Search -
Coleridge, and the Moral Tendency of His Writings
Coleridge and the Moral Tendency of His Writings Author:William Mitchell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PAET I. PHILOSOPHY OF COLERIDGE. The reader is premonished that Coleridge belongs to the transcendental or mystic school. His son-in-law, Henry Nelson Cole... more »ridge, Esq., the Editor of his Literary Remains, prepares us for high metaphysical flights, by informing us that, " in perusing the following pages the reader will, in a few instances, meet with disquisitions of a transcendental character, which as a general rule have been avoided : the truth is, that they were found so indissolubly intertwined with the more popular matter which preceded and followed as to make separation impracticable." We are thankful for this acknowledgment, and that the more transcendental disquisitions have been left unpublished. Notwithstanding the expurgation, the remaining philosophy lies, for the most part, beyond the legitimate province of reason, and would not suffer in comparison with the cycles, epicycles, and crystalline spheres of the Ptolemaic system—its essential elements being either an indemonstrable hypothesis, or resting on the basis of a sublime nonentity. In the following extracts, Coleridge explains the elementary principles, and states the origin of his philosophy. " After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in neither of them an abiding place for my reason, I began The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Collected and edited- by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Esq., M. A. London. William Pickering. 1836. to ask myself, Is a system of philosophy, as different from mere history and historic classification, possible ? If possible, what are its necessary conditions ? I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to ...« less