To insects of this class too much countenance is given by the tone and spirit in which Mr. Coleridge's censor conducts his argument. In order to find full matter of accusation against him, he puts into his words a great deal which they do not of themselves contain. According to him my Father's language intimates, that what he was about to teach of the transcendental system in the Biographia Literaria was not only his own by some degree of anticipation, but his own and no one's else that "he was prepared to pour from the lamp of an original, though congenial, thinker a flood of new light upon the dark doctrines in which he so genially coincided." Now, so far from pretending to pour a flood of new light upon the doctrines of Schelling, he not only speaks of him as "the founder of the Philosophy of Nature and most successful improver of the Dynamic system," but declares that to him "we owe the completion, and the most important victories of this revolution in philosophy." He calls Schelling his predecessor though contemporary. Predecessor in what? Surely in those same doctrines which he was about to unfold. That he had not originally learned the general conceptions of this philosophy from Schelling he does indeed affirm, but he expressly ascribes them to Schelling as their discoverer and first teacher, nor does he claim to be considered the author of the system in any sense or in any degree. All he lays claim to, and that only by anticipation, as what he hoped to achieve, is "the honor of rendering it intelligible to his countrymen," and of applying it to "the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes:" and certainly in the application of philosophical principles to the explanation, and, as he believed, support of the Catholic faith, by which means the soundness of the principles themselves is tested, he had a walk of his own in which "no German that ever breathed" has preceded or outstripped him.‡

Plainly enough it was the sum of his future labors in the furtration occurred to me; I never yet have read the book through, though I have had it within reach all my life. It is not worth acknowledging like the other; but this and a thousand similar facts make me feel how much of coincidence in such matters is possible. If my father had read Samson Agonistes, still he may have thought that he should have written the line even if he had not.

* Biog. Lit. chap. ix.

† Ib

Mr. Dequincey said of him, with reference to another application of his thoughts, that, "he spun daily, from the loom of his own magical brain,

therance of truth, not his metaphysical doctrines alone, but his entire system of thought that he had in contemplation, when he intimated a confident belief, that the work he should produce would " appear to be the offspring of his own spirit by better tests than the mere reference to dates :" and although his actual performance fell very far short of what he was ever expecting to perform, yet surely his writings at large contain an amount of original thought sufficient to render this anticipatory pretension at least not ridiculous. That his meaning was thus general more clearly appears from the circumstance that, just before this appeal concerning his originality of authorship, he refers to his design of applying philosophy to religion; and without doubt his religious philosophy differed materially from that of the great German. In connection, too, with the same subject he mentions "this or any future work of his ;" so that to suppose him, when he thus expressed himself, to have had in his mind's eye just that portion of his teaching in the B. L. which he had borrowed or was to borrow from Schelling, is gratuitous indeed.* Is it conceivable that Mr. Coleridge would have appealed to tests of originality, which his future writings were to furnish, had he not believed in his heart that they would furnish those tests ?—that he would have defied a comparison of dates, had he been claiming originality merely on the score of what he had consciously borrowed?

But that pretension of his to having anticipated much of what Schelling taught has been treated with vehement scorn, as a mere pretence.

His accordance with the German philosopher, it is peremptorily asserted, could not have been coincidence, because he gave forth Schelling's own doctrine in Schelling's own words, without any important addition or variation. "Genial coincidences, forsooth! where every one word of the one author tallies with every one

theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images, such as no German that ever breathed could have emulated in his dreams."

* His good friend in the Ed. Review of Aug. 1817, sees this matter in a truer light, for he says Mr. C. "proceeds to defend himself against the charge of plagiarism, of which he suspects that he may be suspected by the readers of Schlegel and Schelling, when he comes to unfold, in fulness of time, the mysterious laws of the drama and the human mind." Fas est ab hoste juvari.

word of the other!" That it is ill-judged in any man to tell the world, in his own favor, one tittle more than he is prepared to prove, I have no intention to dispute, nor is it for the sake of maintaining my father's claims as a metaphysical seer, that I trouble myself with the above position; for another reason, more deeply concerning, I must contend, that his having neither added to, nor varied from, the doctrines of Schelling does not make it clear as noonday, that he had not some original insight into them, nor is even his adoption of Schelling's words any absolute proof, that he had in no degree anticipated their sense. There can be no reasonable doubt, that he was at least in the same line of thought with him,--was in search of what Schelling discovered -before he met with his writings and on this point it is to be remarked, that the writer in Blackwood, though he professes to give the whole of Mr. Coleridge's defence, omits a very important part of it, that in which he accounts for his averred coincidence with the German writer, and thus establishes its probability.* True enough it is that the transcendental doctrine contained in the Biographia Literaria is conveyed for the most part in the language of Schelling, and this seems to show, that he had not formed into a regular composition any identical views of his own before he read that author's works; but that the main concep

* See, in the ninth chapter of this work, the passage beginning, had studied in the same school-" p. 264.

