Aids to Reflection and the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Aids to Reflection and the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge [Coleridge, Samuel Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00


Comment.

Since the preceding pages were composed, and during an interim of depression and disqualification, I heard with a delight and an interest, that I might without hyperbole call medicinal, that the contra-distinction of Understanding from Reason, for which during twenty years I have been contending, casting my bread upon the waters with a perseverance, which in the existing state of the public taste nothing but the deepest conviction of its importance could have inspired—has been lately adopted and sanctioned by the present distinguished Professor of Anatomy, in the Course of Lectures given by him at the Royal College of Surgeons, on the zoological part of Natural History; and, if I am rightly informed, in one of the eloquent and impressive introductory Discourses. [99] In explaining the Nature of Instinct, as deduced from the actions and tendencies of animals successively presented to the observation of the comparative physiologist in the ascending scale of organic life—or rather, I should have said, in an attempt to determine that precise import of the term, which is required by the facts [100] —the Professor explained the nature of what I have elsewhere called the adaptive power, that is, the faculty of adapting means to proximate ends. [N. B. I mean here a relative end—that which relatively to one thing is an end, though relatively to some other it is in itself a mean. It is to be regretted, that we have no single word to express those ends, that are not the end: for the distinction between those and an end in the proper sense of the term is an important one.] The Professor, I say, not only explained, first, the nature of the adaptive power in genere, and, secondly, the distinct character of the same power as it exists specifically and exclusively in the human being, and acquires the name of Understanding; but he did it in a way which gave the whole sum and substance of my convictions, of all I had so long wished, and so often, but with such imperfect success, attempted to convey, free from all semblance of paradoxy, and from all occasion of offence— omnem offendiculi [101] ansam præcidens. It is, indeed, for the fragmentary reader only that I have any scruple. In those who have had the patience to accompany me so far on the up-hill road to manly principles, I can have no reason to guard against that disposition to hasty offence from anticipation of consequences,—that faithless and loveless spirit of fear which plunged Galileo into a prison [102] —a spirit most unworthy of an educated man, who ought to have learnt that the mistakes of scientific men have never injured Christianity, while every new truth discovered by them has either added to its evidence, or prepared the mind for its reception.

On Instinct in Connection with the Understanding.

It is evident, that the definition of a Genus or class is an adequate definition only of the lowest species of that Genus: for each higher species is distinguished from



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