A Poet's Philosophy
The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. (Pilot Press. 25s.)
C:oleridge as Critic. By Herbert Read. (Faber. 65.) THE few people who listened attentively to Coleridge's lectures on philosophy must have had a very strange experience. They observed
the face of Coleridge, animated so radiantly by his own delight in exposition, and yet they were bewildered, even to stuporosity, by a singular complication and uncouthness of utterance in which it was more than easy to mistake one word for another : " Lucretius " sounded like " Lycurgus," and tint and group" were indistinguish- able from "tent and grove." Many of the mumbled sentences appeared to contain little meaning, or a meaning so tortuous that it was hardly explicable ; and then, from time to time, there would come a great phrase of power and enlightenment.
; Something of the bewilderment of Coleridge's listeners will be shared by those- who read the Philosophical Lectures which arc now so admirably presented, for the first time, by Kathleen Coburn. This book is undoubtedly of great importance, not as a philosophical exposition, but as a very necessary component in the understanding of Coleridge. For Coleridge himself never had a clear view of any system, and was repelled by the austerities of logic. Prolonged effort was distasteful to his nature ; his enthusiasm, though intense, was extremely volatile ; and he rarely succeeded in producing more than a few fragments of his original intentions. True, his intentions were of the highest order (whether in marriage or philosophy), and ,yet the performance never fulfilled the promise. He was a man intoxicated by German metaphysics, the grand reaction from the materialistic doctrines of the eighteenth century, but he was not invariably able to appreciate the full force or flavour of a new Rhilosophical vintage.
For these lectures, even with allowance for possible errors in the shorthand notes, cannot be regarded as an objective exposition of the different systems or as the constructive analysis of a system congenial to the lecturer. What they show is a general diffused enthusiasm for metaphysics and religion, with much muddle and a helpless verbal entanglement. The editor speaks very truly when she says, "It is difficult to summarise Coleridge." He starts with an a priori assumption that any line which is likely to induce atheism .has to be avoided, since it cannot be described as philosophy. This attitude is defensible in the case of one who takes for granted the major premisses of a theologian, although it is bound to lead to difficulties (as it does in these lectures) when the history of philosophy Is considered as a whole. Coleridge is thus naïvely inconsistent in his treatment of Occam and of Bruno, for example, and is out of his depth when he comes to Spinoza—whose name is here spelt in two different ways—and afraid of coming to grips with Hume. For this reason he necessarily fails to understand Locke, whose concept of ideas he looks upon as " pagan " or "mechanical." And philosophy, he says, is nothing at all if it is not "the transit from paganism to religion." Thus, thc sophist is described as "a worm" engendered by "putridity," and any type of scepticism is an "ebb of philosophy " because it will probably reject the offerings. of a .revealed faith. It followed that Coleridge's philosophical lectures were not so much a
contribution to the study of philosophy as a contribution to the Anglican revival. Mr. Herbert Read's little volume is an amplified form of the lecture which he delivered at Baltimore in 1948. His thesis is that Coleridge applied a metaphysical theory, or at least a theory of imaginative activity, to the principles of literary criticism. Perhaps it is possible to take Coleridge too seriously in these matters, for he was a man of confused impulses, not a man of considered method. It is important to note, as Mr. Read degs, that Coleridge was at any rate "the first psychologist in criticism." But I think the only point of consistency in Coleridge was metaphysical ; and all metaphysics, for Coleridge, were focused ultimately in the Christian revelation.
C. E. VULLIAMY.
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