Biographia Literaria
sheet which I accidentally met with at the printer’s. Even from this
scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to
admire the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the
greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their
accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a
second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query;
whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as
to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute
synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are many
which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and
which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue.
When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more
words,--(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is
progressive and of course imperfect)--erroneous consequences will be
drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as
true in toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in
the things themselves--(whether in or out of the mind)--for a knowledge
of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the
equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the
appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been
used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and
of such general currency that the language does as it were think for
us--(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic’s safe substitute for
arithmetical knowledge)--we then say, that it is evident to common
sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was
born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at
large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At
least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it
is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment in genere,
and where it is not used scholastically for the universal reason. Thus
in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world was called to arms by
the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers exerted themselves
in the detection of an error, which a school-boy would now be able to
confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion and obligation
conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what appertained to
the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a mere confusion
of terms.]
[Footnote 24: I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume’s sense on account
of its general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though
against my own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word
has been the cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in
its original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel
of St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object,
when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted
it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous
image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the
idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living,
seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea
became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in
Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to
Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign of
Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense,
or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use
of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it, more or less to
image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be
displeased with the following interesting exemplification from Bishop
Jeremy Taylor. “St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an
embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way
with a censer of fire in one band, and a vessel of water in the other;
and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic
deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what
she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, My purpose is
with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames
of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we
rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to
abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the
idea.” Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful
hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain,
which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external
world,--Locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to
whatever is the immediate object of the mind’s attention or
consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those representations which are
accompanied with a sense of a present object from those reproduced by
the mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and confined the
word idea to the latter.]
[Footnote 25: I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson’s
Dictionary nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which
Newton and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely
appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without
ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would
often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of
the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a beauty
in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close
philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,
intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.]
[Footnote 26: And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin.]
[Footnote 27: Videlicet; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each
consisting of three subdivisions. See Kritik der reinen Vernunft. See
too the judicious remarks on Locke and Hume.]
[Footnote 28: St. Luke x. 21.]
[Footnote 29: An American Indian with little variety of images, and a
still scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to
many purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to
give his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry
interspersed with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of
such men as Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole
armoury of expressions, their only organ of thought.]
[Footnote 30: The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoisnsus may,
perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to
those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness
of Fichte’s idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.
The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God,
EGOENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK, Grammarian,
and Subrector in Gymmasic.
Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
I, I, I! I itself I!
The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
I, you and he, and he, you and I,
All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
All I itself I!
(Fools! a truce with this starting!)
All my I! all my I!
He’s a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone--
Then substantive and plural-singular grown
He thus spake on! Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root!
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign
To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!]
[Footnote 31: It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice
to pass over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez, a gentleman
equally well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who
demands notice on the present occasion as the author of “A new System
of Physiology” in two volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of
“An Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy
which now prevail” in one volume octavo, entitled, “The Principles of
physiological and physical Science.” The latter work is not quite equal
to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater necessity
of distinguishing the principles of the author’s philosophy from his
conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, etc.
which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary
consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of this
volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior work, the
reasonings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an
infinite power in any finite substance are the offspring of no common
mind; and the experiment on the expansibility of the air is at least
plausible and highly ingenious. But the merit, which will secure both
to the book and to the writer a high and honourable name with
posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the
copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my
opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology;
established not only the existence of final causes, but their necessity
and efficiency to every system that merits the name of philosophical;
and, substituting life and progressive power for the contradictory
inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as the first
instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The author’s views,
as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and completely his own, as
he neither possessed nor do his writings discover, the least
acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the germs of the
philosophy exist: and his volumes were published many years before the
full development of these germs by Schelling. Mr. Saumarez’s detection
of the Braunonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time;
and I scarcely remember in any work on any subject a confutation so
thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at this time to have stated
the fact; as in the preface to the work, which I have already announced
on the Logos, I have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer, and
genuine philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundation somewhat
deeper and wider to have superseded a considerable part of my labours.]
[Footnote 32: But for sundry notes on Shakespeare, and other pieces
which have fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to
observe; that discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now
call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of
generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus,
Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry is always and
essentially intuitive.]
[Footnote 33: Revelation xx. 3.]
[Footnote 34: See Laing’s History of Scotland.--Walter Scott’s bards,
ballads, etc.]
[Footnote 35: Thus organization, and motion are regarded as from God,
not in God.]
[Footnote 36: Job, chap. xxviii.]
[Footnote 37: Wherever A=B, and A is not=B, are equally demonstrable,
the premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the