SUMMARY OF AN ESSAY

ON THE FUNDAMENTAL POSITION OF THE MYSTERIES IN RELATION TO GREEK TRAGEDY.

THE Position, to the establishment of which Mr. Coleridge regards his essay as the Prolegomena, is that the Greek Tragedy stood in the same relation to the Mysteries, as the Epic Song, and the Fine Arts to the Temple Worship, or the Religion of the State; that the proper function of the Tragic Poet was under the disguise of popular superstitions, and using the popular Mythology as his stuff and drapery to communicate so much and no more of the doctrines preserved in the Mysteries as should counteract the demoralizing influence of the state religion, without disturbing the public tranquillity, or weakening the reverence for the laws, or bringing into contempt the ancestral and local usages and traditions on which the patriotism of the citizens mainly rested, or that nationality in its intensest form which was little less than essential in the constitution of a Greek republic. To establish this position it was necessary to explain the nature of these secret doctrines, or at least the fundamental principles of the faith and philosophy of Elensis and Samothrace. The Samothracian Mysteries Mr. Coleridge supposes to have been of Phonician origin, and both these and the Elensinian to have retained the religious belief of the more ancient inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, prior to their union with the Hellenes and the Egyptian colonies that it comprised sundry relics and fragments of the Patriarchal Faith, the traditions historical and prophetic of the Noetic Family, though corrupted and depraved by their combinations with the system of Pantheism, or the Worship of the Universe as God (Jupiter est quodcunque vides), which Mr. Coleridge contends to have been the first great Apostasy of the Ancient World. But a religion founded on Pantheism, is of necessity a religion founded on philosophy, i. e. an attempt to determine the origin of nature by the unaided strength of the human intellect, however unsound and false that philosophy may have been. And of this the sacred books of the Indian Priests afford at once proof and instance. Again: the earlier the date of any philosophic scheme, the more subjective will it be found—in other words the earliest reasoners sought in their own minds the

form, measure, and substance of all other power. Abstracting from whatever was individual and accidental, from whatever distinguished one human mind from another, they fixed their attention exclusively on the characters which belong to all rational beings, and which therefore they contemplated as mind itself, mind in its essence. And however averse a scholar of the present day may be to these first fruits of speculative thought, as metaphysics, a knowledge of their contents and distinctive tenets is indispensable as history. At all events without this knowledge he will in vain attempt to understand the spirit and genius. of the arts, institutions, and governing minds of ancient Greece. The difficulty of comprehending any scheme of opinion is proportionate to its greater or lesser unlikeness to the principles and modes of reasoning in which our own minds have been formed. Where the difference is so great as almost to amount to contrariety, no clearness in the exhibition of the scheme will remove the sense, or rather, perhaps, the sensation, of strangeness from the hearer's mind. Even beyond its utmost demerits it will appear obscure, unreal, visionary. This difficulty the author anticipates as an obstacle to the ready comprehension of the first principles of the eldest philosophy, and the esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries; but to the necessity of overcoming this the only obstacle, the thoughtful inquirer must resign himself, as the condition under which alone he may expect to solve a series of problems the most interesting of all that the records of ancient history propose or suggest.

The fundamental position of the Mysteries, Mr. Coleridge contends, consists in affirming that the productive powers or laws of nature are essentially the same with the active powers of the mind-in other words, that mind, or Nous, under which term they combine the universal attributes of reason and will, is a principle of forms and patterns, endued with a tendency to manifest itself as such; and that this mind or eternal essence exists in two modes of being. Namely, either the form and the productive power, which gives it outward and phænomenal reality, are united in equal and adequate proportions, in which case it is what the eldest philosophers, and the moderns in imitation of them, call a law of nature; or the form remaining the same, but with the productive power in unequal or inadequate proportions, whether the diminution be effected by the mind's own act or

original determination not to put forth this inherent power, or whether the power have been repressed, and as it were driven inward by the violence of a superior force from without,—and in this case it was called by the most Ancient School "Intelligible Number," by a later School "Idea," or Mind-xar' ¿§oxŋv. To this position a second was added, namely, that the form could not put forth its productive or self-realizing power without ceasing at the same moment to exist for itself,-i. e. to exist, and know itself as existing. The formative power was as it were alienated from itself and absorbed in the product. It existed as an instinctive, essentially intelligential, but not self-knowing, power. It was law, Jupiter, or (when contemplated plurally) the Dii Majores. On the other hand, to possess its own being consciously, the form must remain single and only inwardly productive. To exist for itself, it must continue to exist by itself. It must be an idea; but an idea in the primary sense of the term, the sense attached to it by the oldest Italian School and by Plato,—not as a synonyme of, but in contra-distinction from, image, conception or notion: as a true entity of all entities the most actual, of all essences the most essential.

