The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant & Ariel Durant
Author:Will Durant & Ariel Durant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1975-12-15T00:00:00+00:00
(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 past, and the habit of thoughtfully assimilating the events of our own age to those of the time before.”75
A Lay Sermon (1817) continued this appeal to the “higher and middle classes” as the best vehicles of sane reform, and as guards against the “sophists and incendiaries of the revolutionary school.”76 But the book recognized some current evils: the reckless swelling of the national debt, a peasantry sinking into pauperism, the labor of children in the factories. Coleridge noted “the folly, presumption, and extravagance that followed our late unprecedented prosperity; the blind practices and blinding passions of speculation in the commercial world, with the shoal of ostentatious fooleries and sensual vices.” He mourned the liability of the new business economy to periodical exaltations and depressions, leading to breakdowns and general suffering.77
He recommended some basic reforms. “Our manufacturers must consent to regulation,”78 especially of child labor. The state should recognize as its “positive ends: 1. To make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual. 2. To secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his own condition and that of his children. 3. The development of those faculties which are essential to his humanity; i.e., to his rational and moral being.”79 He called for an organization of the leaders in every profession to study the social problem in the perspective of philosophy, and to offer recommendations to the community; and this “national church should be financed by the state.”80
Coleridge ended his Lay Sermon by conceding to the theologians that no purely lay or secular wisdom can solve the problems of mankind; only a supernatural religion and a God-given moral code can check the inherent cupidity of men.81 Evil is so inborn in us that “human intelligence… alone” is “inadequate to the office of restoring health to the will.”82 He called for a humble return to religion, and to full faith in Christ as God dying to redeem mankind.83
In 1815–16 Coleridge composed or dictated certain “Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions” for use in a projected autobiography. That volume was never completed, and Coleridge published the sketches in
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