Table Talk by Coleridge

The excerpts below are quotes from Table Talk by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which consists of recollections of his conversations published after his death by his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge. I came across the first one recently and thought it very pertinent to our present time, particularly with relevance to the reaction during the recent health scare. So I looked through an online version of the book and found it full of similar pithy observations, a few of which I reproduce here with an occasional comment in italics

 

 There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth – the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry.

One should add that the real good is the same as the real true so it is the apparent or even the false good that people, especially women, prefer to the real good, and this is because it makes greater appeal to their feelings or to their desire for comfort, safety and general 'niceness'.

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire — which is  not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work — may be stated in  two words : — the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. 

This is not exactly two words but one can see what he means, and it could be said to be what is happening to the West now.

 

Kant assigns three great races of mankind. If two individuals  of distinct races cross, a third, or tertium aliquid is invariably produced, different from either, as a white and a negro produce a mulatto. But when different varieties of the same race cross, the offspring is according to what we call chance ; it is now like one,  now like the other parent. Note this, when you see the children of any couple of distinct European complexions, — as English and Spanish, German and Italian, Russian and Portuguese, and so on. 

I have noticed this in people of my acquaintance.

 

There are two principles in every European and Christian state: Permanency and Progression. In the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England, which are as new and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so for ever to us, these two principles came to a struggle. It was natural that the great and the good of the nation should be found in the ranks of either side. 

Many of the present problems are caused by the abandonment of what Coleridge calls the sense of Permanency.

 

Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind;  just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts — and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference. 

Bring back the use of the word 'methinks'.

 

This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the times of Charles I and the Cromwellate. In them the premises are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premises are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the University of Oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it. 

You could apply this to our age in the sense that reasoned discourse stripped of ideology is becoming rarer, but I suspect that could have been said of many other times too.

 

St. John's logic is Oriental, and consists chiefly in position and parallel; whilst St. Paul displays all the intricacies of the Greek system.

The mystic and the philosopher.

 

The first three Gospels show the history, that is, the fulfilment of  the prophecies in the facts. St. John declares explicitly the doctrine, oracularly, and without comment, because, being pure reason, it can only be proved by itself. For Christianity proves itself, as the sun is seen by its own light. Its evidence is involved in its existence. St Paul writes more particularly for the dialectic understanding; and proves those doctrines, which were capable of such proof, by common logic. 

A proof of Christianity lies in the fact that it offers us more than we could have ever hoped for or imagined.

 

St. John used the term Logos technically. Philo-Judaeus had so used it several years before the probable date of the composition of this Gospel; and it was commonly understood amongst the Jewish Rabbis at that time, and afterwards, of the manifested God. The Jewish Church understood the Messiah to be a divine person. Philo expressly cautions against anyone's supposing the Logos to be a mere personification, or symbol. He says the Logos is a substantial, self-existent Being. The Gnostics, as they were afterwards called, were a kind of Arians; and thought the Logos was an after-birth. They placed the Abyss and Silence before him. Therefore it was that St. John said, with emphasis, “ln the beginning was the Word." He was begotten in the first simultaneous burst of Godhead, if such an expression may be pardoned, in speaking of eternal existence. 

To assert that God is a Person is not a childish projection but the most advanced religious doctrine.

 

The national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be so.

It certainly has and even more so today.

 

Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet.

As now when completely incompatible ideologies unite to contest the real.

Plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. Little that is positive is advanced in them. Socrates may be fairly represented by Plato in the more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is Pythagoras.

It's a pity we know Plato by his nickname or we could talk of Aristocles (his real name) and Aristotle. Apparently he was given this nickname, which means broad as in broad-chested, by his wrestling coach. All philosophers should have a wrestling coach.

 

In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus. The ancients had no notion of the fall of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in Aeschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil jumbled together. 

An interesting insight.

"Most women have no character at all," said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better,  saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Everyone wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife, — creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.

If the highest state of matter is to reflect spirit perfectly you can see what he means here.

The man's desire is for the woman ; but the woman's desire is  rarely other than for the desire of the man. 

A generalisation but not without substance.

 

I cannot say I expect much from mere Egyptian antiquities. Everything really that is intellectually great in that country seems to me of Grecian origin.

Sometimes he gets it wrong. On the other hand (and see below), the Greeks did make rational what the Egyptians seemed only to understand intuitively.

 

There was, I conceive, one great Japetic original of language, under which Greek, Latin, and other European dialects, and, perhaps, Sanskrit, range as species. The Japetic race separated 

into two branches; one, with a tendency to migrate south-west, — Greeks, Italians, &c. ; and the other northwest, — Goths, Germans, Swedes, &c. The Hebrew is Semitic. 

Japetic means descending from Noah's son Japheth and seems to refer here to Indo-Europeans.

 

I more clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity (that is to say, the Trinity) is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it.

 

The result of my system will be to show that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat. 

More true than ever today.

 

The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right and both wrong. They each maintained 

opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premise. 

I see what he means but I would still place the Realists above the Nominalists. The latter could be said to be the origin of modern materialism.

A Fall  of some sort or other — the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute — is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight.

The doctrine of the Fall makes sense of so much.

A woman's head is usually over ears in her heart Man seems to have been designed for the superior being of the two; but as things are, I think women are generally better creatures than men. They have, 

taken universally, weaker appetites and weaker intellects, but they have much stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever. 

The tragedy of feminism which poses as a liberator but actually corrupts.

The Trinity is the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendent as the distinction. 

If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer it to, but the fiendish ? Passion without any appetite is fiendish. 

Demons exist.

The best way to bring a clever young man who has become sceptical and unsettled to reason, is to make him feel something. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual ; and that sense alone will make him think to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. 

We must distinguish between feeling and feelings.

 

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.

 

I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood, — identity in these makes men of one country. 

Immigration without proper integration is a disaster. This is why it should be kept to reasonable limits, limits which it has far exceeded in Western nations in recent years.

 

The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. 

 

Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. I quite calculate on my being one day or other holden in worse repute by many Christians than the Unitarians and open infidels. It must be undergone by everyone who loves the truth for its own sake beyond all other things. 

It's more important to be on the right side than to believe exactly the same things.

People may say what they please about the gradual improvement of the Arts. It is not true of the substance. The Arts and the Muses both spring forth in the youth of nations, like Minerva from the front of

 Jupiter, all armed: manual dexterity may, indeed, be improved by practice. 

The difference between inspiring impulse and execution.

I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to the Greek philosophy to be groundless. It sprang up in Greece itself, and began with physics only. Then it took in the idea of a living cause and made Pantheism out of the two. Socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally, Plato asserted or reasserted the idea of a God the maker of the world. The measure of human philosophy was thus full, when Christianity came to add what before was wanting - assurance. After this again, the Neo-Platonists joined Theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and mere mysticism. 

Egypt probably did not have an intellectualised philosophy as such but it did have a highly developed knowledge of mysticism and magic. Otherwise this is not a bad history of religion in the West.

 

This is just a small selection from the first half of the book. I may do another post on the remainder but it serves to remind us that Coleridge was much more than just a romantic poet.