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be hoped, hereafter appear in a philosophical work by his friend and fellow-student Mr. Green.

The second great ground of accusation against my father is his having laid claim to "the main and fundamental ideas" of Schelling's system. "We ourselves," says the critic, "in our day have had some small dealings with 'main and fundamental ideas,' and we know thus much about them, that it is very easy for any man or for every man to have them; the difficulty is in bringing them intelligibly, effectively, and articulately out,-in elaborating them into clear and intelligible shapes." He proceeds to illustrate his argument, on the hint of an expression used by Mr. Gillman, in his Life of Coleridge, with a choice simile. "Wasps," says he, "and even" other insects, which I decline naming after him, "are, we suppose, capable of collecting the juice of flowers, and this juice may be called their fundamental ideas;' but the bee alone is a genuis among flies, because he alone can put forth his ideas in the shape of honey, and make the breakfast-table glad." True or false, all this has little to do with any thing that my father has said in the Biographia Literaria. As for the bare "raw material" (to use the critic's own expression), out of which intellectual systems are formed, it is possessed by every human being, from Adam to his children of the present day, by one just as much as another. Clodpates, who draw no lines save with the plough across the field, have all the geometry folded up in their minds that Euclid unfolded in his book: Kant's doctrine of pure reason is a web woven out of stuff that is in every man's brain; and the simplest Christian is implicitly as great a divine as Thomas Aquinas. But when a man declares that the fundamental ideas of a system are born and matured in his mind, he evidently means, not merely that he possesses the mere material or elements of the system, but that the system itself, as to its leading points and most general positions, has been evolved from the depths of his spirit by his own independent efforts; this has certainly more relation to the wrought honey than to the raw. My father's allegation, that the principal points of Schelling's system were not new to him when he found them uttered in Schelling's words shall be considered presently; his own full belief of what he asserted, I, of course, do not make matter of question or debate.

First, however, reverting for a moment to the simile of the

"wasps," I beg to observe, that even if such insects might suck the juice of flowers if they would, mechanically might (though their organs are not adapted for the purpose like those of bees), yet it is certain that instinctively they never do. In vain for them not only the "violets blow," but all the breathing spring beside. On the other hand, a habit of searching the nectaries of delicate blossoms, far sought on heights or in hidden glades, has been found by naturalists to be generally connected with honey-making faculties and thus, without admitting any proper analogy betwixt flower-juice, and fundamental ideas, I will so far avail myself of the illustration as to suggest that, in like manner, he who sought truth far and near, amid the pages of abstruse and neglected metaphysicians of former times, and discovered the merits of new ones, just sprung up in a foreign country, before they were recognized in his own, was probably led to such researches by some special aptitude for studies of this nature and powers of thought in the same line. The wasps and baser flies of literature neither collect juice nor make honey; they only buzz and sting, flitting around the well-spread board, to which they have never furnished one wholesome morsel, to the disturbance of those who sit thereat; a meddlesome but not, like certain wasps of old, the manliest race, for they most attack those who have the powers of the world least on their side, or, being gone out of this world altogether, can neither resist nor return their violence. Time was that when a lion died bees deposited their sweets in his carcass; but now, too often, wasps and vulgar flies gather about the dead lion, to shed upon his motionless remains only what is bitter and offensive!†

ἀνδρικώτατον λένος. Rana, v. 1077.

"No sooner is the lion dead than these hungry flesh-flies swarm about him, verifying a part only of Samson's riddle, they find meat, but they produce no sweetness." Omniana, I. p. 234. I certainly did not recollect this sentence when I wrote the sentence above. My father did not recollect Samson Agonistes, l. 136,

"When insupportably his foot advanced—”

at the time of his writing in the France,

"When insupportably advancing

Her arm made mockery of the warrior's tramp."

Mr. Dequincey represented him as denying the debt to Milton. Now I verily think that I had never read the passage in the Omniana, when the lion illus

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To insects of this class too much countenance is given by the tone and spirit in which Mr. Coleridge's censor conducts his argument. In order to find full matter of accusation against him, he puts into his words a great deal which they do not of themselves contain. According to him my Father's language intimates, that what he was about to teach of the transcendental system in the Biographia Literaria was not only his own by some degree of anticipation, but his own and no one's else that he was prepared to pour from the lamp of an original, though congenial, thinker a flood of new light upon the dark doctrines in which he so genially coincided." Now, so far from pretending to pour a flood of new light upon the doctrines of Schelling, he not only speaks of him as "the founder of the Philosophy of Nature and most successful improver of the Dynamic system,"* but declares that to him "we owe the completion, and the most important victories of this revolution in philosophy." He calls Schelling his predecessor though contemporary. Predecessor in what? Surely in those same doctrines which he was about to unfold. That he had not originally learned the general conceptions of this philosophy from Schelling he does indeed affirm, but he expressly ascribes them to Schelling as their discoverer and first teacher, nor does he claim to be considered the author of the system in any sense or in any degree. All he lays claim to, and that only by anticipation, as what he hoped to achieve, is "the honor of rendering it intelligible to his countrymen," and of applying it to "the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes:" and certainly in the application of philosophical principles to the explanation, and, as he believed, support of the Catholic faith, by which means the soundness of the principles themselves is tested, he had a walk of his own in which "" no German that ever breathed" has preceded or outstripped him.‡

