Volume XI: The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant

Author:Will Durant
Language: eng
Format: epub

XI. COLERIDGE PHILOSOPHER: 1808–17

Perhaps we have exaggerated Coleridge’s collapse; we must note that between 1808 and 1815 he delivered lectures—at Bristol and at the Royal Institution in London—which suffered somewhat from confusion of thought and expression, but impressed such auditors as Charles Lamb, Lord Byron, Samuel Rogers, Thomas Moore, and Leigh Hunt; as if by some spontaneous esprit de corps, these and other scribes came to the support of their maimed compeer. Henry Crabb Robinson, who numbered a dozen English or German notables among his friends, described the third of the London lectures as “excellent and very German.” “In the fourth,” he reported, “the mode of treating the subject was very German, and much too abstract for his audience, which was thin.”68 Coleridge’s accumulation of facts, ideas, and prejudices was too abundant to let him cleave to his announced subject; he wandered wildly but inspired. Charles Lamb, who summarized him in a famous phrase as an “archangel, a little damaged,”69 concluded that it was “enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet.”70

During the years 1815–17, when Coleridge was again nearing a breakdown, he poured his aging conclusions into print. In Theory of Life (1815) he showed a surprising knowledge of science, especially of chemistry, which he knew through friendship with Humphry Davy; but he rejected all attempts to explain mind in physicochemical terms. He called “absurd the notion of [Erasmus] Darwin,… of man’s having progressed from an orang-outang state.”71

In The Statesman’s Manual (1816) he offered the Bible as “the best guide to political thought and foresight.”

The historian finds that great events, even the most important changes in the commercial relations of the world,… had their origin not in the combinations of statesmen, or in the practical insights of men of business, but in the closets of uninterested theorists, in the visions of recluse geniuses…. All the epochforming revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion, and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems.72

(He may have been thinking of the results of the thoughts of Christ, Copernicus, Gutenberg, Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau.) After a fair summary of the factors that led to the French Revolution, Coleridge concluded that the voice of the people is not the voice of God; that the people think in passionate absolutes, and cannot be trusted with power;73 and that the best road to reform is through the conscience and action of an educated and propertied minority.74 Generally the best guide to right action, in politics as elsewhere, is the Bible, for this contains all the important truths of history and philosophy. “Of the laboring classes more than this is not demanded,” and “not perhaps generally desirable…. But you,… as men moving in the higher classes of society,” should also know history, philosophy, and theology. The antidote to false statesmanship is history, as “the collation of the present with the

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