I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young
men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds,
and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I
rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or
wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of
facts and personal experiences. Mr. ---- is, I suppose, one of the rising
young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making
remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable
with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute
ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of
selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he
grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light,
otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find
them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "But then," said Mr.
----, "_that_ principle of selection came from facts!"--"To be sure!" I
replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those
antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for
ever,--but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous
aim or principle." He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon's induction:
I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps
enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for
the Baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction--a very different thing.[1]
[Footnote 1:
As far as I can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by
Mr. Coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the Platonic
and Baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the
Friend, from p. 176 to 216. No edition of the Novum Organum should ever be
published without a transcript of it.--ED.]
_September_ 22. 1830.