Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--The _Spiritual Philosophy_ of Mr.
Green.
In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties
which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr.
Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's
"great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years
of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the
latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that he
continued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, getting
more and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two events
occurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One
of these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; the
other was the death of his disciple's father, with the result of
leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render him
independent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will,
together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed,
imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far
as necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his life
to the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing the
doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, two
years after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, and
thenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, he
applied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour of
love.
We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr.
Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his
previous collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen,
declared in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great
work had been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a
condition fit for the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not
the case; and the probability is therefore that "more than a volume"
meant written material equal in amount to more than a volume--of
course, an entirely different thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us
that no available written material existed for setting comprehensively
before the public, in Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form,
the philosophical system with which he wished his name to be
identified. Instead of it there were fragments--for the most part
mutually inadaptable fragments, and beginnings, and studies of special
subjects, and numberless notes on the margins and fly-leaves of books.
With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise
the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than
such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and
explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all
correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to
whatsoever the human mind can contemplate--sensuous or
supersensuous--of experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under
post-diluvian conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish
his self-proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked
his task with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and
political history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology,
physics, and the allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics,
pathology, all these subjects," declares his biographer, "were
thoughtfully studied by him, in at least their basial principles and
metaphysics, and most were elaborately written of, as though for the
divisions of some vast cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his
labours he thought it convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he
began to study Hebrew when more than sixty years old, and still later
in life he took up Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his
seventieth year and found his health beginning to fail him that Mr.
Green seems to have felt that his design, in its more ambitious scope,
must be abandoned, and that, in the impossibility of applying the
Coleridgian system of philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his
imperative duty under his literary trust to work out that particular
application of it which its author had most at heart. Already, in an
unpublished work which he had made it the first care of his trusteeship
to compose, he had, though but roughly and imperfectly, as he
considered, exhibited the relation of his master's doctrines to
revealed religion, and it had now become time to supersede this
unpublished compendium, the _Religio Laici_, as he had styled it, by a
fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, that
"Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest
philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence,
the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal
truths of reason--truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature
and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere
discover for himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the
few remaining years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of
seventy-two, left behind him in MS. the work entitled _Spiritual
Philosophy: founded on the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor
Coleridge,_ which was published two years later, together with the
memoir of the author, from which I have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It
consists of two volumes, the first of which is devoted to the
exposition of the general principles of Coleridge's philosophy, while
the second is entirely theological, and aims at indicating on
principles for which the first volume has contended, the essential
doctrines of Christianity.
The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition
(if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of the
results of a transcendental intuition) of the essential difference
between the reason and the understanding--a distinction which Coleridge
has himself elsewhere described as preeminently the _gradus ad
philosophiam,_ and might well have called its _pons asinorum._ In the
second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to the
establishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted
in all philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital
to the theology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical
basis. This position is that the human will is to be regarded as the
one ultimate fact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines
himself to the contemplation of his percipient and reflective self
alone--so long as he attends only to those modes of consciousness which
are produced in him by the impressions of the senses and the operations
of thought, he can never hope to escape from the famous _reductio ad
inscibile_ of Hume. He can never affirm anything more than the
existence of those modes of consciousness, or assert, at least as a
direct deliverance of intuition, that his conscious self _is_ anything
apart from the perceptions and concepts to which he is attending. But
when he turns from his perceiving and thinking to his willing self he
becomes for the first time aware of something deeper than the mere
objective presentations of consciousness; he obtains a direct intuition
of an originant, causative, and independent self-existence. He will
have attained in short to the knowledge of a noumenon, and of the only
knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere insuperable between the
subject and object, is broken down; that which _knows_ becomes
identified with that which _is;_ and in the consciousness of will the
consciousness also of a self, as something independent of and superior
to its own modifications, is not so much affirmed as acquired. The
essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology consists in the
alteration of a single though a very important word in the well-known
Cartesian formula. _Cogito ergo sum_ had been shown by Hume to involve
an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according to the Scottish
sceptic, had no right to have said more than _Cogito ergo cogitationes
sunt._ But substitute willing for thinking, convert the formula into
_Volo ergo sum_, and it becomes irrefragable.
So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green's
subsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will
as the ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he
has thus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For
since man, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am,
asserts, nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a
Spiritual being, and thereby knows what substance truly and properly
is--so he contemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects
partaking of reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is
conscious in his own person." So far, however, from this being a
philosophy of Realism, it is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms,
a philosophy of Idealism. I, at least, am unable to see how any
Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, could ask for a better definition of
his theory of the external world than that it "partakes of reality by
virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his own
person."
But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that
one is chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist
for Transcendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between his
philosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a question
whether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch
which has here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out
of place. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher
afterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his
philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, _as
such organon,_ that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it could
be redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of the
latter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could be
complete without at least some brief glance at the details of this
notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of the
Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who
have been trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice
to processes of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms
of the inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you
have done justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no
candid student of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a
professed disciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign
familiarity with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often
compelled, to formulate its positions and recite its processes in
somewhat of the same modest and confiding spirit as animates those
youthful geometricians who leacn their Euclid by heart. With this
proviso I will, as briefly as may be, trace the course of the dialectic
by which Mr. Green seeks to make the Coleridgian metaphysics
demonstrative of the truth of Christianity.
Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base of
Philosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth of
the Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to the
development of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to
the conception of the Idea of God. The argument--if we may apply so
definite a name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to
something that may perhaps be higher, but is certainly _other_ than the
ratiocinative faculty--is founded partly on moral and partly on
intellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena
associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of
the conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make
itself absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of
man's fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the
individual and the race from the fulfilment of this tendency,--Mr.
Green shows how the Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect
(for he seems to use all three expressions indiscriminately) is morally
prepared for the reception of the truth which his Understanding alone
could never have compassed,--the Idea of God. This is in effect neither
more nor less than a restatement of that time-honoured argument for the
existence of some Being of perfect holiness which has always weighed so
much with men of high spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its
actually enhancing the intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man
possesses a Will which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a
nature which constantly impels him to those gratifications of will
which tend not to self-preservation and progress, but to their
contraries. Surely, then, on the strength of the mere law of life,
which prevails everywhere, here must be some higher archetypal Will, to
which human wills, or rather certain selected examples of them, may
more and more conform themselves, and in which the union of unlimited
efficiency in operation with unqualified purity of aim has been once
for all effected. Or to put it yet another way: The life of the
virtuous man is a life auxiliary to the preservation and progress of
the race; but his will is under restraint. The will of the vicious man
energises freely enough, but his life is hostile to the preservation
and progress of the race. Now the natural and essential _nisus_ of all
Will is towards absolute freedom. But nothing in life has a natural and
essential _nisus_ towards that which tends to its deterioration and
extinction. Therefore, there must be some ultimate means of reconciling
absolute freedom of the Will with perfectly salutary conditions of its
exercise. And since Mr. Green, like his master and all other
Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, and contenting himself with
assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency" which will gradually
bring the human will into the required conditions, he here makes the
inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude that there must be a
self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom and power concur
with perfect purity and holiness.
So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, it
will be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. It
has, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves," which
has been called Will, originates in some source to which we should be
rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such
a thing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of the
understanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwise
than hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes
to the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the
following simple _petitio principii:_ the power is first assumed to be
a Will; it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of
Will would escape us except under the condition of Personality; and
from this the existence of a personal God as the source of the power in
question deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by
which Mr. Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the
Absolute as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he
argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation"
be regarded as identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a
hypothetical Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute
Will is not the less absolute from being self-determined _ab intra._
For how, he asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be
conceived as a Will except by conceiving it as _se finiens,_
predetermining itself to the specific processes required by the act of
causation? How, indeed? But the answer of a Pantheist would of course
be that the very impossibility of conceiving of Will except as _se
finiens_ is his very ground for rejecting the notion of a volitional
(in the sense of a personal) origin of the cosmos.
However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism
of Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the
central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy--the construction
of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics.
Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an
individual Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to
evolve the Idea of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally
necessary process from two of the invariable accompaniments of the
above-mentioned introspective act. "For as in our consciousness," he
truly says, "we are under the necessity of distinguishing the relation
of 'myself,' now as the _subject_ thinking and now as the _object_
contemplated in the manifold of thought, so we might express the
relations in the Divine instance as _Deus Subjectivus_ and _Deus
Objectimis,_--that is, the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will,
uttering itself as and contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity
or plenitude of Being eternally and causatively realised in his
Personality." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument)
that the Idea of God the Father as necessarily involves the Idea of God
the Son as the "I" who, as the thinking subject, contemplate myself,
implies the contemplated "Me" as the object thought of. Again, the man
who reflects on the fact of his consciousness, "which discloses to him
the unavoidable opposition of subject and object in the self of which
he is conscious, cannot fail to see that the conscious mind requires
not only the distinction in order to the act of reflection in itself,
but the continual sense of the relative nature of the distinction and
of the essential oneness of the mind itself." Whence it follows (so
runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of the first two
Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves the Idea of the Third
Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" implies the
perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the contemplated--the
"I" and the "Me"--are one. In this manner is the Idea of the Trinity
shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out of it by an
implication as necessary as that which connects together the three
phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act of
the individual mind. [1]
It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has been
made to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed
to it could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen
chapters which follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine
of the Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to
explain the mysteries of the fall of man and of original sin.
Considered in the aspect in which Coleridge himself would have
preferred to regard his pupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to
lead the minds of men to Christianity by an intellectual route, no more
hopeless enterprise perhaps could have been conceived than that
embodied in these volumes. It is like offering a traveller a guide-book
written in hieroglyphics. Upon the most liberal computation it is
probable that not one-fourth part of educated mankind are capable of so
much as comprehending the philosophic doctrine upon which Coleridge
seeks to base Christianity, and it is doubtful whether any but a still
smaller fraction of these would admit that the foundation was capable
of supporting the superstructure. That the writings of the pupil, like
the teachings of the master whom he interprets, may serve the cause of
religion in another than an intellectual way is possible enough. Not a
few of the functions assigned to the Speculative Reason will strike
many of us as moral and spiritual rather than intellectual in their
character, and the appeal to them is in fact an appeal to man to
chasten the lower passions of his nature, and to discipline his unruly
will. Exhortations of that kind are religious all the world of
philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moral fervour
and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefits of
Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it would
of course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether
from the exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded.
FOOTNOTES
1. Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Reason
as we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one would be
disposed to reply that if the above argument proves the existence of
three persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the existence of
three persons in every man who reflects upon his conscious self. That
the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must be
conceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the human
mind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these three
relations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green asserts
indeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove.