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fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances:

If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,

For each seem'd either !!!

"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr. Wordsworth, though with a few of the words altered:

An Orphic tale indeed,

A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted !12

"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced: and I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am required to see.

"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least one that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers will have both right and reason to complain of you. This Chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount

11 [Milton's Par. Lost, Book ii., 1. 669. S. C.] 12 [Coleridge's Poet. Works, vol. i., p. 208.]

to so little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from your titlepage, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on Idea! Realism, which holds the same relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato? It will be well, if already you have rɔt too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to blame.

"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you have deserved it..

"Your affectionate, &c."

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of this volume.

The e Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.1 13 The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation." It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead."

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

13 [This last clause “and as a repetition, &c,." I find stroked out in a copy of the B. L. containing a few MS. marginal notes of the author, which are printed in this edition. I think it best to preserve the sentence, while I mention the author's judgment upon it, especially as it has been quoted. S. C.]

14 [Compare this distinction with that of the Productive and Reproductive Imagination given in the section on the Transcendental Synthesis of the Imagination (synthesis speciosa) in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Works, vol. ii., p. 14, 1, 2.]

15 [For what is said of objects in the last sentence see Transsc. Id., p. 68 Abhandlungen Phil. Schrift., p. 224.]

APPENDIX.

I.

THE following marginalia of Mr. Coleridge, which were spoken of in a note to chap. ix. were transcribed for a new edition of the Biographia by Mr. C.'s late editor, with the passages referred to in the original German. These passages are here given upon the whole a little more at large, and in English, but with a clear understanding that entire justice cannot in this way be done to the notions of Schelling, which, to be perfectly estimated, must be considered in the disquisitions to which they belong, as plants and flowers must be viewed in their native situations in order to be fully understood and admired.* S. C.

MS. note on Schelling's Philosoph. Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit und die damit Zusammenhängenden Gegenstande. Phil. Schrift., p. 397.

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There are indeed many just and excellent observations in this work of Schelling's, and yet even more than usual over-meaning or un-meaning quid pro quos-thing-phrases, such as "Licht," Finsterniss," "Feuer," "centre," "circumference," "ground," and the like—which seem to involve the dilemma, that either they are mere similes, where that which they are meant to illustrate has never been stated, or that they are degrees of a kind, which kind has not been defined. Hence Schelling seems to be looking objectively at one thing, and imagining himself thinking of another; and after all this mysticism, what is the result? Still the old questions return, and I find none but the old answers. This ground to God's existence either lessens, or does not

* I wish the reader to know, before perusing these notes, on the authority of Archdeacon Hare, that "for the last twelve years Schelling has been strongly contending against Hegel, and has made, or at all events professes to make, the idea of personality, and of a personal God, the central principle of his system." Quoted from the Archdeacon's admirable defence of Luther, Mission of the Comforter. Vol. ii., note 10, p. 800

lessen, his power. In the first case it is, in effect, a co-existent God,evil, because the ground of all evil;-in the second it leaves us as before. With that "before" my understanding is perfectly satisfied; and, vehemently as Schelling condemns that theory of freedom, which makes it consist in the paramountcy of the Reason over the Will, wherein does his own solution differ from this, except in expressing with uncouth mysticism the very same notion? For what can be meant by the "individuality, or Ichheit, becoming eccentric, and usurping the circumference," if not this? He himself plainly says that moral evil arises not from privation-much less negation-but from the same constituents losing their proper ordination, that is, becoming C. B. A. instead of A. B. C. But wherein does this differ from the assertion, that the freedom of man consists in all the selfishness of his nature being subordinated to, and used as the instrument and materia of, his Reason, that is, his sense of the universal Will?

In short nothing seems gained. To creation-Werden-he himself admits that we must resort; he himself admits it, in even a much higher sense, in the Logos, or the alter Deus et idem. Other creations were still possible, from the will of God, and not from His essence, and yet partaking of His goodness. A mere machine could be made happy, but not deserving of happiness; but if God created a Being with a power of choosing good, that Being must have been created with a power of choosing evil; otherwise there is no meaning in the word Choice. And thus we come round again to the necessity arising out of finiteness, with Leibnitz and Plato. For it is evident that by Matter Plato and Plotinus meant Finiteness;-or how else could they call it rò pà ŏv, without any qualities, and yet capable of all? The whole question of the origin of Evil resolves itself into one. Is the Holy Will good in and of itself, or only relative, that is, as a mean to pleasure, joy, happiness, and the like? If the latter be the truth, no solution can be given of the origin of Evil compatible with the attributes of God; but (as in the problem of the squaring of the circle) we can demonstrate that it is impossible to be solved. If the former be true, as I more than believe, the solution is easy, and almost self-evident. Man cannot be a moral being without having had the choice of good and evil, and he cannot choose good without having been able to choose evil. God, as infinite and self-existing, is the alone One, in whom Freedom and Necessity can be one and the same from the beginning: in all finite beings it must have been arrived at by a primary act, as in Angels, or by a succession of acts as in Man.

In addition it seems to me that Schelling unfairly represents Kant's system as the mere subjecting of the appetites to the Reason. Whereas

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