Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

W. H.

Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus—it is but to open the cork and it flames—but to love and serviceable friendship, let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it.

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803

I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]—heard from Southey the "Institution of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power always exclusively produce such beings as in each moment of their duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according to this argument, you ought to charge God with malignity for having created you—your own life and all its comforts are in the indictment against the Creator—for surely even a child would be ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word I here had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I should write the fraction 1⁄ 1000on a slate, then rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number 555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was greatly improved by the measure, that it was grown a far finer figure!—conceiting a change where there had been positive substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of power or goodness—it appears, I say, that their sole justification rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as vice and misery—on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven as in hell—on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being in a state of happiness could ever have conceived—an argument which a millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted his notion of creatability ? whether the intellect, by an unborn and original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying to an Almighty Being such words as all . Why were not all Gods? But there is no all in creation. It is composed of infinites, and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our notions of infinity applied to numbers—turns with delight to distinct images and clear ideas, contemplates a world , an harmonious system, where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a multitude of individuals apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed, prove this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny omniform, as eternal, agency to God—by finding it impossible to conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of God should be without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of which has given to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramental significance in the mind of many great and good men)—admit this, and all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful. We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light. All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays.

This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be steppy .

A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock

Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening—how, as he was asked who redeemed him, and was to say, "God the Son," he went on humming and hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of sleep—that curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of bulls . I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past five.

To return to the question of evil—woe to the man to whom it is an uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun it with dread. And here—N.B.—scourge with deserved and lofty scorn those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: God, right and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the question must be new, spicy hot gingerbread, from a French constitution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called planets or asteroids—something new [it must be], something out of themselves—for whatever is in them is deep within them—must be old as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old and novel—to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if they then sprang forth at His own Fiat—this marks the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a case of positive substitution. This, I fully believe, settles the question. The assertion that there is in the essence of the divine nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and system (not number—in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational, an object both of imagination and intellect by order—this is no mere assertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of God. Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God.