COLERIDGE AS PHILOSOPHER by JOHN H. MUIRHEAD M. A., GLASGOW AND
OXFORD LL. D., GLASGOW AND CALIFORNIA EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF
PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM LONDON GEORGE ALLEN
UNWIN LTD NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY IIST XQ3O II rights I2SX
Yea, oft alone. Piercing the long neglected holy cave. The haunt
obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry
walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame Of odorous lamps
tended by Saint and Sage. COLERIDGE A Tombless Epitaph Thou that
within me art, my Self An Ey Or Temple of a wide Infinity O What a
World art Thou a World within In thee appear All Things, and are
Alive in Thee Super-Substantial, rare, Abov themselves, and near
a-kin To those pure Things we find In His Great Mind, Who made the
World Tho now eclipsed by Sin, Yet this within my Intellect Is
found, when on it I reflect. THOMAS TRAHERNE My Spirit PREFACE THE
following study was undertaken in the con viction, gathered from a
superficial acquaintance with Coleridges published works, that as a
stage in the development of a national form of idealistic
philosophy his ideas are far more important than has hitherto been
realized either by the educated public or by professed students of
the subject. Closer study of them further convinced me that they
formed in his mind a far more coherent body of philosophical
thought than he has been any where credited with, and that to do
fuller justice to this side of his multifarious and miraculous
activity a more serious attempt than any with which I was
acquainted required to be made to set them in relation to the state
of philosophy at the time, and to the great revival of metaphysical
study in England which thelatter half of the nineteenth century was
to witness. There was obvious diffi culty, and not less obvious
risk in any such attempt. The difficulty consisted not merely in
the wide diffusion of the sources from which, in his published
works, his philosophical opinions had to be gathered, but in the
popular character of the writings in which the more explicit
statements of them were contained We know in our own time how much
injury in respect to depth and coherence may be done by the
occasionalism 55, of so much of the philosophical writing of
England and America. Bradley used to deplore the loss to philosophy
caused by William Jamess continual occupation 16 COLERIDGE AS
PHILOSOPHER with popular exposition in lecture form. In Coleridges
case his own ardent missionary spirit combined with his straitened
circumstances was a constant temptation to dissipate his powers in
practical applications instead of in the systematic development of
his ideas. If Lambs gibe as to his preaching was an exaggeration,
something like it may be said of his crusading activities against
what he considered the secular and materialistic spirit of his time
and country. The risk of such an attempt as is here made is that
the brilliant flashes of his innumerable apergus should be robbed
of their delightful element of surprise by being made to appear
merely side lights of a duller if steadier illumination, and that
what was the outcome of the poetry within him finding new means of
utterance, after it had died out in its proper medium of verse,
should be reduced to the prose of doctrinaire philosophy. Coleridge
suffers, writes Leslie Stephen, 1 when any attempt is made to
extract a philo sophical system from his works.His admirers must
limit themselves to claims for what he undoubtedly deserves, the
honour of having done much to stimulate thought, and abandon any
claim to the construction of a definite system. Fortunately the
light thrown upon the whole subject by the recent direction of
attention to important manuscript remains has relieved the 1 Art. e
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Cp. Hours in a Library, essay on Coleridge, vol. iv. Coleridge
never constructed a system...
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