Biographia Literaria
to find a body, behold! we had nothing but its ghost--the apparition of
a defunct substance!
I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God
grant health and permission), be treated of at large and systematically
in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on the Productive
Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full
commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself intelligible as
far as my present subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly to
observe.--1. That all association demands and presupposes the existence
of the thoughts and images to be associated.--2. That the hypothesis of
an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications
of our own being, which alone, according to this system, we actually
behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley’s, inasmuch as it equally,
perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness
of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres,
the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own
brains.--3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor
precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the
percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from
without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The
formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an
original; the copyist of Raffael’s Transfiguration must repeat more or
less perfectly the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a
thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of
light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty.
We might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that
supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the
world, to the tune of “This is the house that Jack built.” The sic
Deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine
goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why
is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist’s concern.
It is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of
pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal’s fancy and commands
us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or
palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters
of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing
to the sky with self-complacent grin [26] have appealed to common sense,
whether the sun did not move and the earth stand still.
CHAPTER IX
Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of
a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author’s
obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between the
letter and the spirit of Kant’s writings, and a vindication of prudence
in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte’s attempt to complete the Critical
system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to
Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez.
After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley,
Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place
for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as
different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If
possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed
to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole
practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect,
and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up
against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find,
that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all
inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. Assume
in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius
in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz’s qualifying praeter ipsum
intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood
by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced
from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal
and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [27], and
the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks
without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by
occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on
the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience
itself possible. The first book of Locke’s Essay, (if the supposed
error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an
absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is
formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of
Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.
The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after
the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way
conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio,
identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally
each other’s substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception,
(i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time
during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus
purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of
Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early
study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA
PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius
Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the
“De la causa, principio et uno,” of the philosopher of Nola, who could
boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and
whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all
contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the
Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood,
but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most
natural.
Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic
theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;
and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of
the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for
himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might
be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and
from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that
the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians
of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he
conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never
stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the
ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in
the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as
contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the
following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let
me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance
from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his
pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another’s words to my
own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still
more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was
possible.
Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last
two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have
existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to
pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of
free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in
actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride
beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the
transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who
actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of
having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration
to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to
their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and
the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of
spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living
ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been
enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered
livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without
distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those,
whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only
extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the
most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but
the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no
other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble
and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by
profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, I thank
thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes
[28]. No; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the
schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from
the fountain, but drove them out of the very Temple, which mean time the
buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of
thieves.
And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for
this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished
themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others;
unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth
periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their
fingers’ ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words
immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those
phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate
inspiration; as for instance, “It was delivered unto me;”--“I strove
not to speak;”-“I said, I will be silent;”--“But the word was in my
heart as a burning fire;”--“and I could not forbear.” Hence too the
unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the
clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in
the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words
of the only book, with which they were familiar [29]. “Woe is me that I
am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--I love peace: the
souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one
of them doth curse me!” O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger
imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent
expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what
might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a
new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius.
His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the
everlasting; for “the world is not his friend, nor the world’s law.”
Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong
and so unusual, the man’s body should sympathize with the struggles of
his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake
the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of
his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on