Samuel Coleridge - The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3

It is difficult to say, which most shines through this whole passage, the spirit of wisdom or the spirit of meekness. The fatal error of the Romish Church did not consist in the inappellability of the Councils, or that an acquiescence in their decisions and decree was a duty binding on the conscience of the dissentients, – not I say in contending for a practical infallibility of Council or Pope; but in laying claim to an actual and absolute immunity from error, and consequently for the unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope. Hence, even wise decisions – wise under the particular circumstances and times – degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation. Hence errors became like glaciers , or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits of each returning winter.

Ib. 6. p. 212.

An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty.

I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian.

Ib. c. viii. 1. p. 2-20.

For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against God, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto?

Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro . Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible phasis or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual.

The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an ecclesia or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the enclesia , and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the ingens desiderium proborum .

8th Sept, 1826.

Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232.

Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned.

Quære . I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century.

B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249.

That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.

See the essays on method, in the Friend 10 10 See the essays generally from the fourth to the ninth, both inclusively, in Vol. III 3rd edition, more especially, the fifth essay. – Ed. . Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters; – and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties. Now this is either – first, equivalent to the assertion of a prima et nuda materia , so happily ridiculed by the author of Hudibras 11 11 Part. I. c. i. vv. 151 – 6. – Ed. , and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives: – or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used proleptice in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is res noumenon ; the thing is res phenomenon 12 12 See the essay on the idea of the Prometheus of Æschylus. Literary Remains , Vol. II p. 323. – Ed. A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance, – causa sub-faciens .

P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space – long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique: – and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent.