THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

by Janusz Aleksander Sysak

Submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

March 2000.

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, The University of Melbourne. p.2

ABSTRACT

This thesis aims to show that Coleridge's thinking about science was inseparable from and influenced by his social and political concerns. During his lifetime, science was undergoing a major transition from mechanistic to dynamical modes of explanation. Coleridge's views on natural philosophy reflect this change. As a young man, in the mid-1790s, he embraced the mechanistic philosophy of Necessitarianism, especially in his psychology. In the early 1800s, however, he began to condemn the ideas to which he had previously been attracted. While there were technical, philosophical and religious reasons for this turnabout, there were also major political ones. For he repeatedly complained that the prevailing 'mechanical philosophy' of the period bolstered emerging liberal and Utilitarian philosophies based ultimately on self-interest. To combat the 'commercial' ideology of early nineteenth century Britain, he accordingly advocated an alternative, 'dynamic' view of nature, derived from German Idealism. I argue that Coleridge championed this 'dynamic philosophy' because it sustained his own conservative politics, grounded ultimately on the view that states possess an intrinsic unity, so are not the product of individualistic self-interest. p.3

This is to certify that: (i) the thesis comprises only my original work; (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used; (iii) the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies, appendices and footnotes. p.4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Keith Hutchison, for his continual encouragement, abiding patience, and scholarly example. His enthusiasm and interest in this project has been immeasurably helpful, and I have learnt much from him for which I am indebted. I am also grateful to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne for its support throughout the writing and research of this thesis. On top of the material facilities it made available, the HPS Department provided a stimulating and congenial environment for doctoral study. I would also like to acknowledge the Australian government for a scholarship provided in the initial years of research. An expression of gratitude is due to all the other people - HPS staff, fellow students, friends, and colleagues - who have been supportive and taken an interest in my doctoral labours. Finally, very special thanks must be given to my family for their unwavering encouragement and moral support throughout the thesis. p.5

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS ...... 7

INTRODUCTION ...... 8

CHAPTER I: THE 'COMPLEAT NECESSITARIAN'. YOUNG COLERIDGE AND MECHANISTIC SCIENCE ...... 13 I.1 Introduction ...... 13 I.2 Cambridge ...... 16 I.3 Necessitarianism ...... 20 I.4 The Moral and Political Agenda of Mechanistic Necessitarianism ...... 26 I.5 Mechanistic Necessitarianism and the Politics of Reason 32 I.6 Unitarian Hostility to Church and State ...... 41 I.7 The 'Patriot Sages' ...... 45 I.8 'Transfer[ring] the Proofs' ...... 54

CHAPTER II: 'JACOBIN SCIENCE'— SCIENTIFIC POLITICS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN ...... 62 II.1 Introduction ...... 62 II.2 The 'Modern Sages' ...... 66 II.3 The Establishment Assault on 'Jacobin Science' .... 83 II.4 Coleridge's Change of Heart ...... 110

CHAPTER III: 'COMMERCIAL G. BRITAIN'— COLERIDGE'S OBJECTIONS TO THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY ...... 123 III.1 Introduction ...... 123 III.2 Reductionistic Sensationalism ...... 127 III.3 The Politics of Innate Ideas ...... 133 III.4 Coleridge's 'Platonic Old England' ...... 140 III.5 'Commercial G. Britain' ...... 148 p.6

III.6 'Epicurean' Ethics ...... 157 III.7 The Distinction between the Reason and the Understanding ...... 166 III.8 The 'Lay Sermons' ...... 174 III.9 The Mechanical State ...... 181

CHAPTER IV: 'AN ACT OR POWER' IN MATTER AND SPIRIT— DYNAMISM AND IDEALISM ...... 196 IV.1 Introduction ...... 196 IV.2 The Young Coleridge, 'Monads' and Pantheism .... 201 IV.3 Dynamism ...... 210 IV.4 Idealism ...... 215 IV.5 Naturphilosophie and the Fundamental Characteristics of the External World ...... 224 IV.6 Dynamic Chemistry and Physiology in Britain .... 231 IV.7 Coleridge's Dynamic Theory of Life ...... 243

CHAPTER V: 'PRESERVING THE METHOD OF NATURE IN THE CONDUCT OF THE STATE'— COLERIDGE'S DYNAMIC POLITICS ...... 254 V.1 Introduction ...... 254 V.2 Coleridge's 'Essays on Method' ...... 257 V.3 The Politics of Idealism ...... 260 V.4 The Idealist Elite ...... 265 V.5 'Polar' Politics ...... 270 V.6 The Organic State ...... 277

CONCLUSION ...... 292

WORKS CITED ...... 294 p.7

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviated titles are used throughout the footnotes in the thesis and in most cases will be intelligible to the reader without even consulting the list of works cited. However, those that may not be obvious even after consulting the works cited are:

CC - The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. General editor, Kathleen Coburn. Bollingen Series 75. London and Princeton, NJ: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Routledge, in more recent volumes) and Princeton University Press, 1969 - .

CL - Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71.

CN - The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. 3 vols. Bollingen Series 50. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957, 1961. Vol. 3. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

PL - The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Pilot Press, 1949.

PW - The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.

NOTE ON SPELLING. I have chosen not to correct the occasionally idiosyncratic spelling used in primary sources. p.8

INTRODUCTION

That the author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and the Biographia Literaria had a keen interest in science surprises many who know of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) primarily as a poet and literary critic. This is despite the fact that even in his poetry and literary criticism there are frequent references to science. In his own day Coleridge was certainly viewed as much more than a poet. For one thing, he was famous as a political journalist and had helped bring about significant increases in the circulation of leading newspapers. He also wrote prominent treatises of a religious and political nature, and gave well-attended lectures on the history of philosophy. Again, interspersed through all of this were comments and reflections on science, revealing a deep interest in and knowledge of contemporary scientific developments.

Although Coleridge did not publish any separate exposition of his scientific thought during his lifetime, there is a substantial amount of published and unpublished material of interest to the scientific historian. Yet, relatively little has been written on Coleridge's thinking about science. Recently, some major investigations have partly remedied this omission. In particular, Trevor Levere's Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (1981) reveals the huge breadth and depth of Coleridge's scientific knowledge. Levere shows that Coleridge was conversant with the many of the latest developments in physics, chemistry, geology and natural history, and that he kept up an active dialogue about these developments with important scientific figures in early nineteenth-century Britain such as Humphry Davy and Joseph Henry Green. Levere also examines in detail the large number of German scientific and philosophical sources that informed Coleridge's 'dynamic' natural philosophy. Poetry Realized in Nature thus Introduction p.9 offers an invaluable account of the contemporary intellectual context of the mature Coleridge's thinking about science.

Coleridge's earlier views on science (in the mid-1790s) form the focus of Ian Wylie's more recent Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (1989). One particular virtue of this study is that it elucidates the young poet's thought not only through the natural philosophical sources he read, but also in the light of his theological and political preoccupations. This is a fruitful approach, for we shall discover that there is ample evidence to demonstrate that Coleridge consistently viewed science as essentially tied to these other realms of inquiry.

The main aim of this thesis, indeed, is to show that throughout his life, Coleridge's thinking about science was inseparable from his social and political concerns.(1) The thesis thus takes an approach to Coleridge's thought that is informed by a recent tendency in the historiography to view science as influenced not only by intellectual considerations, but also by the socio-political context within which scientific ideas evolve. In Coleridge's case there is a particularly obvious reason for adopting such an approach. For he repeatedly claimed that the mechanistic science of his time sustained emerging liberal and Utilitarian ideologies, and offered his own sociologically oriented analysis of this science's success. While he provided no similar analysis of his own preference for an alternative, dynamic philosophy, we shall see that he and others used such a philosophy to support a conservative model of the state.

The thesis proceeds chronologically, so as to obtain a sense not only of the development of Coleridge's thought, its discontinuities, but also of important continuities. The first

1 The fruitfulness of relating Coleridge's science to his political motivations has been suggested by Bloor in a review essay of Levere's Poetry Realized in Nature. See Bloor, 'Coleridge's Moral Copula'. Introduction p.10 chapter canvasses the young Coleridge's thinking about science in the mid-1790s, the period discussed in Wylie's Young Coleridge. The focus here, however, is different. For what is pivotal, I argue, in Coleridge's early scientific and social thought was the philosophical perspective of Necessitarianism that he embraced while a student at Cambridge. Necessitarianism was grounded in an intelligible, mechanistic view of nature, and it was this rational approach to phenomena, especially as applied to psychology, that was attractive to the young Coleridge. We shall see that mechanistic Necessitarianism provided him and others with a framework for challenging those who defended the old social hierarchy by appeals to tradition and religion.

The following chapter pursues this political dimension of natural philosophy in the thought of Coleridge and some of his contemporaries during the 1790s and early 1800s. Science in Britain during this period was distinctly affected by political tensions surrounding the French Revolution and its aftermath. Notable scientific figures admired by Coleridge - such as Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin - and the young poet himself, were censured as Jacobins (after the radical French faction led by Robespierre) and accused of attempting to tear apart the fabric of society. However, it was not only the politics of these 'Jacobin' scientists that the authorities condemned as subversive, but their scientific views as well. We shall examine various reasons why this 'Jacobin science' was perceived as a threat by those in power. The chapter will also explore a gradual, yet noticeable, change in Coleridge's politics at the end of the 1790s. This period is a complex one in Coleridge's thought, and it is difficult at times to ascertain his position in the polarized politics and science of the period. In the early 1800s, however, his views become decidedly conservative. Significantly, we shall see that this political change of heart Introduction p.11 was followed by a new hostility to the natural philosophies he had earlier championed.

The causes of Coleridge's growing animosity to the scientific ideas of figures he once admired are investigated in detail in Chapter III. From 1800, he increasingly attacked these ideas as ingredients in a more general, mechanical philosophy. While some of his criticisms were technical, many more were aimed at what he alleged were this philosophy's religious, moral and political implications. In particular, he argued that mechanism gave immense credibility to a sensationalist epistemology that was being used to justify a liberal capitalist ideology based on self-interest. The mechanical philosophy, he complained, served as a scientific legitimation for the new individualistic political orientation of a 'Commercial G. Britain'. Coleridge publicly lamented this state of affairs and repeatedly warned his contemporaries about the subtle ways in which mechanistic science was undermining the traditional structure of British society.

His remedy for what he perceived as Britain's religious, moral and political degeneration was an alternative, dynamic or force-based science, derived immediately from the Naturphilosophie of the German thinker, Schelling. This dynamic science is canvassed in Chapter IV. As indicated above, a detailed account of the contemporary intellectual sources of Coleridge's dynamic philosophy has been provided by Levere. The principal aims here are different. One purpose of this chapter is to show that Coleridge's mature espousal of dynamism was not such a novel development in his thought. For, as early as the mid-1790s, he held a view of nature as fundamentally active, in contrast to a mechanistic, static picture of matter. At that time, he was drawn to a pantheistic conception of nature as well as to Priestley's dynamic physics. We shall note that his subsequent condemnation of both pantheism and Priestley is best Introduction p.12 explained as a function of his changing political allegiances. Another important continuity in Coleridge's thought to be examined here was his predilection for idealist philosophies. Such philosophies, which emphasized the mind's activity in structuring experience, were opposed to mechanistic ones that treated the mind as passively formed by external sensations. We shall observe that the mature Coleridge's dynamic view of the mind underpinned his dynamic natural philosophy and his conservative politics.

The final chapter specifically explores the political dimension of Coleridge's dynamic philosophy. His public advocacy of this philosophy began in the economically and politically volatile period in Britain following the Napoleonic wars. Time and again, he insisted that it was vital for Britain's ruling classes to take heed of the political effects of the prevailing mechanistic science and to counter these by endorsing a dynamic physics. But how could such a physics bolster the conservative politics the mature Coleridge deemed crucial for the nation's well-being? We shall see that it did so in two main ways. Firstly, the empirical success of Schelling's dynamic Naturphilosophie sanctioned the application of its idealist epistemology in other, non-scientific domains, especially in politics. Coleridge's defence of the traditional social order is in fact thoroughly informed by such an idealist epistemology. The second way in which dynamism supported Coleridge's conservative politics was through its ontology. For Coleridge, along with others, argued that the fundamental principles of nature were the same as those that operate in human societies. So, if material objects possessed a dynamic principle of unity, states too ought to possess an inherent tendency to unity, so were not the product of individualistic self-interest. The social hierarchy, then, must be respected, and political power must not be allowed to pass down to the lower social orders. The Introduction p.13 mature Coleridge's dynamic natural philosophy thus buttressed his conservative conception of the state. p.14

CHAPTER I: THE 'COMPLEAT NECESSITARIAN'. YOUNG COLERIDGE AND MECHANISTIC SCIENCE

I.1 Introduction

Coleridge's early thought has been quite extensively commented upon. It is well-known, for instance, that during the mid-1790s, the budding young poet enthusiastically took up radical politics, was converted to Unitarian Christianity and briefly embraced a philosophical outlook referred to as 'Necessitarianism' or 'Necessarianism'. His growing interest in natural philosophy at this time is also familiar to Coleridge scholars, but has received comparatively little attention. This is partly due to the elliptical quality of some of his important statements on the subject, and also to the fact that they are often buried in (what he himself later acknowledged to be) occasionally unfathomable poetry.(2) These have made it difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of the young poet's thinking about natural philosophy.

One fruitful way of deciphering Coleridge's comments on natural philosophy has been to investigate the sources, both intellectual and social, from which they were drawn. Groundbreaking work in this direction was carried out in Piper's Active Universe (1962). There, Coleridge's early thinking on nature was traced to a pantheistic current of ideas that had found its way from the French Enlightenment into Coleridge's intellectual milieu.(3) Since then, however, new comprehensive editions of the public lectures and journalism of the mid-1790s have revealed a much wider range of direct and local influences

2 See, for example, Coleridge's note to lines from his poem, 'The Destiny of Nations', in PW,1, p. 140. Here he commented, 'These are very fine Lines, tho' I say it ... but, hang me, if I know or ever did know the meaning of them ...'.

3 Piper, Active Universe, pp. 16-59. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.15 on the young philosopher of nature. More recently, a major investigation of the natural philosophical sources that inspired Coleridge's early pronouncements in verse, letters, notes and lectures has been undertaken by Wylie in Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (1989). This study not only discusses the natural philosophical literature that informed Coleridge's own views, but also rightly relates Coleridge's interest in this literature to the broader religious and political questions that concerned him. This is appropriate, because (as we shall see below) the scientific contemporaries of Coleridge who had the greatest impact on his thought saw their science as having an important bearing on such questions.

I shall, however, argue that it was not so much this science as a more general philosophical programme attached to it that most affected Coleridge's views on theology and politics in this period. This was the eighteenth-century philosophy of 'Necessitarianism', the ideological significance of which for the young Coleridge has been generally underestimated by commentators. In the present chapter, I shall explain and examine this philosophy, and shall argue that it provided the common framework for Coleridge's early thinking on both natural and social philosophies. His belief that natural philosophy supported a Necessitarian perspective reveals to us, therefore, the unequivocal political commitments in his views on nature.

The relevant period in Coleridge's life that will be canvassed here extends from 1792, just after he had gone up to Cambridge at the age of nineteen, to the time he was living in or near Bristol in the years 1795-96. This chapter will thus begin with Coleridge at Jesus College, Cambridge, and will examine in particular the influence on him there of the Unitarian and political radical, William Frend. The chapter will go on to describe the philosophy of Necessitarianism, as expressed by two major eighteenth-century thinkers who were introduced to Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.16

Coleridge at Cambridge - the physician and psychological theorist, David Hartley (1705-1757), and the natural philosopher, political radical and Unitarian theologian, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). Their grounding of Necessitarianism in a mechanistic view of nature and its application to an understanding of human psychology will be explained. The moral implications of this Necessitarian psychology will then be discussed. Eighteenth-century Necessitarians argued that a 'moral sense' was not innate but the product of the environment alone, and they believed that this fact could be established through an investigation of human psychology. In the following section, the broader political implications of Necessitarianism will be examined. The mechanistic framework of this philosophy, I shall argue, served to undermine tradition as a basis for authority, by requiring rational, intelligible explanations for all, and not just material, phenomena. We shall then see that attacks on the British Establishment by Priestley and the young Coleridge were informed by this insistence on rationality in all spheres of inquiry.

The chapter's final two sections will indicate the central role Coleridge attributed to natural philosophy in bringing about social change. This 'moral' function of natural philosophy operated in two ways. Firstly, discoveries by scientists like Newton and Franklin could be harnessed to materially improving social conditions. Secondly, and more importantly for Coleridge, natural philosophy provided a way of understanding the fundamental mechanistic principles that governed not only matter, but the human sphere as well.

Curiously, both these 'moral' functions of natural philosophy were expressed by the young Coleridge in terms of a millenarian optimism, largely derived from Hartley and Priestley. The Millenium, Coleridge thought, was being expedited by recent developments in the sciences. But its imminent arrival urgently Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.17 required a deeper understanding of the 'book of nature', so that all should know how God wished them to act. In subsequent chapters we shall see that this belief - that knowledge of nature gave one special insight into social questions - informed Coleridge's thinking about natural philosophy throughout his life.

I.2 Cambridge

In a 1792 letter written to his brother, George, soon after taking up residence at Jesus College, Cambridge, Coleridge mentioned that he was enjoying the acquaintance of one of the College Fellows, William Frend. He went on in the same paragraph to indicate that his religious views were now unconventional, saying that he was cautious about publicly criticizing 'that gluttony of Faith waggishly yclept Orthodoxy.'(4) This link with Frend is important, for the latter's heterodox opinions in both religion and politics were widely known at Cambridge, and were rapidly earning him the hostility of the university authorities. Coleridge, it seems, was coming to embrace Frend's dangerous views.

The decade of the 1790s, however, was not a good time for expressing opinions that were unfavourable to the religious and political Establishments. The 1789 Revolution and subsequent events in France caused considerable concern to the British authorities who feared the gallic example would encourage insurrection at home. Early in 1793, indeed, following the execution of Louis XVI, Britain joined in the war against the newly formed French Republic. Frend publicly opposed the war and even went so far as to express his support for the French Revolution and for British political reform. Not surprisingly,

4CL,1, p.20: to George Coleridge, 24 January 1792. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.18 his indifference to the ruling class's sensibilities saw him dismissed from Cambridge in 1793. The Jesus students loyal to Frend attended his university trial, and, according to one account, Coleridge was conspicuously boisterous during the proceedings.(5)

Frend's influence on the young Coleridge is particularly apparent at this time in the latter's well-known conversion to the Unitarianism espoused by Frend. Unitarianism was a Nonconformist sect which, as the name implies, rejected the mystery of the Trinity - the belief in a triune God - thereby defying the authority of the established Anglican Church. Some Unitarians, such as Frend, were referred to as Socinians, the rationally inclined sect named after the sixteenth-century Italian Unitarian, Fausto Sozzini. They tended to hold a radical view that Christ was merely human and did not in any way partake in divinity. Other Unitarians adopted a more moderate, Arian position on the Trinity, arguing that, while Christ was not consubstantial with God the Father, he nonetheless had a divine status and had existed before the creation. Unitarians were especially noted for the importance they attached to a rational interpretation of the Bible.(6) Coleridge's adoption of this

5 On Coleridge's Cambridge years and Frend, see Roe, Radical Years, pp. 84-117. See also: Knight, University Rebel, pp. 118-19, 140-1, 143, 214-15; Gascoigne, Cambridge, pp. 226-33. That Coleridge was probably still in close contact with Frend for some time after is indicated by a letter included in Coleridge's 1796 periodical, The Watchman, which is signed F-D and deals specifically with the repeal of the quasi-feudal Game Laws, a subject broached by Frend in a previous publication. Frend's letter attacked the exclusive prerogative of the wealthy to hunt game. It pointed to the problems for farmers of having their land destroyed by animals that they were legally prevented from killing, and to the social consequences of the over-harsh penalties for poaching. CC,2, pp. 172-4, and the editor's note on p. 173.

6 See: Watts, The Dissenters, p. 371 et. seq.; Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, passim, but esp. pp. 68-9; Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, pp. 236-315. On Frend's reputation as a Socinian, see Gascoigne, Cambridge, p. 227. Both Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke also held views that could be considered Unitarian. See Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, pp. 77-93, 110-34. On the Unitarians' emphasis on an (continued...) Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.19 unorthodox creed was a significant move for the young Cambridge undergraduate, as a university degree was generally seen to be a predictable step on the way to fulfilling one of the traditional roles of sons of country gentlemen, and becoming an Anglican clergyman. Young Samuel, however, decided to risk his family's disapproval and the socio-economic uncertainties attendant upon rejecting a privileged status.(7) In late 1794 he left Cambridge without taking his degree. This may well have been because of the scruples he now had regarding the compulsory allegiance required of degree candidates to the established Church's 39 articles.(8)

Coleridge's change of creed, however, also had political implications. For to be a Unitarian in late eighteenth-century Britain did not just mean one took a particular view on Scriptural exegesis. It meant also, if one's Unitarianism were declared, to be legally barred by the seventeenth-century Test and Corporation Acts from holding public office and from entering university, and it therefore meant most certainly to be in favour of constitutional reform. By virtue of formal exclusion from the religious and political Establishments it also often implied that, if one had means, one was probably a member of the new middle classes, earning a living from trade or manufacture.(9)

6(...continued) informed reading of Scripture, see Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan', pp. 7, 24-7, 33, 231-2.

7 Everest notes that Coleridge's immediate family of clergymen, schoolmasters and soldiers must have been sadly puzzled by his early, unorthodox behaviour. Everest, Coleridge's Secret Ministry, pp. 118-19.

8 See Wylie, Young Coleridge, p. 55. Katherine Cooke adds that Coleridge also would have found the university curriculum narrow and unchallenging, geared chiefly as it was to providing suitable candidates for country parsonages. Unitarianism, on the other hand, provided an intellectually stimulating milieu, through its rigorous interrogation of religious orthodoxy. Cooke, Coleridge, pp. 12-13.

9 See: Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 65-98; Holt, Unitarian Contribution, passim. This political and socio-economic pattern was (continued...) Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.20

After his departure from Cambridge, Coleridge moved to Bristol where he soon befriended members of that city's prosperous middle-class Unitarian community.(10) While sharing the Unitarians' religious and political sympathies, however, it is important to note that Coleridge did not embrace their commercial aspirations. This is evident from some 1795 public lectures he gave in Bristol on religious and political subjects. In these he argued that trade, manufacture and private property corrupted human beings and were inconsistent with Christianity. 'Jesus Christ', he claimed, 'forbids to his disciples all property - and teaches us that accumulation was incompatible with their Salvation'.(11) The young Coleridge's position, therefore, was opposed to that of many Unitarians.

Through the Unitarian circles he began to mix in at Cambridge, Coleridge was introduced to the ideas of two thinkers whose profound impact on his early views is legendary in Coleridge scholarship: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. The latter was intimate with Frend and shared the same political convictions and theological persuasion. Indeed, Priestley was the most prominent British Unitarian of the second half of the eighteenth century, defending his religious position in numerous works dealing with questions of theology and natural philosophy. These were doubtless discussed in the Unitarian milieu of Jesus College in the early 1790s, especially as Priestley, like Frend, had gained considerable notoriety for his pro-revolutionary pronouncements.

9(...continued) of course also characteristic of other religious sects, such as the Quakers, who dissented from Anglican orthodoxy. Both the Corporation Act (1661) and the Test Act (1673) required office holders to declare their allegiance to the Church of England and receive its Communion. These acts were repealed only in 1828. Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, vol. 2, pp. 209-10, 353.

10 Holmes, Early Visions, pp. 95-6; Deschamps, Pensée de Coleridge, p. 317.

11 CC,1, p. 226. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.21

David Hartley's role in eighteenth-century Unitarianism is less direct. He too had studied at Jesus College, and, although not a professed Dissenter, he declined ordination because of private reservations regarding the Church's articles.(12) His magnum opus, the 1749 Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, was made popular through an abridged edition put out by Priestley in 1775. In Hartley's system, Priestley found support for his own philosophical views. So, shortly after his re-edition of the Observations, Priestley incorporated Hartley's ideas into two of his most controversial works, both published in 1777: Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated.(13) As these works were intended as a philosophical justification of Priestley's Christianity, it is obvious why Hartley, though not a Unitarian himself, came to be seen as an important thinker in Unitarian circles. Coleridge's early interest in Hartley thus coincided with his espousal of Unitarianism and the philosophical stance of Necessitarianism defended by both Hartley and Priestley.

I.3 Necessitarianism

Necessitarianism was a deterministic philosophy, that is, it regarded any present state of events in the world as having only one possible succeeding state.(14) Any succeeding state of events, then, could in principle be reliably predicted, as long as all the data concerning a present state and the laws

12 Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 9, p. 67, s.v. 'Hartley'.

13 See: McEvoy and McGuire, 'God and Nature', pp. 348-57; McEvoy, 'Electricity, Knowledge', p. 7.

14 This paragraph and the following one are based on: Priestley, Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, pp. 1-19; Willey, Eighteenth- Century Background, pp. 147-9, 171-4; Taylor, 'Determinism', pp. 363-7. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.22 underlying the behaviour of phenomena were known - and it was also believed that these could be known. That the material world functioned in such a predictable fashion was taken for granted by Hartley, Priestley and many others. They further insisted, however, that human psychology was also deterministic. Any thought or action, they claimed, was the necessary or inescapable outcome of a prior psychological state plus external influences. Their Necessitarianism in fact focussed almost wholly on this psychological determinism, although both thinkers saw the latter as closely linked to determinism in the material world. Coleridge much later defined Necessitarianism as a belief 'that motives act on the Will, as bodies act on bodies; and that whether mind and matter are essentially the same or essentially different, they are both alike under one and the same law of compulsory Causation.'(15) Indeed, in order to justify their view of mental events, both Hartley and Priestley invoked the new mechanistic science which they saw as supporting a deterministic model of nature.(16) For this science had successfully described a world that appeared to operate with machine-like regularity. The celestial bodies, for example, seemed to be restricted to tracing out predetermined paths: they could conceivably follow no other motion than that predicted for them by mathematical calculations based on theory and observation.(17)

The determinism of physical and mental phenomena, however, had serious implications, particularly in the areas of theology and ethics. If every occurrence was the inevitable product of a previous physical or mental state, the course of events could seemingly be altered neither by the agency of God nor by the

15 CC,9, p. 139. Cf. Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, pp. 36, 59-60, 79.

16 See, for example: Hartley, Observations, pp. 267, 500, 504; Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), p. 356.

17 Oddly, the belief that classical mechanics is always deterministic is quite false. See Hutchison, 'Classical Mechanics', esp. pp. 319-22. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.23 human will. Providence and human free will were thus meaningless in a radically deterministic universe. Hartley and Priestley, however, considered there to be no contradiction between Necessitarianism and Christianity, and believed that there were immense disadvantages in an indeterministic conception of free will. Yet, as we shall discover in a later section of this chapter, these disadvantages were not so much theological as political.

Coleridge's enthusiasm for the Necessitarianism of Hartley and Priestley and its mechanistic underpinning is found in some letters of late 1794 to his friend, Robert Southey. In one of these, Coleridge confidently announced, 'I am a compleat Necessitarian and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself - but I go farther than Hartley and believe the corporeality of thought - namely, that it is motion'. A slightly later letter to Southey reveals that at this time Coleridge spoke of himself as 'a Unitarian Christian' and - in the light of his new-found Necessitarian beliefs - 'an Advocate for the Automatism of Man.'(18)

As these statements indicate, Coleridge's contact with the Necessitarianism of Hartley and Priestley had inspired him to tackle some major philosophical questions. What, for instance, was the nature of mind and matter, and were human beings subject to the same mechanical laws that philosophers had found in inanimate nature? Such issues were important ones in the eighteenth century and, as we shall see, they too had a significant bearing on theological and political concerns. Answers to them, however, were increasingly seen as dependent on theoretical developments in the sciences. Both Hartley and Priestley had sought solutions to such problems in natural

18 CL,1, pp. 137, 147: to Robert Southey: 11 December 1794; 29 December 1794. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.24 philosophy, and this was one of the attractions for Coleridge in their thought.

Hartley's work, especially, appeared to demonstrate the value in using the approach and findings of natural philosophy. Its aim, as is well-known, was to provide a rational explanation of Christian morality, and in order to do this Hartley expressly adopted the empirical, analytical method of Newtonian physics. Toward the beginning of his Observations, he wrote, in obvious mimicry of Newton,(19)

The proper Method of Philosophizing seems to be, to discover and establish the general Laws of Action, affecting the Subject under Consideration, from certain select, well-defined, and well-attested Phaenomena, and then to explain and predict the other Phaenomena by these Laws. This is the Method of Analysis and Synthesis recommended and followed by Sir Isaac Newton.

The phenomena that Hartley was particularly interested in explaining and predicting were psychological. Just as natural philosophers had tried to demonstrate that a wide variety of physical events were deducible from several fundamental laws of nature, Hartley hoped to show that the universal precepts of morality and religion were due to a small number of psychological principles. His apparent success in this enterprise is attested by Coleridge in a letter of 1801. The explanatory potential revealed by Hartley of the psychological notion of the 'association of ideas', Coleridge felt, was comparable to that of Newton's law of gravitation. Thus, while 'neither N[ewton] nor H[artley] discovered the Law ... both taught & first taught, the way to apply it universally.'(20)

19 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. 6. Cf. Newton, Mathematical Principles pp. xvii-xviii, xx-xxi.

20 CL,2, p. 686: to Josiah Wedgwood, 24 February 1801. See also CC,7, vol. 1, p. 92. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.25

Hartley's use of Newton's model, however, went beyond simply imitating its scientific methodology. Although his psycho- ethical conclusions were argued in detail and empirically supported, they could be even more persuasive if underpinned by a mechanical explanation of sensory transmission in the body's nervous system, such as that sketched by Newton. In the Queries to the Opticks, Newton had suggested that sensations were communicated to the brain by means of vibrations of infinitesimal particles in an aetherial fluid in the body's nervous system.(21) Hartley found this hypothesis persuasive and developed it at length in the first part of the Observations. He strongly suggested, moreover, that the vibrations of this fluid in the brain might be the source of mental processes. However, the possibility that such a notion could be interpreted as endorsing a materialistic view of the mind worried the theologically correct Hartley, and he insisted that his system could easily dispense with it. A causal nexus between matter and mind, he claimed, had been assumed strictly 'in order to make farther Inquiries,' and should not be viewed as 'supposing Matter to be endued with Sensation' or 'so as to oppose the Immateriality of the Soul.'(22) Nonetheless, his elaboration of Newton's aetherial hypothesis was subsequently taken to be an important attempt to explain the perennial puzzle of mind-body interaction, and it was this aspect of Hartley's work that particularly attracted the young Coleridge. In 'Religious Musings', a major early poem written soon after he left Cambridge, Coleridge's admiration for Hartley's vibrationary theory was unreserved. Here, Hartley was portrayed as 'he of mortal kind/ Wisest, he first who marked the

21 Newton, Opticks, pp. 345-47, 353.

22 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, pp. 7-34, 511-12. On the Newtonian inspiration for Hartley's views, see Smith, 'Hartley's Newtonian Neuropsychology'. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.26 ideal tribes/ Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain ... '.(23)

Yet as the statements to Southey quoted above (p. 21) indicate, Coleridge was convinced that Hartley's psychophysiological speculations had not gone far enough. He rejected the latter's dualistic scruples and appeared to think that the mind actually shared the attributes of extension and motion that seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers had assigned to matter alone. This conviction that spirit and matter were ontologically equivalent probably derived from Priestley who had advocated a radically monistic solution to the problem of spirit-matter interaction.(24)

In his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, Priestley argued that there was in fact no good reason for continuing to treat mind and body as ontologically distinct, as Descartes and others had done. Experimental evidence demonstrated, he maintained, that the 'material' universe was not made up of the extended, impenetrable particles of matter posited by Cartesian mechanical philosophy, but of immaterial forces of attraction and repulsion that were neither solid nor extended. This, he claimed, had been convincingly explained by the Jesuit natural

23 'Religious Musings', ll. 368-70, PW,1, p. 123.

24 Nevertheless, some of Hartley's statements definitely tended toward such a monistic conclusion, thus undermining his pretence to theological orthodoxy. He wrote, for instance, that his theory entailed 'that Matter, if it could be endued with the most simple Kinds of Sensation, might also arrive at all that Intelligence of which the human Mind is possessed'. Also doctrinally suspect was his admission that 'the Immateriality of the Soul has little or no Connexion with its Immortality'. Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, pp. 511-12. One might surmise that Hartley did not have any problem personally with the notion that thought was produced by a materially constituted brain. He would not after all have been obliged to assume that God too was material. It was impolitic, however, to publicly admit that matter manifested the active properties traditionally reserved for spirit. Priestley pursued the course that Hartley could have taken, and made God distinct from an ontologically homogeneous world of active matter/spirit, but this, as we shall later see, failed to appease his opponents. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.27 philosopher, R. J. Boscovich (1711-1787), and by Priestley's compatriot, the astronomer, John Michell (1724-1793).(25) But if the attributes of the 'material' world were like those of the mechanists' unextended immaterial mind, spirit and matter, as far as Priestley was concerned, were essentially the same thing:(26)

If I be asked how, upon this hypothesis matter differs from spirit, if there be nothing in matter that is properly solid or impenetrable; I answer, that it no way concerns me, or true philosophy, to maintain that there is any such difference between them as has hitherto been supposed.

Invoking Ockham's razor, Priestley noted elsewhere that it was philosophically unsound to treat spirit and matter as heterogeneous, for this would be 'to multiply substances without necessity.' As their interaction was widely accepted, he maintained, it was only logical to assume that spirit affected matter through the same attractive and repulsive 'power' that was known to operate in matter itself. Moreover, such a position, he claimed, had been given support by Hartley who had argued that phenomena such as gravitation, magnetism, electricity and cohesion were connected with the very aetherial vibrations that gave rise to mental processes. 'The relation that attractions and repulsions bear to several modes of thought,' Priestley affirmed, 'may be seen in Hartley's Observations on Man.'(27)

25 Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), pp. 11-23. See also Boscovich, Theory of Natural Philosophy. Priestley claimed to have met Boscovich in Paris in 1774. Priestley, Works, vol. 10, p. 482. Priestley noted in 1790 that he had earlier known Michell at Leeds, and referred to him as 'the inventor of artificial magnets'. Ibid., vol. 19, p. 306. Michell's 'A Treatise of Artificial Magnets' appeared in 1750. Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 13, p. 333, s.v. 'Michell'. On Michell's work and ideas and his relationship to Boscovich and Priestley, see Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, pp. 241-9. Schofield argues that Priestley was probably introduced to Boscovich's theories by Michell. Ibid., p. 242.

26 Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), p. 16.

27 Priestley and Price, Free Discussion, pp. 23, 20. Hartley's discussion of this latter point can be found in Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, pp. 27-30. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.28

This monistic perspective on nature - curiously described by Priestley as 'materialism' - seems to be what Coleridge had in view in his above declaration to Southey. For, if mind shared the attributes of body, thought could indeed be considered as corporeal and participating in the force-driven motion that Boscovich and Michell had posited in the seemingly material world.

I.4 The Moral and Political Agenda of Mechanistic Necessitarianism

As already indicated, the psychological Necessitarianism of Coleridge's mentors, Hartley and Priestley, was modelled on mechanistic natural philosophy. This mechanistic model was particularly obvious in the psychophysiological part of Hartley's system. But it also underpinned his account of human learning. According to Hartley, learning occurred through the combinations of ideas which had their original source in sensation. All knowledge, he claimed, could be traced back through the course of its development to its earliest individual components: the mental correlatives of physical sensations. Following Locke, he called these original ideas, 'ideas of sensation' or 'simple' ideas. 'Complex' or 'intellectual' ideas were subsequently formed through 'associations' of these 'simple' ideas - a process which for Hartley corresponded to the repeated spatio-temporal juxtaposition of sensations.(28) This psychological model was thoroughly mechanistic and deterministic. For Hartley, all thought and behaviour could be reliably traced to antecedent causal states, as he explained:(29)

28 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, pp. 2, 56-84. Cf. Locke, Essay, 2.2 and 2.12, (pp. 99-100, 132-4).

29 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. 500. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.29

by the Mechanism of human Actions I mean, that each Action results from the previous Circumstances of Body and Mind, in the same manner, and with the same Certainty, as other Effects do from their mechanical Causes ... .

Coleridge's pronouncement in late 1794 that he was 'an Advocate for the Automatism of Man' (see above, p. 21) seems to have been inspired by just such a mechanistic account of human learning.

There was, however, another essential and related feature of Hartley's system that was most likely also reflected in Coleridge's claim here. This was an ethical determinism, again characterized in mechanistic terms, and constituting the central purpose of Hartley's Necessitarian project.(30) It was based upon the psychophysiological and epistemological frameworks we have seen so far, and was heavily dependent upon the sensationalist psychology of association and a Lockean view of human nature as being ultimately reducible to pleasure/pain motivations.(31)

Throughout his or her life, Hartley maintained, each human being undergoes an ethical education, which is the inevitable product of his or her circumstances. A 'moral sense', he argued, is the product of the environment alone, and the same environment should produce the same morality in everybody, in a predictably mechanistic fashion. This happens in the following way.(32) In the learning process, a person first of all comes to associate 'simple' or sensible ideas of pleasure or pain with objects in his or her experience. These sensible associations then undergo a predictable, almost alchemical, transmutation into six

30 This notion of a moral determinism in Hartley's work is suggested in Willey, Eighteenth-Century Background, pp. 139-47.

31 Locke argued that human behaviour is largely governed by sensations of pleasure or pain, and that morality is merely a function of these sensations. See Locke, Essay, 2.20 and 2.21.42, (pp. 159-61, 174).

32 The following account is based on Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, pp. 416-499. See also Willey, Eighteenth-Century Background, pp. 140-6. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.30 successive categories or 'classes' of 'intellectual' pleasures and pains. Moreover, as the individual learns to associate the 'simple' sensations with each new category of 'intellectual' pleasures and pains, the latter eventually come to be pursued or avoided for their own sake and not for their original, sensory associations. To begin with, the sensible pleasures and pains are associated with intellectual pleasures and pains that have a similarly self-centred tendency. The first three classes in Hartley's associational hierarchy exhibit such a tendency. They are: the pleasures and pains of 'imagination', which derive from aesthetic and intellectual stimulation; those of 'ambition', which are connected with the praise or blame given to us by others; and those of 'self-interest', which are divided into three kinds according to the proportion of personal and non- personal benefit gained from their pursuit or avoidance. Hartley's final three classes then continue the ascent toward virtue, as the self-interested pleasures and pains are increasingly associated with altruistic ones: ideas of 'sympathy' or compassion lead to those of 'theopathy' (concerned with the love and fear of God) and finally to those of 'the moral sense', in which the original, self-interested motives are completely dissolved into a pure love of virtue and hatred of vice. Hartley believed that this moral trajectory of the individual was natural and inevitable, for(33)

God has so formed the World, and perhaps ... was obliged by his moral Perfections so to form it, as that Virtue must have amiable and pleasing Ideas affixed to it; Vice, odious ones. The Moral Sense is therefore generated necessarily and mechanically.

This, then, was the moral Necessitarianism about which Coleridge enthusiastically wrote to Southey just after leaving Cambridge.

33 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. 504. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.31

But it was not only its implications for the moral life of the individual that attracted the young 'Advocate for the Automatism of Man'. For Hartley's Necessitarian framework also provided a foundation for social and political reform. His account of the 'mechanism of the human mind', as we have just seen, was partly aimed at demonstrating that the learning process ought to lead God's creatures to worship Him and act virtuously towards one another. When this did not happen it could not be the result of free will, however, so had to be caused by external circumstances. The advantage of his system, Hartley felt, was that it enabled one to understand just where in the associative mechanism things had gone awry. Misdirected thought or behaviour, he claimed, could always be corrected by providing the appropriate associations at points in the learning process. It was therefore possible for everyone to reach an equal degree of happiness, through 'a proper Adjustment of the Impressions and Associations'. One could thus envisage a society where the mental and moral differences that distinguished the more from the less fortunate would eventually be eliminated by the right form of education and government. This was indeed a direct consequence of Hartley's Necessitarianism:(34)

if Beings of the same Nature ... be exposed for an indefinite Time to the same Impressions and Associations, all their particular Differences will, at last, be over- ruled, and they will become perfectly similar, or even equal.

The tendency implied here in Hartley's message - to view all human beings as fundamentally similar, despite their apparent differences - is a good example of what Lovejoy has called uniformitarianism. Lovejoy saw such a tendency as the most important characteristic of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and suggested that it originated in a modern scientific concern

34 Ibid., p. 82. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.32 to find uniformity or regularity in nature.(35) Indeed, such a concern is apparent in the mechanical philosophy. For an important aim of this seventeenth-century philosophy was to explain matter in terms of a minimal number of general laws and properties, in opposition to a medieval, Aristotelian view of matter as endowed with a multiplicity of innate, idiosyncratic qualities. Hartley's mechanistic psychology can be seen as pursuing this same goal of providing a simpler, more uniform explanation of human behaviour and doing away with individual, innate qualities as causal explanations of phenomena. By doing so, it directly challenged a traditional, hierarchical view of society based upon a belief in innate qualitative differences. In the Middle Ages, for instance, nobility was typically viewed as a quality one is born with.(36) Hartley's psychology implied, however, that human worth was not innate and idiosyncratic, for human beings were fundamentally alike and their differences due to circumstances. Uniformitarianism will be discussed in detail in the following chapter. There we shall see that opponents of reform in late eighteenth-century Britain saw egalitarian doctrines of natural rights as linked to uniformitarianism, and to uniformitarianism in science in particular.

Hartley's psycho-ethical account of experience was embraced by prominent advocates of reform such as Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and William Godwin, and became a corner-stone of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Utilitarianism.(37) The possibility of using it as the framework for an egalitarian society was also recognized by Coleridge who, in 1794, formed a project with Southey to set up a Utopian community - a 'Pantisocracy' - in Pennsylvania. Earlier that year, Priestley

35 Lovejoy, Essays, pp. 79-81.

36 See Hutchison, 'Eclipse of Scholastic Philosophy', pp. 331, 334.

37 See: Halévy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 433 et. seq.; Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, pp. 94-8. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.33 had emigrated to America, disenchanted with the increasingly repressive climate in Britain under the government of William Pitt. Coleridge and Southey decided to follow Priestley and establish their own agrarian 'Pantisocracy' not far from where he had settled. 'Pantisocracy', a term coined by Coleridge from the Greek, meant government ('cracy') by all ('pan') equally ('iso'). The principles of the projected community were in fact radically egalitarian: there was to be no distinction in rank and no private property. The influence on Pantisocracy of Hartley's Necessitarian view that vice is a function of circumstances is indicated in a letter Coleridge wrote to Southey later that year. He reminded Southey that 'the leading Idea of Pantisocracy is to make men necessarily virtuous by removing all Motives to Evil - all possible Temptations.'(38)

Across the Atlantic in Pennsylvania - the proposed territory for Coleridge's Pantisocratic endeavour - the egalitarian implications of Hartley's system were acknowledged by the well- known reformer and physician, Benjamin Rush (1745-1813). Rush whole-heartedly espoused Hartley's mechanistic Necessitarianism, and attempted to rigorously apply it to the moral, social and biological spheres. 'Moral obligation', political 'power' and 'animal life', he argued, could best be explained in terms of a mechanistic framework of externally operating causes, beginning ultimately with God. All of these phenomena, he noted, had been 'believed to depend upon causes within themselves; but they are now rescued from an internal and placed upon an external basis.'

38 CL,1, p. 114: to Robert Southey, 21 October 1794. Pantisocracy, however, did not come to fruition, partly because of personal differences between Coleridge and Southey, and partly due to disagreement over the form it would take. Southey backed down on the American location, suggested Wales as a more practicable alternative, and seemed no longer to believe in the original, egalitarian principles of the venture. He had now come to insist, according to Coleridge, that members of the community retain their private possessions and that they even have servants. For a lively and informative account of the whole enterprise, see Holmes, Early Visions, pp. 59-100. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.34

There was thus an underlying similarity between these diverse phenomena, which reflected the integral nature of Hartley's system. Even Hartley's psychophysiology, Rush maintained, supported the idea of a thoroughly egalitarian Christian republic. But the crucial instrument for reform was the association of ideas which, Rush insisted, must be applied at all levels of education to ensure the formation of correct moral and political attitudes. He thus urged his compatriots to undertake 'the moral education of youth upon new and mechanical principles.'(39) Once the right social and educational environment had been established, the Necessitarian learning process described by Hartley would naturally unfold.

Rush's insistence on the external, rather than the internal, causes of behaviour again reveals the link between Hartley's psychology and the mechanical philosophy, and the political implications of the latter. Hutchison has observed that the mechanical philosophy's view of matter was heavily relational: that is, it took a body's characteristics to be largely a function of its relationships with other bodies external to it, and not to qualities within it.(40) Like the mechanical philosophy, Hartley's Necessitarian psychology similarly emphasized the external, and not the internal, causes of behaviour, and thus implied a rejection of the innate, Aristotelian qualities used to justify a hierarchical social order.

39 D'Elia, 'Revolutionary uses of psychology'. The quotes are taken from pp. 112 and 117, respectively.

40 Hutchison, 'Eclipse of Scholastic Philosophy', pp. 337-40. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.35

I.5 Mechanistic Necessitarianism and the Politics of Reason

In his famous debate with the champion of Newtonianism, Samuel Clarke, the German philosopher Leibniz complained about Newton's failure to explain gravity in the intelligible language of mechanistic interaction. Newton's non-mechanical gravitation, he claimed, was 'inexplicable, unintelligible, precarious, groundless, and unexampled.' It was not amenable to human reason, in contrast to the natural philosophy of Boyle who (Leibniz approvingly noted) had 'made it his chief business to inculcate, that every thing was done mechanically in natural philosophy.'(41)

This importance given by Leibniz to reason in scientific matters was a legacy of the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers' onslaught on the restrictive authority of Aristotelian Scholasticism. No longer were knowledge claims which were made solely on the basis of a traditional authority seen as acceptable. Now, any such claim was supposed to undergo the scrutiny of the individual's own judgement, and reasons had to be provided for believing it. Mechanistic explanations, as Leibniz pointed out to Clarke, were intelligible to human reason, while Newton's account of the operation of gravity seemed suspiciously like a return to the unintelligible universe of the Scholastics.(42) An important concomitant of the new emphasis on reason here, however, was a profound questioning of other forms of traditional authority; for example, that of political and ecclesiastical institutions.(43) The insistence of mechanistic science that the world was rational and intelligible, therefore, had revolutionary implications.

41 Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, pp. 94, 92.

42 Ibid., p. 94.

43 See, for example, Krieger, Kings and Philosophers, pp. 153-63, 210-15. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.36

Such an anti-authoritarian tendency was overt in the psychological Necessitarianism of Hartley and Priestley which took the mechanical philosophy as its model. This becomes clear once we examine the attitudes of both thinkers to the crucial notion of free will, a notion which had traditionally been interpreted (as the word 'free' indicates) in non-deterministic terms. Both in fact claimed that free will was congruous with their mechanistic determinism. This, however, is a manifest contradiction. For the strict determinism that Hartley and Priestley were arguing for, by definition, excludes free will understood as being unconditioned choice. Nevertheless, both seem to have been genuinely convinced that Necessitarianism was compatible with free will. So let us examine their claim. Their argument goes like this: human beings possess the capacity to choose from a number of possible alternative outcomes. The choice they make, however, is always determined by a prior motive(s) which can have only one possible outcome. Faced with a number of alternative outcomes, then, a person will only choose the one which is in fact dictated by his or her motive(s) at that time. This position was put succinctly by Priestley in The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated.(44)

All the liberty, or rather power, that I say a man has not, is that of doing several things when all the previous circumstances (including the state of his mind and his views of things) are precisely the same. What I contend for is that, with the same state of mind, the same strength of any particular passion, for example, and the same views of things, as any particular object appearing equally desirable, he would always, voluntarily, make the same choice, and come to the same determination.

For Priestley, therefore, people are free to choose, but any choice is always determined by a prior mental state. The sort of free will that Hartley and Priestley were talking about, then, consists simply in the freedom to realize one's volitions. So

44 Priestley, Philosophical Necessity Illustrated,p.7. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.37

Hartley has a case in claiming that free will, as he and Priestley understood it, 'is not only consistent with the Doctrine of Mechanism, but even flows from it'. For he saw the human will as just another caused effect in the seemingly deterministic, mechanical sequences of phenomena. This interpretation of free will, however, sidestepped the real issue of whether the human will could operate independently of such causal constraints.

Both thinkers, however, had a ready answer to this problem. There was another kind of free will, they claimed, that was incompatible with mechanistic Necessitarianism and against which they forcefully protested. This 'philosophical free-will', as Hartley called it, was the very antithesis of the deterministic principle that a course of action and its opposite cannot both result from the same initial conditions.(45) It in fact corresponds to the technical conception of free will as undetermined choice. In behavioural terms, to possess this sort of free will would mean being able to act in opposition to one's motives. For Hartley and Priestley, such an idea was nonsensical, as all actions were necessarily governed by motives and so could not be viewed as occurring independently of them. They thus adamantly rejected it.

So, why did they reject it and argue for a deterministic view of human behaviour? There may have been religious grounds for doing so, as the question of the will's autonomy was particularly relevant to Christian theology. For to repudiate free will, as Hartley and Priestley were clearly doing, could lead to blaming God (rather than human beings) for moral evil, or end up casting doubt upon the very existence of God. For, if the world were viewed as capable of functioning in a purely deterministic fashion, the ongoing influence of a supreme being was apparently

45 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, pp. 500-1. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.38 superfluous. Yet, both Hartley and Priestley were extremely devout Christians, and clearly did not pursue their Necessitarianism to promote atheism. Their objections to an autonomous free will and their affirmation of necessity, then, must have had some other purpose. This purpose may have been a strictly philosophical one of endeavouring to determine the truth of the question. This, however, does not seem plausible, as very little space is devoted by either Hartley or Priestley to refuting the opposition. They appeared to be interested only in demonstrating to their readers the coherence of their own position.

A whole host of other religious and philosophical concerns must surely have been behind their promotion of Necessitarianism, but my concern here is to point out a political motivation - one that is consistent throughout this thesis. Thus, Utilitarian advocates of Necessitarianism saw this philosophy as having important political uses, and they make this remarkably explicit.(46) From a Necessitarian perspective, the precise causes of any action or thought were revealed to be amenable to human enquiry and discoverable by retracing the mechanical sequence of causes that led to the thought or action. Hartley had written that 'all the Evidences for the mechanical Nature of the Body or Mind are so many Encouragements to study them faithfully and diligently, since what is mechanical may both be understood and remedied.'(47) On the political level this 'doctrine of philosophical necessity' showed, as the young Coleridge pointed out, 'that vice is the effect of error and the offspring of surrounding circumstances'.(48) It was then just a

46 See, for example, Halévy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 8-9, 20-1, 486-7..

47 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. 267.

48 CC,1, p. 49. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.39 question of changing social circumstances in order to obtain a more equitable distribution of happiness.

But it was not just such indirect applications of Necessitarianism that might lead one to conclude that denials of 'philosophical free-will' had a definite political purpose. For to affirm that causation must be fully explicable was a blunt affirmation of what was perhaps the central question of the Enlightenment - that there are no mysteries - and this presented a challenge to the authority of tradition.(49) Even though Hartley and Priestley did not explicitly oppose 'philosophical free-will' on such grounds, simply by virtue of arguing against it they were bringing into question any form of traditional authority - philosophical, ecclesiastical or political - which ignored the universality of reason.

There was, in fact, an obvious way in which this Necessitarian insistence on intelligibility and rationality undermined traditional authority. We have already noted that Hartley's central purpose in the first part of Observations was to show how a moral sense could be obtained from sense experience. Thus, as Hartley himself acknowledged, he was pursuing the epistemological task engaged in by Locke of demonstrating that practically all human knowledge was empirically derived. Like Locke, then, he was simultaneously intent on showing that there were no innate principles or ideas. But Locke's attack on innatism had had a clearly political as well as a philosophical agenda. For Locke was following the proponents of the new mechanistic science in disputing traditional authority and insisting that all knowledge be

49 The Enlightenment was clearly a movement against superstitition and its buttressing of traditional power. Kant's short 1784 essay, 'What is Enlightenment' summed up the demystifying tendency of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment's motto, Kant claimed, was 'Have courage to use your own reason!', and he insisted this was particularly applicable to religion. See Kant, Foundations, pp. 83-90. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.40 subjected to the tests of reason or empirical evidence. Innatism, he argued, could not be supported on either ground, and so was open to abuse by those who spoke from a position of authority. Such abuse, he implied, had in fact already occurred, for many realized the power to be gained from denying others the use of their natural faculties. 'It was of no small advantage', he maintained,(50)

to those who affected to be masters and teachers, to make this the principle of principles, - that principles must not be questioned. For, having once established this tenet, that there are innate principles, it put their followers upon a necessity of receiving some doctrines as such; which was to take them off from the use of their own reason and judgment, and put them upon believing and taking them upon trust without further examination; in which posture of blind credulity they might be more easily governed by, and made useful to some sort of men, who had the skill and office to principle and guide them. Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another, to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truths, and to make a man swallow that for an innate principle which may serve to his purpose who teacheth them.

Significantly, one of the major inspirations for Hartley's Observations had been a short essay by his contemporary, the scholar John Gay (1699-1745), who had taken up the Lockean banner against the innatist philosophy of Frances Hutcheson. Hartley declared that it was Gay's Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle and Immediate Criterion of Virtue (published as a preface to William King's 1731 Essay on the Origin of Evil) that had first suggested to him the possibility of using psychological association to explain the formation of all intellectual ideas.(51) Gay's specific disagreement with Hutcheson was over the latter's notion of an innate moral faculty or 'moral sense'. The empiricist Gay vigorously repudiated the view 'that this Moral Sense, or these public Affections, are innate, or implanted in us'. On the contrary, he asserted, such

50 Locke, Essay, 1.4.25, (p. 87).

51 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. v. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.41 sociable 'instincts' were merely the product of habit, and could be shown upon further examination to be due either to the imitation of others with an end to obtaining their approbation, or to the association in our minds of actions considered virtuous with past pleasure or happiness.(52) Hartley, like Gay, rejected the notion of an innate moral sense, maintaining that association provided a completely adequate and comprehensible account of human virtue. Reason once again was claimed to be the only reliable arbiter in such debates; a non-rational foundation for moral principles was clearly distasteful to eighteenth-century Lockeans such as Gay and Hartley. However, the seriousness with which Hartley took up the gauntlet indicates that, for him, as well as for Locke and Gay, there was a great deal more at stake in the controversy surrounding innate ideas than simply the philosophical adequacy of the concept. Once more, it is plausible to presume that the issue was really a wider one involving (at least) unsubstantiated authority. This interpretation is confirmed by an explicitly political treatment of the question later in the century by Priestley.

In 1774 Priestley published a critique of the Scottish 'common sense' school of philosophy in which he saw a restatement of the innatist notions that Locke and Hartley had attempted to discredit. As a disciple of both the latter, Priestley, understandably, was opposed to what he took to be a dangerous return to an irrational, obscurantist philosophy. A quotation on the title-page of Priestley's critique, taken from Gay's Dissertation, gave a plain indication of where his sympathies lay: 'As some men have imagined innate ideas, because they had forgot how they came by them; so others have set up almost as many distinct instincts as there are acquired principles of

52 Gay, Dissertation, pp. xi-xxxiii. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.42 acting.'(53) As suggested by this quotation, one of Priestley's objections in the book was philosophical. The 'common sense' doctrine, he complained, unnecessarily multiplied entities by explaining mental phenomena in terms of 'a number of independent, arbitrary, instinctive principles', instead of using the economical, empiricist sensationalism of Locke or Hartley.(54) This complaint, revealingly, was very much like that made by mechanical philosophers about the medieval Aristotelians' idiosyncratic qualities (see above, pp. 29, 30). But there were also other urgent grounds for exposing the deficiencies of 'common sense' philosophy. Its disregard for 'the powers of reason', Priestley declared, left it open to a wide range of abuses. One could easily imagine, he wrote, such views 'extending their authority farther than the precincts of metaphysics, morals, religion, christianity, and protestantism'. The implication here was that the civil sphere too was affected by the irrational philosophy of 'common sense'. Indeed, the political ramifications of this philosophy, Priestley went on, were especially disturbing, for, with reason thus banished from philosophy, 'politicians also ... may venture once more to thunder out upon us their exploded doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance.' The 'common sense' teaching of Oswald in particular, he noted, paved the way for despotic action:(55)

53 Priestley, Examination, title-page.

54 Ibid., pp. 1-7. Priestley's criticisms of 'common sense' philosophy are not entirely justified, although there does appear to have been some truth in accusations such as the one here. See Grave, Common Sense, pp. 79n., 144. Grave points out that there were significant differences in the positions of the three figures targetted by Priestley: Thomas Reid (1710-1796), James Beattie (1735-1803), and James Oswald (1703-1793). Reid, the founder of this school of philosophy - which was designed to combat Hume's scepticism - was a more rigorous thinker than either Beattie or Oswald who popularized (and occasionally misrepresented) Reid's views. Priestley's attack on 'common sense', according to Grave, may well have been aimed at the more excessive claims of Reid's disciples. Ibid., pp. 1-5.

55 Priestley, Examination, pp. 200-1. There were apparently grounds for Priestley's complaint here that there was a tendency to subjectivism (continued...) Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.43

for every man will think himself authorized to assume the office of interpreting its decrees, as this new power holds a separate office in every man's own breast. Indeed our author has left the politician but little to do ..., having ranked obedience to the magistrate among the primary truths of nature.

For Priestley, an innatist philosophy clearly had the potential to be abused by those in power. Whereas the philosophies of Locke and Hartley - which demanded explanations for mental phenomena - offered a safeguard from such abuse.

Priestley's sentiments about the political dangers of innatism were echoed by his contemporary, the prominent Anglican archdeacon, William Paley (1743-1805) who similarly indicated that the notion of innate moral principles was susceptible to political exploitation. In a section of his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), Paley argued against Aristotle's idea that some people are born slaves, in order to expose theories which advanced the notion of instinctive or inborn moral qualities. Such theories, Paley suggested, were often used to justify the claims of those who defended tradition and opposed social and political change. He explained that(56)

authority and convenience, education, prejudice, and general practice, have a great share in the making of [ideas like that of Aristotle's]. For which reason, I am apt to suspect, that a system of morality, built upon instincts, will only find out reasons and excuses for opinions and practices already established - will seldom correct or reform them.

It is easy to see how Necessitarianism supported the arguments of those who claimed that innatism lent itself to political manipulation. For Necessitarianism provided a way of combatting claims that had no rational basis, especially those

55(...continued) in the philosophy of 'common sense'. See Grave, Common Sense, pp. 124-6.

56 Paley, Principles,p.16. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.44 about human psychology. In Priestley's philosophy, the Necessitarian assault on the abuses of traditional authority was sustained by his monistic ontology. For, according to this ontology, mind was subject to the same mechanical causal laws as matter, and these laws were seen to be accessible to human reason. In his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, Priestley maintained that 'the doctrine of necessity ... is the immediate result of the doctrine of the materiality of man; for mechanism is the undoubted consequence of materialism.'(57) Like his mechanistic Necessitarianism, then, Priestley's monism upheld a political position that challenged those who were unable to vindicate their views by reason.

I.6 Unitarian Hostility to Church and State

Priestley's challenge to tradition as a source of knowledge, implicit in his critique of the Scottish philosophers, was of course partly self-interested. For his professed Unitarianism excluded him from the religious and political Establishments which he so strongly condemned. Much of his writing, therefore, advocated equal religious and political rights for those who dissented from tradition in the form of Anglican orthodoxy. In the years leading up to and immediately after the French Revolution, the Unitarians had intensified their attempts to have the Test and Corporation Acts repealed, believing that the time was opportune to force a change.(58) The Unitarian neophyte, Samuel Coleridge, inspired by the examples of Frend and Priestley, joined in their protest against the reactionary forces of Church and State.

57 Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), p. 356.

58 Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 81-98. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.45

Notwithstanding the youthful Coleridge's participation in the Unitarian cause, it is important to recognize that there was a crucial difference between his political position and that of Unitarians like Priestley, a difference of which he was fully aware. In one of his Bristol lectures, for example, he took to task a 'class among the friends of Freedom' who (though not mentioned by name) are identifiable as middle-class Dissenters, ostracized by the Test and Corporation Acts. Here Coleridge berated his partners in reform, not only for their selfish ambitions but also for their indifference and condescension to the poor. He complained that(59)

they pursue the interests of Freedom steadily, but with narrow and self-centering views: they anticipate with exultation the abolition of priviledged orders, and of acts that persecute by exclusion from the right of citizenship ... [yet] whatever tends to improve and elevate the ranks of our poorer brethren, they regard with suspicious jealousy, as the dreams of the visionary; as if there were any thing in the superiority of Lord to Gentleman, so mortifying in the barrier, so fatal to happiness in the consequences, as the more real distinction of master and servant, of rich man and of poor.

While severe, this portrayal of the Dissenters' politics seems to have had some truth in it. Priestley, for instance, lectured in the Dissenting academy at Warrington against government provision of relief for the poor on the grounds that this encouraged idleness and thriftlessness.(60) Coleridge's position on reform was much more radical. For a Christian nation to countenance any

59 CC,1, p. 11. The perception that the Dissenters' participation in reform was chiefly self-interested was shared also by the Manchester reformer, Thomas Walker, who wrote in 1794 that 'Dissenters ... through fear or some other motive ... have been so strongly the advocates of an Overstrained Moderation that they have rather been the enemies than the friends of those who have ventured the most and effected the most for the rights of the people.' Cited in Thompson, English Working Class, p. 57.

60 Priestley, Lectures, vol. 2, pp. 56-9. Priestley's preference in economics was for a liberal, laissez-faire policy. See ibid., pp. 230-2, 241. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.46 form of economic disparity, he believed, was hypocritical. For 'Universal Equality', he argued, 'is the object of the Mess[iah's] mission'.(61)

Nonetheless, Coleridge's criticism of the Church Establishment in the mid-1790s was expressed in terms of the rationalism characteristic of Unitarian Christianity. Thus, one of his foremost complaints was directed at what he saw as the established Church's manipulation of the public through mystification. For example, in a 1795 published lecture, Conciones ad populum or Addresses to the People, he attacked the Church for fostering political quiescence by cloaking its teachings in mystery. In an almost contemporaneous pamphlet, The Plot Discovered: or An Address to the People, against Ministerial Treason, the same tendency was again censured, and Coleridge warned lest 'our laws as well as our religion be muffled up in mysteries'.(62) Orthodox Christianity was represented as the ally of privilege and power, and Coleridge chastized it in his Bristol lectures for deviating from what he considered to be the true egalitarian purport of the gospels. In one of these lectures he drew on arguments of Priestley to explain the degeneration of Christian teachings. Corruption of the original Church's beliefs, Coleridge claimed, was due principally to the influence of ideas of Gnostic and Platonic origin: Gnosticism had encouraged mystification, opportunism and exclusiveness in the Church, while Plato's metaphysics had given rise to the confusing notion of the Christian Trinity.(63) The young Unitarian's opposition to the Trinity, however, was not merely doctrinal.

61 CC,1, p. 218.

62 Ibid., pp. 30, 285.

63 Ibid., pp. 195-202, 207-12. The source for Coleridge's restatement of Priestley's ideas is given by the editors of Coleridge's lectures as Joseph Priestley, An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ. (4 vols. Birmingham, 1786. Vol. 1, pp. 320-55.) CC,1, p. 208n.2. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.47

The problem with the Platonic metaphysics adopted by Christianity, he argued, was not so much its falsity, but the way in which it had been used to evade the simple message of the man Christ - a message which was above all else political. Instead of carrying out the revolutionary mission expressed in Christ's teachings, the Church, Coleridge complained, had opted to defend the old order of privilege and inequality. Christianity, he wrote to the radical leader, John Thelwall,(64)

teaches in the most explicit terms the rights of Man, his right to Wisdom, his right to an equal share in all the blessings of Nature; it commands it's disciples to go every where, & every where to preach these rights ... .

Evidence of the young Coleridge's hostility to the British Establishment of his day is not hard to find. His poem, 'Religious Musings', for instance, menacingly foretold the downfall of those in power. The Anglican Church was portrayed here as an obfuscatory institution 'on whose black front was written Mystery', and as a 'mitred Atheism', more concerned with pomp than piety. In a footnote, Coleridge deciphered his prophetic allegory, informing his readers that the storm there mentioned - signalling the dawn of freedom from oppression - was the French Revolution, and that Babylon referred to 'the union of Religion with Power and Wealth, wherever it is found.'(65) Another major poetic effort from this period also adopted an allegorical form to convey a similar revolutionary message - Southey's poem, Joan of Arc, on which Coleridge collaborated, was an obvious statement of the authors' disapproval of Britain's aggression against the French republic: Joan, symbol of liberty,

64 CL,1, p. 282: to John Thelwall, 17 December 1796. Coleridge's view that Christianity had a fundamentally political message is clear from the prospectus of his sixth Bristol lecture which announced that he would be speaking on 'The grand political Views of Christianity - that far beyond all other Religions, and even sects of Philosophy, it is the Friend of Civil Freedom ... '. CC,1, p. 214.

65 'Religious Musings', ll. 334, 330, and n.1, PW,1, p. 121. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.48 had been put to death unjustly by the same British oppressors that were now repeating the moral crimes of their forebears.(66)

In 1796, the year Joan of Arc was published, Coleridge presented a more direct challenge to the authorities in the form of his own periodical, The Watchman, which he circulated mainly to well-to-do Unitarian subscribers in the north Midlands.(67) The periodical's aim, as its prospectus announced, was to support the Whigs in their attempt to revoke the Pitt government's recent legislation banning anti-royalist proclamations and political assembly, as well as to promote the expansion of the suffrage. It reprinted revolutionary speeches by George Washington and by members of the radical French Committee of Public Safety. Coleridge plainly shared the belief of the latter that 'nations, too long the dupes of perfidious kings, nobles, and priests, will eventually recover their rights'.(68)

I.7 The 'Patriot Sages'

In his pro-revolutionary poem, 'Religious Musings', Coleridge announced the replacement of the old privileged order by a new millenarian constitution heralded by the French Revolution. The forerunners of this Christian Millenium were the natural philosophers - 'patriot sages', as he called them(69) - whose scientific discoveries had helped liberate society from the

66 See Southey, Joan of Arc.

67 See editor's introduction, CC,2, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv.

68 Ibid., pp. 5, 373.

69 While also using Coleridge's term 'patriot sage' in the sense used here, Wylie applies it more broadly to include the young reformers who shared Coleridge's Pantisocratic vision of a Utopian existence in the New World. Wylie, Young Coleridge, pp. 47-61, 77, 79-80. Although Wylie argues that these young visionaries were among the 'elect' group referred to in 'Religious Musings', the idea of 'patriot sage' seems to me applicable only to the narrower cluster of scientific thinkers described below. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.49 injustices of that ancien régime: 'From Avarice thus, from Luxury and War/ Sprang heavenly Science; and from Science Freedom.' Benjamin Franklin was the first of the 'patriot sages' mentioned here, depicted as harnessing the power of the skies for human benefit. Later, a triumphant pageant of those 'who in past ages have endeavoured to ameliorate the state of man' is greeted to Christ's thousand-year kingdom by the poet Milton, as 'Adoring Newton his serener eye/ Raises to heaven'. Hartley then follows and is praised for his Newtonian neuropsychology. Finally, Priestley appears as 'patriot, and saint, and sage/ ... [who] from his loved native land/ Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous/ By dark lies maddening the blind multitude/ Drove with vain hate.'(70)

Coleridge's political allegiances are clear here. Franklin had been one of the key figures in the struggle for American independence from Britain, and Coleridge's praise of him in 'Religious Musings' underscores the young poet's revolutionary sympathies. Priestley - champion of reform, devout Christian and natural philosopher - had recently been driven from his country by a morally and politically corrupt Establishment. The event alluded to by Coleridge in the above lines was the burning of Priestley's house and laboratory by a loyalist mob during anti- revolutionary riots in Birmingham in 1791.(71) These riots took place immediately after local supporters of reform had been celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The rioters targetted the homes of prominent Dissenters known for their reformist politics, and, according to some contemporary accounts, were countenanced by members of the local clergy and gentry. It is also clear, however, that the crowd was propelled by its own deep-seated prejudices: the rioters' anachronistic

70 "Religious Musings", ll. 224-5, 234-7, 359n.1, 364-375, PW,1, pp. 117, 118, 122-3.

71 The following summary is based on Rose, 'Priestley Riots'. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.50 cries of 'No Popery' concealed a class-based resentment towards their largely middle-class victims, many of whom, like Priestley, were conspicuous for having embraced Nonconformist religion. For different motives, the class and religious questions also drove the antagonism of the local Anglican Establishment which saw in middle-class Dissent a threat to its own privileged position. Prior to the riots, Dissenters were represented in the sermons of Anglican clergymen as undermining church and state, and such rhetoric was clearly a goad to the Birmingham crowd.(72) The Birmingham Establishment, then, bore a good deal of the responsibility for the riots, and in fact did little to prevent them. Indeed, they had good reason to dislike Priestley. For the radical Dissenter had become increasingly outspoken in his pro-revolutionary sentiments and was soon to be made a French citizen and elected to membership of the newly formed French National Convention.(73)

Coleridge's admiration for the politics of such 'patriot sages' was indissociable, as 'Religious Musings' shows, from his high regard for their scientific discoveries. This connection between science and liberty - reason and revolution - had been encountered by him while at Cambridge, but it was even more noticeable in his radical Bristol milieu. An important new

72 Another possible motive suggested for the Birmingham mob's antipathy to Priestley was the latter's vocal opposition to the Poor Laws. Priestley, like others of his social class and similar Calvinistic upbringing, complained that relief of the poor encouraged idleness and ultimately led to social disorder. See Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 134-5. Interestingly, Kramnick points out that criticisms of the poor by middle-class radicals such as Priestley and Thomas Paine mirrored their complaints about the aristocracy: both classes were condemned for parasitism and their failure to conform to a Protestant bourgeois ideal of self-discipline and diligence. Kramnick, Rage of Edmund Burke, pp. 159-60. See also Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 228-30.

73 Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 16, p. 364, s.v. 'Priestley'. Priestley accepted French citizenship, but refused membership of the Convention on the grounds that he knew little of the language and of the region he had been chosen to represent. Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 135. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.51 influence on Coleridge here was the prominent chemist, Thomas Beddoes (1750-1808), who was also Coleridge's physician.(74) Beddoes had been forced to resign from a readership in chemistry at Oxford in 1792, after his nomination for a proposed new Regius Chair of Chemistry at the university had been refused because of his politics. The Home Office described Beddoes as 'a most violent Democrate ... [who] takes great pains to seduce Young Men to the same political principles with himself'. Subsequently, his name joined Priestley's on the government's black list of 'Disaffected & seditious persons'.(75) Beddoes was connected with a number of other well-known scientific figures of the time, all of whom shared the same reformist outlook. In particular, he was associated, as was Franklin, with the Lunar Society of Birmingham - an informal group of reform-minded scientists, inventors and industrialists - which took its name from regular meetings at the full moon. This Society included well-known figures of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, such as James Watt, Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood. Priestley too was a member, as was the famous physician, naturalist and poet, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802).(76) Darwin's work in fact had a significant impact on the young Coleridge who adopted many of the scientist's ideas and metaphors in his own poetry.(77) Coleridge also shared the

74 On Coleridge's association with Beddoes, see Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes, pp. 123-44.

75 Quoted in Levere, 'Beddoes at Oxford', p. 65. See also idem, 'Dr. Thomas Beddoes'. On Beddoes at Oxford, see also Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes, pp. 31-59, 76-8.

76 See Schofield, Lunar Society. Significantly, this Society was one of the targets of the Birmingham mob that attacked Priestley's house in 1791. Rose, 'Priestley Riots', pp. 75-6.

77 On Darwin's influence on Coleridge's poetry, see King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution, pp. 260, 267-70. Coleridge had met Darwin while collecting subscribers for The Watchman, and, though he complained of Darwin's deistic tendencies, was clearly impressed by this 'most inventive of philosophical men.' See CL,1, p. 177: to Josiah Wade, 27 January 1796. Coleridge's high esteem for Darwin can also be gauged by a letter of the following year in which he claimed that Darwin 'is the first literary character in Europe, and the most (continued...) Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.52 overtly republican politics of Darwin, who, in a letter of 1790, enthusiastically declared to his fellow Lunatic, Watt, 'Do you not congratulate your grandchildren on the dawn of universal liberty? I feel myself becoming all french in both chemistry and politics.'(78) Darwin's didactic poetry exemplified the alliance between science and politics that we find in Coleridge's thinking at this time. In his 1791 Botanic Garden, for instance, Darwin wrote enthusiastically of the revolutions in America and France, and here too the scientist and statesman, Franklin, was represented as playing a significant role in political transformation. Darwin depicted Franklin's electrical fluid as the metaphorical vehicle for propagating the message of emancipation from tyranny and ignorance:(79)

So, borne on founding pinions to the WEST, When Tyrant- Power had built his eagle nest ... Immortal FRANKLIN watch'd the callow crew, And stabb'd the struggling Vampires, ere they flew. - The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran, Hill lighted hill, and man electrified man ... Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA's plains Inglorious slept, unconscious of his chains ... While stern Bastile with iron cage inthralls His folded limbs, and hems in marble walls. - Touch'd by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed ... .

So, for Coleridge and the scientific thinkers he referred to as 'patriot sages', social reform was inextricably linked to scientific progress.

The political vision sustained by the scientific achievements celebrated in 'Religious Musings', however, was expressed from a

77(...continued) original-minded Man.' Ibid., p. 305: to John Thelwall, 6 February 1797.

78 Cited in King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution, p. 205.

79 Darwin, Botanic Garden, Pt. 1, Canto 2, ll. 361-2, 365-8, 377-8, 383-6, pp. 91-2. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.53 religious perspective that sits strangely with the young Coleridge's Unitarian insistence on rationality in religious matters. This was a Christian millenarianism that had often appeared in Europe in periods of social and political upheaval. In Britain, the belief in the advent of the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth had flourished during the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s.(80) In the eighteenth century, the rapid pace of social and intellectual change seemed to contribute to millenarian speculation that the end times were approaching. Hartley, for example, believed that there were clear indications that 'all the States of Christendom' would soon meet the fate prophesied of 'Babylon' in the book of Revelation. He urged that 'no one deceive himself or others. The present Circumstances of the World are extraordinary and critical, beyond what has ever yet happened.'(81) Two decades later, Priestley expressed similar views, but his apocalyptic warnings took on an urgency that Hartley's had not had. For, in the 1770s, the arrival of a new era seemed decidedly imminent, as political events began to take on a definite revolutionary colouring. In a letter of 1771, for instance, in which he discussed the political situation in North America, Priestley confided, 'to me every thing looks like the approach of that dismal catastrophe described, I may say predicted, by Dr. Hartley'. There was, however, a note of optimistic anticipation in Priestley's forebodings, for he added, 'I shall be looking for the downfall of Church and State together. I am really expecting some very calamitous, but finally glorious, events.'(82)

80 Garrett, Respectable Folly, pp. 1-11. 121-5.

81 Hartley, Observations, vol. 2, pp. 440-1, 455.

82 Priestley, Works, vol. 1, pt.2, p. 146, cited in Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 130. Priestley, in his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772-1774), initially advanced a symbolic rather than a literal understanding of the millenium. See Priestley, Works, vol. 2, pp. 366-7. However, he changed his mind later, and in A General History of the Christian Church, to the Fall of the Western (continued...) Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.54

For Priestley and others who shared his views, 1789 could not but have seemed to be the fulfillment of their millenarian hopes. Indeed, the Revolution saw a dramatic resurgence in millenarian proclamations in Britain as well as in France. Many saw current events as confirmation of Biblical prophecies predicting the end of the world, Christ's Second Coming and the emergence of a new 'Golden Age'.(83) In 1794, for example, Priestley gravely pronounced that it was 'highly probable ... that the present disturbances in Europe are the beginning of those very calamitous times' prophesied in the Bible.(84) 'Religious Musings' reveals that Coleridge too believed that the Millenium was imminent, but that he felt that its accomplishment rested with 'patriot sages' - those natural philosophers whose discoveries had furthered social progress.

The crucial role that Coleridge saw natural philosophy as playing in the Millenium's realization is apparent elsewhere in this period. For example, in 1796, he recorded:(85)

Millenium, an History of, as brought about by progression in natural philosophy - particularly, meteorology or science of airs & winds - Quaere - might not a Commentary on the Revelations be written from late philosophical discoveries?

Kathleen Coburn has pointed out the similarity between this passage and a footnote in the first part of Darwin's The Botanic Garden. In the section of his poem where the footnote appears, Darwin speculated that atmospheric changes in wind direction

82(...continued) Empire (1790: 1803), he argued 'that the reign of Christ, whatever be its nature, will be on this earth, seems to be evident, from what was said by the angels at the time of the ascension, viz. that he would return from heaven in the same manner as they then saw him go up thither.' Ibid., vol. 8, p. 204.

83 See: Garrett, Respectable Folly, passim; Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 54-5, 127-30.

84 Priestley, Present State of Europe,p.2.

85 CN,1, entry 133: 1796. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.55 might be due to chemical action, an understanding of which could give human beings entry to a millenarian 'Golden Age'.(86) For the free-thinking Darwin, the chiliastic language here was clearly metaphorical: the 'Golden Age' was symbolic of the social and political revolutions that a new knowledge of the physical world, procured by natural philosophy, would bring about. Coleridge, however, like his mentors, Hartley and Priestley, seems to have taken the millenarian message literally, even though he seemed also to share Darwin's secular perspective that social transformation depended upon human effort.

Coleridge's millenarian attitudes, in fact, were somewhat paradoxical. If the Millenium was predestined to occur, surely human intervention was inefficacious.(87) This seeming contradiction in Coleridge's position was underscored by his simultaneous espousal in the mid-1790s of the characteristic theological optimism of the eighteenth century.(88) Human misfortune, he believed, was part of the divine plan; it was simply, in the words of Alexander Pope, 'harmony not understood'. Such a sanguine outlook had been embraced by Priestley who felt that Pope's optimism was entailed by 'the doctrine of necessity' which(89)

86 Ibid., entry 133n.; Darwin, Botanic Garden, Pt. 1, Canto 4, ll. 308n.1, 320, pp. 186-7. Wylie provides an illuminating account of the way in which the phenomena of air and gases were a major focus of scientific interest for the three radical scientific figures most influential on Coleridge's early attitude to natural philosophy - Priestley, Beddoes and Darwin. All three believed that immense benefits to humanity would derive from a greater knowledge of pneumatic phenomena. For Coleridge, the observations of these scientific thinkers also offered rich possibilities for revolutionary symbolism, of which he made ample use in his early poetry and lectures. See Wylie, Young Coleridge, pp. 68-74.

87 Cf. Wylie, Young Coleridge, p. 65. This incongruity was typical of millenarianism. See Garrett, Respectable Folly, pp. 7, 10.

88 On this optimism, see Hampson, The Enlightenment, pp. 99-106.

89 Priestley and Price, Free Discussion, p. 220. Priestley actually cited Pope here. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.56

leads us to consider ourselves, and every thing else as at the uncontrolled disposal of the greatest and best of beings; that, strictly speaking, nothing does, or can, go wrong; that all retrograde motions, in the moral as well as in the natural world, are only apparent, not real.

Similarly convinced that social harmony would prevail according to God's plan for humanity, Coleridge in 1794 urged Southey to become 'a Necessitarian - and (believing in an all- loving Omnipotence) an Optimist.' Later, in a letter to Thelwall, he explained that the latter's atheism did not upset him, for as 'a Necessitarian ... and as an Optimist, I feel diminished concern.'(90) This acquiescence in the wisdom and benevolence of divine providence pervaded Coleridge's 1795 Bristol lectures, where, for instance, he maintained that(91)

reasoning strictly and with logical Accuracy I should deny the existence of any Evil, inasmuch as the end determines the nature of the means and I have been able to discover nothing of which the end is not good.

Such apparent fatalism, however, was deceptive. In the section immediately following this passage, Coleridge's standpoint was rather that of the Hartleyan reformer. Suffering, he said, had the purpose of inciting us to eliminate its cause; it provided an indication that circumstances were not as God had intended them to be and so should be altered. This of course presupposed a knowledge of the divinely established principles according to which the world operated, and, for Coleridge, those who possessed that knowledge were the 'patriot sages'.

90 CL,1, pp. 145, 205: to Robert Southey, 29 December 1794; to John Thelwall, late April 1796.

91 CC,1, p. 105. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.57

I.8 'Transfer[ring] the Proofs'

Coleridge's millenarian optimism, then, required another kind of involvement by natural philosophers in God's plan. In order to usher in the Millenium, one had to know how to interpret the 'book of nature' that God had written. In his 1796 millenarian poem, 'The Destiny of Nations', Coleridge claimed that 'all that meets the bodily sense' is 'Symbolical, one mighty alphabet/ For infant minds'.(92) What precisely Coleridge meant by 'symbolical' here is not made clear by him. But, presumably, he was using the term in a Platonic or Neoplatonic, rather than an Aristotelian, sense. In the Aristotelian tradition, a symbol tended to be viewed as a conventional representation of something with which it did not necessarily have any intrinsic connection - it was merely a 'sign' for something else. Allegories or personifications, such as 'Justice' represented by a woman holding a balance in one hand and a sword in the other, are what is meant by this kind of Aristotelian 'symbol'. For Platonists and Neoplatonists, on the other hand, a symbol was not something which merely stood for something else: it actually shared the essential characteristics of that which it represented. For instance, light was a symbol of the divine.(93)

92 'The Destiny of Nations', ll. 18-20, PW,1, p. 132. In the first of his 1795 lectures, Coleridge similarly stated, 'The Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of himself.' CC,1, p. 94.

93 See, for example, Gombrich, Symbolic Images, pp. 124, 142-70. This, then, was not the kind of metaphorical symbol used (for example) by Dante, to express in terms of common sense experience what the intellect has no means of adequately expressing: for instance, the sun as a symbol for God. See Boyde, Dante, p. 205 et. seq. But Dante also clearly saw the natural world as symbolic in a specifically Neoplatonic way, which may be reflected here in Coleridge's use of the idea of a symbol. For Dante saw the various levels of matter in the 'scale of being' as corresponding to a spiritual 'scale' extending beyond matter. Thus, one could come to know the spiritual world via the material one. Ibid., pp. 129-31. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.58

Such a Platonic use of the term 'symbol' was made explicit by Coleridge some twenty years later, in a famous passage in The Statesman's Manual (1816). A 'symbol', he there explained(94)

... is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.

Difficult as this passage may be, what it does convey is the Platonic and Neoplatonic sense of there being different levels of reality which have something essentially in common between them. What Coleridge says here in fact comes very close to the Renaissance Neoplatonic idea of a correspondence between the microcosm and macrocosm: the spiritual realm is mirrored in both nature and the human realm. This seems to cast some light on the young Coleridge's use of the term 'symbolical' in 'The Destiny of Nations'. For we shall see that he claimed that the structure of nature was fundamentally similar to that of human societies. It was thus imperative to understand the 'symbolical' language of nature for what it could tell us about the world's moral constitution.

Coleridge's view at this time that natural philosophy had the special task of discovering 'moral' truths from an investigation of the physical world is also indicated in a brief note which seems to have been inspired by his reading of Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684-1690). This note, which simply read 'transfer the proofs of natural to moral Sciences', reflected Burnet's view that divine providence manifested itself

94 CC,6, p. 30. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.59 in the human, as well as in the natural, spheres.(95) Burnet's work no doubt made an impression on Coleridge, for it was presented from a millenarian frame of reference and contained a distinctly revolutionary message dictated by the political circumstances in which Burnet was living.(96) Interestingly, Burnet insisted that knowledge of the workings of Providence would be obtained by a natural philosophy based on 'the true principles that govern Nature, which are Geometrical and Mechanical. By these you discover the footsteps of the Divine

95 CN,1, entry 100: 1796, and editor's note. See Burnet, Theory of the Earth, vol. 1, pp. 107, 319, 323-4. The idea that knowledge of nature could be used to support truths of religion and morality is of course found in Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion (1736). See Butler, Works, vol. 1. In a letter of 1798, Coleridge praised Butler's arguments from nature, claiming that 'Butler's Analogy ... would answer irresistably all the objections to Christianity founded on a priori reasonings'. CL,1, p. 386: to John Prior Estlin, 13 February 1798. In 1801 Coleridge maintained that Butler was one of the 'only three great Metaphysicians which this country has produced'. CL,2, p. 703: to Josiah Wedgwood, February 1801. Later, however, in marginal notes written possibly between 1808 and 1815, Coleridge found fault with some of Butler's analogical reasoning, and criticized him for conflating the mental faculties of Reason and Understanding. CC,12, vol. 1, pp. 867-9: marginalia on Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature.

96 Burnet's apocalyptic warnings were designed to bolster the cause of the Anglican Church in the face of the threat posed by both the Catholic monarchy in Britain and the increasingly truculent anti- Protestantism of Louis XIV's France. That the millenarianism in Burnet's work was directed towards the political scene prior to the Glorious Revolution is supported, Margaret Jacob argues, by the omission of many of the crucial, millenarian passages in the 1690 English translation of the original, Latin, pre-Revolutionary edition. Jacob, The Newtonians, pp. 100-15. Although millenarianism in early modern Europe was typically a medium of expression for radical grievances, Jacob shows that it could just as easily be appropriated for the ideological purposes of moderates or conservatives who were anxious that its rhetorical power not be exploited by radicals alone. The millenarianianism of Burnet and other Anglicans during the Restoration is a case in point. Telling confirmation of this idea is also provided by Garrett who points out that in the early 1790s millenarian sentiments suddenly became conspicuous in official anti-Jacobin propaganda. Due to Britain's new-found solidarity with anti-French Catholic countries and an influx of clerical fugitives from across the channel, however, the 'Beast' of the Apocalypse was now painted as republican France and not Roman Catholicism. See Garrett, Respectable Folly, pp. 167-8. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.60

Art and Wisdom, and trace the progress of Nature step by step ...'.(97)

Coleridge's belief that only those capable of adequately interpreting the 'book of nature' could 'transfer the proofs of natural to moral Sciences' has been discussed by Wylie. Wylie points out that Coleridge, like Priestley, saw general tendencies in nature as providing the model for the way societies should function. For example, good would overcome evil in the same way that nature reconstituted its own equilibrium. The 'book of nature' thus furnished clues to God's plan for humanity.(98)

For Coleridge, however, it was not just knowledge of general tendencies in nature that could guide human action. It was the fundamental rationality of nature itself that provided a blueprint for the workings of the 'moral' sphere. The many references to 'proofs' and 'evidence' in his writings at this time suggest that what the young Necessitarian viewed as most able to shed light on the 'moral sciences' was the rational and empirical approach of the natural sciences.

For instance, in one of his Bristol lectures, Coleridge invoked the Newtonian method in defence of revealed religion. The claims of Christian revelation were credible, he argued, because they were not just revelations, but were supported by 'a mass of direct Evidence', just as Newton's scientific approach involved the accumulation of observational data prior to formulating a general theory. In this attitude to revelation, Coleridge was following Locke who had argued that the claim to have knowledge directly from God should always be put to the test

97 Burnet, Theory of the Earth, vol. 1, p. 315. Burnet went on here to criticize Aristotelian 'Forms and Qualities'. He complained that 'no man can raise a Theory upon such grounds, nor calculate any revolutions of Nature; nor render any service, or invent anything useful in Humane Life ...'. Ibid., pp. 315-16.

98 Wylie, Young Coleridge, pp. 72-4, 77. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.61 of reason.(99) Coleridge contrasted this method, which he saw Newton's philosophy as exemplifying, with the strategy of unbelievers whose attacks on Christianity (he claimed) displayed an approach analogous to that used in the cosmological constructions of Ptolemy and Descartes. Unable to provide grounds for their rejection of Christianity, heathens could only dismiss 'positive Testimony by ... metaphysical a priori reasonings how God ought to have acted!'(100) Earlier in the same lecture, Newton's method was invoked for similar reasons. Here, Coleridge asserted that if an hypothesis conforms to the available evidence better and more economically than any alternative, then(101)

the probability amounts to a moral Certainty. On this principle rests the Truth of the Newtonian System, and the same principle obtains in Arithmetic. ... Let us adopt this undeniable Principle in our reasonings on Revealed Religion.

Such religious uses of the scientific method employed by Newton and Locke had clear implications for the 'moral' realm. For, by insisting that revelation be confirmed by reason or experience, Coleridge, like Locke, was in effect challenging the reliance of established religion upon tradition. The message contained in Coleridge's advocacy of reason in religious matters was that the clergy's authority, ostensibly founded on revelation alone (but in reality based on tradition) should not be taken for granted.

99 See Locke, Essay, 4.18 and 4.19, (pp. 424-33).

100 CC,1, p. 189.

101 Ibid., p. 175. The editors point out that Coleridge is closely following a passage in the first volume of Johann David Michaelis's Introduction to the New Testament. (Translated by Herbert Marsh. 4 vols. Cambridge, 1793-1801.) Coleridge's knowledge of Newton in this period seems to have been mainly second-hand, and derived partly from Colin Maclaurin's Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748), used in the first of Coleridge's Bristol lectures. The editors' notes in CC,1, pp. 93-4, 97-8, 111, 190, detail Coleridge's borrowings from this work. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.62

The rational method of the natural sciences also had the broader political agenda discussed above in relation to Necessitarianism. We saw that the Necessitarian reform of Hartley and Priestley was based on the rationally amenable principles of mechanistic philosophy. Nature was accessible to human reason, for its operations could be understood in intelligible, mechanical terms, and, for both thinkers, the mechanistic approach to investigating the physical world was that which ought to be applied to the human sphere. Priestley had argued that there was in fact no point in making a distinction between general principles governing the behaviour of matter and those governing human psychology and, ultimately, morality. As mental and physical phenomena obeyed the same causal rationality, he maintained, there was 'no sufficient reason why we should not comprize them under the same general term of physics.'(102) This subjection of the human sphere to the mechanistic principles of natural philosophy was definitely a major facet of Coleridge's revolutionary, millenarian intention to 'transfer the proofs of natural to moral Sciences'. But there was also another politically suggestive sense in which this intention could be interpreted.

Priestley had claimed that his physics was applicable to mind as well as matter, and Coleridge, as we have seen, followed him in this idea as well as in his own political and religious views. Yet, despite Priestley's Unitarian belief in a transcendent God, his monistic perspective further undermined this God's already reduced role in a mechanistic universe. The seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers' distinction between passive matter and active spirit had propped up the belief in the necessity of

102 'A letter to Dr. Horseley', in Priestley and Price, Free Discussion, pp. 221-2. Significantly, at his trial, William Frend recommended the science of Priestley's precursors, Newton and Boscovich, as models of 'liberal enquiry'. See Piper, 'Unitarian Consensus', p. 276. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.63 supernatural intervention in nature, for inert matter plainly required spirit in order to move.(103) Priestley, however, had taken away this critical function of spirit by insisting that matter was active and not at all distinct from spirit. The theological consequences of such a view were underscored by Priestley's notorious contemporary, the French Baron d'Holbach, in the latter's Système de la nature (1770). There, d'Holbach, an avowed atheist, presented a monistic conception of matter very similar to that of Priestley. 'If by "Nature"', d'Holbach submitted,(104)

we understand a mass of dead material, devoid of all properties and entirely passive, we shall doubtless be compelled to search outside this Nature for the principle of its movements. But if by Nature we understand that which it really is, a whole of which the various parts have various properties, behave in accordance with these properties, and are in a state of perpetual interaction upon each other ... then we shall have no need to have recourse to supernatural forces in order to account for the [formation of] objects and the phenomena that we see.

For d'Holbach, the political ramifications of such a theory of active matter were obvious, for the belief in supernature, he argued, was a strategy of priests and tyrants to delude ordinary citizens into accepting their earthly misery. He complained particularly about the doctrine of a life after death which 'has become the basis of almost all religious and political systems ... The founders of religions have used it to bind their gullible disciples; legislators have considered it as the most effective

103 This is the central claim of Hutchison, 'Supernaturalism'.

104 Cited in Willey, Eighteenth-Century Background, p. 152. I have used Willey's translation (with the minor addition of the words in square brackets), as it is faithful to the original passage which can be found in Holbach, Système, vol. 1, pp. 29-30. D'Holbach's unsettling naturalism was echoed by the Marquis de Sade in his 1782 Dialogue entre un Prêtre et un Moribond. De Sade's dying atheist challenged the priest who was trying to elicit his repentance with the words: 'My friend, prove to me that matter is inert, and I will grant you the Creator. Prove to me that nature is not self-sufficient, and I will allow you to presume she has a master.' Sade, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 14, p. 56. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.64 way of keeping their subjects under the yoke ...'.(105) Therefore, if physics were to demonstrate that such beliefs found no support in nature, those in power could not so easily exploit them for political ends. While Priestley by no means embraced d'Holbach's militant atheism, he clearly shared the Frenchman's sentiments regarding the political abuses of institutionalized religion, and also believed that his own deterministic monism would provide an antidote to the obscurantism of a conservative Establishment.

Coleridge's Unitarian hostility to established religion and politics was doubtless sustained by Priestley's monistic ontology as well as by the rational approach to phenomena that characterized mechanistic Necessitarianism. Priestley in fact insisted that the various perspectives he defended were interrelated:(106)

the three doctrines of materialism, of that which is commonly called Socinianism, and of philosophical necessity, are equally parts of one system, being equally founded on just observations of nature, and fair deductions from the scriptures ... .

The political implications of this system, which Coleridge zealously espoused in the mid-1790s, were unambiguous, for each part of it was subversive of traditional authority. The natural philosophy that Coleridge early on embraced, then, was inextricably bound up with political and religious heterodoxy.

Subsequently, Coleridge came to oppose the outlook on nature that he held in this period. This famous change is generally put down to his avowed dissatisfaction with what he claimed to be the philosophical inadequacies and atheistic tendencies of this outlook. However, this interpretation is highly misleading, for

105 Holbach, Système, vol. 1, p. 332.

106 Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), p. 356. Ch.I: The 'Compleat Necessitarian' p.65 it ignores the political concerns that we have noted as being inseparable from his early thinking about natural philosophy. Coleridge's later thought, as we shall see, continued to exhibit the same fundamental conviction that natural and social philosophies are interconnected. p.66

CHAPTER II: 'JACOBIN SCIENCE'— SCIENTIFIC POLITICS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

II.1 Introduction

As we have already mentioned, the years immediately after the French Revolution saw politics in Britain as dominated by calls for reform and fear that rebellion might spread across the Channel.(1) Reacting against the pressure for change and the ever-present threat of invasion, the British government adopted various repressive political measures. Many of these were direct, in the form of gagging legislation or litigation against suspected fomenters of sedition. Indirectly, the governing classes also undertook a war of propaganda to arouse patriotic feeling against all who professed revolutionary, or even merely reformist, ideas.

As in all propagandist hostilities, a major weapon in this war was namecalling, and one of the names that the British authorities found to be particularly efficacious in inciting outrage against its domestic enemies was that of 'Jacobin'. This term came from France where the revolutionary Jacobin Club, under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, had come to dominate the new republican Convention in the years 1792-94. The Jacobins were the most radical of the revolutionary clubs, and espoused an extreme egalitarianism. The anxiety that their policies provoked abroad was exacerbated by the mass executions of supposed traitors under the notorious Terror of 1793-94 in which the

1 My discussion here of British politics at the end of the eighteenth century is based on: Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 1979, passim, but especially pp. 267-74, 303-6, 332-58, 387-90, 403-15; Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 232-318; idem, Politics of the People, pp. 237-54, 276-86; Cobban, History, vol. 1, pp. 177-80, 203-4, 208-18. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.67

Jacobins were instrumental. So to be called a 'Jacobin' in Britain suggested that one would stop at nothing to overthrow the existing social hierarchy.

Those in Britain to whom the label of 'Jacobin' was most often applied were industrial artisans who agitated for major social and political reform, taking particular inspiration from the popular writings of Thomas Paine.(2) The designation was proudly accepted by some. The radical leader, John Thelwall, for instance, saw it as aptly denoting a broad political programme which sought to reform the feudal practices and institutions of the old rule. In his 1796 Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments. A Series of Letters to the People, in Reply to the False Principles of Burke, Thelwall boldly summed up the aspirations of his working-class comrades: 'I adopt the term Jacobinism without hesitation', he there declared,(3)

1. Because it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies ... 2. Because, although I abhor the sanguinary ferocity of the late Jacobins in France, yet their principles ... are the most consonant with my ideas of reason, and the nature of man, of any that I have met with ... I use the term Jacobinism simply to indicate a large and comprehensive system of reform, not professing to be built upon the authorities and principles of the Gothic custumary.

2 Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 171-2.

3 Thelwall, Rights of Nature, p. 454, cited in Thompson, English Working Class, p. 200. The term, 'Gothic custumary', is a reference to the old Germanic customary laws, upon which the feudal system was built. The term is repeatedly taken to task throughout Thelwall's Rights of Nature which was directed at Burke's 1796 Letters on a Regicide Peace. In the first of Burke's letters, the term was in fact invoked to defend the traditional social order of Europe against the innovations 'of the Jacobin republic'. Burke claimed that 'the whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe ... was drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic custumary, from the feudal institutions which must be considered as an emanation from that custumary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system and discipline by the Roman law.' Burke, Works, vol. 5, pp. 305-6. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.68

Despite these working-class applications, the term 'Jacobin' was also used by the ruling elite in Britain in a more general sense, to refer to any vocal supporter of the French Revolution or of constitutional reform. Thus the semi-official newspaper, The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, generally aimed its criticism higher, at middle-class reformers, including the scientific thinkers with whom Coleridge was closely associated - the 'patriot sages' of the previous chapter. We shall examine this criticism further below, and note that it included both Priestley and Darwin, as well as the young Coleridge.

We shall also see that the Establishment's censure of these 'patriot sages' was directed as much against their scientific as their political views. For, those in power unquestionably took their opponents' natural philosophies to be politically dangerous: the science of the 'Jacobins' was seen as promoting their radical politics. Natural philosophy, then, was deemed to be an important arena for fighting the ideological battles of the time. This assumption was of course not limited to those defending the status quo, for we have already noted that the Necessitarian perspective on nature that Coleridge espoused in the mid-1790s had an overt anti-authoritarian agenda.

Yet, while Coleridge and his government were clearly on hostile terms throughout the 1790s, the lines of battle were not particularly well defined. For the young rebel not only challenged the British administration, but (as we have also noted) took to task some of his radical comrades. Locating Coleridge's position in the polarized politics of his time, then, is not straightforward. To complicate matters further, Coleridge attacked both his fellow revolutionaries and the British authorities in terms similar to those found in the latter's Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.69 condemnation of the 'Jacobin science'(4) with which he identified: right-wing criticism of radical philosophies was mirrored in his accusation that his opponents at both ends of the political spectrum were encouraging natural philosophies with atheistic tendencies. This confusion too will be dealt with below.

By the early 1800s, however, a much modified position had appeared in Coleridge's political journalism, and he began to rally behind the conservative interests of the ruling classes. In view of the above-mentioned perceptions by him and others that natural philosophy and politics were closely connected, one might expect that Coleridge's altered politics would be accompanied by a changed allegiance in natural philosophy. This we shall observe in the following chapter. In the 1800s, a distinct hostility emerges to the 'Jacobin science' that he had embraced during the previous decade, and he now opposes both the politics and the science of the 'patriot sages' as if they were interrelated components of a single ideological programme.

The present chapter will, however, begin by examining some earlier complaints of Coleridge's about natural philosophy. These were from 1795 and were directed against a different group of 'sages' - 'modern sages' as he called them - whose natural philosophies (he claimed) tended toward atheism. These

4 The term 'Jacobin science' has been used in the sense here by Scott, 'Impact of the French Revolution', p. 475. It has also been used by Shapin to refer to the scientific philosophy, described by Gillispie, that was being advocated by the Jacobin administration in France after the Revolution. See: Gillispie, 'Jacobin Philosophy of Science'; Shapin, 'Social uses of science', p. 122. Gillispie's 'Jacobin philosophy of science', however, is not the same thing as the 'Jacobin science' described here. The main contention of Gillispie's paper is that the French Jacobins held a profound suspicion of intellectuals and 'abstract' theories, so wished to replace the mathematically based physics of the Académie des sciences with a more 'democratic', utilitarian focus. This ideological hostility to theoretical science is not apparent in the 'Jacobin science' decried by the British authorities. Nevertheless, there are some interesting similarities. For example, chemistry and its view of matter as active were seen in both contexts as linked to democratic reform. Such connections between British and French science would be worth exploring more fully in another place. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.70 complaints are best understood, I shall contend, as part of an attempt at that time to uphold his own religiously informed politics. Then will follow an account of the Establishment's offensive on 'Jacobin' scientists - the 'patriot sages' on whose side Coleridge initially ranged himself. Finally, this chapter will canvass a drift in Coleridge's politics from the radicalism of the mid-1790s to the incipient conservatism of the early 1800s when (as we shall later see) he began to join the Establishment in its condemnation of 'Jacobin science'. Though now following the lead of those in power, Coleridge's new 'anti-Jacobin' position, I shall note, reflects many of his earlier views, especially those expressed in his criticism of the atheistic world-view sustained by the natural philosophies of 'modern sages'.

II.2 The 'Modern Sages'

In the first of six 'Lectures on Revealed Religion its Corruptions and Political Views', delivered in Bristol in 1795, the twenty-two year old Coleridge made his first public complaint about natural philosophy. Such complaints were later to become commonplace in his public and private pronouncements, and frequently occurred in contexts where politics were at issue. The same is true here. Indeed, the specific grievances about natural philosophy expressed in his 1795 lectures were directly connected with the political positions that he was attacking in them. For Coleridge's broad aim in these lectures was to provide a statement of his own idiosyncratic political position in 1795, and to compare it with those of the other parties in the post- revolutionary debate on political reform. In his view, the principal defect of these other parties - whose identities will be discussed below - was their rejection of, or disregard for, truly Christian values in politics. In his lectures, therefore, Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.71

Coleridge aimed to show not only that the radical Pantisocratic politics (see above pp. 30, 31) that he himself advocated was compatible with Christianity, but also that the irreligious politics of those he opposed was untenable. This is where natural philosophy comes into the picture. For one way of undermining what he took to be the atheistic world-views of his political opponents was to bring into question the assumptions about nature that sustained them.

So, toward the beginning of his first lecture, we find Coleridge expressing a complaint about atheistic tendencies in natural philosophy. Some natural philosophers, he protested, have had the audacity to claim that 'the Phaenomena of Nature are explicable without Deity', and so have tried to account for natural events in terms of matter alone.(5) For Coleridge, this idea was always unacceptable, and until the end of his life he was to insist that spiritual causation was fundamental in nature. In his lecture, he directed the complaint at a target he labelled as some 'modern sages'. Who he had in mind here was not made explicit, however, but it is reasonable to presume that it was not the 'patriot sages' whom he was praising so highly in the contemporaneous 'Religious Musings' (1794-6). Indeed, one can be confident that the latter were specifically excluded from Coleridge's criticisms in this lecture. For we have noted that the young poet and lecturer commended the science of such 'patriot sages' as Franklin and Priestley for revealing God's workings in nature. Coleridge's target in his lecture, then, must have been some other tendencies in natural philosophy, different to those of Franklin and Priestley. We shall see that his specific objections in fact confirm this conjecture and provide a fairly clear idea as to what this target was.

5CC,1, pp. 96-100. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.72

Coleridge began his offensive by claiming that there were inconsistencies in the arguments used to reject supernaturalistic explanations in natural philosophy. Inspired by his reading of Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), he noted that some atheists assert that it is illogical to suppose that something separate from the material universe can act upon it. Such a line of reasoning, however, (Coleridge pointed out) is seriously undermined by the widely acknowledged action of gravity. For, according to the materialists' rationale here, if the cause of gravity were immaterial it should not affect matter; but if material, it would either occupy the whole of space and thereby exclude all other matter, or be spatially localized yet paradoxically exert a mysterious influence outside its location (and so effectively beg the question). He went on to maintain that, since fundamental causes in nature will always be beyond our perceptual and rational capacities, we should not expect to have a deeper knowledge of them than that provided by their observable 'effects'.(6) Here Coleridge might seem to have been recommending some form of scientific scepticism, but his intention was not so much to deny the possibility of knowledge of spiritual causes as to affirm their intangible reality. He was in effect arguing that one can never be sure that phenomena are not produced by immaterial causes.

He then went on to challenge the explanatory power of materialistic philosophies, alleging that they were unable to account for the structural complexity of the universe. In imitation of Cudworth, he first of all divided atheistic natural philosophies into two major camps: the atomistic and the hylozoic. Closely paraphrasing Colin Maclaurin's Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748), Coleridge dismissed the first view - that the universe was produced 'from

6 Ibid., pp. 96-7. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.73 the accidental play of Atoms acting according to mere mechanical Laws' - because it was implausible to suppose that the intricate and harmonious arrangements of nature arose 'from a lucky hit in the Blind Uproar'.(7) He then continued by attacking the hylozoists who attributed organization in nature to a primitive, 'plastic' or formative capacity 'inherent in each particle of Matter'. Coleridge asserted that this position, like that of the atomists, did not at all explain how matter was able to organize itself into its various configurations, and, especially, how such non-reflexive activity could produce intelligence. This argument was taken from Cudworth, though the technical inadequacy of the hylozoists' position, brought into question by Coleridge, had not been Cudworth's principal concern. What had worried Cudworth most were the theological implications of hylozoism. For if matter contained enough of its own principles of activity, divine agency would no longer be needed to account for physical phenomena. Cudworth indicated, however, that such an objection did not apply to the atomistic mechanical philosophy of his contemporaries in which matter was regarded as inactive.(8)

What Coleridge was objecting to in the thought of 'modern sages', then, was quite explicit. But which individuals he believed held these atheistic world-views was left unclear. The editors of his lectures assume that he was thinking of philosophers censured by Cudworth, such as Hobbes and Descartes.(9) Given the contemporary relevance of the lectures, however, one must suspect that Coleridge had in mind more recent natural philosophers rather than those Cudworth had been attacking in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately for the

7 Ibid., p. 98, and editors' notes.

8 Ibid., pp. 98-100; Cudworth, True Intellectual System, vol .1, pp. vii- viii, 46-52, 105-9, 174-5. On Cudworth's attitude toward corpuscularian mechanical philosophy see Hutchison, 'Supernaturalism', pp. 319-23.

9CC,1, p. 100n. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.74 commentator, Coleridge does not provide any names. One can reasonably presume, however, that the views of the 'modern sages' were connected with the positions of those he was seeking to undermine throughout the remainder of the lectures on revealed religion - and it is already agreed that these lectures had two principal targets.(10)

The first was a group of people who actually shared Coleridge's hostility to the political and religious Establishments. Like him, they favoured reform and decried the reactionary politics of the Pitt administration and the Church's complicity in them. For reasons that will shortly become apparent, however, Coleridge was keen to dissociate himself from this group, and publicly criticized it elsewhere on both religious and political grounds. It included important radical figures such as John Thelwall and Thomas Paine, the dramatist Thomas Holcroft, and the philosopher and novelist, William Godwin. Of these, only Thelwall, it seems, published views close to those of the 'modern sages' criticized by Coleridge. I know no concrete evidence, however, that Coleridge was familiar with Thelwall's 1793 Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality until the end of 1796, when he wrote to its author requesting a copy. In his essay, Thelwall had criticized the view of the eminent eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist, John Hunter, that life is due to a distinct 'Vital Principle' contained in the blood. In his letter, Coleridge correctly noted that Thelwall held instead that life was 'the result of organized matter acted on by external [material] Stimuli.'(11) Thelwall's position was in fact radically materialistic. He declared that 'where there is not matter, there there is vacuum; - where vacuum is not, there there must be matter.' He went on to criticize the notion

10 See: editors' introduction in CC,1, pp. lvi-lvii; Leask, Politics of Imagination,p.19.

11 CL,1, pp. 294-5: to John Thelwall, 31 December 1796. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.75 that spirit is something distinct from matter, arguing that what is commonly called 'spirit' merely refers to a 'more subtile matter', 'a fine and subtile, or aeriform essence'. The means of vital stimulation, Thelwall speculated, was 'the electrical fluid'.(12) Were there evidence that Coleridge knew of Thelwall's Essay at the time of his lectures, the question of the identity of the 'modern sages' would seem to be partly solved. For the views expressed by Thelwall fit neatly into the category of hylozoic atheism which Coleridge had taken to task in the lectures. But, without such evidence, the identification is weak.

Of the remaining members of this group of radicals, the only other one in whose published writings natural philosophy was overtly discussed was Paine. In The Age of Reason (1794), alluded to by Coleridge in his lectures, Paine advocated a universal, rationalistic 'deism' to replace Christianity and other revelatory faiths which he saw as thoroughly corrupt and exploitative. Deism, Paine believed, avoided the deceit and abusiveness of such religions, because it was not based on the mysterious authority of a priestly class and its scriptures. For Paine, evidence of a deity was not to be found in sacred books, but through a scientific examination of nature. His deism thus entailed 'contemplating the power, wisdom and benignity of the Deity in His works, and in endeavoring to imitate Him in everything moral, scientifical and mechanical.'(13) So, to this end of discovering divine design in nature, natural philosophy was essential. Echoing others who had similarly advanced a natural, as opposed to a revealed, religion, Paine maintained that what 'is now called natural philosophy ... is the study of

12 Thelwall, Essay, pp. 35-6, 40. See also Wylie, Young Coleridge, pp. 124-8.

13 Paine, Complete Writings, p. 498. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.76 the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in His works, and is the true theology.'(14)

At the beginning of his third lecture on revealed religion, Coleridge explicitly attacked Paine's theological views. They displayed, he maintained, 'dogmatic Ignorance', and he dismissed them as ineffectual by comparison with Paine's political writings. He then went on to insist that the truth of revealed prophecies was verifiable in the same manner in which God's existence could be established from observation of nature: by attending to the evidence of design in human events. But Paine, Coleridge erroneously claimed, had rejected the famous argument from design held by his predecessors: 'what to the eye of Thomas Paine appears a chaos of Unintelligibles Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke and David Hartley discover to be miraculous Order, and Wisdom more than human.'(15) This misrepresentation of Paine's views is revealing. For it indicates that Coleridge took Paine to hold a natural philosophy that closely resembled that of the 'modern sages' who believed that nature was the product of 'the accidental play of Atoms acting according to mere mechanical Laws'. It is quite likely, then, that Coleridge had someone like Paine in mind in his attack on 'modern sages' who 'exclude our God and Untenant the Universe'.(16)

That Coleridge took Paine to task for embracing such an atheistic cosmology, however, suggests that he was not in fact thinking primarily of natural philosophers when attacking 'modern sages'. We have already noted that one of the principal objections to the politics of his opponents was what he saw as their rejection of religious values. As he perceived his political opponents to be hostile to religion, it would be

14 Ibid., p. 487.

15 CC,1, pp. 149-50.

16 Ibid., pp. 98, 100. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.77 tempting for him then to see them as subscribing to atheistic natural philosophies, whether they explicitly advocated such positions or not. So, Coleridge's assault on the 'modern sages' might best be read as an attempt to undermine the 'atheistic' position of his radical adversaries. Indeed, such a reading is supported by his treatment of Godwin, the main figure within the radical group he was targetting.

Although some aspects of Godwin's thought were congenial to Coleridge,(17) he strongly objected to what he judged to be its too 'rational' conception of morality, its disregard for sentiment and tradition. In An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), for example, Godwin had stated, 'I ought to prefer no human being to another, because that being is my father, my wife or my son, but because, for reasons which equally appeal to all understandings, that being is entitled to preference.'(18) Coleridge opposed this dispassionate ethics, and argued that it failed to take into account the psychology of the individual's moral development. As a disciple of Hartley, Coleridge believed that the transformation of initially self- centred motives into selfless ones was a learnt process, and that benevolence could only be acquired after having first known such a feeling in the reduced context of one's family and friendships. 'The most expansive Benevolence', the young lecturer maintained, 'is that effected and rendered permanent by social and domestic affections.'(19)

While Coleridge clearly valued such personal and familial attachments in themselves, his defence of them against Godwin was

17 Coleridge's positive view of Godwin is apparent in a letter of 1794, where he expressed his intention 'in the book of Pantisocracy ... to have comprised all that is good in Godwin'. CL,1, p. 115: to Robert Southey, 21 October 1794.

18 Godwin, Political Justice, vol. 2, p. 852. This passage was first drawn to my attention in CC,1, p. 164n.1.

19 CC,1, p. 162. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.78 motivated also by the indispensable role that he, following Hartley, felt they played in providing the foundation for religious feeling. Echoing Hartley, Coleridge asserted that such 'filial and domestic affections discipline the heart and prepare it for that blessed state of perfection in which all our Passions are to be absorbed in the Love of God.'(20) Godwin had assigned no importance at all to religious feeling in Political Justice, and in that work he had even shown himself to be openly hostile to religion, declaring that(21)

Religion is in reality in all its parts an accommodation to the prejudices and weaknesses of mankind. Its authors communicated to the world as much truth, as they calculated that the world would be willing to receive. But it is time that we should lay aside the instruction intended only for children in understanding, and contemplate the nature and principles of things.

Coleridge's profound concern about the absence of a religious underpinning to Godwin's social philosophy was manifest in a 1796 letter in which he professed to be planning a response to the philosopher which was(22)

designed to shew not only the absurdities and wickedness of his System, but to detect ... the defects of all the systems of morality before & since Christ, & to shew that wherein they have been right, they have exactly coincided with the Gospel, and that each has erred exactly where & in porportion as, he has deviated from that perfect canon.

But behind Coleridge's religious misgivings about Godwin's secular moral philosophy was a deeper apprehension which was made more explicit in his late 1795 pamphlet, Conciones ad Populum, or Addresses to the People, and which reveals a paternalistic élitism that is fundamental to all Coleridge's political thought. Here, Coleridge maintained that Godwin was wrong in assuming that

20 Ibid.

21 Godwin, Political Justice, vol. 2, p. 797.

22 CL,1, p. 267: to Benjamin Flower, 11 December 1796. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.79 everyone had the ability to make rational, moral choices. For the uneducated, poorer classes, in particular, required guidance in morality - guidance that Coleridge thought only religion could supply. Moreover, such moral guidance was especially desirable in the socially unstable climate of the times. Thus, in deliberate opposition to Godwin, Coleridge argued in the Conciones that 'in that barbarous tumult of inimical Interests, which the present state of Society exhibits, Religion appears to offer the only means universally efficient [by which] the lower Classes [can] be made to learn their Duties, and urged to practise them'.(23) The strong implication here was that, without the moral restraint fostered by religion, the poor might be incited to follow 'interests' that threatened social stability.

Such caveats about the political maturity of the poor are not hard to understand, but were especially evident to Coleridge in the way the uneducated masses in both France and Britain had recently been used as instruments of terror against middle-class intellectuals such as Priestley. The Conciones warned about adopting Robespierre's violent methods in Britain, and urged its readers to consider just who were the nation's 'friends of liberty'. One of the four 'classes' of 'friends' that Coleridge described consisted of those 'sufficiently possessed of natural sense to despise the Priest, and of natural feeling to hate the Oppressor'. This group, however, was susceptible to suggestion from 'sanguinary Demagogues', such as 'the sable-vested Instigators of the Birmingham riots'. With Priestley's fate still probably in mind, the 'Introductory Address' of the Conciones concluded with admonitions to Coleridge's fellow reformists to be wary of provoking violence by what they said: 'Let us not wantonly offend ... the prejudices of our weaker

23 CC,1, pp. 43-4. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.80 brethren, nor by ill-timed and vehement declarations of opinion excite in them malignant feelings towards us.'(24)

Godwin's philosophy, Coleridge believed, failed to take account of the educational disparity between the rich and the poor and of the need for the moderating influence of religion on the latter. However, he perceived it to be gaining popularity with radical leaders like Thelwall who were lecturing to the poorer working classes.(25) In a 1796 article entitled 'Modern Patriotism' in his periodical The Watchman, for example, Coleridge took to task the radical orators who had 'studied Mr. Godwin's Essay on Political Justice'. He accused them of being self-seeking and not really having the welfare of the poor at heart. Moreover, true patriots, he argued, 'must condescend to believe in a God, and in the existence of a Future State!'(26) After meeting Godwin's friend Thomas Holcroft in late 1794, Coleridge complained that 'he absolutely infests you with

24 Ibid., pp. 35-8, 48.

25 See Roe, Radical Years, pp. 116-7. E. P. Thompson, however, takes issue with Roe on Godwin's influence on Thelwall. Thompson, 'Wordsworth's Crisis', p. 5. Yet, whether or not Thelwall was a Godwinian, Coleridge appears to have seen him as such. Although Coleridge subsequently became friendly with Thelwall, he was still clearly concerned about the radical leader's authority over the poorer classes. Thus, in a 1797 letter written to a third party to obtain a cottage for Thelwall in Coleridge's neighbourhood, Coleridge admitted that it would be politically risky if a radical of Thelwall's stature were to move to the area. He nonetheless argued that the company Thelwall would find might usefully temper the radical leader's 'natural impetuosity'. For 'if the day of darkness & tempest should come,' the millenarian Coleridge warned, 'it is most probable, that the influence of T[helwall] would be very great on the lower classes'. CL,1, p. 342: to John Chubb, 20 August 1797. Coleridge, of course, would also have been concerned about the considerable influence that Paine wielded on the poorer sections of society. Thompson notes that although the content of The Age of Reason was not particularly novel, its audience was. While similar views had already been publicized within a middle-class, dissenting or free-thinking milieu, Paine's work was aimed at a wider, popular audience, and consequently caused concern among the ruling classes. Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 105-6.

