How trivial! Would to God it were only habitual! O what is sadder than that the crambe bis cocta of the understanding should be and remain a foreign dish to the efficient will—that the best and loftiest precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of folly habitual.