Plainly enough it was the sum of his future labors in the fur

tration occurred to me; I never yet have read the book through, though I have had it within reach all my life. It is not worth acknowledging like the other; but this and a thousand similar facts make me feel how much of coincidence in such matters is possible. If my father had read Samson Agonistes, still he may have thought that he should have written the line even if he had not.

Biog. Lit. chap. ix.

+ Ib

Mr. Dequincey said of him, with reference to another application of his thoughts, that, "he spun daily, from the loom of his own magical brain,

therance of truth, not his metaphysical doctrines alone, but his entire system of thought that he had in contemplation, when he intimated a confident belief, that the work he should produce would appear to be the offspring of his own spirit by better tests than the mere reference to dates :" and although his actual performance fell very far short of what he was ever expecting to perform, yet surely his writings at large contain an amount of original thought sufficient to render this anticipatory pretension at least not ridiculous. That his meaning was thus general more clearly appears from the circumstance that, just before this appeal concerning his originality of authorship, he refers to his design of applying philosophy to religion; and without doubt his religious philosophy differed materially from that of the great German. In connection, too, with the same subject he mentions "this or any future work of his;" so that to suppose him, when he thus expressed himself, to have had in his mind's eye just that portion of his teaching in the B. L. which he had borrowed or was to borrow from Schelling, is gratuitous indeed.* Is it conceivable that Mr. Coleridge would have appealed to tests of originality, which his future writings were to furnish, had he not believed in his heart that they would furnish those tests ?-that he would have defied a comparison of dates, had he been claiming originality merely on the score of what he had consciously borrowed?

But that pretension of his to having anticipated much of what Schelling taught has been treated with vehement scorn, as a mere pretence.

His accordance with the German philosopher, it is peremptorily ⚫ asserted, could not have been coincidence, because he gave forth Schelling's own doctrine in Schelling's own words, without any important addition or variation. "Genial coincidences, forsooth! where every one word of the one author tallies with every one

theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images, such as no German that ever breathed could have emulated in his dreams."

His good friend in the Ed. Review of Aug. 1817, sees this matter in a truer light, for he says Mr. C. "proceeds to defend himself against the charge of plagiarism, of which he suspects that he may be suspected by the readers of Schlegel and Schelling, when he comes to unfold, in fulness of time, the mysterious laws of the drama and the human mind." Fas est ab hoste juvari.

word of the other!" That it is ill-judged in any man to tell the world, in his own favor, one tittle more than he is prepared to prove, I have no intention to dispute, nor is it for the sake of maintaining my father's claims as a metaphysical seer, that I trouble myself with the above position; for another reason, more deeply concerning, I must contend, that his having neither added to, nor varied from, the doctrines of Schelling does not make it clear as noonday, that he had not some original insight into them, nor is even his adoption of Schelling's words any absolute proof, that he had in no degree anticipated their sense. There can be no reasonable doubt, that he was at least in the same line of thought with him,—was in search of what Schelling discovered -before he met with his writings and on this point it is to be remarked, that the writer in Blackwood, though he professes to give the whole of Mr. Coleridge's defence, omits a very important part of it, that in which he accounts for his averred coincidence with the German writer, and thus establishes its probability.* True enough it is that the transcendental doctrine contained in the Biographia Literaria is conveyed for the most part in the language of Schelling, and this seems to show, that he had not formed into a regular composition any identical views of his own before he read that author's works; but that the main concep

* See, in the ninth chapter of this work, the passage beginning, "We had studied in the same school-" p. 264.

This admission refers to such parts of the book as expressly convey the transcendental doctrine. Certain observations on religious philosophy cited by Mr. Coleridge he declares himself to have anticipated in writing. A few sentences with which he prefaces the extract in the ninth chapter, which have been strongly animadverted upon, I give here, together with the defence of them, in order to avoid any recurrence to the present subject hereafter: "While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible." "This passage," says my Father's late Editor, "is noted with particular acrimony by the writer in Blackwood, as 'outraging common sense and the capacities of human belief,' with more about 'cool assurance,' and 'taking upon him to say,' and the like. And why all this? Is there any thing in the substance or leading thought in the following paragraph so peculiar and extraordinary, as to make it incredible,

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