26 CC,2, pp. 98-100: March 17, 1796. Lewis Patton - the editor of this volume of Coleridge's works - argues that the targets of this article were most probably Thelwall and other notable radicals. See ibid., p. 98n.3. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.81

Atheism'. Similarly, in a 1796 letter to Thelwall, Coleridge openly expressed his misgivings about the politics of his correspondent and the latter's 'Atheistic Brethren'.(27) Coleridge's concern to combat the 'atheistic' politics of Paine, Godwin, and those within Godwin's circle would have prompted him to attack atheism more generally in his 1795 lectures. His criticism of the natural philosophies of 'modern sages', then, can be read as part of a strategy to undermine such 'atheistic' politics - that of the extreme left.

The 1795 lectures on revealed religion, however, had a second explicit target, one at the opposite end of the political spectrum. This was the Church Establishment which, Coleridge believed, had corrupted the original, spiritual and political ideals of Christianity. His criticism of the atheism of 'modern sages' should also be viewed as directed against this target, for he saw the religious and political Establishments as espousing Christian principles in name only. In the Conciones, for example, he claimed that the British government's brutality during the American War of Independence had made the colonists realize that their opponents were 'practical Atheists, professing to believe a God, yet acting as if there were none.'(28) Elsewhere, at this time, he also depicted the Church of England as a 'mitred Atheism'.(29) But, in the lectures on revealed religion, his attack on the Church and the political system it supported, was largely meant to demonstrate to his radical companions-in-arms that, behind the corrupt beliefs and practices of official religion, there was a genuine, uncorrupted Christianity which had political relevance in 1795. So, by rebuking the Church in his lectures, Coleridge was in effect

27 CL,1, p. 139: to Robert Southey, 17 December 1794; ibid., p. 214: to John Thelwall, 13 May 1796.

28 CC,1, p. 58.

29 'Religious Musings', l. 334, PW,1, p. 121. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.82 attempting to affirm his own Christian radicalism in the face of an influential, atheistic one. It was this atheistic radicalism, then, and not the corrupt Church Establishment, which he primarily sought to undermine by attacking natural philosophies that excluded God from nature.

Corroboration for this interpretation of the attack on 'modern sages' is provided by a similar, contemporary complaint about atheistic natural philosophies found in a long footnote included in one of Coleridge's sections of Joan of Arc (written mainly by Southey and published in 1796).(30) This two-page diatribe on atheistic philosophies might initially come as a surprise in a poem that is modelled on the epic style of Milton and is essentially a political allegory. Nevertheless, the footnote can be seen as having some bearing on the subject matter of this part of the poem, which is meant to describe the influence of 'preternatural agency' on the events of Joan's life. It refers to a part of the poem, where Coleridge complains about an atheistic tendency in natural philosophy. In the poem, those who apparently embrace this philosophy are Joan's enemies - the English authorities - whose religious pretensions are clearly fraudulent. By contrast with Joan's spirituality, they show too great an attachment to the material world:(31)

But some there are who deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,

30 Southey's final rewriting of the poem most probably took place, with Coleridge's collaboration, between May and August, 1795, thus significantly overlapping with Coleridge's lectures in May and June. See Whalley, '"Joan of Arc"', p. 68.

31 Southey, Joan of Arc, Bk. 2, ll. 29-35, 37, pp. 40-1. The footnote occurs on pp. 41-42. Some twenty years down the track, as we shall see, the lines quoted here were used to refer to a quite different enemy. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.83

Self-working Tools, uncaus'd Effects ... Untenanting Creation of its God.

Of course, the kind of natural philosophy that Coleridge portrayed here did not exist in the fourteenth century. The mention of 'subtle fluids' and 'impacts' obviously refers to some of the post-Newtonian natural philosophies which employed both the concept of a subtle, aetherial medium pervading space, and that of impacts between atomistic particles to explain material phenomena. As Joan of Arc was plainly allegorical, Coleridge here was challenging a current point of view that he felt represented the position of those he was criticizing in the poem. The contemporary embodiment of the English army and clergy who fought against Joan was the British government (in complicity with the Church of England) recently defeated in America and now pursuing an unjust war against France and a policy of repression at home. This part of the allegory, then, can be interpreted as conveying a sense of what Coleridge saw as the too worldly values of the British Establishment at that time. But we shall see below that, as in the lectures, it can be read as also condemning that other group whose interests were opposed to the spiritually oriented politics that he was advocating in the mid-1790s: the atheistic radicals mentioned above who shared much (though not all) of his political vision. First of all, however, we need to look at the detailed objections contained in Coleridge's footnote, which is attached to the line mentioning 'subtle fluids, impacts, essences'.

Coleridge's overt target in this note was Newton's notion of a subtle aetherial fluid (as proposed in the Queries to the 1717 edition of the Opticks as a means of accounting for gravity and diverse physiological and optical phenomena). Yet, his attack on the Newtonian aether appears to have been directed primarily at his mentor Hartley's use of it. For he provided a description of the aether's operation taken directly from Hartley, and observed Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.84 that the aether provided the vital mechanism for Hartley's vibrationary psychophysiology.

This, however, seems to contradict the enthusiasm with which we saw (p. 24) the young poet applauding Hartley's aetherial speculations in the contemporary 'Religious Musings' (1794-96). The solution to this problem is soon found, for we shall see that Coleridge's discontent in his footnote was not really with the technical application of the aether which he openly admired in 'Religious Musings'.

Nevertheless, the note initially conveys the impression that Coleridge found the physical details of the aether to be problematical. For he included criticism of Newton's theory on technical grounds, reproducing verbatim some objections taken from Andrew Baxter's Newtonian An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1733).(32) The first objection concerned Newton's explanation of attraction as a result of the graded density of an aetherial medium. Newton had argued that the aether was less rarefied in the empty spaces between bodies than in the pores within them, and that it became increasingly dense with distance from any body. Bodies or parts of bodies, he asserted, would naturally tend to move towards portions of the aether that were less dense, thus accounting for gravitational attraction between bodies.(33) Baxter complained that, according to this hypothesis, the density of the aether in a body would never be constant, but would vary in relation to the sizes of other bodies to which it gravitated. Coleridge, however, maintained in his note that he was not fully convinced by this reasoning and directed the reader to an additional argument by Baxter which he deemed to be more persuasive. The power imputed to the aether, Baxter maintained,

32 The passages from which Coleridge borrowed can be found in: Hartley, Observations, p. 13; Baxter, Enquiry, pp. 34-6.

33 Newton, Opticks, pp. 350-1. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.85 meant that it should have a density equivalent to the most compact substance on Earth that it was purportedly able to move. But if this were the case, he claimed, it would be impenetrable to any other less dense object. Even Newton's assumption that matter is highly porous was dismissed by Baxter as an inadequate and ad hoc solution to the problem of the aether's requiring the same density as the bodies it moves.

Coleridge's literal duplication of Baxter's complaints, without any commentary on them, suggests that the technical debate surrounding the Newtonian aether did not essentially matter to him. Indeed, the final section of his footnote reveals that his prime concern was, rather, with the theological implications of such a concept. 'Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy', he claimed,

leads in its consequences to Atheism ... For if matter, by any powers or properties given to it, can produce the order of the visible world and even generate thought; why may it not have possessed such properties by inherent right? and where is the necessity of a God?

This is strikingly similar to the kind of complaint made by Cudworth (see above, pp. 68, 69) whose work Coleridge drew upon in his first Bristol lecture on revealed religion to rebut modern versions of hylozoism: if any power to originate both organization in nature and intelligence were attributed to matter itself, there would then be no need to invoke a creative Deity to explain their genesis. For Coleridge, Newton's aether appeared to have just such animating properties. Although it was material, it also seemed to have the activating capability that had often been assigned by seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers to spirit alone. Hartley, from whom Coleridge had largely gleaned his understanding of the aether, had in fact credited it with a wide range of effects. He believed that Newton had made it the source not only of gravitation and some optical and physiological phenomena, but also of electricity, Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.86 cohesion and heat transmission.(34) The active spirit/ passive matter distinction that might sustain a supernaturalistic cosmology was positively undermined by such an idea; the active role of spirit was being taken over by a material aether. Coleridge complained in his footnote that 'Newton's Deity seems ... to have delegated so much power as to make it inconceivable what he can have reserved. He is dethroned by Vice-regent second causes.'

Such theological objections echoed the substance of Baxter's dissatisfaction with the Newtonian aether. Like Cudworth, Baxter had affirmed that matter's inertness supported the existence of a separate, active realm of spirit: the mechanical philosophy could not explain the origin of movement, for which it was necessary to look beyond the material world. Newton's philosophy, which Baxter called upon in support of his claim, had also treated matter as fundamentally inactive. But the hypothesis of the aether, Baxter believed, obscured an inescapable truth: the motion of matter was due to an immaterial cause.(35) His refutation of the aether was thus integral to the aim of his work, which was to reaffirm a Cartesian distinction between active spirit and passive matter. The importance of this distinction for Baxter was its usefulness in combatting atheism. He claimed 'that to begin with examining the nature of matter, and shewing its inactivity, makes the shortest work with Atheists of all denominations.' Consequently, he specifically attacked philosophies such as those of Hobbes and Spinoza that denied the Cartesian distinction. He also took Locke to task for suggesting that matter might possess a God-given capacity for thought, for

34 Thus, like many eighteenth-century Newtonians, Hartley confused the properties of the aether with those of the 'subtle spirit' described in the General Scholium added to the second, 1713 edition of the Principia. On the significant differences between these two kinds of subtle medium, see Home, 'Newton's Subtle Matter', pp. 196-9.

35 Baxter, Enquiry, pp. 121-5, 27-39. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.87 this notion blurred the sharp division between inert matter and active spirit that Baxter and others deemed to be theologically crucial.(36)

The young Coleridge's reiteration of Baxter's concerns shows that the latter certainly made a strong impression on him. Indeed, later in life, he vividly recalled the pleasure he had had reading Baxter while tramping with Southey through the English countryside and elaborating initial plans for Pantisocracy, just shortly before the two poets' collaboration on the political allegory of Joan of Arc.(37) So, it is easy to see how Baxter's reflections on theology and natural philosophy could come to be juxtaposed with the radical political sympathies that were expressed in the poem. But there was a good reason for Coleridge's inclusion of Baxter's ideas here. As we saw above, Coleridge's revolutionary attitude was qualified by a hostility to other radicals whose 'atheistic' political agenda he opposed. Baxter appeared to Coleridge to have located a highly influential source of atheism in aether-invoking natural philosophies. Therefore, by restating Baxter's complaints about the Newtonian aether, Coleridge could simultaneously affirm his own religiously informed position and endeavour to undermine the 'atheistic' radicalism of his peers.

Just as in his lectures, then, Coleridge's criticism of atheistic philosophies in Joan of Arc can be read as intended for his fellow revolutionaries. It was clearly, however, also meant as a rebuke to the religious duplicity of Britain's rulers, whose brutal repression of reform constituted a travesty of Christianity, comparable to the English burning of Joan of Arc.

36 Ibid., pp. 80-2, 341-6. See Locke, Essay, 4.3.6, (pp. 333-4). On the significance of Cartesian dualism in Baxter's philosophy, see Metzger, Attraction universelle, pp. 166-76.

37 See the quote from one of Coleridge's notebooks in Beer, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, p. 79. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.88

But the alliance between the Church and political reaction did not mean that Christian values should be dismissed from politics. For reform without a religious framework, Coleridge felt, would have dangerous repercussions. So the corruption of the Church Establishment, he contended, was no excuse for secular politics, and, in his lectures on revealed religion and in Joan of Arc,he challenged the atheistic views of his fellow revolutionaries as well as the irreligious conduct of his government. We shall later see that, throughout the rest of the decade, he in fact continued to criticize both groups from a religious standpoint similar to that found in his attacks in 1795.

II.3 The Establishment Assault on 'Jacobin Science'

What is notable in Coleridge's censure of opposing political views in Joan of Arc and his lectures is that he took his opponents' natural philosophies to be a vital expression of these views. Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, his own radical politics in the mid-1790s were sustained by Priestley's immaterialistic physics, which he saw as offering strong support for the idea of spiritual causation in nature and society. His high opinion of Priestley - 'patriot, and saint, and sage' - was still evident later in the decade, and in 1798 he declared himself as regarding 'every experiment that Priestly made in Chemistry, as giving wings to his more sublime theological works.'(38) The ruling classes, however, did not share this enthusiasm. They did, however, share Coleridge's belief that opposing political views were sustained by opposing natural philosophies, and throughout the 1790s took to task the science of Priestley in terms similar to those used by Coleridge to criticize the 'modern sages'. They thus complained that the

38 CL,1, p. 372: to John Prior Estlin, 16 January 1798. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.89 scientific views of Priestley and his 'Jacobin' circle were atheistic, and portrayed these views as connected with revolutionary politics.

One of the most ardent defenders of the established order here was Edmund Burke, whose famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was largely directed at Nonconformist supporters of the Revolution, like Priestley and Priestley's Unitarian friend, Richard Price.(39) Price was well-known for his advocacy of the rights of the American colonists during the War of Independence and for his defence of civil rights in Britain. It was in fact his sermon, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered in November 1789 to the recently founded 'Society for Commemorating the [1688] Revolution in Great Britain', which prompted Burke to write the Reflections. In his sermon, Price applauded the principles endorsed by the Glorious Revolution, but argued that it was incomplete. While he conceded that gains in civil and religious liberties had been made since 1688, he complained that religious freedom was still restricted by the Test and Corporation Acts, and that the existing parliamentary system of representation was inadequate and corrupt. The sermon concluded with praise of the American and French revolutions and with a severe admonition to those who continued to obstruct the inevitable course of reform.(40)

Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments and slavish hierarchies! ... You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.

39 Unlike Priestley, however, Price was an Arian Unitarian. On this and other doctrinal differences between Priestley and Price, see Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 471-6.

40 Price, Discourse, p. 196. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.90

Price's public support of events in France and exhortation to his countryfellows to follow the French example alarmed Burke who, in the Reflections, attacked Price, claiming that the latter was in league with 'literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers; with political theologians, and theological politicians, both at home and abroad.'(41) In Burke's mind, the political theologian Priestley was plainly associated with such a conspiracy. For he later quotes Priestley explicitly, to attack a passage expressing the hope that the Church of England be disestablished: that 'perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alliance [between church and state] be broken.'(42)

Priestley had typically spoken from the standpoint of a Dissenter, so it is not surprising to find Burke, elsewhere at this time, specifically singling out this group as a major threat to social order. In his 1791 Thoughts on French Affairs, the conservative statesman characterized the British partisans of the 'levelling' politics of 'the French Rights of Men'as 'comprehending most of the dissenters of the three leading denominations ... [and] all who are dissenters in character, temper, and disposition'. This 'levelling' contingent was fairly broad. It included some Whigs and Tories, 'all the Atheists, Deists, and Socinians', and especially the new, commercial,

41 Burke, Reflections,p.9.

42 Ibid., p. 55. The attribution of this quotation to Priestley is made by the editor in a note on p. 343, where he refers the reader to Priestley's History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782). The passage can be found in Priestley, History, vol. 2, p. 484. Just before he left Britain for America, Priestley argued that his public 'hostility to the doctrines of the established church, and more especially to all civil establishments of religion whatever' was the only reason for his harassment by the authorities in league with Burke. He also claimed that the anti-revolutionary riots around the country were specifically directed against the Dissenters. Priestley, Present State of Europe, pp. xii-xiii, vi-vii. See also pp. 43-4. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.91 middle classes.(43) Dissenters, as we have already noted, were conspicuous in the latter social category.

It was not, however, Dissent in itself that worried Burke, but the reformist politics of the Dissenters which had received impetus from the successful overthrow of the old regime in France.(44) The social order defended by Burke was threatened by such a movement, so he sought to expose what he took to be its most subversive features. The most explicit among these was certainly its challenge to established religion; for 'Religion', he maintained in the Reflections, 'is the basis of civil society'.(45) In the Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), he rhetorically depicted Priestley - one of the most outspoken opponents of a state church - as part of an international alliance of 'atheists' who(46)

of late ... are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious. They are sworn enemies to kings, nobility, and priesthood. We have seen all the academicians at Paris, with Condorcet, the friend and correspondent of Priestley, at their head, the most furious of the extravagant republicans.

This link alleged here by Burke between Priestley, atheism, republicanism, and the French Académie des Sciences of which the mathematician and philosophe the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was permanent secretary, is telling. For it clearly indicates not only that Burke's ostensible objections to Priestley's

43 Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs, ..., in Burke, Reflections, pp. 291-2.

44 Burke's favourable attitude before 1789 to toleration of Dissent and repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts is discussed by Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, pp. 104-15. Besides the political motive for Burke's change of heart towards the Dissenters, Henriques indicates that Burke also had a more personal motive due to their opportunistic support for his parliamentary rivals during the 1780s. See also Kramnick, Rage of Edmund Burke, pp. 149-50.

45 Burke, Reflections,p.87.

46 Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs, ..., in Burke, Reflections, pp. 314-15. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.92 religious position were really driven by political hostility, but also that Burke understood the scientific community as playing a major role in the offending politics. In France this was manifestly the case,(47) but it also confirms my repeated claims that in Britain too there was a definite connection between the radicals' science and their politics.

For Burke, such a connection could be demonstrated rather mundanely, through Priestley's specialty, chemistry.(48) To begin with, Priestley had deliberately used incendiary imagery taken from chemistry to illustrate his arguments. In a 1787 sermon, for example, he had explained the inevitability of reform by suggesting metaphorically that the Dissenters were placing gunpowder 'under the old building of error and superstition', and so only 'a single spark' would suffice to bring it down. Priestley publicly used the analogy again in 1790, but with far more menacing undertones. Such an explosion as that recently witnessed in France, he warned, might easily take place in Britain and would most likely be set off by the established Church.(49) Burke seems to have had this in mind in the Reflections where, after alluding to Priestley's aspirations for the Church's disestablishment, he claimed that the revolutionaries 'have wrought under ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all

47 Besides Condorcet who was a member of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the eminent astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793) (also criticized by Burke) became the first president of the National Assembly, and shortly after mayor of Paris. Dictionnaire de Biographie Française: vol. 9, pp. 458-9, s.v. 'Condorcet'; vol. 4, pp. 1347-53, s.v. 'Bailly'. Gillispie mentions a number of other less well-known scientific figures who held important political positions in the new republic. Many of these were members of the French Linnaean Society, reformed after the Revolution under the name of the Société d'histoire naturelle. Gillispie, 'Jacobin Philosophy of Science', pp. 267-8.

48 Burke's hostility to Priestley's chemistry is discussed by Crosland, 'Science as a Threat', pp. 281-8, and Golinski, Science as Public Culture, pp. 176-86.

49 Cited in Crosland, 'Science as a Threat', pp. 285-6. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.93 precedents, charters, and acts of parliament.'(50) As Crosland points out, there are a number of places where Burke similarly used the chemical metaphor to convey a sense of the flammable situation in France, and also to denigrate the revolutionary cause by drawing parallels with alchemy. More direct criticisms of the French chemists, however, appeared in Burke's 1796 Letter to a Noble Lord, which elicited a protest from one Thomas George Street who argued that Burke was going overboard by maligning what even those outside France applauded as worthwhile progress in chemistry. Street added that 'the mention of chymical operations naturally connects with it, in Mr Burke's, as well as in every other person's mind, the name of Priestley'.(51)

It was not, however, the petty destructive metaphors provided by Priestley's chemistry that most worried Burke. Far more significant than this concern was a deep uneasiness about the way in which Priestley and the French revolutionaries had apparently applied a radically uniformitarian outlook, borrowed from their view of nature, to social and political questions. Uniformitarianism, Lovejoy has argued, was the primary feature of Enlightenment thought.(52) It was a perspective based on the assumption that an extreme regularity underlies the seeming diversity of human thought and behaviours - an assumption, Lovejoy indicates, that derived from an analogous view of nature as uniform or regular in its deeper operations. Enlightenment uniformitarianism manifested itself, he claims, in the tendency 'to standardize men and their beliefs, their likings, their

50 Burke, Reflections,p.55.

51 Crosland, 'Science as a Threat', pp. 283-4, 287-8. The quotation is on p. 288, and is taken from Thomas George Street, A Reply to a Letter from the Rt. Hon Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord. Being a Vindication of the Duke of Bedford's Attack upon Mr Burke's Pension. (London, 1796), p. 23.

52 Lovejoy, Essays, pp. 79-81. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.94 activities, and their institutions.'(53) We shall see below that such an attitude can in fact easily be identified in the egalitarian doctrines to which Burke and others were reacting in the decade after the French Revolution. So, Burke's hostility to the kind of social uniformitarianism described by Lovejoy is quite clear. The connection between this uniformitarianism and science, however, requires some elucidation.

The presence of uniformitarian assumptions in science is not explicitly discussed by Lovejoy, but there is a stunningly good illustration of it and the idea that Enlightenment uniformitarianism had a basis in science in a passage by Burke's arch-foe, Priestley. In the preface to his 1790 Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy, connected with the Subject, Priestley expressed a wish that those who claimed to be 'philosophers'(54)

would ... carry the same spirit into the study of history, and of human nature, that they do into their laboratories; first assuring themselves with respect to facts, and then explaining those facts by reducing them to general principles (which, from the uniformity of nature, must be universally true) ... .

Another exceptionally clear instance of uniformitarianism in science has recently been noted in a famous episode in the history of eighteenth-century optics. This episode is worth describing in some detail, for the terms of debate emerge very clearly and turn out to be remarkably similar to those used by Burke to characterize what he saw as the fundamental differences between his own political philosophy and the uniformitarianism of his revolutionary opponents.

The dispute began with the Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, and the British optician, John Dollond, in the middle of

53 Ibid., p. 80.

54 Priestley, Experiments, vol. 1, p. xxxix. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.95 the eighteenth century.(55) The point at issue was whether it was feasible to produce a perfect image of an object by means of multiple lenses. Newton had shown that perfect focussing could not be produced by passing light through a single lens, due to the different refrangibilities of the various colours in white light. The possibility that this chromatic aberration might be corrected by using lens combinations was also rejected by Newton in the Opticks, on the basis of a theorem allegedly derived from experiment. This Newtonian position held sway until 1748 when it was contested by Euler on the basis of some relatively simple computations that presumed, without defence, that refractive indices did not obey Newtons's theorem, but a logarithmic law instead. Only later did Euler explain where his replacement law came from. It was a simple consequence of what he called the 'Fundamental Hypothesis' - a widely endorsed presumption of optical uniformity, according to which a pair of surfaces that had the same effect on red light, would have to have the same effect on all other colours.

Several years later, in 1752, Euler's formulation was attacked by Dollond, on the grounds that it was purely theoretical, whereas Newton's position, Dollond contended, was empirical. Euler, however, refused to shift his ground, and reaffirmed his stance against Newton and Dollond. Meanwhile, arguments put forward in response to Euler by the Swedish mathematician, Samuel Klingenstierna, persuaded Dollond to reconsider his support of Newton (although Klingenstierna also rejected Euler's conclusions). As a result, Dollond changed his mind and soon managed to produce achromatic lenses. Euler nonetheless refused to concede that chromatic aberration could be eliminated by Dollond's methods. For Dollond's bluntly empirical procedure produced results incompatible with Euler's fundamental

55 The following summary is based on Hutchison, 'Idiosyncrasy'. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.96 hypothesis, so revealed in a particularly clearcut fashion that nature was nowhere near as uniform or regular in its behaviour as was believed, but functioned in an unacceptably variable and idiosyncratic manner.

Euler and the vast majority of his contemporaries who shared his uniformitarian presumptions finally had to accept the fact that refractive indices are not distributed in a lawlike fashion. Similar challenges to uniformitarianism in eighteenth-century science were also present in other areas, such as research on friction. Most eighteenth-century friction studies, Gillmor indicates in his biography of the French physicist, Charles Augustin Coulomb,(56) were predominantly theoretical in their approach, with many results being based on broad extrapolations (via some implicit presumption of regularity) from extremely limited experimental data. Coulomb, by contrast, while not disavowing the importance of theories, adopted a rigorously empirical procedure in his work on friction. In an acclaimed 1781 essay on the subject, he presented his investigations involving a wide range of variables, and showed that, in determining friction, one had to take into account changing factors such as the kind of materials being investigated and the quality of their surfaces. This important methodological innovation in quantitative studies of friction reminds one of Dollond's individual measurement of optical media in order to correct chromatic aberration.

Such acknowledgments of nature's complexity, Hutchison suggests, can be seen as early instances of an outlook that is commonly viewed as characteristic of the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.(57) For, despite all the difficulties in categorizing the Romantics, it is usually

56 Gillmor, Coulomb, pp. 118-138.

57 Hutchison, 'Idiosyncrasy'. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.97 agreed that they significantly reject the universalizing tendency of Enlightenment thought and emphasize in its place the uniqueness and variety of phenomena.(58) This 'anti- uniformitarian' attitude is conspicuous in the optical metaphors used by representative Romantics such as Keats, Shelley and Novalis.(59) The last, in particular, readily employed the imagery of refraction to portray the pleasing diversity of nature, declaring, for example, through one of the characters in his novel Henry of Ofterdingen, that 'Nature ... is to our mind what a body is to light. The body ... refracts it into peculiar colours ...'.(60) Furthermore, Goethe (who is usually viewed as closely connected with Romanticism) saw in the discovery of achromatic lenses pleasing confirmation of his own predilection for variety in nature. This predilection, moreover, went hand in hand with a suspicion of theory - a suspicion that we have already observed in Dollond's response to Euler. Goethe (Hutchison notes) opposed the idea that nature could be explained by a single theoretical position and wished that there were as many perspectives in science as there were Christian creeds in New York.(61) The scientific approach he favoured was (like Dollond's) a fundamentally empirical one, and it was an over-

58 See, for example: Lovejoy, Chain of Being, pp. 293, et. seq.; Schenk, European Romantics, pp. 14-21; Cranston, 'Romanticism and Revolution', pp. 19-28; Butler, 'Romanticism in England', pp. 41-59; Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 5-6. While agreeing with Lovejoy in viewing the Romantics as opposed to mechanism and the rule-bound formalism of Neoclassical aesthetics, Engell makes the important point that the Romantic generation did not reject all aspects of the Enlightenment. He notes that many eighteenth-century thinkers were highly thought of by the Romantics, and that criticism of figures like Locke and Pope as 'symbols' of the Enlightenment was to a large degree directed against these figures' self-styled successors. Coleridge's misrepresentation of Newton is a typical example of this Romantic tendency to denigrate well-known thinkers when it was really their followers who were resented. See Sysak, 'Coleridge's Construction'.

59 Hutchison, 'Idiosyncrasy' pp. 155-8.

60 Quoted in ibid., p. 158.

61 Ibid., pp. 160-1. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.98 hasty endorsement of an inadequately tested theory (Sepper has argued) that Goethe saw as the central problem in Newton's theory of colours.(62)

Now exactly the same hostility to simplistic theories is a major feature of Burke's political philosophy, where it is similarly accompanied by a preference for finding variety and complexity in the world. In the Reflections, Burke insisted that revolutionary doctrines of natural rights were 'theories', conceived without any basis in experience, whereas 'the science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it' was a 'practical' or 'experimental science, not to be taught à priori'.(63) Burke even went on here to use an optical analogy to illustrate his point. Natural rights, he argued, are(64)

like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, [and] are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs.

This complaint was clearly directed against the tendency that we have seen Euler defending, a tendency to treat phenomena as if they behaved over-uniformly, according to a simple principle or rule. Burke objected to such uniformitarianism in politics because he saw human nature as multi-faceted and social institutions as the fruit of centuries of experimental adjustment to produce harmony out of the variety of human needs and

62 Sepper, 'Science of Seeing', pp. 191-3. On the importance Goethe placed on experiment and observation in science, see also Nielsen, 'Another Kind of Light', pp. 136-40.

63 Burke, Reflections, pp. 58-9.

64 Ibid., p. 59. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.99 passions. The uniformitarian natural rights theories of Priestley and the French revolutionaries, he believed, dangerously oversimplified the complex social realities with which politics dealt.

That Burke saw this political uniformitarianism as connected with uniformitarianism in science is indicated by another passage in the Reflections where he explicitly likened the revolutionary ideology that he was combatting to the mechanical philosophy. For, just as the latter had reduced the apparent multiplicity of phenomena to a single corpuscular substance - the motions of which could be explained by a minimal number of physical laws - the philosophy of natural rights, according to Burke, similarly presumed that human beings were fundamentally all alike and narrowly motivated by a single principle of self-interest to the exclusion of many other, more noble emotions. 'On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy,' he maintained,(65)

laws are to be supported only by ... the concern which each individual ... can spare to them from his own private interests. ... Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the [common good]. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied ... in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.

Elsewhere in the Reflections, Burke again indicated that he saw a revolutionary political uniformitarianism as linked to a scientific tendency to explain the diversity of phenomena in terms of simplistic theories. He complained, for instance, about the new legislative divisions of territory in post-revolutionary France, claiming that that country already had suitable ways of administering the land, based upon custom and natural boundaries. The new departments, he alleged, had an abstract geometrical basis, and were all of equal size and all square. He maintained that 'this new pavement of square within square' was 'made on the

65 Ibid., pp. 74-5. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.100 system of Empedocles and Buffon, and not upon any politic principle'.(66) What Burke seems to have meant by this, was that these thinkers' accounts of nature were abstract and theoretical rather than concrete and empirical, and that such an abstract approach to phenomena informed the new French government's actions. For this section of the Reflections deals specifically with such issues. Indeed, the science of politics, Burke argued, could not be compressed into neat, general theories. It could only be formulated in practice, and the diversity of human experience would require different solutions in different circumstances.(67)

Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived. In old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed they are ... not often constructed after any theory; theories are rather drawn from them.

This link between a scientific tendency to reduce the diversity of nature to a few abstract rules and the radicals' political uniformitarianism is emphasized by Burke throughout the Reflections by repeated references to what he claimed was the mathematical or geometrical character of natural rights theories. Mathematical truths were purely abstract, he argued, and it was misguided to treat moral and social concerns like a mathematical problem. So, while equality was a notion that could be demonstrated in geometry and arithmetic, he insisted that it was ill-suited to social arrangements where class divisions, such as those found in the ancient Roman republic, reflected a 'natural' diversity of human abilities and circumstances. The Romans, Burke asserted, appreciated the complexity of human societies and 'knew that their business was too arduous to be accomplished with

66 Ibid., pp. 169-70.

67 Ibid., p. 168. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.101 no better apparatus than ... the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman.'(68) Besides, the classification of a society's citizens made it possible, he maintained, to safeguard the particular advantages of each class. A legislator's failure to thus order his society was like a farmer's neglecting to classify the different kinds of animals he owned: the farmer, Burke claimed, would not be so naive as 'to abstract and equalize them all into [a single class of] animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care, and employment'. Moreover, the diversity of interests present in a hierarchical social system, he indicated, had the advantage of preventing the concentration of power in the hands of a tyrant.(69) The revolutionaries, however, ignoring 'the natural order of things' and the benefits of social inequality, were constructing their republic on the uniformitarian principle of natural rights: 'they have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens ... into one homogeneous mass', Burke complained, and 'have levelled and crushed together all the orders which they found'.(70) Burke's famous quote that 'the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded'(71) is another reference to the way in which he saw his opponents as erroneously trying to apply abstract, quantitative notions of equality and uniformity to what he believed was an intrinsically hierarchical and qualitatively diverse social order.

There is a good deal of other evidence to indicate that, in the 1790s, a link between science and revolutionary politics was widely perceived. For example, several years after Burke's Reflections, in 1794, an anonymous attack was made on the

68 Ibid., p. 180.

69 Ibid., pp. 181, 182.

70 Ibid., pp. 46, 181-2.

71 Ibid., p. 73. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.102 erstwhile Oxford Reader in Chemistry, Thomas Beddoes (see above, p. 48). This attack came in the form of a pamphlet entitled The Golden Age. A poetical epistle from Erasmus D--n, M.D. to Thomas Beddoes, M.D. Purporting thus to be written by Priestley's and Beddoes's friend, Erasmus Darwin, this parody of Darwin's poetic efforts was a 'reply' to an open letter that Beddoes had addressed to Darwin regarding a novel treatment for consumption. In the pamphlet, Beddoes's scientific and political views were ridiculed, as was his admiration for the social progress made in post-revolutionary France. He was lampooned as a 'Paracelsus of this wondrous age;/ ... the philosophic Chymist's Guide,/ The Bigot's Scourge, of Democrats the Pride'.(72)

Two years later, an open letter of Beddoes to the prime minister, Pitt, was enthusiastically reviewed by Coleridge. According to this review, Beddoes had complained in his letter that the authorities' reactionary policies were steadily alienating the scientific community. The review further regretted that, in the troubled 1790s, scientists with progressive views were regarded with suspicion by those in power:(73)

In a strain of keenest irony the Doctor notices the singular fact, that, while the French have pressed into their service all the inventive powers of the chemist and mechanic, the sons of science in Britain (almost without an exception) are known to regard the system and measure of the Minister with contempt or abhorrence: nor does he omit to glance on the recent practice of electing Members of the Royal Society from the colour of their political opinions.

72 Quoted in Levere, 'Dr. Thomas Beddoes', pp. 192-3. The politically motivated hostility to Beddoes's science in this period is also discussed by Golinski, Science as Public Culture, pp. 155-6, 163, 165, 170-5.

73 'Review of "A Letter to the Right Hon. WILLIAM PITT, on the Means of relieving the present Scarcity and preventing the Diseases that arise from meagre Food". BY THOMAS BEDDOES, M.D.', The Watchman, March 17, 1796, CC,2, p. 100. I have not seen the letter itself. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.103

Later in the decade, the kind of satire to which Beddoes had been subjected in 1794 had become an important weapon of the ruling classes in their offensive against British 'Jacobins' and the science associated with them. To assist this war against 'Jacobinism', the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner was published during the parliamentary session of 1797-8, under the direction of George Canning, Pitt's Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and several other Tories.(74) The stated purpose of this unofficial mouthpiece of the Pitt administration was to present a pro-government angle on weekly events and to expose the alleged fabrications on these by its opponents 'which may be found in the Papers devoted to the cause of SEDITION and IRRELIGION, to the pay or principles of FRANCE.'.(75) In addition to commentary on political events, the paper contained a large number of satirical poems, prominent among which were caricatures of the verse of Erasmus Darwin and of Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824), a Whig M.P. and well-known man of letters.

Knight had already come in for harsh criticism after the publication of his didactic poem, The Landscape (1794), for which he had been rightly accused of furthering radical interests.(76) But it was his slightly later poem, The Progress of Civil Society (1796), that the Anti-Jacobin chose to parody under the title 'The Progress of Man'. Although in his poem Knight had censured the French Revolution, the Anti-Jacobin nonetheless considered his views as an assault on 'Order and Government', and linked him explicitly to Priestley, Paine, William Godwin and 'all the French Encyclopedists'.(77) This reaction to his work was partly

74 See Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, pp. 21-5.

75 Anti-Jacobin, vol. 1, p. 7.

76 This poem attacked the prevailing norms of landscape gardening and caused quite a stir. An illuminating account of the controversy can be found in Messmann, Richard Payne Knight, pp. 59-84.

77 Anti-Jacobin, vol. 1, pp. 557, 526. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.104 the result of its agnostic tone, which provoked the poet William Mason, for example, to write to Horace Walpole, urging that Knight's 'rash scepticism ... be exposed before the next general election, that such honest freeholders, who detest the French Jacobins, may be led to make it a point of conscience not to vote for him'.(78) Mason and other 'Anti-Jacobins' were no doubt alarmed by Knight's refusal in the opening lines of his poem to acknowledge Providence. For Knight, divine superintendance of nature was just one of a number of unproven cosmological hypotheses:(79)

Whether primordial motion sprang to life From the wild of elemental strife; In central chains, the mass inert confined And sublimated matter into mind?- Or, whether one great all-pervading soul Moves in each part, and animates the whole; Unnumber'd worlds to one great centre draws; And governs all by pre-establish'd laws?- Whether, in fate's eternal fetters bound, Mechanic nature goes her endless round; Or, ever varying, acts but to fulfill The sovereign mandates of almighty will?- Let learned folly seek, or foolish pride; Rash in presumptuous ignorance, decide.

As far as the Anti-Jacobin was concerned, such epistemic reservations were a plain indication of Knight's broader political commitment to what was described by the pseudonymous author of the satirical version of his poem as 'New Principles'. These 'principles', the paper claimed, constituted a philosophical assault on tradition. For those who embraced them aimed to 'recover the ... nakedness of human nature, by ridding her of the cumbrous establishments which ... our Species have heaped upon her'. The first of these anti-traditional principles attributed to Knight was simply that 'Whatever is, is WRONG'.

78 Messman, Richard Payne Knight, p. 94. The quotation is taken from The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, (eds., W. S. Lewis et al. 48 vols. New Haven, 1937-83), vol. 29, pp. 334-5.

79 Cited in Messman, Richard Payne Knight,p.93. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.105

The second was the optimistic faith in the 'eternal and absolute PERFECTIBILITY of MAN'. Now this belief in the unlimited capacity of human beings to better themselves and their social conditions is pronounced in Priestley's political and scientific writings. In his Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty, for example, Priestley had declared that(80)

the human species ... is capable of ... unbounded improvement ... a man at this time, who has been tolerably well educated, in an improved Christian country, is a being possessed of much greater power, to be, and to make happy, than a person of the same age, in the same or any other country, some centuries ago. And, for this reason ... a person some centuries hence will, at the same age, be as much superior to us.

Given the apparent innocuousness of the prospect painted here by Priestley, it is not immediately obvious why the Anti-Jacobin would find such views disturbing. Nowhere does it make explicit the link between perfectibility and revolution. What was common to both, however, was the idea that change is a good thing, and the perfectibilist belief in the illimitable progress of human beings and their institutions threatened a British Establishment that was fearful of change, especially of the kind that had recently taken place in France. Perfectibility also implied that there were no innate inequalities between human beings: that there were no limitations, apart from those imposed by society, to any individual's capacity to improve him or herself. The doctrine of perfectibility was in fact directly connected with the views of those considered to be responsible for the French revolution - the eighteenth-century philosophes. Of the latter, only one was alive at the time of the Revolution and subsequently wrote a major philosophical statement of his perfectibilist

80 Priestley, Works, vol. 22, p. 8. The first edition of Priestley's Essay was published in 1768. The second, 1771 edition, however, is the one used here. On perfectibility, see Passmore, Perfectibility of Man. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.106 beliefs in the posthumously published Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind (1795). This was Condorcet, who Burke considered a particularly dangerous revolutionary thinker. In his Sketch, Condorcet wrote that he intended(81)

to show by appeal to reason and fact that nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.

One of the central arguments of Condorcet's work was that social progress was largely driven by scientific and technological developments. Priestley had similarly argued in the preface to his History and Present State of Electricity (1767) that 'from Natural Philosophy have flowed all those great inventions, by means of which mankind in general are able to subsist with more ease, and in greater numbers upon the face of the earth.' He there had also maintained that the study of nature offered numerous examples of the inevitablity of change and progress.(82) In the preface to his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1790) Priestley went much further in drawing the connections between scientific and political change. There he announced threateningly that(83)

81 Condorcet, Sketch,p.4.

82 Priestley, State of Electricity, pp. xviii, iii.

83 Priestley, Experiments, vol. 1, pp. xxii-xxiii. Very similar opinions were expressed privately, albeit with a more humorous intention, by Josiah Wedgwood, Priestley's associate in the famous Lunar Society of Birmingham. In a letter of 1766, Wedgwood wrote to a mutual friend, Thomas Bentley, 'I am much pleased with your disquisition upon the Capabilitys of Electricity, and should be glad to contribute ... towards rendering Doctor Priestley's very ingenious experiments more extensively usefull ... But what dareing mortals you are! to rob the Thunderer of his Bolts, - and for what? - no doubt to blast the oppressors of the poor and needy, or to execute some public piece of justice in the most tremendous and conspicuous manner, that shall make the great ones of the Earth tremble!' Wedgwood, Selected (continued...) Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.107

the amazing improvements in natural knowledge which have been made within the last century ... will be instrumental in bringing about other changes in the state of the world ... This rapid progress of knowledge, which, like the progress of a wave of the sea, of sound, or of light from the sun, extends itself ... in all directions, will ... be the means, under God, of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion,as well as of science; and all the efforts of the interested friends of corrupt establishments of all kinds, will be ineffectual for their support in this enlightened age ... the English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine.

In view of such strong sentiments about the social consequences of science, it is not surprising to find the Anti- Jacobin directly attacking the scientific views of proponents of perfectibility such as Priestley. The latter's experiments with gases, indeed, were explicitly derided for being too perfectibilist, for aspiring to 'raise Man from his present biped state ... to a rank in which he would be, as it were, all MIND, would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality; feed on OXYGENE, and never DIE ... '.(84)

An explicit perfectibilist faith in social improvement is also evident in the scientific writings of Erasmus Darwin whose ideas The Anti-Jacobin satirized in 'The Loves of the Triangles', a parody of Darwin's didactic poem, The Loves of the Plants (1789).(85) But what the review indicated as most objectionable in Darwin's writings was less the idea of human perfectibility than its natural analogue. For, in his 1794 Zoonomia; or, The

83(...continued) Letters, p. 44, cited in Kramnick, Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 18. On the Lunar Society, see Schofield, Lunar Society.

84 Anti-Jacobin, vol. 2, pp. 164-5. Beddoes's experimentation with the medicinal effects of gases in his Pneumatic Institution met with similar ridicule from the Anti-Jacobin's successor, the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. See Golinski, Science as Public Culture, p. 173.

85 This was the second part of Darwin's Botanic Garden. The first part, The Economy of Vegetation, was however published later in 1791. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.108

Laws of Organic Life, Darwin had asserted, contrary to a standard Christian tradition, that the cosmos was in fact constantly changing and improving, and that the different forms of life had developed 'from a single living filament'. Moreover, continuous transformation in the natural world was probably due, he claimed, to nature itself and not to divine intervention. He referred to David Hume in support of his views, claiming that Hume had similarly proposed(86)

that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat.

Shortly after the publication of Zoonomia, the conservative British Critic complained of Darwin's disdain for Christian revelation, and objected that humans could clearly not have souls if they shared a common ancestry with other animals.(87) Following the British Critic's lead, the Anti-Jacobin parodied Darwin's idea of a progressive evolution of life from a common, original 'filament', and ridiculed the notion that matter had an inherent nisus or self-organizing capacity.(88) Such complaints, however, were not just theologically driven, for we shall now see

86 Darwin, Zoonomia, pp. 498, 509.

87 Garfinkle, 'Science and Religion', p. 384.

88 'The Loves of the Triangles', Anti-Jacobin, vol. 2, pp. 171-2, 202. The idea of a nisus, the review indicated, was that of the German natural historian and anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), which Darwin had further developed. Interestingly, at about this time, the young Coleridge was planning an educational tour to Germany specifically to attend lectures by Blumenbach and other liberal-minded scholars. Shaffer has pointed out that Darwin's and Coleridge's friend, Beddoes, with his wide knowledge of German scholarship and personal contacts in Germany, was instrumental in Coleridge's decision to go there. Shaffer, 'Kubla Khan', pp. 28-30. Coleridge's trip in 1798-9 did not pass unnoticed by the watchdogs of the Establishment, and his ten-month absence was criticized in the new Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review. There, in the caption of a famous cartoon which will be discussed below, he was censured for disloyally abandoning his country, wife and children to become a 'citizen of the world'. CL,1, p. 552n. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.109 that naturalism like that of Darwin brought into question the existing social order. Furthermore, as we have already observed, Darwin's perfectibilist view of nature effectively supported the idea that change of any kind was 'natural' and that inequality was not innate.

The opinion that notions of inherently active matter were politically dangerous was made clear in another reactionary publication that was contemporary with the Anti-Jacobin. This was the 1797 Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies by the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University, John Robison (1739- 1805). This work, dedicated to the 'Secretary at War', William Wyndham, echoed Burke's apprehensions about revolution spreading to Britain. But it went further than Burke by insisting that an international republican plot was being hatched in masonic lodges around Europe. Those responsible for this conspiracy, Robison claimed, were members of a Bavarian secret society called the Illuminati. They were, he argued, 'the most active leaders in the French Revolution', endorsing 'levelling principles and cosmopolitism' and aiming 'to establish universal Liberty and Equality, the imprescriptible Rights of Man ...'.(89) For Robison, there was a danger that such principles had already arrived in Britain, and the prime suspect was once again Priestley, who, though living at a safe distance across the ocean, supposedly still wielded considerable influence. Robison informed his compatriots that Priestley 'has already given the most promising specimens of his own docility in the principles of

89 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, pp. 11, 41, 375. It is important to note that Robison's target was freemasonry on the continent rather than in Britain. For Robison himself was a mason, and one of the aims of his book was to dissociate British freemasonry from what he judged to be the seditious intrigues of its continental counterparts. See Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, pp. 16-17. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.110

Illuminatism, and has already passed through several degrees of initiation.'(90)

Robison, however, was not only worried about Priestley's conspiratorial politics. What he found especially disquieting in Priestley's 'illuminatism' was the latter's account of mind and use of Hartley's vibrationary psychophysiology. For Robison, Priestley's conflation of mind and matter was dangerous. Hartley's theory, moreover, gave credence to Priestley's position, for the doctrine of aetherial vibrations suggested that there was a direct connection between mental phenomena and material events - a connection which strongly implied the materiality of mind, and thus the lack of any hierarchical distinction between spirit and matter. Priestley, Robison warned his countryfellows, had(91)

been preparing ... his readers for Atheism by his theory of mind, and by his commentary on the unmeaning jargon of Dr Hartley. ... For, if intelligence and design be nothing but a certain modification of the vibratiunculæ or undulations of any kind, what is supreme intelligence, but a more extensive, and ... refined undulation, pervading or mixing with all others?

Robison expressed his concern several times in Proofs of a Conspiracy about the subversive potential of theories like Hartley's which reduced 'mental powers' and 'moral feelings' to physiology. He complained that a 'complete freezing of the heart would ... be the consequence of a theory which could perfectly

90 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, p. 482. Priestley, to the best of my knowledge, was not a freemason. While one of Robison's colleagues suggested that Robison's alarmist fears were brought on by the medicinal use of opium, they were not at all out of character. See Morrell, 'Robison and Playfair', p. 51. Nor was such alarmism entirely dismissed by the intelligentsia. For we shall see below that the Edinburgh professor expressed similar views in other places, most notably in the Encylopaedia Britannica, whose willingness to publish such views indicates that they were not unacceptable to an educated, conservative readership.

91 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, pp. 482-3. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.111 explain the affections by vibrations or crystallizations.'(92) Robison had already noted that this idea of 'crystallizations' was that of the French natural philosopher, Jean-Claude de Lamétherie (1743-1817). Lamétherie believed that crystallization was the basis for all vital activity and that life forms originated spontaneously. He exercized some influence over contemporary science through his editorship of the respected scientific review, Journal de Physique.(93) Robison quipped that(94)

Mr de la Metherie hopes, that before the enlightened Republic of France has got into its teens, he shall be able to tell his fellow citizens, in his Journal de Physique, that particular form of crystallization which men have been accustomed to call God.

In an earlier article on 'Physics', published in the 1795 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Robison had also singled out Lamétherie as representative of those scientists who, by claiming that mind- like substances are the source of activity in nature, blur the hierarchical distinction between spirit and matter. He went on to insist that this distinction was of the utmost significance, for there were serious 'consequences which naturally follow from ... sinking the mental faculties of man to a level with the operations of mechanics or chemistry'. These consequences of denying the superior, spiritual character of mind, for Robison, were of course theological, but they were not just theological. For they were plainly observable, he maintained, in the French Revolution - in 'the frenzy which the reasoning pride of man has raised in our neighbourhood, and ... should make us abandon its

92 Ibid., pp. 471-2.

93 Taylor, 'Lamétherie', pp. 603-4.

94 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, p. 430. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.112 bloodstained road, and return ... to survey the works of God ...'.(95)

Like Burke, then, Robison clearly associated the natural philosophy of Priestley and the French scientists with revolutionary politics. This Burkean attitude to French science and its British counterpart continued well into the early decades of the next century. Robison, notably, continued to convey it through the 1803 Supplement to the Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Morrell has already noted that both Robison and the Supplement's editor and principal contributor, George Gleig, used the scientific articles in this work to advance their conservative political agenda.(96) The article on 'Action', referred to by Morrell, provides a good illustration of their approach, and shows us the links they saw. This was probably written by Gleig who claimed to be representing the position of Thomas Reid - one of Priestley's main adversaries - who was said to have argued that(97)

what are called the powers of nature, such as impulse, attraction, repulsion, elasticity, &c. are not, strictly speaking, powers or causes, but the effects of the agency of some active and intelligent being; and that physical causes ... are nothing more than laws or rules, according to which the agent produces the effect.

In support of Reid, Gleig strongly opposed the attribution of agency to inanimate objects, such as when a stone's falling is assigned to the action or 'influence' of the earth, or the tides to that of the sun and moon. Matter, according to Gleig, has no

95 Robison, 'Physics', p. 640. Robison's article is briefly discussed in Hughes, 'Science in English Encylopædias', p. 369.

96 Morrell, 'Robison and Playfair', pp. 49-50. See also: Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 7, pp. 1302-3, s.v. 'Gleig'; Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, pp. 97-8.

97 Supplement, vol. 1, p. 2. The idea that activity in nature is ultimately due to a spiritual cause was espoused by others, in particular by Newton. See, for example, Home, 'Force, Electricity, and the Powers of Living Matter', pp. 116-17. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.113 power to act on other objects, let alone on objects not in contact. All action, he maintained, is caused by a 'distinct agent or agents' such as God or divinely delegated agencies. Having thus established his theologically correct credentials, Gleig then offered some observational corroboration of his claim that matter was inherently devoid of agency. The changing behaviour of bodies when at different distances from one another, he argued, meant that such variations could not be due to supposedly unvarying properties within matter, but only to agencies separate from it. He went on to criticize the work of chemists, probably with Priestley and the latter's French colleagues in mind, declaring that 'none of them can say with certainty that he has discovered a single agent ... agents and agency cannot be subjected to any kind of physical experiments.'(98) For Gleig, then, the problem of agency, so crucial to the debate surrounding materialism, was one whose solution lay with Christian theologians, not with radical natural philosophers. Moreover, the idea of agency, he affirmed, stemmed from the perception of our own mental power to initiate activity; it was not found, he implied, in the inert world of material objects, as some French materialists had claimed. Gleig thus entreated his readers, in a tone reminiscent of Burke and Robison, to take stock of(99)

what dreadful consequences have in another country resulted from that pretended philosophy which excludes the agency of mind from the universe ... [and] to inquire whether our consciousness and reflection do not lead us to refer real agency to mind alone.

No doubt Gleig was also thinking here of the British followers of 'that pretended philosophy'.

98 Supplement, vol. 1, p. 3.

99 Ibid. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.114

In Britain in the decade or so after 1789, then, the issue of whether matter possessed inherent activity was not debated simply because of its importance for physics, but because of its extra- scientific implications. Indeed, the notion of active matter, Robison claimed in his 1795 article on 'Physics', did not pose any problem for science. 'Natural philosophy, it is true,' he argued,(100)

commonly takes it for granted that matter is wholly inactive; but it is not of any moment in physics whether this opinion is true or false; whether matter is acted on according to certain laws, or whether it acts of itself according to the same laws, makes no difference to the natural philosopher.

The theological and political stakes in the question of matter's activity, however, were perfectly plain, and not only to Robison and his conservative colleagues. For we have seen an especially clear statement of what was at issue in the debate over active matter in the passage from d'Holbach discussed in the previous chapter (pp. 59, 60).

D'Holbach's complaint that supernaturalism had been manipulated by the ruling classes for their own ends was in fact not a groundless one, and we find a particularly good illustration of his point in the claims of Burke twenty years later. For Burke vindicated the social hierarchy of his time by invoking a divinely established order in the world. 'Each contract of each particular state', Burke declared in a famous passage of the Reflections,(101)

is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.

100 Robison, 'Physics', p. 653.

101 Burke, Reflections, pp. 93-4. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.115

Now if science were to show that nature could function quite well without a hypothetical realm of spirit, Burke's position would prove to be indefensible, and it would be much harder to alternatively defend the view that 'all physical and moral natures' should maintain 'their appointed place'. It was thus in the interests of those who wished to preserve the existing social hierarchy to retain a distinct ontological role for spirit in nature, as had for example existed in much seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy.(102)

It was this task of upholding a hierarchical dualism in natural philosophy that Robison had taken upon himself, and one of the principal messages of his article on 'Physics' was that 'the mechanical philosophy now in vogue' was an aberration of the legitimate mechanical philosophy to which he himself subscribed. Moreover, the latter, he claimed, was entirely compatible with the aspirations of the governing elite - for good science is politically neutral. 'The truths ... which the naturalist discovers', Robison maintained toward the end of his article, 'are such as do not in general affect the passions of men'. One could then rest assured, he concluded, that 'those whose interest is to keep men in political or religious ignorance, cannot easily suspect bad consequences from improvements in this science'.(103)

For Robison to thus insist on the political neutrality of his own natural philosophy clearly indicates that in the 1790s science was not an apolitical enterprise. Indeed, we have observed that the attacks in this period on the natural philosophies of Priestley, Darwin and others had a definite political motivation. For those defending the existing social

102 Hutchison has suggested that the supernaturalism of the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century in fact lent support to the new absolutist politics of that period. See Hutchison, 'Reformation Politics', pp. 10-12. Cf. Shapin, 'Of Gods and Kings', pp. 196-9, 210-12.

103 Robison, 'Physics', pp. 640, 659. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.116 order, then, 'Jacobin science' unquestionably sustained 'Jacobin' politics.

II.4 Coleridge's Change of Heart(104)

Coleridge's professed admiration in the 1790s for the circle of 'Jacobin' scientists who were being universally condemned by the Establishment and his public expression of similar radical views naturally brought him under suspicion. The Anti-Jacobin considered him to be influential enough for it to include some obvious references to him and his work in its final issue. This issue contained a poem entitled 'New Morality' which singled out Coleridge, Southey, Priestley, Godwin, Thelwall, and Paine as national enemies. It incorporated a menacing parody of Coleridge's tribute to Priestley in 'Religious Musings': 'PRIESTLEY's a Saint, and STONE a Patriot still'.(105) It also took to task liberal papers such as the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, in which Coleridge had published some of his radical poetry. These were accused of treacherously embracing the 'Rights of Man' ideology of the French revolutionaries. 'Thou Morning Chronicle, and Morning Post,' ... ye make the Rights of Man your theme,/ Your Country libel, and your God

104 While my account here covers ground already covered by others, I aim to emphasize the independence of Coleridge's politics throughout the 1790s and some fundamental continuities between his early radicalism and subsequent conservatism. His position after 1800 was, in significant ways, consistent with that of the mid-1790s. In particular, it was informed by a similar insistence on the importance of religious values in politics. Some important secondary sources on Coleridge's political 'apostasy' are: David Erdman's introduction to Coleridge's journalistic essays in the Morning Post and Courier, CC,3, vol. 1, pp. lix-cxiii; Thompson, 'Disenchantment or Default'; Miller, Ideology and Enlightenment, pp. 8-27, 89-121.

105 In 'Religious Musings', Coleridge had described Priestley as 'patriot, and saint, and sage'. 'Religious Musings', l. 371, PW,1, p. 123. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.117 blaspheme'.(106) In an illustration of the 'New Morality' by the famous cartoonist James Gillray,(107) published soon afterwards in the successor to The Anti-Jacobin, the monthly Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review, the liberal papers' titles were prominent, as were clear caricatures of the government's opponents. Also noticeable were altered titles of publications that the authorities deemed subversive, such as Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Wrongs of Women' (A Vindication of the Rights of Women) and Darwin's 'Zoonomia or Jacobin Plants' (Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life). In conformity with The Anti-Jacobin's poem, the figures in Gillray's cartoon were portrayed as paying tribute to one of the newly-elected French Directors, Louis-Marie de Larevellière-Lépaux.(108) Conspicuous in this reverent company were the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, Thelwall, Coleridge and Southey. The last two were depicted as orating asses, a satirical touch which alluded to a 1794 poem of Coleridge's, published in the Morning Chronicle, entitled 'Address to a Young Jack-Ass and its Tether'd mother'. In the poem, Coleridge had expressed his wish that the tethered ass, his 'Brother',-a symbol of those oppressed by the government's harsh wartime economic policies - could soon join him 'in the Dell/ Of high- soul'd Pantisocracy to dwell'. At the end of a 1796 version of the poem, the poet provokingly challenged the Establishment by contrasting the joyful braying of the ass in a pantisocratic

106 Anti-Jacobin, vol. 2, pp. 630, 635-6. As The Anti-Jacobin was designed as an antidote to these papers' anti-ministerial position, it lost no opportunity in disparaging them. For instance, a characteristic entry in the index of the edition of The Anti-Jacobin used here read: 'Morning Chronicle - its impiety - its blasphemy - its falsehood - its historical, geographical and political ignorance - its insolence - baseness - and stupidity. Passim, passim.'

107 See figure on opposite page, reproduced from Hill, Gillray, plate 74.

108 Hill, Gillray,p.71. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.118

Utopia with 'warbled melodies that soothe to rest/ The tumult of some SCOUNDREL Monarch's breast.'(109)

By the time of The Anti-Jacobin's attack on Coleridge, the repressive measures of the Pitt government had succeeded in effectively stifling popular political opposition in Britain.(110) Thelwall, for instance, had found it expedient to retire from politics to the Welsh countryside where he nonetheless continued to be persecuted.(111) In 1797, he had even hoped to join Coleridge and Wordsworth, living the secluded life of poets in rural Somerset, but was warned against doing so by Coleridge who claimed that 'even riots & dangerous riots might be the consequence'.(112) Later, in the Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge related an episode from this time which may explain his concern about Thelwall's permanently joining him and Wordsworth; an episode which also illustrates the British government's widespread use of spies and informers in the mid-1790s. Coleridge recounted how, at Nether Stowey in 1797, the poets had been shadowed by a spy who, on overhearing them talk about one 'Spy Nozy', feared that he and his prominent nose had been detected. This story, with its amusing pun on 'Spinoza', may well have been made up by Coleridge. But there was a spy in Nether Stowey at this time, hot on the trail of the two poets

109 The lines cited here from the Morning Chronicle's versions of Coleridge's poem can be found in PW,1, pp. 75-6.

110 On the British government's persecution of radicals in the 1790s, see: Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 271-4, 287-92, 305-6, 313-14, 318-25, 332-58, 387-406, 413-15, 451-61, 485-8; Thompson, 'Disenchantment or Default', pp. 155-68; Roe, Radical Years, chapter 7.

111 Everest, Coleridge's Secret Ministry, pp. 128-9. A 1797 letter of Coleridge testifies to the problems that Thelwall was encountering. The radical leader, he explained in this letter, 'by his particular exertions in the propagation of those principles, which we hold sacred & of the highest importance, ... has become, as you well know, particularly unpopular, thro' every part of the Kingdom'. CL,1, p. 342: to John Chubb, 20 August 1797.

112 CL,1, p. 343: to John Thelwall, 21 August 1797. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.119 after the Home Office had received local reports about their suspicious note-taking and queries regarding the navigability of the local river down to the sea. In the Biographia, Coleridge indicated that he had merely been preparing notes for a poem, to be entitled 'The Brook'. But, as a French invasion party had recently landed on the Welsh coast, the locals and Home Office were understandably worried about the poets' activities. The spy, however, was more interested to learn that Thelwall had very recently visited Stowey.(113)

By 1798, the tone of Coleridge's political statements had become more moderate than at the time of his Pantisocratic aspirations several years earlier, a fact which can partly be explained by the repressive political climate in Britain.(114) Nevertheless, he was still openly critical of the government, accusing it of callously turning a blind eye to the suffering it was causing through its war against France and through its subservience to the powerful interests of the slave trade. For example, a poem, 'Fire, Famine, and Slaughter; a War Eclogue', published in early 1798 in the Morning Post, was a direct attack on Pitt's policies towards France and Ireland. The poem was set in the war-stricken Vendée region in France where the three personifications of its title were depicted as running rampage at Pitt's behest. Although the French government was in fact directly responsible for the carnage and privation alluded to in the poem, Coleridge held the British administration indirectly accountable because of its intransigent hostility to the young republic. The accusation that Britain had exacerbated France's domestic politics by overreacting to the Revolution echoed Coleridge's 1795 pamphlet, Conciones ad Populum. There he had accused Britain not only of bringing misery to France, but also

113 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 193-7; Roe, 'Who was Spy Nozy?'; idem, Radical Years, pp. 248-62.

114 See Roe, Radical Years, pp. 234-8. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.120 of causing suffering in Africa, India and America: 'the four Quarters of the Globe groan beneath the intolerable iniquity of this nation.' This comment was reprinted in a note to a later political poem, 'Ode to the Departing Year' (1796) where he again condemned Britain's indifference to war-time suffering and the horrors of the slave trade. In a 1797 version of this poem, he bitterly complained, 'For ever shall the bloody island scowl?/ For ever shall her vast and iron bow/ Shoot Famine's evil arrows o'er the world ...?'(115)

In February, 1798, however, the French invaded Switzerland, provoking protest from even those like Coleridge who had continued to view France optimistically as the only place in Europe where a new, progressive regime would soon develop. He almost immediately composed 'France: an Ode', a 'palinodia' or recantation (as he later put it) of his previous support for the French Revolution.(116) Indeed, this poem expressed his regret for having ever thought that France would provide a political example which the rest of Europe should follow. It also gave an account of the attitudes of those in Britain who, believing that domestic strife was probably a necessary stage in the evolution of the new state, had supported the republic through its internal political vicissitudes. French territorial ambitions, however, had finally disabused the country's defenders abroad. Coleridge sharply rebuked France for its betrayal of liberal principles: 'Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind?/ To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway'. Yet, despite the young poet's disenchantment with French liberty, he still did not see Britain as offering a credible alternative, and the poem was as scathing

115 CC,1, p. 58; 'Ode to the Departing Year', ll. 94-6, PW,1, p. 165n.

116 CC,7, vol. 1, p. 200. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.121 of the Pitt administration's complicity in the slave trade as it was of France's ideological perfidy.(117)

It was not surprising, then, that The Anti-Jacobin in 1798 included Coleridge, along with Priestley and Darwin, in its inventory of seditious persons. The young radical, however, did not entirely merit this animosity. For, as we have observed, he publicly shared the Establishment's professed concern about an atheistic tendency in left-wing circles. But Coleridge's open advocacy of the views of Priestley and Beddoes, together with the Pantisocratic ideology expressed in his Bristol lectures and The Watchman, would have made it difficult not to identify him with other, extreme radical interests. A 1796 review of his poems, for example, concluded with the remark 'that Mr. Coleridge is the most violent leveller we have met with, even in this age of levelling. Instead of an equal division of property, our poet spurns at all property'.(118) Coleridge's independent position within the revolutionary camp, therefore, was clearly not recognized by the Establishment which, moreover, had to bear the brunt of his criticism. The median position he was trying to steer between the extremes of atheistic radicalism and state and church corruption would also have been viewed as suspiciously ambiguous in the polarized political climate of the 1790s.

Coleridge's distinct political stance was still noticeable in his 1798 political poems. In 'France: an Ode', for instance, he portrayed liberty as equally removed 'from Priestcraft's harpy minions' as from 'factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves'.(119) 'Priestcraft' here was an obvious reference to the Anglican Establishment, and 'Blasphemy' to the infidel radicals. In

117 'France: an Ode', ll. 80-1, and note to ll. 85-9, PW,1, pp. 246-7.

118 From unsigned notice in English Review, August 1796, xxviii, 172-5, in Jackson, ed., Critical Heritage, vol. 2, p. 229.

119 'France: an Ode', ll. 95-6, PW,1, p. 247. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.122

'Fears in Solitude; written in April 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion', the poet again distanced himself from the two extremes of British politics, although he was now clearly less fervent than he had previously been about constitutional reform. For instance, Coleridge here rebuked those in Britain who sought 'All change from change of constituted power;/ As if a Government had been a robe'. This more moderate position on reform was largely due to his revised attitude toward the French who, ironically, were described in the poem in very similar terms to those which the poet had earlier used to characterize his British adversaries in Joan of Arc. Just as Joan's enemies had been admonished for giving value to the 'gross and visible sphere' at the expense of the spiritual, the French were now depicted as 'Impious and false, a light yet cruel race,/ Who laugh away all virtue ... and still promising/ Freedom [are] themselves too sensual to be free'. Nevertheless, in the poem Coleridge again put much of the blame for France's aggression on British policy, urging his countryfellows in a prophetic vein, to 'repent ... of the wrongs with which we stung/ So fierce a foe to frenzy'. He in fact argued that Britain's current economic and political distress was due to the nation's deep-seated moral corruption, for which a French invasion would be the celestial recompense. To reinforce this apocalyptic message, the poem offered a provoking picture of the British reactionaries who 'Dote with a mad idolatry; and all/ Who will not fall before their images,/ And yield them worship, they are enemies/ Even of their country!' At the end of this line, the poet sadly noted, 'Such have I been deemed.'(120)

The conciliatory route that Coleridge thought he was proposing between the Scylla of revolution and the Charybdis of

120 'Fears in Solitude', ll. 162-3, 140-3, 152-3, 172-5, PW,1, pp. 260-2. Interestingly, Coleridge continued to see Providence as intervening in human history, though France came to replace Britain as the target of divine retribution. See, for example, CL,2, p. 763: to Lord Liverpool, 28 July 1817. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.123 reaction, then, predictably met with an unappreciative reception from the British Establishment. The conservative Monthly Mirror remarked, in response to the publication of the quarto pamphlet which included 'Fears in Solitude' and 'France: an Ode', that Coleridge was 'no friend to the present system of government', and complained that his warnings of providential justice to be inflicted on Britain were 'not highly honourable to his feelings as a Briton, nor very complimentary to the national character.' The British Critic, which we observed above to be hostile to Erasmus Darwin, similarly lamented Coleridge's 'absurd and preposterous prejudices against his country'. Yet, Coleridge's new position also began to draw a negative response from the supporters of reform who had viewed his earlier political career as indicative of his solidarity with their cause. The liberal Critical Review, for instance, regretfully noted that 'Mr. Coleridge has become an alarmist'. It claimed, however, that his latest poems indicated he was still on the opposition's side.(121)

Indeed, despite his changed attitude toward France, Coleridge did not abandon the reformist principles of his Bristol days. In a 1799 letter to Wordsworth, for example, he expressed his wish that the latter(122)

would write a poem, in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes.

This statement, directed at former radicals who had abandoned the revolutionary cause, shows that Coleridge still held to a broad

121 From: unsigned review, Monthly Mirror, January 1799, vii, 36-7; unsigned review, British Critic, June 1799, xiii, 662-3; unsigned review, Critical Review, August 1799, xxvi, 472-5, in Jackson, ed., Critical Heritage: vol. 2, pp. 237-8; vol. 1, p. 48;, vol. 1, p. 49.

122 CL,1, p. 527: to William Wordsworth, circa 10 September 1799. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.124 vision of cosmopolitan emancipation from the fetters of tyranny and inequality. Such Utopian sentiments clearly went against the grain of the nationalistic, anti-gallican rhetoric of the Pitt administration, which Coleridge, as journalist, continued to attack. For instance, in a review in the Morning Post of a pamphlet by Arthur Young, a well-known writer on travel and agricultural matters, Coleridge criticized the writer's recantation of reformist opinions, and eloquently argued,(123)

We have, alas! too often mistaken newspaper anecdotes of rogues in Paris for the annals of the French nation since the revolution; and in our rage against a phantom of Jacobinism, have shamefuly neglected to calculate the blessings from the destruction of Feudalism. The vine of liberty shall not be blasphemed by us, because the Noahs of the revolutionary deluge, who first planted it, were made drunk by its untried fruits.

In 1800, then, Coleridge obviously still believed in the liberal ideals in the name of which the Ancien Régime had been overthrown. But he was going to find it more and more difficult to defend them in the face of rising patriotism at home and the glaring discrepancy between these ideals and the new Napoleonic rule in France. Thus, two years later, he could no longer find anything to praise in France's conduct. In a series of articles published in the Morning Post in the latter part of 1802, his political position, along with that of the newspaper, had changed dramatically. In direct contrast to his above condemnation of feudalism, he now advocated the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and claimed to have always supported a patrician form of government. Napoleon's opposition to inherited power, he maintained, was opposed to 'the habit of [Coleridge's own] mind to think with great respect of feudal institutions in general, and with an especial admiration of ... hereditary succession.' With Napoleon still in view, he went on to argue

123 'Review of a pamphlet by Arthur Young, Esq. F.R.S. and Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, entitled, "The Question of Scarcity Plainly stated, &c."', Morning Post, 27 March 1800, CC,3, vol. 1, p. 238. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.125 that a landed aristocracy was a healthy 'check on the power of the Crown'.(124)

Coleridge's new political stance was particularly evident in another article from this time, entitled 'Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin'. Here, he began by decrying the administration's harassment of those who, like him, had earlier expressed support for the French Revolution and had opposed the British administration's bellicosity toward France. He continued, however, by arguing that the term 'Jacobin' in such cases was misapplied, and he professed himself to be as stalwart in his antagonism to true Jacobinism as his government. Real Jacobins, he claimed, believed in 'absolute revolutions' and equal, 'universal suffrage': 'Whoever builds a Government on personal and natural rights, is ... a Jacobin. Whoever builds on social rights, that is, hereditary rank, property, and long prescription, is an Anti-Jacobin'.(125) The former radical now plainly saw himself in the latter camp. The message of this article, then, was strangely ambiguous. On the one hand, the authorities' heavy-handed treatment of the political opposition was censured. Yet, as the title indicated, Coleridge was anxious to be seen as a reformed character who shared the politically conservative interests of his government, and even those of the derisive Anti-Jacobin newspaper. This identification with the Establishment was extreme, for here he also maintained that he had never embraced the revolutionary, egalitarian 'system of French politics'.(126)

As far back as our memory reaches, it was an axiom in politics with us, that in every country in which property prevailed, property must be the grand basis of the

124 From 'Affairs of France', Morning Post, 9 October 1802, CC,3, vol. 3, pp. 353-4.

125 'Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin', Morning Post, 21 October 1802, CC,3, vol. 1, pp. 367-70.

126 Ibid., pp. 372-3. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.126

government; and that that government was the best, in which the power was the most exactly proportioned to the property.

Such an apparent repudiation of Coleridge's former political principles demands an explanation. Financial opportunism might have been a motive, for the Morning Post, which was to some extent providing his bread and butter, was concerned about how to attract a larger readership in an increasingly nationalistic climate of opinion. Coleridge was in fact quite influential in determining the paper's new political direction, so it is certainly possible that he pushed a change of partisanship for reasons of personal expediency.(127)

Yet, there were clearly other reasons for Coleridge's change of heart, not the least being the dismay that he, like many others, must have felt toward the outcome of Jacobinism in France.(128) The young Coleridge had invested his political hopes in the French republic, and had continued to defend the latter against British, 'anti-Jacobin' invective. But Napoleon had quashed any remaining illusions that France might have retained at least some of its revolutionary idealism. It was probably no accident that Coleridge's conservatism emerged full-blooded in 1802 - the year Napoleon assumed the First Consulship for life. For Napoleon's action clearly signalled the end of the French republican experiment, comparable, Coleridge argued in an article of that year, to the demise of the Roman republic under the rule of Julius, Augustus, and Tiberius Caesar. Coleridge's feeling that he and others had been personally betrayed by Napoleon was ruefully noted: 'We are not conscious of any feelings of bitterness towards the First Consul; or, if any, only that venial prejudice, which naturally results from the having hoped proudly

127 See: CC,3, vol. 1, pp. lxx-lxxi, civ; Miller, Ideology and Enlightenment, pp. 106-7.

128 See Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 494-5. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.127 of any individual, and the having been miserably disappointed.'(129)

Nevertheless, it is also important to bear in mind that there was an important continuity between Coleridge's new political position and some fundamental aspects of his earlier thinking.(130) For example, in his Bristol lectures he had demonstrated an evident antagonism to the commercially driven, inhumane conduct of the British government, particularly in connection with the slave trade.(131) Notwithstanding his recommendation to abolish private property at that time, Coleridge's Pantisocratic antipathy to commerce was, to some extent, in keeping with his new defence of the anti-commercial, landed interest. We shall in fact see in the following chapter that one of the central characteristics of his post-1800 politics was a hostility to what he saw as the increasing ascendancy of a 'commercial spirit' in British society. By siding with the Establishment, then, he can effectively be understood as seeking an ally in his continuing rejection of this commercial morality.

Also anticipating Coleridge's new conservative position was the earlier paternalistic élitism that we have noted. His anti- democratic sentiments can already be discerned in his attitude to the politics sustained by the 'modern sages' in the mid-1790s. For he then held that his own reformist perspective was distinct from the ultra-democratic tendencies of some of his comrades-in- arms. Coleridge's opposition to the latter's atheistic radicalism, as we have seen, was due not only to their irreligion, but more importantly to their political influence on

129 'Comparison of the Present State of France with that of Rome under Julius and Augustus Caesar. I', Morning Post, 21 September 1802, CC,3, vol. 1, pp. 312-20. The quotation is on p. 319.

130 Cf. Miller, Ideology and Enlightenment, pp. 119-21.

131 CC,1, pp. 223-6. See also Coleridge's 'Lecture on the Slave-Trade', delivered in Bristol just shortly after the last of his lectures on revealed religion. Ibid., pp. 235-51. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.128 the working classes. He saw such influence as dangerous, for the uneducated could be easily manipulated, as was evident from the French Terror and the mob action against Priestley in Birmingham. Moreover, a society in which political power lay in the hands of demagogues and their followers was clearly not the kind in which Coleridge could ever foresee himself and his peers playing a part.

That the anti-democratic leanings in his earlier thought should come to be emphasized at the expense of its communitarianism can thus be viewed as a function of his increased concern about the consequences of working-class agitation. Napoleon's bellicose ambitions must have exacerbated Coleridge's fear that domestic instability could provide an opportunity for atheistic demagogues to come to power and lead the country along a path similar to that taken in France. In the event, the established political order might well have seemed to Coleridge to be the only sure defence against the irreligious, democratic tendencies of the period.

One revealing new feature of this alliance with the landed classes was an antagonism that Coleridge began to adopt to everything French - an antagonism already apparent in Burke and other 'Anti-Jacobins' of the 1790s. Thus, an article of 1802 began the first of many denunciations of French science, literature and politics as interrelated components of a single, all-embracing 'mock philosophy'.(132) This hostility was to become ever more pronounced in his writings, and, like his new political allies, he was to gradually come to view the 'Jacobin science' that they had censured as a serious threat to the aristocratic polity he now defended. It is important to note here that Coleridge's new scientific position was a result of his

132 'Comparison of the Present State of France with that of Rome under Julius and Augustus Caesar. II', Morning Post, 25 September 1802, CC,3, vol. 1, p. 324. Ch.II: 'Jacobin Science' p.129 changing politics. He did not change his politics because of his science. Thus, following the lead of Establishment apologists, even Hartley and Priestley were to meet with stern reproof from their former disciple. Coleridge's attack on 'Jacobin science', however, occupied a much more central position in his politics than it had done in those of Burke, Robison, or The Anti-Jacobin. He took pains to demonstrate that the connections between natural and social philosophies that his political predecessors seemed to take for granted could in fact be clearly articulated and traced historically. Reflecting his critique of the 'modern sages' in his Bristol lectures, Coleridge continued to argue that natural philosopy was not a politically neutral enterprise, just as it was not detached from theological considerations. So, over the next thirty years, much of his intellectual effort was devoted to spelling out the social implications of what he took to be the prevailing 'Jacobin science' of the time. Increasingly, he referred to this science by what he saw as its predominant attribute: 'mechanism'. The 'mechanical philosophy' of the early nineteenth century, Coleridge came to insist, had a political agenda that many failed to notice, and so required unmasking. p.130

CHAPTER III: 'COMMERCIAL G. BRITAIN'— COLERIDGE'S OBJECTIONS TO THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY

III.1 Introduction

The mechanical philosophy of the eighteenth century was perceived by many as little different to its original, seventeenth-century version. The fact that Newton had made a big change to that philosophy in adding forces to its physics was often overlooked, as was the fact that Newton's eighteenth- century successors had also modified Newton. Thus, the fifth edition of Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1741-43), described what was obviously eighteenth-century 'Newtonian Philosophy' as 'mechanical',(1) and Coleridge similarly referred to Newtonian philosophy, in his 1795 footnote to Southey's Joan of Arc,as 'the mechanic philosophy'.(2)

In the preceding chapter, in our discussion of that footnote, we saw that what the young Coleridge specifically objected to in eighteenth-century Newtonianism was a materialistic tendency that he found within it. We also noted that while he complained about some technical failings of this philosophy, by reiterating criticisms made by Andrew Baxter about the Newtonian aether, the technicalities of the aether were not Coleridge's, or Baxter's, real concern. Both were more worried about the theological implications of Newton's concept. For if the aether possessed inherent activity (as the Queries to the Opticks appeared to suggest) divine agency was not required to explain matter's

1 Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. 2, s.v. 'Newtonian Philosophy'.