Now on this Antithesis of idea and law, that is of mind as an unproductive but self-knowing power, and of mind as a productive but unconscious power, the whole religion of pantheism as disclosed in the Mysteries turns, as on its axis, bi-polar.

FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY ON TASTE. 1810.

THE same arguments that decide the question, whether taste has any fixed principles, may probably lead to a determination of what those principles are. First, then, what is taste in its metaphorical sense, or, which will be the easiest mode of arriving at the same solution, what is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of sight or hearing, on the one hand, and of touch or smell on the other? And this question seems the more natural, because in correct language we confine beauty, the main subject of taste, to objects of sight and combinations of sounds, and never, except sportively or by abuse of words, speak of a beautiful flavor, or a beautiful scent.

Now the analysis of our senses in the commonest books of anthropology has drawn our attention to the distinction between the perfectly organic, and the mixed senses;-the first presenting objects, as distinct from the perception;-the last as blending the perception with the sense of the object. Our eyes and ears-(I am not now considering what is or is not the case really, but only that of which we are regularly conscious as appearances), our eyes most often appear to us perfect organs of the sentient principle, and wholly in action, and our hearing so much more so than the three other senses, and in all the ordinary exertions of that sense, perhaps, equally so with the sight, that all languages place them in one class, and express their different modifications by nearly the same metaphors. The three remaining senses appear in part passive, and combine with the perception of the outward object a distinct sense of our own life. Taste, therefore, as opposed to vision and sound, will teach us to expect in its metaphorical use a certain reference of any given object to our own being, and not merely a distinct notion of the object in itself, or in its independent properties. From the sense of touch, on the other hand, it is distinguishable by adding to this reference to our vital being some degree of enjoyment, or the contrary,some perceptible impulse from pleasure or pain to complacency or dislike. The sense of smell, indeed, might perhaps have furnished a metaphor of the same import with that of taste; but the latter was naturally chosen by the majority of civilized nations on account of the greater frequency, importance, and dignity of its employment or exertion in human nature.

By taste, therefore, as applied to the fine arts, we must be supposed to mean an intellectual perception of any object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensibility of pain or pleasure, or, vice versa, a sense of enjoyment or dislike co-instantaneously combined with, and appearing to proceed from, some intellectual perception of the object;-intellectual perception, I say; for otherwise it would be a definition of taste in its primary rather than in its metaphorical sense. Briefly, taste is a metaphor taken from one of our mixed senses, and applied to objects of the more purely organic senses, and of our moral sense, when we would imply the co-existence of immediate personal dislike or complacency. In this definition of taste, therefore, is involved the definition of fine arts, namely, as being such the chief and

discriminative purpose of which it is to gratify the taste,—that is, not merely to connect, but to combine and unite, a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves, with the perception of external arrangement.

The great question, therefore, whether taste in any one of the fine arts has any fixed principle or ideal, will find its solution in the ascertainment of two facts:-first, whether in every determination of the taste concerning any work of the fine arts, the individual does not, with or even against the approbation of his general judgment, involuntarily claim that all other minds ought to think and feel the same; whether the common expressions, 'I

dare say I may be wrong, but that is my particular taste;'—are

uttered as an offering of courtesy, as a sacrifice to the undoubted fact of our individual fallibility, or are spoken with perfect sincerity, not only of the reason but of the whole feeling, with the same entireness of mind and heart, with which we concede a right to every person to differ from another in his preference of bodily tastes and flavors. If we should find ourselves compelled to deny this, and to admit that, notwithstanding the consciousness of our liability to error, and in spite of all those many individual experiences which may have strengthened the consciousness, each man does at the moment so far legislate for all men, as to believe of necessity that he is either right or wrong, and that if it be right for him, it is universally right,-we must then proceed to ascertain :—secondly, whether the source of these phenomena is at all to be found in those parts of our nature, in which each intellect is representative of all,-and whether wholly, or partially. No person of common reflection demands even in feeling, that what tastes pleasant to him ought to produce the same effect on all living beings; but every man does and must expect and demand the universal acquiescence of all intelligent beings in every conviction of his understanding.

THE only necessary, but this the absolutely necessary, prerequisite to a full insight into the grounds of the beauty in the objects of sight, is the directing of the attention to the action of