"We

This admission refers to such parts of the book as expressly convey the transcendental doctrine. Certain observations on religious philosophy cited by Mr. Coleridge he declares himself to have anticipated in writing. A few sentences with which he prefaces the extract in the ninth chapter, which have been strongly animadverted upon, I give here, together with the defence of them, in order to avoid any recurrence to the present subject hereafter: "While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible." "This passage," says my Father's late Editor, "is noted with particular acrimony by the writer in Blackwood, as 'outraging common sense and the capacities of human belief,' with more about 'cool assurance,' and 'taking upon him to say,' and the like. And why all this? Is there any thing in the substance or leading thought in the following paragraph so peculiar and extraordinary, as to make it incredible,

tions of Schelling's system were wholly new to his mind, when he met with them there, can not be determined by any such test.

Coincidences in the discoveries of science are more common, especially among contemporaries, than in the products of fancy and imagination, because these are not, like the last, mere arbitrary combinations of materials drawn from the storehouse of the universe, capable of being infinitely varied; but revelations of truths which manifest themselves, one and the same, to every inquirer who goes far enough in a certain direction of thought to meet with them-which lie in the path of the human intellect, and must be arrived at, when it has made a certain progress in its pre-appointed course. In all scientific product two factors are required; energy of thought in the discoverer, and a special state of preparation for the particular advance in the state of science itself. Real Idealism could never have dawned on the mind of Schelling had he not been born into the meridian light of the Idealism of Kant, which was surely founded on the Idealism of

that the same may have passed through the mind of such a man as even this writer seems to admit Mr. Coleridge to have been? He studied in Germany in 1798, and Schelling's pamphlet was published in 1806. The writer can not comprehend how Mr. C. could take upon him to say, 'that coincidence only was possible' in the case, 'except on the ground, that it was impossible for any human being to write any thing but what he (Mr. C.) had written before.' And yet no human being but one could ever suppose that Mr. Coleridge meant any such folly. What can be simpler? He says he had before 1806 noted down--and his friends and his enemies-(that he should have such still!)-know his habit in this particular-the substance, that is, as most people understand it, the general thought of the paragraph. If that were so, there having been no personal intercourse between Schelling and Coleridge, coincidence, in Italics or Roman, was only possible in the case.

A complaint is also made. that a passage of 49 lines comprising six only of original writing, should be said to be only in part translated; which Coleridge never said. "The following observations" very obviously extend to the words "William Law," two pages beyond the 49 lines; of the whole it is truly said, that it is partly translated, about one half of it, in different parts, not being so. H. N. C.

Upon this false supposition that my father referred only to the 49 lines in his acknowledgment, he is not only attacked for having spoken of them as in part translated, but declared to have taken without acknowledgment "two other long sentences from the Darlegung," which occur in the following paragraph, and which, because he altered them a little for the occasion, he is reproached with having "curiously transmogrified.”

Berkeley. Is it any thing then so very incredible, that a man, from his childhood an ardent metaphysical inquirer, who had gone through the same preparatory discipline with Schelling, by reflection upon the doctrines of Kant, their perfect reasonableness, so far as they advanced beyond all previous thought, their unsatisfactoriness where they stopped short, and elung, in words at least, to the old dogmatism, might have been led into modes of rectifying and completing his system similar to those which Schelling adopted? That Coleridge does not appear to have gone beyond the subtle German in the path of discovery is insufficient to prove, that he might not independently have gone as far; for we do not commonly see that more than one important advance is made in metaphysical science at any one period. Berkeleyanism presented itself to the mind of Arthur Collier before he had read a syllable of Berkeley's metaphysical writings, and he maintained the non-existence of matter by arguments substantially the same as those employed in the Principles of Human Knowledge and Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, without communication, as we may reasonably suppose, with their admirable author.* Let us suppose Collier to have been a man careless and immethodical in his habits, continually diverted from regular scientific inquiry by a "shaping spirit of imagination, -one whose disposition led him to be ever seeking matter for new thought, rather than laboring to reduce into presentable order that which he had already acquired; let us further suppose that, before he had given expression to his views in a regular treatise, the works of Berkeley had fallen in his way; would it not almost inevitably have happened, that the conceptions, floating in his mind, but not yet fixed in language, would have mixed themselves up indistinguishably with those of the older author, and assumed the same form? But if the form into which his thoughts were thrown had been the same with that adopted by his "predecessor though contemporary," the philosophy of the two would have been identical, for Collier's view neither materially added to Berkeley's nor varied from it. On such considerations as these it may surely be deemed possible, that my Father did not wholly deceive himself, much less wilfully seek to deceive others, when he affirmed that "the main and fundamental ideas" of Schelling's system were born and ma* See Mr. Benson's Memoirs of Collier, pp. 18, 19.

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