2 Southey, Joan of Arc, p. 42. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.131 motion. Newton's God, Coleridge observed, seemed to be 'dethroned by Vice-regent second causes'.(3)

Yet it was not just the theological implications of eighteenth-century Newtonianism that bothered Coleridge. For we have seen that the immaterialistic position he was advocating in Southey's poem underpinned the spiritual politics (embraced in the poem by Joan herself) that he then was championing: a politics opposed to both the religious hypocrisy of a reactionary Establishment and the atheistic politics of leading radicals. The 'mechanic philosophy' he was attacking, then, was one that he saw as sustaining unsatisfactory political positions.

This perception - that Newtonianism was connected with politics - was not unusual in eighteenth-century Britain. Newton's natural philosophy, for example, played an important apologetic role on behalf of the British Establishment throughout the century. That this role was not only religious, but political as well, is plain from the fact that, in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Newton's name was often invoked to promote religious, political and moral orthodoxy.(4) At the end of the eighteenth century, however, this conservative use of Newtonianism was subverted by Newton's enlistment into natural philosophies that threatened the ruling elite. Newton now became linked to opponents of the religious and political Establishments. In particular, to scientific figures who publicly supported the French revolution. Indeed, John Robison was quite adamant that Newton's name was being tarnished by its association with the radical 'Jacobin science' discussed in the previous chapter, and endeavoured to reclaim the great scientist

3 Ibid.

4 See: Gascoigne, 'Bentley to the Victorians', pp. 219-27, 231, 234-8; Yeo, 'Genius, Method, and Morality', pp. 271-3. For valuable discussion of the ideological dimension of Newtonian science in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see also Stewart, Rise of Public Science, passim. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.132 for those in power. But he realized this was no easy task, for (as we have seen) Newton himself had made his views susceptible to a materialistic interpretation, by positing the aether. Robison glumly observed that Newton 'would surely recollect with regret that unhappy hour, when ... he first [suggested] his whim of a vibrating aether', for it had 'paved the way for much of the atomical philosophy of the moderns.'(5)

While, from the early 1800s, an increasingly conservative Coleridge began to follow Robison and others in condemning 'Jacobin science', it was not out of a shared concern to preserve the apologetic role of Newtonianism for the ruling classes. Indeed, Coleridge unequivocally portrayed Newton as an ally of the Jacobin scientists. Thus, while the nineteenth-century British Establishment continued to use Newton's name to uphold religious and political orthodoxy,(6) Coleridge began to blame Newton for social and political evils that he claimed had been encouraged by the scientist's 'mechanic philosophy'.

In the present chapter, we shall see that what Coleridge repeatedly condemned as most dangerous in this philosophy was its attached sensationalist epistemology. The high value Newtonianism placed on knowledge derived from the senses, he complained, not only undermined the belief in an imperceptible, spiritual reality, but more importantly, lent credibility to a

5 Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, pp. 483-4. The phrase replaced between square brackets was 'threw out', which might easily convey the opposite of Robison's meaning here. Robison was of course thinking of the politically subversive views of self-proclaimed Newtonians like Hartley and Priestley, but he also had in mind others who claimed a Newtonian pedigree, such as the Marquis de Laplace. The Frenchman's astronomical treatises, Robison complained, exemplified a very different attitude to that found in the General Scholium of Newton's Principia. Whereas Newton's work encouraged reflection on God's providential solicitude for humanity, Laplace's system, Robison maintained, led us to consider our insignificance in a fortuitous universe. Ibid., pp. 230-3. The political consequences of such an alarming idea, Robison maintained, had been made clear by events across the Channel.

6 See Gascoigne, 'Bentley to the Victorians', pp. 235-8. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.133 secular morality, one based on the sense of pleasure, and such 'Epicureanism' had undesirable social and political consequences. In particular (he protested) this self-focussed morality bolstered a new 'commercial' social order in which a mercenary individualism was rapidly replacing a regard for the common good claimed by both traditionalists and egalitarians. It was imperative, then, to refute the epistemological foundations given this morality by mechanistic science.

Coleridge undertook this in various ways. From a very early period, he attacked the reductionistic methodology of sensationalism, and defended innate ideas against a Lockean position that all our knowledge is obtained via the senses. Curiously, we shall also discover that, in keeping with this defence of innatism, he increasingly advocated a Platonic theory of knowledge that underpinned a hierarchical, aristocratic view of society.

His attack on the sensationalist epistemology promoted by Newtonianism later led him to insist on a distinction, derived from Kant, between mental faculties of 'Reason' and 'Understanding'. A clear idea of this distinction was vital, Coleridge claimed, for these faculties' legitimate epistemological functions had been distorted within the 'Epicurean' framework of the mechanical philosophy, and this distortion also sustained individualistic ideologies.

We shall also see that another major objection levelled at Newtonianism by the mature Coleridge was that it led to a vastly over-simplified model of nature, one which was then misapplied to social phenomena to argue that states should be viewed on the analogy of a machine. This was similar to Burke's complaint noted above (pp. 92-96) that a uniformitarian, scientific approach to nature had been misappropriated by eighteenth-century natural rights theorists. We shall observe that Coleridge Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.134 followed Burke in drawing a connection between the mechanical philosophy and natural rights, but went much further. For he argued that it was not just the quantitative, abstract approach of mechanistic science, but some of its most fundamental concepts, that sustained liberal social philosophies. Thus, Locke's individualistic 'natural rights', Coleridge asserted, owed their origin to an 'atomistic' conception of matter. Similar conceptual misappropriation could also be detected (he argued) in the laissez-faire doctrines of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which portrayed the economy as functioning like a self-regulating machine. Such a mechanistic model of society, he protested, not only debased human beings, but dangerously implied - in support of revolutionary change - that states were mere artifices that might occasionally need to be taken apart and reconstituted in order to function better. In Chapter V, we shall see that this model was opposed to the mature Coleridge's own view, derived from Burke, that human societies were analogous to living organisms, which had an intrinsic unity while developing 'naturally' and gradually over time.

For Coleridge, then, a mechanistic natural philosopy threatened in a variety of ways the traditional social order, which, from the early 1800s, he was coming to defend. Yet, we shall find that his criticism of the mechanical philosophy and its political implications was remarkably consistent with some of the views he had expressed earlier, as a 'radical' in the mid- 1790s. Concern about the rising influence of political demagogues, for instance, was a major motive for his hostility to this philosophy in both periods. But, while previously he had directly attacked the radicals' anti-hierarchical science, he now saw the main threat as coming from the increasingly powerful mercantile classes. By their endorsement of Newtonianism for their own political ends, they were unwittingly abetting the revolutionary cause. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.135

III.2 Reductionistic Sensationalism

From the time of his attacks on the 'mechanic philosophy' in Joan of Arc, Coleridge explicitly linked mechanism with a Lockean epistemology, in which credibility was restricted to knowledge derived from the senses - with the sense of sight especially privileged. Such a sensationalist epistemology, he believed, involved an implicit rejection of immaterial causation, for it effectively insisted that all causes in science must be deducible from observation. Coleridge was opposed to such an attitude. So, in the concluding paragraph of his footnote in Joan of Arc, he defended the reality of fundamental causes that lay outside the scope of the senses against those who refused to acknowledge that 'invisible things are not the objects of vision'. He went on to complain here that 'philosophical systems ... are received not for their Truth, but in proportion as they attribute to Causes a susceptibility of being seen, whenever our visual organs shall have become sufficiently powerful.'(7) Because sensation was widely seen as the source of knowledge, materialistic theories like those using Newton's aether were often deemed more credible than theories that did not employ a material source of motion.

More evidence of Coleridge's early hostility to a sensationalist approach to knowledge is found in a 1797 letter to his friend, Thomas Poole, though here he expressed a different objection, importantly, to that found in Joan of Arc. In this letter he protested that natural philosophies which privilege sense experience tend to dissect nature - to reduce macroscopic events to atomistic elements - thereby creating the delusion that reality consists of 'little things'. Those 'Experimentalists' who believe in 'the constant testimony of their senses', he complained, 'contemplate nothing but parts - and all parts are

7 Southey, Joan of Arc, p. 42. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.136 necessarily little - and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things.'(8)

Implicit in this later attack on sensationalism was a new objection to mechanism, one that targetted its reductionistic epistemology. Indeed, the sensationalism of Locke and his followers was based on the assumption that perception and thought can be broken down into fundamental, discrete units that correspond to sense impressions. In Chapter I (p. 26) we saw that Locke believed that the basic elements of thought were 'simple' ideas derived from individual sensations. He claimed, for example, that(9)

though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the things themselves, so united and blended that there is no separation, no distance between them, yet it is plain, the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed.

Following Locke, Hume similarly maintained that 'it is impossible perfectly to understand any idea, without tracing it up to its origin, and examining that primary impression, from which it arises.'(10) There were clear advantages for Hume in such a reductionistic approach to ideas, modelled on Newton's analytical method. It might enable us, he suggested, to 'attain a new microscope or species of optics, by which, in the moral sciences, the most minute, and most simple ideas may be so enlarged as to fall readily under our apprehension'.(11) At the end of the Queries in the Opticks Newton had in fact indicated that 'the Method of Analysis', based on experiment and observation, had important 'Moral' advantages. This method enabled one, Newton explained, to 'proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from

8CL,1, p. 354: to Thomas Poole, 16 October 1797.

9 Locke, Essay, 2.2.1, (p. 99).

10 Hume, Treatise, bk. 1, pt. 3, sec. 2, (pp. 120-1).

11 Hume, Enquiry, sec. 7, pt. 1, (p. 62). Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.137

Motions to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones ...'. He went on to claim that such a method would greatly benefit the moral sphere: 'if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged.'(12) We saw (pp. 22, 28, 29) that the moral benefits of Newton's analytical method were plain to Hartley, who argued that an understanding of the precise environmental causes of behaviour could be used to develop a happier and more just society. Hartley insisted that it was 'of the utmost Consequence to Morality and Religion, that the Affections and Passions should be analysed into their simple compounding Parts, by reversing the Steps of the Associations which concur to form them.'(13)

In 1797, Coleridge was starting to become hostile to such a reductionistic approach to mental phenomena, though he did not at that time appear to associate it with either Locke, Hume or Hartley. Several years later, however, in the early 1800s, he began to explicitly condemn these thinkers as Newton's accomplices in a reductionistic programme of mechanistic philosophy. Thus, echoing his 1797 criticism to Poole of those philosophers obsessed with 'little things', in an 1801 letter to the same friend, Coleridge first accused Locke of being the originator of 'the party of the Little-ists'.(14) He went on to express his intention to expose the 'artifices' of other 'little- ists', then proceeded immediately to attack Newton. 'Deep Thinking', he maintained,(15)

12 Newton, Opticks, pp. 404-5.

13 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. 81.

14 CL,2, p. 708: to Thomas Poole, 23 March 1801.

15 Ibid., p. 709. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.138

is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and ... all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton's works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind ... that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakspere or a Milton.

The implication of this passage is that Newton's 'mechanic philosophy', and its attached sensationalist epistemology, are intellectually and spiritually shallow. For they presume that the ultimate causes of things can be known by a rational, reductionistic procedure. For Coleridge, as the passage here suggests, such truths could only be known through a kind of revelation or inspiration - an unmediated spiritual knowing - and never by human reason alone. As we read on in Coleridge's letter we learn that his opinion was prompted by a reading of Newton's Opticks, which he claimed to be studying in the hope of mastering Newton's system before the age of thirty. Although he was 'exceedingly delighted with the beauty & neatness of [Newton's] experiments' and 'the accuracy of his immediate Deductions from them', Coleridge had serious reservations concerning 'the opinions founded on these Deductions'. Thus, just as in his attack on Newton in the footnote to Joan of Arc, he was once again taking issue with the Queries, and we saw that his main complaint about the Queries was that Newton had endeavoured to explain the basis of activity in the universe in terms of a material aether. This hostility to Newton's (apparent) ontology was probably one motive for Coleridge's insinuation that Newton's philosophy was the product of a superficial intellect. But we discover that Coleridge's main complaint now about the Queries was levelled at what he claimed were their thoroughly sensationalist premises. For he accused Newton here not only of being a materialist, but also of embracing a view - seen by Coleridge as implicit in a sensationalist epistemology - that the mind has no active role in perception, but merely re-acts,ina Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.139 mechanical fashion, to sensory impressions. Newton's 'whole Theory', Coleridge declared,(16)

is ... so exceedingly superficial as without impropriety to be deemed false. Newton was a mere materialist - mind, in his system is always passive, - a lazy looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive,ifit be indeed made in God's Image, & that too in the sublimest sense - the Image of the Creator - there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.

This criticism of Newton's Queries was clearly a response to the general empirical methodology of the Opticks, in which significant emphasis is given to the reports of the senses. Indeed, in several of the Queries, Newton portrayed the mind as passive in perception, suggesting that vision and hearing are produced by vibrations transmitted in a fluid, aetherial medium to the brain.(17) This was of course a notion that Coleridge had come across in Hartley, but, as I have indicated in another place, it somewhat misrepresents Newton's views on the mind.(18)

It is in fact likely that Coleridge's attack on Newton in his letter to Poole was directed at the much more overt sensationalism of other 'little-ists' like Locke and Hartley, whom he was coming to strongly oppose and whom he saw as applying Newton's analytical method to psychology. For instance, in a letter to Poole of the previous week, Coleridge claimed to have

16 Ibid.

17 Newton, Opticks, pp. 345, 353.

18 See Sysak, 'Coleridge's Construction', pp. 67-9. In several places in the Queries, Newton provides a clear indication that he espoused a traditional dualism, in which the mind is not passive, but participates in the activity that is taken to be characteristic of spirit. Query 31, in particular, defies Coleridge's criticism. For there Newton likens God's omnipotence in nature to the mind's activity in perception: 'the parts of the universe', Newton asserted, are '[God's] Creatures ... subservient to his Will; and he is no more the Soul of them, than the Soul of Man is the Soul of the Species of Things carried through the Organs of Sense into the place of its Sensation, where it perceives them by means of its immediate Presence.' Newton, Opticks, p. 403. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.140 seen through the reductionistic 'doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels'. In this same letter, he also mentioned that he was preparing a study that would expose 'the originality & merits of Locke, Hobbes, & Hume', all of whom were commonly regarded as advocating the sensationalism that Coleridge was attacking in Newton's Queries.(19)

III.3 The Politics of Innate Ideas

This new onslaught on thinkers toward whom he had not previously been hostile was partly prompted by Coleridge's intensive reading at this time of Leibniz and Kant.(20) Both these philosophers had contested the dependence of mechanistic natural philosophies upon sense-based knowledge, and criticized the misapplication of the former in areas they deemed outside the scope of physics. Leibniz, for instance, had earlier in the century complained that 'materialists ... or those who accept only a mechanical philosophy, are wrong in rejecting metaphysical considerations and trying to explain everything in terms of sense experience.'(21) This complaint was directed against what Leibniz saw as an undesirable tendency to apply mechanism to non-physical domains: the phenomenal reality investigated by the mechanical philosophy, he insisted, was only one part of human experience. In the anti-Lockean New Essays on Human Understanding (published posthumously in 1765) Leibniz argued that knowledge was not solely derived from the senses. For the mind also operated independently of sensory experience, a fact for which evidence

19 CL,2, pp. 706-7: to Thomas Poole, 16 March 1801.

20 See ibid., p. 676: to Thomas Poole, 13 February 1801.

21 Letter to Nicolas Remond, January 10, 1714, in Leibniz, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, p. 1064, cited in Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance, p. 153. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.141 could be found in the areas of mathematics, logic, metaphysics and ethics.(22)

A similar conviction that the mind had innate capacities, not derivable from experience, was later expressed by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781:1787). There, for example, Kant argued that perception of external reality is structured by formal conditions of space and time already present in the mind.(23) This idea was seized on by Coleridge as supporting his own view that the mind's agency is essential in perception, and a clear indication of its irreducible, spiritual nature. Thus, immediately preceding the statement to Poole quoted above that he had exposed the flaws in Hartley's associationism, Coleridge claimed that he had now 'completely extricated the notions of Time, and Space'.(24)

Coleridge was plainly impressed, then, by innatist tendencies he found in the philosophies of Leibniz and Kant. His reasons for condemning sensationalist epistemologies and psychologies, however, were not just technical or even religious. As indicated in this chapter's introduction, they were linked to his growing opposition to ascendant individualistic ideologies which threatened the traditional social order.

22 Leibniz, New Essays, pp. 48-50.

23 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 37-73.

24 CL,2, p. 706: to Thomas Poole, 16 March 1801. Levere has suggested that Coleridge at this time may have been familiar with A. F. M. Willich's 1798 Elements of the Critical Philosophy. In the 'Historical Introduction' to this work, the author offered a succint description of Kant's epistemological innovation: 'Kant remarked, that Mathematics and Natural Philosophy had properly become sciences by the discovery, that reason a priori attributed certain principles to objects; and he inquired, whether we could not also succeed better in Metaphysics by taking it for granted, that objects must be accommodated to the constitution of our mind, than by the common supposition, that all our knowledge must be regulated according to external objects.' Cited in Levere, Poetry realized in nature, p. 62. See Willich, Elements,p.14. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.142

We saw in Chapter I that the sensationalist attack on innate ideas, undertaken by Locke and his followers, had an anti- traditionalist, political agenda. Notions of innate principles and ideas, Locke complained, were irrational, dangerous and potentially tyrannical. While sense experience was subject to verification by others, innate ideas were not, so could be unjustly invoked by those in power to defend traditional privileges. We noted that Locke's politically motivated assault on innatism was continued in the eighteenth century by his disciples, and that it was Gay's attack on Hutcheson's notion of an innate 'moral sense' that inspired Hartley to show that 'morality' could be explained quite adequately by the association of ideas derived from the senses. We observed further that later in the century the Lockean, sensationalist agenda against innatism was taken up by Priestley, who censured what he claimed was a politically dangerous notion of innate principles or 'instincts' found in the writings of the Scottish 'common sense' philosophers.

Around 1800, Coleridge began to explicitly defend innate ideas, and even the notion of innate psychological differences, against Locke, Hartley, Paley and others. For example, in marginal annotations on a passage quoted earlier from Hartley's Observations (p. 29, above), Coleridge disputed Hartley's uniformitarian claim that, for 'Beings of the same Nature', any intellectual or moral differences would be eliminated by exposure to 'the same Impressions and Associations'. Coleridge underlined the phrase,'the same Nature', and then queried, 'Is there no difference in the organs, or a priori causes of Ideas?'(25) This

25 CC,12, vol. 2, p. 960: marginalia on the 1791 edition of Hartley's Observations which included a third volume of 'Notes and Additions' by Herman Andrew Pistorius. The editors date these marginalia as between 1799 and 1802. Coleridge's position was not unlike that expressed by James Beattie - one of the 'common sense' philosophers Priestley attacked - who argued that there were inherent differences in the quantity of 'common sense' possessed by individuals, and (continued...) Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.143 opposition to Hartley's uniformitarian psychology reflects Coleridge's growing distrust after 1800 of philosophies with anti-hierarchical tendencies and increasing support for the traditional, landed social order.

More evidence of his increasing preoccupation from the early 1800s with the issue of innate ideas is found in letters and notebooks. In one of the latter, for instance, there is a brief reference to a chapter on innate ideas in the Antidote against Atheism (1653) by the Cambridge 'Platonist', Henry More.(26) In the chapter in question, More attacked those who believe 'that the Soul has no Knowledge nor Notion, but what is in a Passive way impressed or delineated upon her from the Objects of Sense'. To such a sensationalist position, More opposed his own Platonic view that the mind is not passively constituted by experience, but contains knowledge prior to any experience, that 'there is an active and actuall Knowledge in a man, of which ... outward Objects are rather the re-minders than the first begetters or implanters.'(27) Coleridge was probably attracted to this Platonic answer to sensationalist philosophies for religious reasons, but this was not his only motivation. For More's defence of innatism could also be seen as having political implications, as More in fact indicated. In the Antidote,hehad used St. Anselm's ontological argument to demonstrate that God's existence can be proven from the innate idea we have of a perfect

25(...continued) claimed that 'such diversities are ... to be referred, for the most part, to the original constitution of the mind, which it is not in the power of education to alter.' Cited in McEvoy and McGuire, 'God and Nature', p. 375. The citation is taken from James Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immortality of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism, (Edinburgh, 1771), p. 45.

26 CN,1, entry 938: April-November, 1801.

27 More, Several Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, p. 17. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.144 being.(28) In an appendix to his work, however, he listed several major objections that had been raised against this ontological argument. One of these was 'that God did not put this Idea of himself into the Mind of Man, but the subtiler sort of Politicians, that have alwaies used Religion as a mere Engine of State.'(29) Now this was the kind of objection being made by Locke and his followers about the political dangers of a belief in innate moral principles: a belief which could be used to mislead people into unquestioning acceptance of traditional authority. This of course does not mean that all those who defended innate ideas on philosophical or religious grounds had such a political objective. But we shall now see that, in Coleridge's defence of innatism against Locke, the political dimension was explicit.

Locke's treatment of innate ideas was contested by Coleridge in several letters of 1801 to his patron, the industrialist Josiah Wedgwood. In these letters, Coleridge claimed that Locke had not, as was commonly held, overturned the notion of innate ideas.(30) With many others, Coleridge presumed that Locke's target was Descartes, yet Coleridge did not agree (he told Wedgwood) that Descartes endorsed innate ideas. So Locke's targets were 'Men of Straw', 'neither more nor less than Mr Locke's own Ideas of Reflection'. Moreover, he declared, 'there is no Principle, no organic part ... of Mr Locke's Essay which

28 Ibid., pp. 9-36.

29 Ibid., p. 146. In his rebuttal of this objection More elaborated on this 'grand suspicion of Atheists'. The latter claimed (he said) 'that this Notion of a God is onely a crafty Figment of Politicians, whereby they would contain the People in Obedience'. Ibid., p. 166.

30 CL,2, pp. 677-703: to Josiah Wedgwood, February 1801. Some discussion of these letters and their background is provided in Brinkley, 'Coleridge on Locke'. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.145 did not [previously] exist in the metaphysical System of Des Cartes'.(31)

Coleridge was trying to make three main points. The first was that, either out of ignorance or dishonesty, Locke had chosen the wrong target for his assault on innate ideas. He had misunderstood Descartes, or possibly had not even read the Frenchman, alleged Coleridge.(32) The second point was that Locke did not deserve his reputation as an innovative philosopher, for his philosophy was not novel: indeed, it was little different from the very system he claimed to be refuting. Having thus attempted to discredit Locke's originality and competence to deal with the question of innate ideas, Coleridge confided to Wedgwood that he did 'not think the Doctrine of innate Ideas ... so utterly absurd & ridiculous, as Aristotle, Des Cartes, and Mr Locke have concurred in representing it.'(33)

Coleridge's attack here on Locke's sensationalist refutation of innatism should be interpreted as reflecting an increasing hostility to the moral and political implications of Locke's system. Aarsleff has already pointed out indeed, that attempts

31 CL,2, pp. 686, 684, 699.

32 Ibid., p. 692.

33 Ibid., p. 696. Coleridge's continuing support for a doctrine of innate ideas and opposition to Lockean sensationalism is apparent in his later writings. For example, in one of his Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19, he discussed Locke's philosophy, adducing arguments like those found in his 1801 letters to Wedgwood. The central problem with Locke's epistemology, he maintained in his lecture, lay in the depiction of ideas as the result of sense- impressions entering into contact with the mind. Locke could have avoided such an unfortunate, 'mechanical' representation of the origin of ideas, Coleridge claimed, had he more precisely described ideas as being 'elicited', rather than caused, by impressions. PL, p. 378. In other words, Coleridge viewed ideas Platonically, as inborn and merely requiring an external stimulus to be aroused. He offered the following organic analogy: 'Mr. Locke's phrases seem to say that the sun, the rain, the manure, and so on, had made the wheat, had made the barley and so forth ... [However] if for this you substitute the assertion that a grain of wheat might remain for ever and be perfectly useless and to all purposes non-apparent, had it not been that the congenial sunshine and proper soil called it forth - everything in Locke would be perfectly rational.' Ibid., p. 379. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.146

(like that of Coleridge) to undermine Locke's originality were becoming a standard feature of the nineteenth-century British Establishment's war on Utilitarianism. As the latter was popularly seen as stemming from Locke, it could be subverted by casting doubts on Locke's reputation.(34)

Hints of the political motivation for Coleridge's opposition to Lockean sensationalism are in fact provided in the final pages of his last letter to Wedgwood, where he adduced further reasons why he thought the philosopher's intellectual standing in Britain was so undeservedly high. To begin with, he argued, Locke was associated with the victorious party in the 1688 Revolution, and as a result 'his works [were] cried up by the successful Revolutionary Party with the usual Zeal & industry of political Faction.' Furthermore, Locke's philosophy had found powerful advocates among Low Churchmen and Dissenters for the way in which it seemingly harmonized Christian beliefs with the empiricist epistemology accompanying the recently resuscitated, Epicurean atomism of Hobbes and Gassendi. Locke's reputation as a deeply religious man, Coleridge argued, spared the Church of having to take a stand against a growing tendency to appeal to reason and experience, rather than revelation, in religious matters. Coleridge cynically observed:(35)

When the fundamental Principles of the new Epicurean School were taught by Mr Locke, & all the Doctrines of Religion & Morality, forced into juxtaposition & apparent combination with them, the Clergy imagined that a disagreeable Task was fairly taken off their hands - they could admit what they were few of them able to overthrow, & yet shelter themselves from the consequences of the admission by the authority of Mr Locke.

A third factor contributing to Locke's status, Coleridge's letter went on, was national pride in the opinion that, just as 'Newton

34 Aarsleff, 'Locke's Reputation', pp. 401-7, 412-17.

35 CL,2, p. 701. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.147 had ... overthrown Cartesian Physics', Locke had dethroned 'Cartesian Metaphysics'. In addition, Voltaire's influential promotion of Locke and denigration of Newton's opponent, Leibniz, had similarly advanced Locke's reputation. But even more significant than all of these considerations, Coleridge maintained, was a current hostility to metaphysics, for which there were several reasons. First of all, there was the overriding importance that the British attached to commercial activity, which had produced an abundance of lawyers. Added to this was the fact that the country had too few universities. Lastly, and most importantly, the established Church was to blame for this state of affairs by appointing its members on the basis of their acquiescence in the thirty-nine articles rather than on intellectual merit.(36)

For Coleridge, then, Locke's popularity was linked with a number of philosophical and social developments, all of which, in the early 1800s, he was coming to oppose. It was connected with the revival of Epicurean atomism in the seventeenth century, and a concomitant epistemological emphasis on sense-based knowledge - developments which had been opportunistically embraced by the Church. It was also related to the liberal politics of those who had triumphed in 1688 and with the commercial ideology that those politics had subsequently propelled. For the individualistic liberalism of Locke that was endorsed by the 1688 revolutionary settlement lent itself, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, to the laissez-faire economics that were being championed by the new commercial classes, especially by Dissenters like Priestley.(37) That Coleridge could view all these philosophical, political and economic developments as

36 Ibid., pp. 701-3.

37 See Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, chapter 5. Macpherson shows that Locke's individualistic natural rights sanctioned the unlimited individual accumulation of property in emerging bourgeois capitalism. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.148 interrelated, and connected with Locke's sensationalist assault on innate ideas, will perhaps not seem so surprising, once we observe the way in which his own moral and political perspectives were intertwined with an alternative, anti-sensationalist, Platonic theory of knowledge.

III.4 Coleridge's 'Platonic Old England'

Indeed, underlying Coleridge's early critique of the mechanical philosophy and its sensationalist, Lockean epistemology was a conception of the world that was unashamedly Platonic.(38) Plato, in several of his works, had made the important hierarchical distinction between two different kinds of knowledge: that procured through abstract reflection about the world and that obtained through sense experience. True knowledge, Plato claimed, is attained only through the first, 'rational' mode of apprehending reality. Knowledge acquired by means of the senses, on the other hand, is delusory. In the Timaeus, he offered arguments to support his epistemology. There, for instance, he maintained that the object of knowledge obtained through theoretical reasoning is timeless and unchanging. This sort of knowledge is plainly superior to sensory knowledge, which is based on the ever-changing world of temporal, material existence. 'We must', he insisted,(39)

begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real.

38 Coleridge's early Platonism is discussed in Deschamps, Pensée de Coleridge, pp. 373-406.

39 Plato, Timaeus, 27D-28A. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.149

For Plato, the unvarying reality referred to here was an ideal realm of 'forms', upon which the material world apprehended by the senses is imperfectly patterned. An example of this ideal reality, he indicated, is to be found in the spheres of arithmetic and geometry, in which there exists an exactness not found in nature. This point is well illustrated in a section of the Republic, where Plato criticizes too much observation of the heavens as inferior to the mathematical determination of the true relations among physical objects. Knowledge of the things that really matter - the 'ultimate unseen reality' - can never be gained from sensation.(40) The famous 'allegory of the cave' in the Republic elucidates this position. There, the realm of sense experience is only a shadow or reflection of the truly real, yet most people mistake it for the totality of existence.(41)

We earlier saw that such a profound mistrust of sensation was a part of Coleridge's own way of thinking from the time of Joan of Arc. So, it is not surprising to find him in that poem adapting Plato's cave allegory to advance the view that knowledge of a fundamental, immaterial reality could only be represented symbolically, for it could never be procured by the senses. 'All that meets the bodily sense', Coleridge declared, is 'symbolical',(42)

... one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality That we may learn with young unwounded ken Things from their shadows.

We have seen that it was the influence of this imperceptible, immaterial sphere of reality upon phenomena that mattered for the young Coleridge, and in Joan of Arc he criticized those who

40 Plato, Republic, 529A-530C.

41 Ibid., 514A-521B.

42 Southey, Joan of Arc, Bk. 2, ll. 19-24, p. 40. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.150 arrogantly take the senses to be the exclusive source of knowledge about the world, 'who deem themselves most free,/ When they within this gross and visible sphere/ Chain down the winged thought'.(43) A frankly Platonic epistemology, then, sustained the immaterialistic natural philosophy that Coleridge held in the mid-1790s.

But there were also important political implications in such an epistemology, which are apparent in Coleridge's thought from this early period, and which reflect Plato's own politics. For in the Republic Plato had argued that a philosophical elite that has privileged access to the realm of unchanging 'ideas' should govern, while the mass of people who merely have knowledge of the illusory, ephemeral world of sense experience must be excluded from power.(44) So, from a Platonic point of view, the sensationalist epistemology of the 'mechanic philosophy' - which Coleridge saw as sustaining atheistic political ideologies - is an inadequate basis for making political judgements.

The fundamental connection between Coleridge's early thinking about natural philosophy and an elitist view of knowledge and politics is indicated by Wylie. Wylie has persuasively argued

43 Ibid., ll. 29-31, p. 40. Another instance of Coleridge's adoption of a Platonic attitude to knowledge in this early period is found in the poem 'Religious Musings' (1796) where he wrote (ll. 396-8, PW,1, p. 124), in a more lyrical vein, that 'Life is a vision shadowy of Truth;/ And vice, and anguish, and the weary grave, Shapes of a dream!' In slightly later editions of this poem, Coleridge indicated that he thought these lines echoed Bishop Berkeley's immaterialism, and indeed, on a couple of occasions around this time, he referred to himself as a 'Berkleian'. See: PW,1, p. 124n.2; CL,1, pp. 278, 335: to John Thelwall, 17 December 1796; to Robert Southey, 17 July 1797. His enthusiasm for Berkeley at this time is indicated by the fact that he named his second son, born in 1798, after the Irish bishop. His first son, born in 1796, was revealingly given the name Hartley. It is important to note that Coleridge saw Berkeley's philosophy as more harmonious with Platonism than with the tradition of Lockean empiricism. In one of his 1801 letters to Wedgwood, for instance, he declared that Berkeley 'owed much to Plato & Malebranch, but nothing to Locke'. CL,2, p. 703: to Josiah Wedgwood, February 1801.

44 Plato, Republic, 473-529. See also Hutchison, 'Why Does Plato Urge Rulers to Study Astronomy?' Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.151 that the young Coleridge saw himself as one of the inheritors of a tradition of ancient wisdom that had more recently included Newton, Franklin, Hartley and Priestley. Coleridge considered himself to be a successor to these 'patriot sages': a new member of the 'elect band' that alone knew how to read the 'book of nature' and thus bring about a positive transformation in society (cf. above, pp. 45-57).(45) Another example of such elitism, Wylie elsewhere has pointed out, is found in the deliberate fashioning of such poems as 'Religious Musings' to ensure that their political message would be comprehensible only to a select readership of like-minded, millenarian radicals.(46)

Such a hierarchical, Platonic view of knowledge pervades Coleridge's thought in the mid-1790s. In his 1795 lectures, for example (notwithstanding his advocacy of social and political reform) he expressed clear reservations about the ability of the poorer, uneducated sections of society to exercise political wisdom. The potential problems of an extended franchise had been demonstrated to him by the aftermath of the French Revolution.(47)

The annals of the French Revolution have recorded in Letters of Blood, that the Knowledge of the Few cannot counteract the Ignorance of the Many; that the Light of Philosophy, when it is confined to a small Minority, points out the Possessors as the Victims, rather than the Illuminators, of the Multitude.

While this statement implied that the solution to the problems attendant upon democracy lay in education, Coleridge subsequently suggested that such enlightenment was not so easily attainable. In a later lecture, he argued that the poorer classes would only achieve political and economic equality by initially deferring to a few, exceptional individuals. The attainment of an egalitarian

45 Wylie, Young Coleridge, pp. 12-26, 47-61.

46 Idem, 'Coleridge and the Lunaticks', pp. 37-8.

47 CC,1, p. 6. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.152 paradise on Earth was 'not to be procured by the tumultuous uprising of an indignant multitude but [by] an unresisting yet deeply principled Minority'.(48) Such an elitist attitude is much more pronounced in a 1799 letter to Poole, where Coleridge insisted that the kind of education offered by religion provided the only means of keeping the lower classes in check: 'You have been often unwisely fretful with me when I have pressed upon you their depravity. - Without religious joys, and religious terrors nothing can be expected from the inferior Classes in society ...'.(49)

In Coleridge's writings of the early 1800s, we see an increasing number of approving references to Platonism. In a letter of 1802, for example, we find him making a favourable comparison between Platonic, Judaic and Christian conceptions of the divinity: 'if there be any two subjects which have in the very depth of my Nature interested me, it has been the Hebrew & Christian Theology, & the Theology of Plato.' Just as he had contrasted his own Platonic vision of the world in Joan of Arc with that of a 'Newtonian' 'mechanic philosophy', he now counterposed the latter's (apparent) absentee deity to the providential God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. 'In the Hebrew Poets', he claimed, 'each Thing has a life of it's own, & yet they are all one Life. In God they move & live, & have their Being - not had, as the cold System of Newtonian Theology

48 Ibid., p. 218.

49 CL,1, p. 480, to Thomas Poole, 8 April 1799. Coleridge's condescension and suspicion of the poor needs to be balanced against his expressed public concern for their welfare. His attitude was characteristic of many in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who were born into the Establishment yet did not fully identify with it. Chandler uses the term 'Tory-Radical' to describe such thinkers as Coleridge who defended the poor while arguing that they required guidance from 'enlightened' individuals. Chandler, Dream of Order, pp. 4-5. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.153 represents/ but have.'(50) Once again, Coleridge was affirming the primacy of an underlying, spiritual reality in the universe which he felt a Newtonian, mechanistic philosophy had done away with. Ignoring that this was probably not Newton's view, Coleridge went on here to praise the 'platonizing Spirit' of Milton, who, understanding that the real could only be represented symbolically, 'wrote nothing without an interior meaning'. Interestingly, this elucidates Coleridge's comparison (noted above) between the scientist Newton, and the poets Milton and Shakespeare. For Coleridge, Newton's mechanistic depiction of the universe implied that the scientist lacked the 'platonizing spirit' which could apprehend the true, immaterial nature of reality.(51) The dependence of the 'mechanic philosophy' on sense-derived knowledge, Coleridge believed, meant that it could never account for the spiritual basis of phenomena. True knowledge of nature was available only to those who acknowledged such a spiritual basis.

Coleridge's attraction to this hierarchical, Platonic way of understanding the world is again evident in a note from 1805, where he expressed a literary predilection for a 'spiritual platonic old England'. Those who typified this 'platonic old England' were authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Harrington and Wordsworth.(52) The antithesis of the spirit displayed by these writers, Coleridge explained disapprovingly, was that epitomized by Locke in philosophy and Pope in poetry.

50 CL,2, p. 866: to William Sotheby, 10 September 1802. Coleridge's attitude to Newton here contrasts markedly with an earlier opinion expressed to the radical Thelwall, where he similarly argued that the Christian God was one 'in whom we all of us move, & have our being', but defended Christianity on the grounds that 'this Religion was believed by Newton, Locke, & Hartley'. CL,1, p. 280: to John Thelwall, 17 December 1796.

51 Cf. Sysak, 'Coleridge's Construction', pp. 78-80.

52 CN,2, entry 2598: May- August 1805. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.154

Superficially, this might appear to be a response to the canons of eighteenth-century literary taste against which Coleridge and his fellow Romantics were certainly reacting. Pope was seen to be one of the chief representatives of a restrictive, rule-bound Neoclassicism in literature, and a Lockean epistemology was associated with this tradition. For Locke's epistemological reduction of human thought to atomistic sense impressions had been adopted as the basis of eighteenth-century theories of the artistic imagination. In contrast to what was to become the Romantic movement's favoured simile of the imagination as an organic entity that operates according to its own rules and purposes, Neoclassical theorists saw artistic creation in terms of a mechanical reconstitution by the mind of sensory stimuli supplied by the external environment.(53)

Such an aesthetic contrast might indeed be implied in Coleridge's remarks here, but it was not his only concern. For he also explicitly contrasted his 'platonic old England' with a 'commercial G. Britain', and he associated this new image of the nation with men like Hume, Priestley, Paley, Darwin and Pitt - figures identified with philosophical, political, theological and scientific matters rather than with literature.

53 See Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 159-77. Coleridge was later to express this contrast in terms of a distinction made famous by August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), one of the founders of the Romantic movement in Germany. In some lectures of 1808, Schlegel distinguished the new Romantic ideal of great art from previous Neo- classical formulations by arguing that, while in Romanticism the form of the work of art was 'organic', in Neo-classicism it was 'mechanical'. What he meant by this, Schlegel explained, is that 'organic' form springs, as it were, from the nature of the subject in question. In such a process, the work of art seems to take on a completely unique life of its own, as if it were unfolding according to intrinsic 'organic' principles. In 'mechanical' form, on the other hand, the particularity of the subject is submerged by a concern for extrinsic rules. Schlegel, Course of Lectures, p. 340. This distinction was restated by Coleridge to a British public in lectures of 1811-13 on Shakespearean drama. CC,5, vol. 1, pp. 358, 495. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.155

The authors cited above as representing Coleridge's 'platonic old England' similarly had associations that went beyond the purely literary or aesthetic. Some of these associations were scientific, for we have just seen that Coleridge contrasted a 'Platonic' world-view (found in Shakespeare and Milton) with a mechanistic, 'Newtonian' one. In a similar vein (as we shall see more fully in Chapter V) he was coming to regard Bacon as a thinker whose method took one beyond the realm of mere phenomena to the underlying, immaterial structure of nature. Bacon, Coleridge later wrote, was 'the British Plato'.(54)

But there were political implications too in Coleridge's advocacy of a 'platonic old England'. Both the 'old platonists' Harrington and Milton, for instance, had advocated the establishment of a commonwealth under the control of an aristocracy.(55) In the previous chapter, we observed that such an aristocratic society was the kind that Coleridge was increasingly coming to favour in the early 1800s. His 'platonic old England', then, implied a similarly hierarchical social order that derived its justification from a hierarchical, Platonic epistemology and an attached immaterialistic cosmology. Such a society, however, was quickly disappearing to make way for a new 'commercial G. Britain', sustained by a mechanistic, 'Newtonian' science and an associated 'Lockean' sensationalism. In order to subvert this 'commercial G. Britain', then, Coleridge believed it was necessary to expose the philosophical premises upon which it was based. We have seen that this is something he was beginning to do from the early 1800s, through his criticisms of Newton and Locke. Before canvassing further his assault on these thinkers' 'mechanic philosophy', we must first examine why he was opposed to a 'commercial G. Britain'.

54 CC,4, vol. 1, p. 488. Here, Coleridge correspondingly referred to Plato as 'the Athenian Verulam'.

55 See Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 496-512. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.156

III.5 'Commercial G. Britain'

We have already mentioned (pp. 18, 19) that a hostility to commerce was present in Coleridge's thought from the mid-1790s. In his Bristol lectures, for example, he had voiced his objections to the mercenary interests of some of his fellow Unitarians in the reform movement. His Pantisocratic beliefs at that time were clearly in conflict with the idea of commerce for purely monetary gain, as they were with the notion of property accumulation in general. While Coleridge later abandoned his Pantisocratic egalitarianism in favour of an increasingly aristocratic politics, he continued to oppose what he felt was an excessive importance given to commerce in Britain.

Thus, in a damning 1800 critique of Pitt in the Morning Post, he argued that one of the evils that had resulted from the prime minister's period in office had been an 'overbalance of the commercial interest'.(56) The word 'overbalance' here indicated that Coleridge was not condemning commerce outright, but that he saw it as having a disproportionate value compared with other facets of the nation's economy. A slightly earlier article in the same newspaper had in fact given an indication of the sort of balance Coleridge felt would be conducive to Britain's economic well-being. The article, entitled 'Our Commercial Politicians', disputed the view held by some members of the government that it was in the country's commercial interest to pursue war with France. Coleridge's argument against the continuation of war was pitched in its advocates' own terms. Cessation of hostilities and recommencement of trade with France, he claimed, would initially spur British trade. But, more importantly, it might serve to discourage radical tendencies in France by allowing the landed interest to re-establish its power. If such logic fell on

56 'Pitt and Bonaparte: Pitt', Morning Post, 19 March 1800, CC,3, vol. 1, pp. 219-26, (p. 225). Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.157 deaf ears, he had ready another line of reasoning. Britain's attempts to retain its commercial pre-eminence in Europe through war, he maintained, might not only impart such 'a superiority to the moneyed interest of the country over the landed, as might be fatal to our Constitution', but might also have a detrimental effect on 'the condition and morals of the lower and more numerous classes' at home. He went on to suggest that those with landed property were less prone to corruption than those involved in commerce. Moreover, he claimed, the country's wartime commercial gain had occurred at the expense of domestic development and the welfare of the working-class population, much of which had been made dependent upon charity. He concluded by insisting that commerce ought to be seen as but a useful adjunct to other aspects of the nation's life, such as its agrarian production and maritime security.(57)

Coleridge's opposition to a 'commercial G. Britain' in 1800, then, was based on several complaints. If commercial interests had their way and war continued, France would have less chance of regaining the economic stability that was conducive to the conservative politics that Britain wished its neighbours to have. While, on the home front, the 'overbalance of the commercial interest' not only hurt the poorer sections of the population, but also threatened the traditional, agrarian basis of the country's political and economic structure. There were thus pressing political reasons, as well as humanitarian ones, to correct this 'overbalance'.

We can thus begin to explain why Coleridge in 1805 viewed the various individuals listed above as exemplifying a 'commercial G. Britain'. To begin with, the British government could be held primarily responsible for what he saw as a continuing tendency to

57 'Our Commercial Politicians', Morning Post, 1 February 1800, ibid., pp. 140-4. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.158 overvalue commerce. As Pitt was once again prime minister in 1805 after a brief period out of office, it was natural that he be included in this list. Moreover, in the mid-1790s, Coleridge had similarly blamed Pitt for the misery inflicted on the poor as a result of government policies. As a young radical, Coleridge had objected not only to Pitt's heavy-handed treatment of political opponents, but also to the prime minister's apparent unconcern for the widespread economic hardship produced by the war against France. This compassionless politics was symptomatic of the individualistic pursuit of financial gain that Coleridge saw as characterizing a 'commercial G. Britain'. By contrast, the 'spiritual platonic old England' that was being displaced by these new mercenary attitudes, implied a traditional, agricultural society in which fellow-feeling was valued.

In Coleridge's 1800 Morning Post article on Pitt, just such a contrast was clearly implied.(58) There, the young journalist offered a penetrating analysis of the prime minister's character. The problem with Pitt, Coleridge argued, was that he had had no real 'moral' education: his emotions had not been allowed to develop and he had been sheltered from ordinary experience. Coleridge used an organic metaphor to illustrate his point. Pitt's education, he claimed, could be compared to 'a plant sown and reared in a hot-house'. Like the plant, Pitt had been well protected from the elements, so had not experienced a 'natural' emotional development. He was 'a being, who had had no feelings connected with man or nature, no spontaneous impulses'. Coleridge claimed that Pitt's character had been 'cast, rather than grew': the future prime minister had been thrown from infancy into a ready-made 'mould' of family aspirations and 'political connections'. His separation from the ordinary world, Coleridge went on, had made him view it in abstract terms,

58 'Pitt and Bonaparte: Pitt', Morning Post, 19 March 1800, ibid., pp. 219-26. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.159 disconnected from any real, felt experience. It was because of such disconnection from ordinary life, Coleridge claimed, that the emotionally underdeveloped prime minister had brutally rejected calls for reform and waged a war that exacerbated poverty and benefited rich commercial interests. As Holmes has suggested, Coleridge's article represented Pitt's education as the antithesis of the 'organic' development that Romantic thinkers were increasingly coming to favour: a development parallel to that Burke saw in the nation, anchored in history and tradition.(59)

The inclusion of Priestley among those who typified a 'commercial G. Britain' reflected similar concerns. We have noted that there was already some hostility in the young Coleridge's complaints about the self-interested, commercial motives of Priestley and other middle-class Unitarians (see above, pp. 18, 19). This hostility was exacerbated as Coleridge increasingly identified himself with the landed interest. His antagonism was also reflected in a new dissatisfaction with Unitarian Christianity. While there were personal reasons for such dissatisfaction, there were also obvious political ones. For Unitarianism was conspicuous among the new commercial middle classes, whose growing influence Coleridge saw as threatening the traditional social order of a 'platonic old England'.

Coleridge's apostasy from Unitarianism occurred gradually, and as late as 1798 he was still contemplating a career as a Unitarian minister. This was partly from choice and also partly out of a concern to have a means of providing for his young family. He explained to his soon-to-be patron, Josiah Wedgwood, that a Unitarian preaching position offered to him was attractive, because it would supply 'a permanent income not

59 Holmes, Early Visions, p. 264. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.160 inconsistent with [his] religious or political creeds'.(60) The young Coleridge's high regard for Priestley was still strong at this time, and we have already noted that he continued to praise Priestley's chemistry as lending support to the scientist's 'more sublime theological works.'(61)

One of the earliest indications that Coleridge was beginning to question the faith he had embraced in his Cambridge years is found in a 1799 letter written to his wife from Germany, after learning of the death of his second son, Berkeley. Besides conveying the impact of this calamity on Coleridge, the letter also reveals a new hostility to the uniformitarian character of Priestley's impersonal God:(62)

that God works by general laws are to me words without meaning or worse than meaningless ... What and who are these horrible shadows necessity and general law, to which God himself must offer sacrifices - hecatombs of Sacrifices ... the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley.

Coleridge's dissatisfaction with the abstract rationality of Unitarian theology was registered in a notebook entry a little later. There, he pithily expressed his gloom over the available alternatives to religious orthodoxy: 'Socinianism Moonlight - Methodism &c A Stove! O for some Sun that shall unite Light & Warmth'.(63)

Yet, despite such growing pessimism, Coleridge continued to support the rational creed of Priestley. For instance, we find him in 1802 writing to his friend, the Unitarian minister Estlin, that 'the Quakers & Unitarians are the only Christians,

60 CL,1, p. 367: to Josiah Wedgwood, 5 January 1798.

61 Ibid., p. 372: to John Prior Estlin, 16 January 1798.

62 Ibid., p. 482: to Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, 8 April 1799.

63 CN,1, entry 467: September-November 1799. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.161 altogether pure from Idolatry'.(64) In a letter of the following year to another Unitarian friend he likewise insisted that Trinitarians were 'Idolaters' and professed his continuing adherence to a belief in 'the absolute Impersonality of the Deity'.(65) In a similar vein was a note jotted down in the same year: 'the Trinity that none but an Ideot can believe, & the Existence of God which none but a madman can disbelieve.'(66) These statements, however, must be contrasted with others, such as his declaration in an 1802 letter to his brother George, 'that the Socinian & Arian Hypotheses are utterly untenable; but what to put in their place?'(67) Clearly, Coleridge was privately undecided on what to believe. So to his Unitarian friends he avowed doctrinal loyalty, while to his older, paternalistic brother he was only too willing to explain that he had recanted his unorthodox views.(68)

Revealingly, this last letter to his brother provides an indication of the grounds for Coleridge's definitive apostasy from Unitarianism several years later. For it strongly suggests, as one commentator has remarked, that Coleridge 'approached

64 CL,2, p. 893: to John Prior Estlin, 7 December 1802. Some fourteen years later, Coleridge expressed a vastly different opinion of these two Christian sects. See below, p. 180.

65 Ibid., p. 1022: to Matthew Coates, 5 December 1803. Coleridge here referred to this belief as 'the pure Fountain of all [my] moral & religious Feelings & [C]omforts', and noted that his correspondent was 'the first man, from whom I heard that article of my Faith distinctly enunciated'.

66 CN,1, entry 1543: October 1803. Coleridge's hostility to the Church Establishment at this time is also clear from the fact that, in an 1803 edition of his poems, he retained a footnote from the pro- revolutionary 'Religious Musings' (1794-6) which read: 'this passage alludes to the French Revolution: and the subsequent paragraph to the downfall of Religious Establishments. I am convinced that the Babylon of the Apocalypse does not apply to Rome exclusively; but to the union of Religion with Power and Wealth, wherever it is found.' PW,1, p. 121n.1.

67 CL,2, p. 807: to George Coleridge, 1 July 1802.

68 On the young Samuel's relationship to his brother, see Holmes, Early Visions, pp. 14-15, 19, 24, 146-7, 211. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.162 religious orthodoxy by way of political orthodoxy'.(69) Although Coleridge did not yet embrace Anglican teachings, his letter voiced support, on constitutional grounds, for the principle of an 'Established Church'. By this he meant that the Anglican Church and its possessions were 'antecedent to any form of Government in England'. He contrasted this special sanction for the Church's authority with the lack of any similar warrant held by the Dissenters in Britain and with the current situation in France, where the Concordat between the Papacy and Napoleon had recently been established. The result of the Concordat, Coleridge complained, was that the Catholic Church in France was now propertyless and subject to state direction on stipendiary matters and episcopal election.(70)

Such remarks reflect Coleridge's new conservative fears that the decline of religious authority in the state might lead to social anarchy, like that witnessed in France just after the Revolution. He had come to believe that an independent Church offered the only safeguard against such a prospect. His complaints about the Concordat between France and Rome in fact stemmed as much from his concern about the British political scene as from his antipathy to Napoleon's politics. Like his precursor, Burke, Coleridge had one eye turned on the foe abroad while the other was watching the adversary at home. This adversary was coming to include all those who challenged the authority of established religion, especially the Dissenters. The clear preference expressed in his letter to his brother for the constitutional authority of the Church of England over the lack of any such authority in Nonconformist sects indicates that Coleridge now disapproved of the latter for political reasons. Such political considerations must have been critical in his

69 Miller, 'Private Faith', p. 72.

70 CL,2, p. 806: to George Coleridge, 1 July 1802. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.163 private struggle with Unitarian beliefs. Moreover, the Unitarians were overtly hostile to the traditional social hierarchy based on landed property that he increasingly saw as necessary for maintaining social stability: their politics were broadly liberal and they favoured the development of manufacturing and trade over agriculture.

Unitarianism, then, was certainly not compatible with Coleridge's 'platonic old England', and in 1805 he seems to have finally abandoned the faith of his Cambridge years and of his former mentor, Priestley. No longer persuaded that Christianity consisted merely in believing in the historical fact and social message of Christ, Coleridge now held that its key article of faith was the Trinity, and asserted that 'Unitarianism in all its Forms is Idolatry'.(71) Revealingly, Priestley had earlier ascribed what he claimed were the corrupted Christian doctrines of an immaterial soul and the Trinity to the influence of Platonism, and we have seen (p. 43) that this argument had been reiterated by Coleridge in the 1795 Bristol lectures. For Priestley and the young Coleridge, the Platonic distinction between a transcendent realm of truth and a mundane realm of illusion served to vindicate those in power.(72) It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that an increasingly conservative Coleridge was attracted to Platonism as a framework for his new- found religious and political orthodoxy.

Significantly, at the time of his definitive rejection of Unitarianism in 1805, Coleridge was living in Malta, where he had obtained firstly a position as Private Secretary to the governor of the island, Sir Alexander Ball, and then a post as acting Public Secretary. Coleridge made an immediate impression on

71 CN,2, entry 2448: February 1805. Piper notes that the Unitarian Estlin commented that Coleridge had become 'a miserable Calvinist'. Piper, 'Unitarian Consensus', p. 288.

72 Cf. Schaffer, 'States of Mind', pp. 282-3. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.164

Ball, a former admiral and friend of Nelson, and was soon entrusted with the drafting of a series of confidential papers to Nelson and the British administration setting out Ball's views on British naval policy in the Mediterranean.(73) Coleridge's high admiration for Ball is apparent in a letter of 1804, in which he described Ball as 'the abstract Idea of a wise & good Governor.'(74) That Coleridge's final rejection of Unitarianism came while he was engaged in promoting the interests of the governing class again suggests the influence of his new conservative politics on his religious change of heart.

From the above, it is apparent that Coleridge's principal objections to a 'commercial G. Britain' were both moral and political. In Pitt's administration, for example, he found a lack of humanitarian compassion, symptomatic of the self-interest that characterized a mercenary, 'commercial' morality. Priestley's Unitarian beliefs similarly tended to emphasize such a dispassionate attitude to the world, and Coleridge saw this attitude as linked to the middle-class, commercial interests of the Unitarians and other Dissenters. The moral question that concerned him, then, was closely connected with the socio- political question of a changing social order in early nineteenth-century Britain. The old hierarchy based on landed property and linked to the Church of England was giving way to a new hierarchy, in which commercial and industrial interests were coming to play an increasingly prominent role.(75) Coleridge disliked this new, 'commercial', social order and the egoistic morality that he saw as underpinning it. We shall now go on to

73 On Coleridge in Malta, see: Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 16-50; Sultana, Coleridge in Malta and Italy.

74 CL,2, p. 1141: to William Sotheby, 5 July 1804. Coleridge's enduring respect for Ball is also revealed in sketches of the governor's life, included in Coleridge's periodical of 1809-10, The Friend, after learning of Ball's death in 1809. See CC,4, vol. 2, pp. 99-100, 252-6, 287-94, 347-56, 359-69.

75 See, for example, Thomson, England, pp. 23-4, 56-8. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.165 see why he viewed the mechanical philosophy, through its sensationalist epistemology, as sustaining this egoistic morality.

III.6 'Epicurean' Ethics

Coleridge's new attitude to the Church of England from the mid-1800s is revealed in another note from 1805, in which he once again complained about those thinkers who epitomized a 'commercial G. Britain'. Here he asserted that these thinkers held an 'Erastian' position - that the Church should bow to secular authority - and he implied that this Erastianism was connected with an egoistic moral philosophy. 'The vile cowardly selfish calculating Ethics of Paley, Priestley, Lock, & other Erastians,' he protested, 'do woefully influence & determine our course of action'.(76) It is not entirely clear why Coleridge here linked Erastianism with an egoistic morality, but presumably it was because he saw both as reducing the primacy of a supernatural morality.

This hostility to egoistic philosophies was already apparent in Coleridge's criticism, made in his letters to Wedgwood, of Locke's reconciliation of the main tenets of 'the new Epicurean School' with 'all the Doctrines of Religion & Morality' (see above, p. 139). For Locke's 'Epicureanism' included not only an atomistic physics, but also an Epicurean view of human beings as fundamentally motivated by a self-interested pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. 'What has an aptness to produce pleasure in us', Locke claimed, 'is that we call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us we call evil, for no other reason but for its

76 CN,2, entry 2627: July-October 1805. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.166 aptness to produce pleasure and pain in us, wherein consists our happiness and misery.'(77)

Coleridge's antagonism to this egoistic, 'Epicurean' morality was explicit in an 1802 article in the Morning Post. His overt target here, however, was not Locke, but the nominally republican (yet seemingly imperial) government of Napoleonic France. Coleridge had come to see the actions of the latter as significantly influenced by the individualistic philosophies he now opposed. In his article (also referred to in the previous chapter, p. 120) he argued that there was a valuable lesson to learn by comparing Napoleon's rule with that of the Roman Caesars, and by placing in parallel the events that had led to the demise of republicanism in both France and Rome.(78) Prior to the breakdown of their republican institutions, Coleridge maintained, both societies witnessed an expansion of commercial activity accompanied by a flourishing of the arts and sciences. These developments, however, had produced a decline in moral standards and a growing disrespect for tradition and religion. The resulting collapse of the republic in both states, therefore,

77 Locke, Essay, 2.21.42, (p. 174). See also ibid., 2.20, (pp. 159-61). Such an egoistic psychology was extrapolated by the ancient Epicureans to the gods whom they similarly viewed as self-centred and unconcerned with human affairs. See Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, pp. 41-8.

78 'Comparison of the present state of France with that of Rome under Julius and Augustus Caesar. I', Morning Post, 21 September 1802, CC,3, vol. 1, pp. 311-20. That Coleridge was not antagonistic to all forms of republicanism is clear from his later article in the same newspaper (also discussed in the previous chapter, pp. 118, 119) 'Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin', Morning Post, 21 October 1802, ibid., pp. 367-73. There (p. 370) Coleridge claimed that Jacobinism was not synonymous with republicanism, for 'Milton was a pure Republican, and yet his notions of government were highly aristocratic'. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.167 was driven 'by the commercial spirit'. But supporting the advance of this 'commercial spirit', Coleridge contended, was an 'Epicurean' philosophy, which took human nature to be primarily governed by a mechanistic tendency to seek pleasurable sensations:(79)

Both in France and Rome the metaphysics and ethics of Epicurus had become the fashionable philosophy among the wealthy and powerful; a philosophy which regards man as a mere machine, a sort of living automaton, which teaches that pleasure is the sole good, and a prudent calculation of enjoyment the only virtue.

Coleridge's analysis here of the failure of French and Roman republicanism is important, because it reveals that he saw an individualistic, 'commercial' morality as conducive to the kind of social instability that characterized post-revolutionary France and had led ultimately to Napoleon's dictatorship. Implicit here was the message that, if one were not careful, something similar could happen in Britain.

While Locke was not explicitly mentioned in this article, it is clear that the 'Epicurean' philosophy Coleridge was attacking was a Lockean one. Although Locke himself did not espouse the idea of a man-machine, he was commonly seen as doing so by eighteenth-century commentators.(80) Moreover, in his Essay Locke had portrayed morality, along implicitly mechanistic lines, as a function of our sensations of pleasure and pain. Lockeans such as Gay and Hartley were similarly confident that human motivation could be explained by a sensationalist psychology of pleasure and pain. Gay, emulating Locke, held that the anticipation of these

79 'Comparison of the present state of France with that of Rome under Julius and Augustus Caesar. I', ibid., p. 315. Prior to the decline of the Republic in the first century B.C., Epicurus's philosophy had become influential in Rome through Lucretius. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, pp. 13, 17-19.

80 See: Yolton, Thinking Matter, pp. 23, 33-45; idem, French Materialism, pp. 80-2, 173. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.168 sensations constituted 'the principle of all action'.(81) Hartley argued that all concepts, including virtue, could ultimately be accounted for by the physical sensations that had led to their formation. The more complex 'intellectual pleasures and pains', he claimed, were 'nothing but the sensible ones variously mixed and compounded together.'(82)

That Coleridge saw such a mechanistic, 'Lockean' philosophy as widespread in republican France is not surprising. To begin with, the idea of a man-machine had been notoriously promoted by the physician and philosopher, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, whose writings were linked with Locke.(83) Moreover, Locke's sensationalist epistemology had been influential in France throughout the eighteenth century and had contributed to the climate of reform at the time of the Revolution.(84) This came about most notably through the writings of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who had promoted Locke's epistemology in France from the middle of the century. In his 1746 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, for instance, Condillac wrote that while the Aristotelians had maintained 'that all our knowledge is derived from the senses ... Mr. Locke ... has the honour of being the first to demonstrate it.'(85) In his Logic (1780), which became a standard text in new educational institutions such as the École Normale in the immediate post-revolutionary period, Condillac asserted, in typically sensationalist fashion, that 'pleasure and pain ... are our first teachers: they enlighten us because they warn us whether we are judging well or badly; and that is why,

81 Gay, Dissertation, p. xxii.

82 Hartley, Observations, vol. 1, p. 83. See also above, pp. 27, 28.

83 See Yolton, Locke and French Materialism, pp. 56, 171, 210.

84 See, for example: Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 560-7, 571-3; Welch, Liberty and Utility, pp. 9-11.

85 Condillac, Essay, pp. 8-9. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.169 without any other help, we make progress in childhood which seems as rapid as it does astonishing.'(86)

A Lockean, sensationalist philosophy was pronounced in other notable, eighteenth-century French works. For example, in the 'Preliminary Discourse' to the Encyclopédie (1751), Jean d'Alembert argued for a thoroughly sensationalist epistemology and ethics: 'all our direct knowledge can be reduced to what we receive through our senses', he claimed, 'whence it follows that we owe all our ideas to our sensations.' He went on to affirm that moral knowledge too was entirely a product of experience. Suffering at the hands of others, he maintained, was what led people to conceive of principles of right and wrong and to subsequently formulate laws to protect themselves.(87)

A more detailed application of sensationalism to ethics - for the specific purpose of legislative reform - was attempted slightly later by Claude-Adrien Helvétius who, in the preface to his infamous De l'esprit (1758), declared that 'morality should be treated like every other science and constructed like an experimental physics.'(88) The foundation upon which Helvétius proposed to establish his 'moral science' was sensationalist and egoistic. He argued that 'pain and pleasure are the sole mainsprings of the moral universe, and that the feeling of self-

86 Albury, Introduction to Logic, pp. 26-7; Condillac, Logic,p.55. See also Gillispie, Edge of Objectivity, pp. 165-72, 175-6.

87 D'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, pp. 6, 10-13.

88 Helvétius, De l'esprit, p. 13. The analogy with physics is evident in another passage where Helvétius wrote that 'the passions are to the moral realm what movement is to physics. Just as movement creates, annuls, preserves and animates everything (and without it, everything is dead) the passions similarly give life to the moral world.' Ibid., p. 90. Albury indicates that the publication of De l'esprit caused an uproar in France, resulting in conclusive censorship of the Encyclopédie. Albury, Introduction to Logic, p. 12. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.170 love is the only basis upon which one might establish a useful morality.'(89)

For Coleridge, such 'Epicureanism' was being dangerously promoted in early nineteenth-century Britain in the guise of utilitarian philosophies like those of Bentham and Paley. Bentham's 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was in fact directly inspired by Helvétius, and began with the pronouncement that 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.' These determinants of human conduct, Bentham maintained, were 'the only things that can operate, as motives'. Accordingly, he adopted Hartley's associationist psychology to argue that 'moral' behaviour was produced by the anticipation of pleasure or pain in the form of rewards or punishments.(90) Paley, similarly, in his 1785 Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, defined happiness - the aim of virtuous action - in an unequivocally utilitarian way, as 'any condition, in which the amount or aggregate of pleasure exceeds that of pain'.(91) Such an individualistic basis for morality was increasingly attacked by Coleridge, as it conflicted with a traditional Christian belief in a universal, divine source of moral knowledge. In a notebook entry of 1803, for example, he berated 'Hartley, Priestley, & the Multitude' for promulgating the utilitarian idea that virtue is not innate, but learnt by external 'examples' or 'inducements'.(92)

That Coleridge was concerned about the political consequences of such a sensationalist, utilitarian ethics is clear from a

89 Helvétius, De l'esprit,p.78.

90 Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, pp. 11, 34-5. Cf. the quotation from Helvétius above. On the influence of Helvétius on Bentham, see Halévy, Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 18-21, 27, 82.

91 Paley, Principles,p.18.

92 CN,1, entry 1713: December 1803. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.171 later statement, published in an 1809 letter in The Courier, one of the leading London newspapers.(93) This letter was one of a series in which he defended the cause of Spanish sovereignty against Napoleonic occupation, and urged the British government to actively support Spain. The bulk of this particular letter, however, was taken up with criticism of a utilitarian morality based upon expediency. This morality, Coleridge claimed, was being advocated by 'the disciples of Hume, Paley, and Condillac, the parents or foster-fathers of modern ethics'.(94) He began by arguing that such a 'calculating' morality was impracticable because the consequences of any action could not all be foreseen, and he maintained that moral behaviour ought to stem instead from 'moral instincts' or principles found within each person's conscience.(95) His purpose, however, was not only to demonstrate how an ethics of expediency affected the sphere of personal morality, but, more importantly, to alert his readers to its broader political consequences. One of the points he was making, against those opposed to British intervention in Spain,(96) was that the British government's actions ought to proceed from fixed moral principles and not solely from a selfish consideration of its own interests. At the same time, he wished to show that a selfish morality was exemplified by Napoleon's conquering disdain for the sovereignty of other nations. He went on to warn the paper's readers that 'there is a natural affinity between

93 'Letters on the Spaniards: Letter VII', The Courier, 22 December 1809, CC,3, vol. 2, pp. 79-85.

94 Ibid., p. 82.

95 Ibid., pp. 79-80.

96 Coleridge gives no specific target for his criticism in his letter. It is clear, however, that he particularly had in mind members of the Tory ministry, and other 'Peace-men'. See CC,3, vol. 1, pp. cxxxiv- cxli. Despite this, in his 'Table Talk' some years later he suggested that it was the Whigs about whom he had been complaining, declaring that they were 'the absolute abettors of the invasion of Spain, and did all in their power to thwart the efforts of [Britain] to resist it'. CC,14, vol. 1, p. 46: 27 April 1823, cited in Colmer, Critic of Society, p. 164. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.172

Despotism and modern Philosophy, notwithstanding the proud pretensions of the latter as the emancipator of the human race'.(97) Coleridge's message here, then, was clearly intended for the utilitarian advocates of 'modern ethics' in Britain who, on the grounds of selfish expediency, were opposing intervention in Spain, and so indirectly encouraging tyranny. He was also insinuating that, if the ruling classes were not attentive to the kinds of 'modern Philosophy' that were gaining in popularity at home, Britain might meet the same fate as France.

Interestingly, this hostility to an individualistic, 'Epicurean' morality places Coleridge in an ongoing controversy in European philosophy that began some two thousand years earlier, in a debate between the ancient Stoics and Epicureans over the origin of moral knowledge. Although it is not specifically alluded to by Coleridge, this debate is worth mentioning, for its terms are very similar to those used by him to contest Locke's 'new Epicurean School'. Indeed, not only are some of Locke's views very close to those of the early Epicureans, but Coleridge's own position is remarkably like that of their Stoic opponents.

Anticipating Locke and his utilitarian followers, the Epicureans had maintained that human actions are motivated chiefly by self-interest, and that moral rules are purely conventional.(98) Against such a view of morality the Stoics claimed that moral standards are universal and made by consulting an internal arbiter, perhaps divinely informed. This Stoic position was articulated by the first-century B.C. Roman thinker, Cicero, who explained that central to the Stoics' position was the idea of a 'natural' law, governing what is right and wrong

97 CC,3, vol. 2, p. 81.

98 On the social philosophy of the Epicureans, see Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 132-6. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.173 and overriding any conventional laws. This kind of law, Cicero indicated, was(99)

a true law - namely, right reason - which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men, and is unchangeable and eternal. By its commands this law summons men to the performance of their duties; by its prohibitions it restrains them from doing wrong. ... To invalidate this law by human legislation is never morally right, nor is it permissible ever to restrict its operation, and to annul it wholly is impossible. ... God ... is the author of this law, its interpreter, and its sponsor.

Although Locke is commonly viewed as a defender of this natural law tradition, the position expressed here by Cicero comes very close to the innatism to which Locke and his followers were apparently opposed. For the Lockeans claimed that truth should be decided according to a common standard of rationality, and not on the authority of tradition or an untestable, inward conviction. In some unpublished 'Essays on the Law of Nature', written in the early 1660s, Locke had in fact argued that knowledge of natural law was neither innate nor sanctioned by custom, but could only be obtained from sensation.(100) This sensationalist position on natural law, however, was seemingly reversed in his later political writings, where rights to life, liberty and possessions were advanced as intrinsic to human nature.(101) Such a discrepancy, however, appears not to have been noticed by Locke's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enemies who viewed his attitude as unequivocally hostile to innatism. To a large degree, this was because Locke's utilitarian followers similarly tended to ignore the innatist

99 Cited in Sabine, Political Theory, p. 164, taken from Cicero, Republic, III, 22, translated by Sabine and Smith.

100 Locke, Essays, pp. 122-35. See pp. 7-13 for information relating to the dating of these 'Essays'.

101 Sabine notes that Locke's 'philosophy as a whole presented the anomaly of a theory of the mind which was in general empirical, joined with a theory of the sciences and a procedure in political science which was rationalist.' Sabine, Political Theory, p. 530. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.174 tendency of his politics and stressed instead the empiricist epistemology of the Essay which ran counter to it.(102)

While Coleridge did not explicitly appeal to the earlier natural law tradition in his assaults on modern 'Epicureanism', he clearly subscribed to the Stoic idea that a moral law was universal and had been divinely implanted in every person. Indeed, the Christian ethical tradition with which he increasingly identified had embraced a very similar conception of natural law to that of the Stoics.(103) This Christian version of natural law was in fact invoked by Locke's opponent, Leibniz, in his defence of the innateness of 'moral knowledge' in the New Essays on Human Understanding. There, Leibniz argued that human beings did not just possess 'instincts' to 'pursue joy and flee sorrow', but had inborn knowledge 'of the natural law which, according to St Paul, God has engraved in their minds.'(104) St Paul's letter to the Romans, alluded to here by Leibniz, was drawn upon later by the mature Coleridge to criticize utilitarianism. In an annotation to a copy of his 1825 Aids to Reflection, Coleridge argued that 'the Apostle's Argument ... in the Epist. to the Romans, and to the Galatians, must appear mere jargon to those who substitute ... the calculations of worldly Prudence for the MORAL LAW.'(105)

Yet, despite the similarities between Coleridge's ethical position and that of the ancient Stoics, he was adamantly opposed to the natural law tradition in one of its most recent incarnations as the Lockean doctrine of natural rights. This was because he saw the latter as emphasizing individual rights at the expense of social duties and responsibilities. For the

102 Ibid., p. 531.

103 See ibid., pp. 180-2.

104 Leibniz, New Essays, p. 92.

105 CC,9, p. 473. See Romans, 2:13-15. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.175 conservative Coleridge, the Stoic conception of a moral 'law' which 'summons men to the performance of their duties' would have had little in common with Locke's individualistic natural rights.

III.7 The Distinction between the Reason and the Understanding

Criticism of the epistemological basis of individualistic philosophies continued to be made throughout Coleridge's writings. Such criticism was especially noticeable in his periodical publication of 1809-10, The Friend. Here, in one place, he took to task the political views of Hobbes and linked them to a sensationalist psychology. Hobbes's system, he claimed, obscured the distinction between rights and duties, and debased human beings by 'affirming that the human mind consists of nothing but manifold modifications of passive sensation'. In Hobbes's sensationalist view of human behaviour, Coleridge continued, people were portrayed as little better than animals, ruled by sensations of fear.(106)

In this section of The Friend, Coleridge went on to make a different criticism about a tendency in politics to view things in an abstract quantitative way, akin to mathematics or geometry. This criticism was remarkably similar to that made by Burke about the adoption in politics of a uniformitarian approach, derived from the sciences (see above, pp. 92-96). Like Burke, Coleridge saw political uniformitarianism as dangerous, for it led to a denial of diversity within and between nations.

Interestingly, Coleridge presented his criticism of political uniformitarianism in terms of an epistemological confusion between two mental faculties: the Reason and the Understanding. While the terminology here was derived from Kant, Coleridge

106 CC,4, vol. 2, p. 98. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.176 appropriated Kant's epistemological distinction for his own, radically different, political ends. The Understanding, Coleridge explained, is the faculty of the mind which organizes the raw data of sense experience. The Reason, on the other hand, functions independently of the world of the senses: through it, the mind arrives at universal mathematical laws as well as religious and moral truths.(107) The relationship between Coleridge's Reason and Understanding, then, is very much like that we observed in Plato's epistemology between a higher, rational mode of knowing that provides access to eternal, innate truths, and knowledge or 'opinion' of an inferior, temporal kind that is acquired through sense experience. In view of what we have already seen of Coleridge's partiality to Platonism, one might expect him to have advocated a political framework in which Reason is supreme. Instead, however, he claimed that while Reason must be appealed to for direction on moral and religious questions, its direct application is inappropriate in politics where the Understanding has a central role. He illustrated this point by outlining the political system of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the eighteenth-century French Physiocrats, who (he maintained) had mistakenly invoked the Reason as the sole guide for political conduct.

The system of these French theorists, Coleridge explained, purports to take universal ideas of the Reason as its guiding principles, but erroneously claims that these ideas are adequate to regulating the conduct of human beings in society.(108) For in politics (he argued) one must also take account of knowledge

107 Ibid., p. 104. Cf. CC,13, pp. 34-5, 66-70, 282-3. On this distinction, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 170-1, B 355-68, B 391-2/ A 334-5, A 509/ B 537, A 546/ B 574, A 548/ B 576, A 567-8/ B 595-6. Kant's distinction is presented as part of a purely epistemological argument. However, we shall later see (pp. 218-20) that there was an important moral and political dimension to Kant's separation of the empirical 'understanding' (Verstand) from the a priori 'reason' (Vernunft).

108 The following summary is based on CC,4, vol. 2, pp. 125-33. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.177 obtained from experience, that is, of knowledge supplied through the activity of the Understanding. If the Reason alone is appealed to for guidance in political matters, the result will be the construction of abstract political theories, having little relevance to the diverse conditions under which each society's institutions have developed. So, while the Reason is the source of universal moral principles that ought to guide a person's actions, it is unsuited for the worldly calculations involved in the government of human societies. The Understanding, on the other hand, concerns itself with the constantly varying circumstances of the external world, and so should be used to develop laws and institutions which conform, as far as possible, with the moral demands of the Reason:(109)

that Reason should be our Guide and Governor is an undeniable Truth, and all our notion of Right and Wrong is built thereon ... yet still the proof is wanting, that the first and most general applications of the power of Man can be definitely regulated by Reason unaided by the positive and conventional Laws in the formation of which the Understanding must be our Guide, and which become just because they happen to be expedient.

Coleman has shown that in The Friend Coleridge was drawing upon several thinkers he was reading at the time. The almost Platonic dichotomy between an ideal private sphere of ethics and its imperfect realization in social relations was prefigured in the writings of the sixteenth-century divine, Richard Hooker, in Kant, and, to a lesser extent, in Burke.(110) Coleridge enlisted these thinkers, particularly in order to argue that there is indeed a moral and religious equality of all human beings. Such an egalitarian ideal, he asserted, was in fact one of the distinguishing features of the Christian Church: all were equal before Christ, and all were equally at liberty to use their Reason to discover moral and religious laws. In an unpublished

109 Ibid., p. 131.

110 Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend, pp. 107-63. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.178 commentary on the Decalogue(111) he maintained that the obligations of the 'moral & rational Individual' implied a 'Universal Equality, King & Peasant'. However he believed that it was wrong to transfer this idea of universal equality to political life, as he alleged Rousseau and Rousseau's revolutionary disciples had done: the religious and ethical sphere pertaining to the 'moral & rational individual' was different from the sphere in which a person is 'a citizen or member of a State.' Burke, likewise, insisted that 'the true moral equality of mankind' should not be confused with 'that real inequality ... of civil life'.(112)

So, one of the main targets of Coleridge's criticism of the misapplication of Reason in The Friend was the uniformitarian doctrine of natural rights. Indeed, the fruits of this doctrine, Coleridge warned, could be seen in France, in the forms of 'the satanic Government of Horror under the Jacobins, and of Terror under the Corsican [Napoleon].'(113) He in fact argued that the misuse of the Reason in politics could lead to either democracy or tyranny. For if one believed 'that no other Laws [are] allowable but those ... of which every Man's Reason is the competent judge, it is indifferent whether one Man, or one or more Assemblies of men, give form and publicity to them.'(114)

While Burke did not spell out the epistemological dimension of his own criticism of eighteenth-century natural rights, he anticipated Coleridge by making a similar distinction between rational and empirical knowledge. The reasoning capacity of individuals, Burke asserted, could never grasp the complexity of social institutions and their development. Individual 'reason'

111 CN,3, entry 3293: 1808/1818.

112 Burke, Reflections,p.35.

113 CC,4, vol. 2, p. 128.

114 Ibid., pp. 129-30. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.179 could not hope to rise above the store of knowledge and wisdom derived from the vast historical experience of a nation or culture.(115)

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

Moreover, the enduring political arrangements of a society, Burke insisted, were rarely the product of abstract, rational theories, but emerged from that society's concrete experiences.(116)

Old establishments are tried by their effects ... they are the results of various necessities and expediences. They are not often constructed after any theory; theories are rather drawn from them. ... The means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project.

