Biographia Literaria
and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an eminent and
successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true
metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the
writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had
taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic
has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which
those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would
remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the
Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so
long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that
false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics
alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the
truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth
from which it may have been drawn.
A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature
to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To
objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main
object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency
of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great
Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to
attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a
plausible and indefinite nomenclature.
But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the
mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that
corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,
who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick
and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever
words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the
least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk
of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing
that might awaken them to a moment’s suspicion of their ignorance. This
alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an
indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and
faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget
each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men
rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss.
Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum
est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert. [55]
I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I
must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of
Mr. Wordsworth’s remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new
edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient
with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article
contributed by me to Mr. Southey’s Omniana, On the soul and its organs
of sense, are the following sentences. “These (the human faculties) I
would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the
ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic;
the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the
aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative,
substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis
theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to
produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means
of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty
of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will
and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to
include under the head of single and double touch.” To this, as far as
it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative
and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth’s “objection is only that the
definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and
to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy.” I reply,
that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the
same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative,
I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I
am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy
with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work
with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in
the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But
it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary
to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth’s subject required or
permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination,
which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He
will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! I will
conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: “He to whom all things
are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may
enjoy true peace and rest of spirit.” [57]
CHAPTER XIII
On the imagination, or esemplastic power
O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav’d from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin’d, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac’d, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigu’d,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion’d to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d,
To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
To intellectual!--give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive. [58]
“Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere.”
“Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
intelligibiliter explicari.” [59]
Sebomai noeron
Kruphian taxin
Chorei TI MESON
Ou katachuthen. [60]
Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will
cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to
the mind from its birth to its maturity.
The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction
of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he
has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by
metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it,
as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles
of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the
metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge,
which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not
furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the
unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of
the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success
than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another
use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual
application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the
discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects.
Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the
questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed
by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and
the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he
well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection
of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid
cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in
motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a
motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the
same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that,
which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a
man’s capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the
same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative
capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to
the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear
that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite
and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must
neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental
philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which
counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in
consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all
direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all
possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that
these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike
indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or
product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those
forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the
circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a scheme or outline
of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results,
by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to
elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively