the emotional nature of man must bear an equal part with his intellectual nature in determining his philosophical creed. The importance of the emotions in philosophy may be thus stated. As the senses furnish us with the facts of the external world in which we live, which directly acts upon us, and to which we have to conform, so the emotions, which are the facts of our inner world, determine our reaction upon the external world of sense, are the ends which we employ the external world to realise for us, the guide of our efforts to mould it to our will. The moral world begins with the emotions, which may be described as those kinds of feeling which accompany thoughts, just as sensations are the kinds of feeling which accompany perceptions of sense. Pleasure and pain of sense are good and evil simply; but moral good and evil. are respectively pleasure and pain of emotion—are a pleasure and pain judged by reference to an inner standard. And the perceptions we have of both kinds may be healthy or morbid, true or perverted, may lead us right or may lead us astray. There are, in short, two great domains of feeling-sense and emotion, and both belong to the great kingdom of nature. We did not make our senses, neither did we make our emotions; but we can within certain limits modify both, and both by the same two methods,-one by modifying the external world, the other by modifying, which in this case is called educating, the faculties themselves. The world, so far as it is an object of thought, is also an object of emotion; and we can no more get rid of its having a character in this respect than we can get rid of its having qualities which sense perceives in it. It is a common error to imagine that when we are said to do anything, the thing done is wholly arbitrary, wholly within our power to do or leave alone, wholly the result of choice. We are a part of nature, and our power is limited to certain comparatively small and slowly operating modifications of nature's course. The moral character of the world as an object of thought belongs wholly to nature and only partially to us, inasmuch as we ourselves are a part of nature. Ours is" an art which nature makes." Until, then, the emotions, those inner sensations which are the key to the character of nature as a whole, are given their due weight and place in philosophy, philosophy cannot be at unity with itself. The mind of man will resist the imposition of a doctrine, however apparently scientific, which professes to be the whole truth without taking into account the moral or emotional side of human nature. Those are the truly comprehensive minds, those are the best philosophers, who insist on having not only the truth, but (as our witnesses' oath says), the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Nor are they the worse for that, even in their character of men of science. The decisive entrance of this principle, as an informing principle, into English philosophy, is due to one whose name will one day be recognised as the greatest which that philosophy can boast-Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge did not, indeed, express or announce the principle, but he acted on it; and he was the first to act on it here or elsewhere. The German writers of the same school show little or no trace of that emotional motive which led the intensely sensitive and imaginative Coleridge to adopt the philosophical doctrines common to them all. Reason, Intellectual Intuition, and the Ideas belonging to them, have with these writers an intellectual content as well as an intellectual framework; they treat man as having high moral and religious duties, prescribed by these ideas, in all relations of life; but they do not regard him as a being in direct emotional relation with the Unseen. With Coleridge, on the contrary, this direct emotional relation is all in all. His poet nature made him introduce the emotional element into the very constitution of that nominally intellectual faculty which was with him, as it was with Kant, with Schelling, and with Hegel, the highest power of mind, the faculty of Reason. The reason was with him an emotional at least as much as it was an intellectual faculty. Whereas Kant had left it purely intellectual-its Ideas having in speculation only a regulative use, and in practical matters only a formal content, the "categorical imperative ”Coleridge ascribed to it a vision of concrete truths, the substance or matter of which received for him its whole value, not as it did for Schelling, from its enlightening the intellect, so much as from its power of touching the heart. Coleridge took up from Kant and Schelling the distinction between the two intellectual faculties, Understanding and Reason, and made this the basis of his whole philosophy. But if we look at the comparison which he institutes between them in the "Aids to Reflection," ,"1 we shall see that the difference in kind which he discovers comes from nothing but this, that he combines with his faculty of Reason the objects upon which it works, namely, the emotions, while he does not combine the corresponding objects, namely, sensations, with his faculty of Understanding. He contrasts them thus: Understanding. "1. Understanding is discursive. "2. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other faculty as its ultimate authority. 66 3. Understanding is the faculty of reflection. 1 Vol. i. p. 175, ed. 1848. "Reason. "I. Reason is fixed. 66 2. The Reason in all its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of their truth. 66 3. Reason [is the faculty] of contemplation. Reason, indeed, is much nearer to Sense than to Understanding : for Reason (says our great Hooker) is a direct aspect of truth, an inward beholding, having a similar relation to the intelligible or spiritual as Sense has to the material or phenomenal." The Reason, then, is with Coleridge thought informed with emotion. Of the two domains described above as dividing between them the kingdom of nature, Sense and Emotion, Coleridge takes Sense as separate from Understanding, while he does not see that Emotion might equally well be taken separately from Reason, nay, that it must be so if Reason and Understanding are to be fairly compared together. Understanding minus its objects, Reason plus its objects, are not fairly to be contrasted. Either both with their objects, and then the difference would seem to be due to the objects; or both without them, and then the difference in kind would vanish altogether. Then it would be discovered that there was no essential difference between Reason and Understanding, taken alike as purely intellectual processes. But the emotions had not in Coleridge's time been distinguished as a separate domain from the senses; indeed, it was mainly to Coleridge's own insistance on the attributes of Reason that they assumed that position in philosophy. It would demand a long work of literary criticism to prove in detail the claim I have now advanced for Coleridge, still more to prove it in contrast with the great German writers of the same school; but in confirmation of it take a single passage from the priceless "Biographia Literaria," where Coleridge is speaking of his early Quantock days, when he first set himself to philosophise in earnest, and "devoted his thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals." "For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John.”1 There is the key to Coleridge the head with Spinoza, the heart with Paul and John. Yes, and there, too, is the key to all philosophy in this country since his time, and what is more, to all philosophy everywhere in the future. The need of finding a system of thought which shall reconcile the phenomena and combine the claims of the head and of the heart-this is what philosophy aims at, and cannot rest till it be accomplished. Here it is that we see Hinton's true place and function in philosophy. He is occupied in working out that problem which Coleridge proposed for solution. He is a hander-on of Coleridge's torch. Let us not be deceived. by appearances. Whatever Coleridge may have said or thought of himself, however much of a theologian he was, the essentials of his doctrine are in no antagonism to the essentials of the English Lockian school. The addition of the domain of Emotion to the domain of Sense is not destruction but addition the addition of a new domain of facts. The quod non prius in sensu receives the addition aut in affectu. The interpretation of the new facts belonging to affectus is another matter. Here Coleridge becomes a theologian; and his interpretation of the facts is, as we have seen, wrong from the first. And the traditional or Church theology, which that mistaken interpretation served for the moment to revivify, has 1 Vol. i. p. 196, ed. 1817. |