In Chapter II, we saw that Burke condemned what he saw as the mathematical or geometrical character of natural rights theories. This was echoed in The Friend by Coleridge who maintained that the uniformitarian 'Rights of Man' doctrines that Rousseau's philosophy sanctioned were a consequence of trying to provide a framework for politics 'analogous ... to Geometry'. The problem with such an approach, Coleridge explained, is that 'Geometry holds forth an Ideal, which can never be fully realized in Nature, ... because it is Nature: because Bodies are more than Extension, and to pure extension of space only the mathematical

115 Burke, Reflections, p. 84. Taking up the Burkean banner against natural rights, The Anti-Jacobin similarly contrasted individual reason with experience and tradition: 'In MORALS We are equally old fashioned. We have yet to learn the modern refinement of referring in all considerations upon human conduct, not to any settled and preconceived principles of right and wrong, not to any general and fundamental rules which experience, and wisdom, and justice, and the common consent of mankind have established, but to the internal admonitions of every man's judgment or conscience in his own particular instance.' Anti-Jacobin, pp. 5-6.

116 Burke, Reflections, pp. 168-9. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.180

Theorems wholly correspond.'(117) Coleridge followed Burke in arguing that 'expediency' or 'prudence' is necessary to effect a compromise between the theoretical ideals of the Reason and the changing circumstances of nations, and he criticized Rousseau for putting forward a system which neglected the diversity of societies. 'A Constitution equally suited to China and America, or to Russia and Great Britain,' he maintained, 'must surely be equally unfit for both'.(118)

The other important example of the misapplication of the Reason in politics, Coleridge argued, was found in the theories of the French Physiocrats in the latter part of the eighteenth century. He objected to these theories for being too abstract, without any empirical foundation. Physiocracy meant government ('cracy') according to laws of nature ('phusis'), by which its proponents understood that the most reasonable way of dealing with a country's economy was to allow it to spontaneously find its own 'natural' equilibrium. During the ancien régime in France, the Physiocrats recommended agricultural reforms entailing a significant reduction in state control. The famous motto of 'laissez faire, laissez passer' in fact originated with them. In order to achieve their economic aims, the Physiocrats also advocated a 'legal despotism' - the co-operation of an 'enlightened' ruler against an aristocracy and clergy who tended to refuse to laissez passer, in order to protect their feudal privileges.(119) It is understandable, therefore, that Coleridge discovered a connection between Physiocratic principles and Napoleon's 'despotic' rule. Indeed, the French Emperor's claims

117 CC,4, vol. 2, pp. 128-9, 132. The view expressed here that 'Bodies are more than Extension' is a good example of the mature Coleridge's 'dynamic' view of matter, canvassed in the following chapter.

118 Ibid., pp. 127-8, 105.

119 On Physiocracy, see: Winch, 'Emergence of Economics', pp. 524-7; Rubin, Economic Thought, pp. 101-10. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.181 to authority, Coleridge asserted, found a perfect vindication in the Physiocrats' 'mathematical' philosophy, which took 'REASON [to be] the sole Sovereign, the only rightful Legislator; but Reason to act on Man must be impersonated ... [so] Providence ... had marked HIM out for the Representative of Reason'.(120) So, just as claims had falsely been made for natural rights on the basis of intuitive knowledge of such rights, Coleridge believed that a similar epistemological error was behind the claims of the Physiocrats and Napoleon. In particular, he complained about the Physiocratic philosophy of laissez-faire with which he claimed Napoleon's regime operated, and which he implied was also based on a mistaken presumption that society operates according to abstract principles, known via the Reason. He summarized this philosophy in the following way:(121)

the greatest possible Happiness of a People is ... to preserve the Freedom of all by coercing within the requisite bounds the Freedom of each. Whatever a Government does more than this, comes of Evil: and its' best employment is the repeal of Laws and Regulations, not the Establishment of them. ... Remove all the interferences of positive Statutes, all Monopoly, all Bounties, all Prohibitions ... let the Revenues of the State be taken at once from the Produce of the Soil; and all things will then find their level, all irregularities will correct each other, and an indestructible Cycle of harmonious motions take place in the moral, equally as in the natural World.

Significantly, the link alleged by Coleridge in The Friend between Rousseau's political uniformitarianism and French laissez-faire economics reflected his criticisms of the philosophy that he saw as sustaining a 'commercial G. Britain'. He in fact acknowledged in his periodical that one of the reasons

120 CC,4, vol. 2, p. 130. Coleridge was, however, wrong in his assumption that Physiocracy found favour under Napoleon. For the speculative economics of the Physiocrats and their successors, the Idéologues, were strongly criticized by the French emperor. See: Welch, Liberty and Utility, pp. 9-10, 38-41, 70-1; Bruun, French Imperium, pp. 210-11.

121 CC,4, vol. 2, pp. 130-1. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.182 for his assault on 'the French Code of revolutionary Principles' was that he found examples of it 'every where in the speeches, and writings, of the English reformers, [and] not seldom in those of their Opponents'.(122) His condemnation of Rousseau and the Physiocrats, then, was clearly an indirect way of taking to task the British reform movement. Indeed, he went on in The Friend to criticize the prominent advocate in Britain of universal male suffrage, Major John Cartwright.(123) On the whole, though, Coleridge's overt criticism of British reformers was fairly reserved. Coleman has suggested that this was because his real targets were the middle-class Dissenters whom he could not openly censure, partly because they made up a significant portion of his periodical's subscription base, and also because many were or had been his friends, although he disapproved of their politics.(124) One can understand, then, why he would have chosen to attack their ideas obliquely, through the French theorists.

III.8 The 'Lay Sermons'

In subsequent works, Coleridge continued to insist that the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding was as crucial in politics as it was in ethics. The problem in both spheres lay in the misapplication of these faculties. While the Understanding's usurpation of the moral and religious function of the Reason had resulted in a utilitarian ethics of expediency, a spurious appeal to the Reason in politics had led to Jacobinical proclamations of inherent, political rights and the Physiocratic, economic principle of laissez-faire. In his writings after 1815, however, Coleridge increasingly blamed the social problems of the

122 Ibid., p. 110.

123 Ibid., pp. 132-7.

124 Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend, pp. 125-31. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.183 age on the moral misuse of the worldly, sense-constrained Understanding. What is important to note here is that he now explicitly attributed this misuse to the ascendancy of a prevailing mechanistic philosophy.

In the 1816 Statesman's Manual; or the Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society, Coleridge examined some of the philosophical and social consequences of the mechanical philosophy and its epistemology. He warned his targetted elite audience that 'the histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened generalising Understanding.'(125) At this point in his book, Coleridge contrasted the history described in the Bible with more recent histories such as that of Hume. He claimed that what particularly distinguished these two kinds of history was that the Bible provided an account of the spiritual meaning of a nation's development, while modern histories merely described and categorized events without revealing their underlying religious or spiritual purpose. So, in a sense, the Bible exemplified for Coleridge a Platonic concern for the spiritual basis of the phenomenal world. The secular emphasis of more recent historical writing, he went on, was characteristic of a modern tendency to deny the moral and religious function of a faculty of Reason and to attempt to deduce morality from the sense-based Understanding alone.(126) He insisted that there were dangerous, unforseen results of this tendency, aptly demonstrated by the French Revolution, of which the causes could be found in:(127)

125 CC,6, p. 28.

126 Ibid., pp. 28-32.

127 Ibid., pp. 33-4. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.184

the rising importance of the commercial and manufacturing class, and its incompatibility with the old feudal privileges and prescriptions; ... the predominance of a presumptuous and irreligious philosophy; ... the extreme over-rating of the knowledge and power given by the improvements of the arts and sciences, especially those of astronomy, mechanics, and a wonder-working chemistry; ... the general conceit that states and governments might be and ought to be constructed as machines, every movement of which might be foreseen and taken into previous calculation ... .

Though Coleridge's ostensible target here was eighteenth- century France, his message was plainly once again intended for his compatriots. For this description of pre-revolutionary French society matched the characteristics of the 'commercial G. Britain' which he opposed. Both societies, for Coleridge, were increasingly secular ones, imbued with utilitarian values that had been fostered by the mechanical philosophy and its sensationalist epistemology. So, there was clearly a warning here for the 'higher classes' in Britain: if the epistemological and moral consequences of the mechanical philosophy were not recognized, the country was in danger of finding itself the victim of social upheavals like those that had occurred in France after the Revolution.

In The Statesman's Manual Coleridge offered a history of the Understanding's arrogation of the moral and religious function of the Reason. The process began in medieval France, he explained, and was intensified toward the end of the fourteenth century, with the emergence of 'the commercial spirit and the ascendancy of the experimental philosophy'.(128) Eventually,

dazzled by the real or supposed discoveries, which it had made, the more the understanding was enriched, the more did it become debased; till science itself put on a selfish and sensual character, and immediate utility ... was imposed as the test of all intellectual powers and pursuits.

128 Ibid., pp. 73-4. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.185

While Coleridge mentioned no names or events, this passage was obviously alluding to the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. It is not at all clear, however, to what exactly he was referring in the earlier medieval period. One might infer that his anti-gallic sentiments and a concern for genealogical consistency prompted him to find the source of the Understanding's usurpation of moral and religious knowledge in France. For he went on to argue that this illegitimate employment of the Understanding had reached its zenith in the French Enlightenment. It was by the efforts of the eighteenth- century, French 'Encyclopaedists' and their followers, he claimed, 'that the Human Understanding ... was tempted to throw off all show of reverence to the spiritual and even to the moral powers and impulses of the soul'. Subsequently, one could find widespread evidence of the encroachment of 'this French wisdom' in 'political economy', in a sensationalist 'ethical philosophy' and in a reductionistic 'chemical art'.(129)

But it was not really the moral misuse of the Understanding in a nation recently defeated that mattered here for Coleridge. For the aim of The Statesman's Manual was to demonstrate to the British ruling classes the ways in which 'this French wisdom' was affecting politics at home. France was in many ways a convenient scapegoat for Coleridge. For not only did its recent history provide a terrifying illustration of his claims. It also allowed him to indirectly vent his concerns about the effects of Newtonianism in Britain without appearing unpatriotic. What he wanted to get across to the British ruling elite was that a seemingly innocuous natural philosophy was having a profound, though unnoticed, influence on domestic politics. The effects of this philosophy were plain in France, but Britain had been spared such excesses. Why? His country's saving grace so far,

129 Ibid., pp. 75-6. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.186

Coleridge maintained, was its constitution, which preserved a balance between the diverse interests of the realm. Without such a 'providential counterpoise', he argued, Britain's recent history could have been quite different, perhaps similar to that of France. For, like the French, the British had embraced 'that system of disguised and decorous epicureanism, which has been the only orthodox philosophy of the last hundred years'. Coleridge was again alluding to Locke's philosophy, and he once more outlined the reasons for its rise to prominence in Britain (see above, pp. 136-140). In particular, he again accused it of deceptively appearing to reconcile religion with the new mechanistic science. Locke, he complained, had gravely misled everyone by 'ingeniously threading-on the dried and shrivelled, yet still wholesome and nutritious fruits, plucked from the rich grafts of ancient wisdom, to the barren and worse than barren fig tree of the mechanic philosophy.'(130)

Thus, one of the main points Coleridge was trying to get across to his elite readership was that, despite popular perceptions, the empiricist epistemology widely adhered to in Britain was undermining the foundations of religion and morality. This was especially apparent, he warned, in Paley's philosophy, which, along with that of Locke, was becoming increasingly fashionable in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the works of both thinkers were staples in the curriculum at Cambridge.(131) Alluding to Paley, Coleridge grumbled that 'the principles ... of taste, morals, and religion taught in our most popular compendia of moral and political philosophy, natural theology, evidences of Christianity, &c. are false, injurious, and debasing.'(132) What, then, was to be done to resist these harmful influences? As the

130 Ibid., pp. 108-9.

131 See Gascoigne, Cambridge, pp. 140, 243.

132 CC,6, p. 110. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.187 title of Coleridge's work suggested, it was in religion that one could find the sorts of principles upon which the affairs of the nation ought to be conducted. But the Christian Bible was not the sole source of 'ancient wisdom' that statesmen should consult. A similar kind of wisdom, he claimed, could be located in more recent schools of thought that had been denigrated by modern 'Epicureans' such as Locke. Here Coleridge referred his readers to Platonists and Neoplatonists of the Italian and British Renaissance, medieval schoolmen and seventeenth-century republicans and divines. The spiritual emphasis in the views of such thinkers, he argued, provided a political antidote to the erroneous opinions of those who 'assume, with Mr. Locke, that the Mind contains only the reliques of the Senses, and therefore proceed with him to explain the substance from the shadow ...'.(133)

In a second 'lay sermon', published in 1817, and entitled A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the Existing Distresses and Discontents, Coleridge spelt out much more clearly some of the immediate dangers of the mechanical philosophy and its sensationalist epistemology.

The 'Distresses and Discontents' referred to in the title were the socio-economic problems faced by Britain following the Napoleonic wars. Peace had not brought expected prosperity and much of the population was unemployed and experiencing economic hardship. Consequently, the political situation was unstable, and Coleridge saw a potential danger. For the poor were being prevailed upon to protest their condition by radical reformers like William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. These men argued that the principal cause of the nation's present economic adversity was corruption, particularly the squandering of wealth in government sinecures, and they urged the working classes to publicly

133 Ibid., pp. 101-3, 107, 111. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.188 remonstrate against such practices.(134) In his Lay Sermon, Coleridge complained about these 'political empirics' and 'demagogues' whom he saw as inciting violence.(135) One of the messages here, then, to 'the Higher and Middle Classes' was that they needed to be wary of what was happening in the ranks of the working classes.

This, however, was not his only message. For he went on to explain what he believed was the fundamental cause of the nation's current troubles. These troubles, he argued, were fundamentally attributable to an 'OVERBALANCE OF THE COMMERCIAL SPIRIT' in the nation - a state of affairs which could be put down to a growing deficiency in the traditional 'COUNTERWEIGHTS'. The first of these 'natural counter-forces' was 'the ancient feeling of rank and ancestry'. Coleridge admitted that this had not always had positive consequences, but maintained that such a sentiment had nonetheless counteracted mercenary social tendencies.(136) A second stabilizing force in the past, he claimed, had existed in the form of 'a genuine intellectual Philosophy with an accredited, learned, and philosophic Class'. As an example of this, he once again pointed to the Renaissance, where politicians and rulers, he indicated, had taken a keen interest in the Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophies of the times. Real 'Philosophy', however, had soon been forgotten, due to 'the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and psychological Empiricism'.(137)

134 Ibid., pp. 141-2, 152-3n.5, 163-4n.7. On the background to the post- war disturbances about which Coleridge and others were anxious see, for example: Halévy, Liberal Awakening, pp. 3-22; Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 660-1, 673-83, 693-700.

135 CC,6, pp. 142-68.

136 Ibid., pp. 169-70.

137 Ibid., pp. 194, 172-3, 170. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.189

A third 'counterweight' to the dominance of commercial interests in Britain had been religion.(138) Although Christianity still played a role in the nation's life, Coleridge warned that influential sects within this religion were undermining its effectiveness as a bulwark against the sway of selfish, commercial interests. He singled out two sects in particular that he felt were abetting commerce by not giving sufficient importance to Christian doctrine: the Unitarians and the Quakers. The Unitarians, he argued, were clearly in complicity with 'the spirit of trade', a fact that was confirmed by the appeal of this sect among educated people 'in our cities and great manufacturing and commercial towns'.(139) The Quakers' case, however, was not so clear cut, as there was much to be commended in their spirituality and moral example. Nevertheless, their links with commerce were similarly apparent, and Coleridge inferred that they were among those 'Christian Mammonists' moving like a train of 'camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed, and each in the confident expectation of passing through the EYE OF THE NEEDLE'.(140)

Interestingly, the 1817 Lay Sermon presented a position that was very similar to that we noted in Coleridge's writings in the mid-1790s. For one of his major concerns then had been to expose both the religious hypocrisy of those in power and the atheistic radicalism of his peers, and to insist that a morality and religion sustained by an immaterialistic natural philosophy was essential for social stability. This concern was still evident in 1817. Now, however, the middle classes were an increasingly important force in government and they needed to be warned that their individualistic ideology - grounded in an empiricist

138 Ibid., pp. 174-91.

139 Ibid., p. 181.

140 Ibid., p. 191. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.190 philosophy - undermined the spiritual principles that were the best defence against the social disintegration threatened by the radicals and their working-class following.

It is important to observe that Coleridge's political position at this time was perceived as an ambivalent one, with its criticisms of both right and left factions of British politics. Holmes has observed this too, noting that the 'lay sermons' were viewed with suspicion by radicals and Tories alike. For, although the terms of Coleridge's politics were conservative in the emphasis placed on duties as opposed to rights, he also explicitly took to task the ruling classes for putting their own interests first and neglecting their social responsibilities.(141) This ambivalence is evident in a passage from The Statesman's Manual, in which Coleridge suggested that the future rulers of Britain required a new moral education in order to better guide those under them.(142)

I am greatly deceived, if one preliminary to an efficient education of the labouring classes be not ... a thorough re-casting of the mould, in which the minds of our Gentry, the characters of our future Land-owners, Magistrates and Senators, are to receive their shape and fashion.

III.9 The Mechanical State

The political insecurity of the times for Coleridge thus derived from a philosophy of self-interest which, he repeatedly insisted, stemmed from Locke and seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy. This link between mechanism and commercial self- interest, Coleridge maintained, could be seen clearly in the thought of early nineteenth-century British political economists such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, who were inspired by

141 Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 440-2, 446-9.

142 CC,6, p. 42, cited in Holmes, Darker Reflections, p. 441. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.191

Adam Smith. Above (p. 174) we saw Coleridge complaining (in The Statesman's Manual) that the historiography and political economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been affected by 'the general contagion of ... mechanic philosophy'. We also saw that he went on to argue that one of the causes of the French Revolution was a view that states ought to function in a predictable, mechanical fashion, that they were 'constructed as machines'. This (we saw) was most probably an allusion to the Physiocrats. These French economists recommended leaving the well-constructed machinery of states alone, so that the economy could find a 'natural' balance.(143) In the 1817 Lay Sermon, the British political economists met with similar criticisms. Their mechanical conception of society, Coleridge asserted, was conducive to a belief that the 'periodical Revolutions of Credit' which were largely responsible for the nation's problems, were 'so much superfluous steam ejected by the Escape Pipes and Safety Valves of a self-regulating Machine: and ... that in a free and trading country all things find their level.'(144) Coleridge protested that this notion of a self-regulating economy demeaned human beings, and he condemned the treatment of workers as objects in the economists' factory model of society. 'But Persons are not Things', he objected, 'but Man does not find his level'.(145)

This last objection was one of Coleridge's few allusions to Adam Smith. In his famous Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith had used the image of a stream of water naturally coming to a level to promote the benefits of unrestricted trade between countries. He cited the

143 On the connection between the Physiocrats and the British political economists, see Welch, Liberty and Utility, pp. 70-3.

144 CC,6, pp. 202-5. On the connection between self-regulating machines and liberalism, see Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery, pp. 164-80. Mayr's work is discussed below.

145 CC,6, pp. 206-8. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.192 examples of Spain and Portugal, where there were stringent taxes and prohibitions on the exportation of gold and silver. Smith argued that the resulting abundance of gold and silver in these countries had led to price inflation and a lull in economic production. Moreover, this abundance served to increase the value of these metals elsewhere, thus giving an additional trade advantage to other countries. Smith claimed that, by abolishing the export restrictions on gold and silver - thus opening 'the flood-gates' - these precious metals would flow into other countries until the 'stream' reached a 'level'. The benefits of such a policy to Spain and Portugal, he maintained, would be lower prices due to the lower value of gold and silver, which in turn would encourage greater productivity and strengthen the economy.(146) In an 1800 essay in the Morning Post, Coleridge berated Smith's mechanical view of economics, declaring that 'Adam Smith's level' was(147)

one of those hard-hearted comparisons of human actions with the laws of inanimate nature. Water will come to a level without pain or pleasure, and provisions of money will come to a level likewise; but, O God! what scenes of anguish must take place while they are coming to a level!

Coleridge was familiar also with the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, though did not have much to say about them either. But what he did say is informative. In 1804, he annotated several passages in the second (1803) edition of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, claiming that the whole work was an unnecessary illustration of the obvious fact - 'that Population

146 Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, pp. 510-13. Cf. the example from Hume, p. 193 below.

147 'Monopolists and Farmers, Letter V', Morning Post, 14 October 1800, CC,3, vol. 1, p. 255. For Coleridge on Smith, see also: CN,1, entry 735: May-June 1800; CL,2, p. 799: to Thomas Poole, 7 May 1802; CN,3, entry 3565: July-September 1809; and the April Fools Day article, 'A Modest Proposal for Abolishing the Church of England', Courier, 1 April 1812, CC,3, vol. 2, p. 346. In this article, Coleridge ironically wrote, 'A free trade and a free religion are my maxims. The one Adam Smith taught me; the other Voltaire.' Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.193 unrestrained would infinitely outrun Food' - and he condemned Malthus's depiction of sex as an uncontrollable physical need.(148) Coleridge was appalled by what he saw as the economists' compassionless view of human beings, and lamented the growing tendency of 'Statesmen & Legislatures to disregard the opinions of wise & learned men' in favour of 'a Malthus, or an Adam Smith'.(149) The increasing popularity of the economists was unmerited, Coleridge maintained, for what little there was of value in their thought boiled down to common sense, so did not deserve much attention.(150)

In my Conviction the whole pretended Science [of Political Economy] is but a Humbug. I have attentively read not only Sir James Stewart [Steuart] & Adam Smith; but Malthus, and Ricardo - and found a multitude of Sophisms but not a single just and important Result which might [not] far more convincingly be deduced from the simplest principles of Morality and Common Sense ... .

Underlying such complaints about the increasing authority of political economy was a more serious one. For the economists were promoting the interests of the new mercantile classes of a 'commercial G. Britain'.(151) Coleridge was clearly opposed to this commercial politics based on self-interest, and saw evidence for it in the economists' mercenary view of human beings as the instruments of blind market forces.

148 CC,12, vol. 3, pp. 805-10: 9-11 January 1804. For other references to Malthus, see also: CN,1, entry 1832: January 1804; CL,2, pp. 1026-7: to Robert Southey, 11 January 1804; CN,2, entry 3104: 1807; CN,3, entry 3560: July-September 1809; CN,3, entry 3590: August-September 1809; CN,3, entry 4183: 1813-1815; CL,4, p. 554: to R. H. Brabant, 13 March 1815.

149 CN,3, entry 3590: August-September 1809.

150 CL,5, p. 442: to John Taylor Coleridge, 8 May 1825. Cf. CC,14, vol. 1, pp. 348-9: 9 March 1833. For Coleridge on Ricardo see also: CN,4, entry 5330: February 1826; CL,6, p. 820: to William Blackwood, 20 October 1829.

151 See Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 686-93. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.194

His continuing opposition to what he saw as the political economists' impersonal, mechanistic ideology is illustrated by his active support in 1818 for Robert Peel's efforts to pass a bill through Parliament limiting the age and hours of child labour in factories. Coleridge circulated two pamphlets urging M.P.s to support the bill, but, as expected, it was initially rejected only to be passed in a watered-down form the following year. As Holmes notes, Coleridge's complaints about the exploitation of children by the wealthy industrialists distinctly resemble earlier ones of the 1790s when the young poet-journalist condemned his government's heartless disregard of the slave trade.(152) This again demonstrates the consistency in Coleridge's hostility to politics driven principally by commercial considerations.

Another thing he found particularly problematical in the political economists' mechanical model was that it sanctioned revolution, by portraying the state as something artificial, without any intrinsic unity. We shall later see that his own view of the state was conceived on the model of an organism. An organism has an intrinsic coherence and purpose that is lacking in a machine. An organic state is thus one in which the institutions are seen as maturing over time, and in which every individual part has a role to fulfil in the general life of the whole. In a mechanical state, on the other hand, there is no inherent purpose and interconnection of parts. In such a state, the individuals have no vital connection with the whole, and the form of the whole seems arbitrary. For Coleridge, this artificial kind of state was reflected in the views of the political economists, and was dangerous. For a state modelled on

152 See: 'Pamplets on Children's Labour', CC,11, vol. 1, pp. 714-51; Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 474-8, and above, pp. 113, 114. See also Coleridge's ironic letter to the editor of The Courier on child labour in cotton factories, in CC,3, vol. 2, pp. 484-9: 31 March 1818. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.195 machinery might readily be dismantled and reconstituted. This danger was plainly conveyed in an 1814 letter by Coleridge to the Courier. There he attacked the egoistic, mechanistic philosophy of 'the doctors and disciples of political economy, with whom "the Wealth of Nations" is of higher authority than either Bible or Statute Book.' He also issued a warning about 'Jacobinism, as it is now reshaping itself in England'. There had recently been, he observed, a proliferation of 'numberless societies and combinations of the mechanics and lower craftsmen of every description ... [in] unchartered guilds ... for the sworn purpose of Lording it over their employers and the public'.(153) The hierarchical social order favoured by the mature Coleridge was very much under threat from what he maintained was(154)

the most intensely jacobinical phaenomenon that has ever appeared in Great Britain ... inasmuch as it dislocates and unjoints the ordained and beneficent interdependence of the higher, middle and lower ranks, destroying or distempering the moral feelings and principles that are the natural growth of these relations ... .

For Coleridge, the mechanical 'dislocating' and 'unjointing' of an 'ordained' and 'natural' social order was a pressing reason why public attention had to be drawn to the subtle political uses of mechanistic philosophy. But, for those who missed the connections in his sometimes long-winded arguments, he also offered succinct chronologies of the process by which social disintegration had been advanced by the mechanical philosophy. One of these chronologies is found in Coleridge's re-worked, 1818 edition of The Friend. Here, in a 'brief history of the last 130 Years, by a lover of Old England', he pointed out the links

153 'To Mr. Justice Fletcher. Letter IV', Courier, 2 November 1814, CC,3, vol. 2, pp. 394, 392-3. On the background to Coleridge's letters to Justice Fletcher, see Colmer, Critic of Society, pp. 125-7.

154 CC,3, vol. 2, pp. 393-4. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.196 between mechanism and revolutionary natural rights theories.(155) The crucial event, he maintained, was the 1688 Glorious Revolution, alongside which the 'Mechanical Philosophy' had been portrayed 'as a kindred revolution in philosophy, and espoused, as a common cause, by the partizans of the revolution in the state.' Although Locke was not explicitly mentioned, this was an obvious allusion to the thinker who was so widely seen as the philosophical apologist for the 1688 Revolution. In the continuation of his 'brief history', Coleridge enumerated the consequences of these twin revolutions:(156)

a system of natural rights instead of social and hereditary privileges ... Imagination excluded from poesy; and fancy [=sensation](157) paramount in physics; the eclipse of the ideal by the mere shadow of the sensible ... the wealth of nations [taken] for the well- being of nations ... Anglo-mania in France; followed by revolution in America ... FRENCH REVOLUTION!

Whether or not such a 'brief history' was intelligible to Coleridge's readers, it was clearly meant to persuade them of the current political dangers inherent in the ascendant mechanistic philosophy. Moreover, it contained the warning that Locke's individualistic 'Epicureanism' was not as innocuous as it seemed. It had already led to revolution on the continent, so what would stop it from having similar effects back home? One had to look carefully, then, at current liberal and utilitarian ideologies which also had their paternity in Locke, and drew their conceptions from the mechanical philosophy.

155 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 446-7.

156 Ibid., p. 447.

157 Coleridge drew a famous distinction between the faculties of 'fancy' and 'imagination' in artistic creation. For Coleridge, the fancy is the faculty of the mind that combines images passively received by the senses. The imagination, on the other hand, actively transforms the data of experience into meaningful wholes. See CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 82-8, 105, 293-4, 304-5. On this distinction in Coleridge and its sources in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English and German thought, see Engell, Creative Imagination, pp. 119-22, 172-83. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.197

With this in mind, Coleridge in 1817 wrote to enlighten the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. His letter began with a brief account of the progress of seventeenth and eighteenth-century mechanical philosophy. This account is telling, because it shows that Coleridge saw the progress of this philosophy as definitely hinging upon, as well as influencing, politics. Mechanism, he explained to the Prime Minister, had been officially endorsed through the establishment of the Royal Society under Charles II. Its future success was then guaranteed by the victory of the Protestant faction of Shaftesbury, Locke's mentor, over the Royalist 'Pagans & Papists' in the Glorious Revolution. The revolutionary destiny of this philosophy was further apparent in its subsequent appropriation by 'the Anti-christians on the continent' - the French Encyclopaedists and their Jacobin successors.(158) Once again, Coleridge was alluding to the development of eighteenth-century natural rights theories, and overtly treating them as a consequence of the mechanical philosophy. He allowed that some might find it implausible that a philosophy which describes the world in terms of atoms and subtle fluids could have social repercussions. They would be wrong, he urged the Prime Minister, for the 'whole tone of Manners and Feeling' of a society, he maintained, is expressed in its metaphysics:(159)

the Taste and Character ... and above all the Religious ... and the Political tendencies of the public mind, [bear] such a close correspondence, so distinct and evident an Analogy to the predominant system of speculative Philosophy ... as must remain inexplicable, unless we admit not only a reaction and interdependence on both sides, but a powerful, tho' most often indirect influence of the latter on all the former.

Coleridge proceeded to explain the influence of 'the Physics & Physiology of the age' on art, religion and politics

158 CL,4, p. 758: to Lord Liverpool, 28 July 1817.

159 Ibid., p. 759. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.198 respectively. The 'long line of correspondencies' between 'speculative Philosophy' and the arts, he argued, shows that 'the coincidence is far too regular to be resolved into mere accident.' Thus, medieval 'reliefless surfaces, imprison'd in their wiry outlines, as so many Definitions personified' showed a clear affinity with Scholasticism. Renaissance Platonism was reflected in the art of Giotto, Raphael and Titian; and the sentiments of 'the common-sense and mechanic Philosophy' could be found in the art of eighteenth-century 'layers-on of "inveterate likenesses", and marble periwig-makers'.(160) Here again Coleridge was alluding to the Neo-classical aesthetics that he and other Romantics saw Locke's empiricist philosophy as supporting (see above, p. 146).

He then drew His Lordship's attention to the social repercussions of the mechanical philosophy's subversion of religion, for 'religion ... is at all times the centre of Gravity ... with and through which Philosophy acts on the community in general'. He took issue with the Deists' non-interventionist, 'clock-work-maker' God, and reiterated his frequently expressed view that, in the eighteenth century, divine agency had been usurped by gravity and a material aether. He blamed the continuation of such notions on the mechanistic philosophy then current, and once more insisted that natural philosophy has a profound influence on society. 'The almost unanimous acceptance of Dalton's Theory in England, & Le Sage's in France,' he contended, 'determine the intellectual character of the age with the force of an experimentum crucis.'(161)

But the pith of Coleridge's message concerned the influence of the mechanical philosophy on politics. This influence was not difficult to discern, he indicated, for this philosophy's

160 Ibid.

161 Ibid., pp. 759-60. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.199 fundamental concepts were conspicuous in recent social philosophies. For instance, a tendency to view natural processes mechanistically had encouraged a parallel view of history that denied the organic continuity and development of social institutions: 'with the Moderns, ... nothing grows; all is made'. This mechanistic conception of society, he explained, had led to a belief that ties with the past were unimportant, and so provided a dangerous rationale for revolution. Once again, he had in mind Locke and eighteenth-century natural rights theorists whom he saw as overtly adopting a mechanistic model.(162)

Can it then be the result of accident, that the Political Dogmata, the principles of which are notoriously affirm'd and supported in the writings of Locke, that the 'Perilous stuff' that still weighs on the heart of Europe, and from which all the dire antidotes of the late Revolution have not yet 'cleans'd the foul bosom' ... is it mere chance, that these need only borrow a few terms from the mechanic philosophy to become a fac-simile of its doctrines.

A conceptual correlation between the mechanical philosophy and liberal politics was also evident, Coleridge complained, in a social application of atomism. The system of the mechanists, he indicated, posits a world constituted by atomistic particles, whose properties and means of combination are not explained. Locke and others, similarly, he argued, had advocated a political theory that depicts individuals as disconnected, atomistic units, whose only security is provided by a fictitious 'contract' that can be broken at will. The consequences of this theory, Coleridge claimed, were social disunity and lawlessness, for in such a system 'an Atom ... by the pure Attribute of his atomy has an equal right with all other Atoms to be constituent & Demiurgic on all occasions.' He went on to assert that it was no 'mere accident' that such notions were 'first drawn into experiment and ... first realized ... by the people that of all the nations of

162 Ibid., p. 761. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.200

Europe were most characterised ... by the ignorance and contempt of all that connects it with the past'.(163) For Coleridge, then, the radical individualism and disregard for tradition of the French Revolutionaries were clear consequences of mechanism. In his Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19, this connection between an atomistic mechanical philosophy and the individualistic principles of the French Revolution was made even more explicit.(164)

We have only to put one word for the other, and in the mechanical philosophy to give the whole system of the French Revolution. Here are certain atoms miraculously invested with certain individual rights, from the collection of which all right and wrong is to depend. These atoms, by a chance and will of their own, were to rush together and thus rushing together they were to form a convention, and this convention was to make a constitution, and this constitution then was to make a contract ... between the major atoms and the minor ones that the minor should govern them ... and if there was any quarrel the major atoms were to assume the power of repulsion, suspending then the power of attraction ... .

In the concluding section of his letter to Lord Liverpool, Coleridge repeated his claim concerning the political effects of the mechanical philosophy, and warned the Prime Minister of the grave danger posed by the upper classes' unwitting assent to this philosophy.(165)

As long as the principles of our Gentry and Clergy are grounded in [this] false Philosophy, which ... has succeeded in rendering Metaphysics a word of opprobrium, all the Sunday and National schools in the world will not preclude Schism in the lower & middle classes.

163 Ibid., pp. 758, 761-2.

164 PL, p. 195. Both the Greek-derived word 'atom' and the Latin-derived 'individual' have the same basic meaning: something that is indivisible, which cannot be further divided. Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary defines 'individuum' as 'an atom, indivisible particle', and offers the following example from Cicero: 'ex illis individuis, unde omnia Democritus gigni affirmat', which translates as 'out of those atoms, out of which Democritus affirms that everything is generated'.

165 CL,4, p. 762. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.201

Coleridge's letter to Liverpool illustrates his conviction that Britain could only be saved from political upheaval if the ruling classes recognized that prevailing political ideologies drew their justification from a mechanistic view of nature. Such a view of nature was reflected in the atomistic 'Epicurean' morality of the time in which a concept of moral responsibility or duty towards others was lacking. It was also patent in the political economists' mechanistic laissez-faire notion that capital regulated itself - that 'things find their level' - an assumption, Coleridge argued, that served to justify the exploitation of the weaker by the more powerful. For him, (as we have seen), such immoral conceptions of human behaviour were principally vindicated through a prevailing sensationalist epistemology that derived its authority from the mechanical philosophy. It was crucial, then, to show that this 'Epicurean' ethics and the views of nature and knowledge on which it was based were ill-founded.

Coleridge's contention that mechanistic models of nature bolstered the new liberal politics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is supported in much of the literature of the period. Mayr has offered interesting evidence that there was in fact a significant relationship between a new generation of self-regulating machines and the liberal conception of the state in the eighteenth century.(166) Protagonists of the liberal idea that it was best for governments to not interfere in the individual pursuit of economic gain typically described their economic models in terms analogous to that of a feedback mechanism. If the economy were left to run on its own, the

166 Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery, pp. 139-89, esp. pp. 164-80. Mayr argues that mechanistic imagery was widely used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to bolster political arguments. Initially, however, the mechanistic imagery was based on an analogy with the clockwork mechanism and tended to support an authoritarian conception of the state such as that of Frederick II of Prussia (see the remarkable examples on pp. 108-9). Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.202 argument goes, it would automatically find its own 'natural' equilibrium. Mayr cites examples from eighteenth-century anti- mercantilist writings, including Hume and Adam Smith. Thus Hume argued, anticipating Smith (see above, pp. 182, 183), that trade betweeen countries would naturally balance out, in the same way that(167)

water, wherever it communicates, remains always at a level. ... were it to be raised in any one place, the superior gravity of that part not being balanced, must depress it, till it meet a counterpoise; and ... the same cause, which redresses the inequality when it happens, must for ever prevent it, without some violent external operation.

Coleridge's attacks on political economy show that he was persuaded that the idea of a self-regulating mechanism was strongly implied in the laissez-faire notions of Smith, the Physiocrats and others.

Not all mechanisms, however, are feedback ones, and Mayr provides some examples of a different mechanistic model of the state used by some of the French thinkers who have been discussed earlier in this chapter. Helvétius and Holbach argued that states ought to run like an uncomplicated machine, emphasizing mechanical simplicity rather than self-regulation. Helvétius, for instance, suggested that good government should function like a 'simple machine, whose springs would be easy to direct and would not require that great apparatus of wheels and counterweights that are so difficult to rewind'.(168) Kramnick has noted similar arguments to these in late eighteenth-century Britain. Advocates of reform such as Paine and Priestley criticized the British constitution on the grounds that it had become an unwieldy 'machine'. For Priestley, the constitution

167 David Hume, 'Of the Balance of Trade', in Essays, vol. 1, p. 333, cited in Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery, p. 170.

168 Helvétius, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 264, as translated by Mayr, Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery, p. 113. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.203 needed to be reformed because 'the more complex any machine is ... the more liable it is to disorder.'(169) David Williams, one of Priestley's dissenting friends, similarly recommended the adoption of uncomplicated, mechanical principles in the workings of the state:(170)

as the development of a machine is owing to the prevalence of some constituent power or powers over others: so in a state, all inconveniences and injuries are to be ascribed to the want of sufficient counter- action and assistance in some of its parts, to balance the pressure of the others; and to assist in producing the ground effect.

While such statements might be viewed as merely figurative, the mechanistic parallel clearly implied (Kramnick indicates) that there was no mystery or complexity in the state's functioning. Like a machine, its workings were visible and relatively simple.(171) This contained a clear warning for those who defended the old social order by reference to tradition or religion. There was the additional implication too, noted by Coleridge, that the state-machine could readily be reconstructed if it was no longer functioning adequately. Such revolutionary connotations of the machine analogy in politics must have been apparent to Coleridge's contemporaries. Indeed, we observed in the previous chapter that the links between science and politics were evident to many at the end of the eighteenth century and that those opposed to social and political reform saw a definite connection between revolution and 'Jacobin science'.

169 From the second (1771) edition of Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political , Civil, and Religious Liberty, in Priestley, Writings, p. 205. Cited in Kramnick, 'Priestley's Scientific Liberalism', pp. 23-4.

170 David Williams, Lectures on Political Liberty, (London, 1782), pp. 74-5, cited in Kramnick, 'Priestley's Scientific Liberalism', p. 28. I have not yet seen this work, nor the one by the same author cited in note 172.

171 Kramnick, loc. cit., pp. 23-4. Ch.III: 'Commercial G. Britain' p.204

Early in the next century, Priestley's friend, Williams, was quite explicit that natural philosophy provided a clear model for social philosophies, arguing that it is 'the principal duty of man to transfer into social institutions, moral, civil, and political, the ideas he deduces from the natural world.'(172) On this, Coleridge certainly would have concurred. The crucial issue was what view of nature one adopted as one's model. Coleridge saw mechanism as bolstering a politics grounded ultimately on self-interest. So what had to be done was to show that there was in fact a compelling alternative to the prevailing mechanical philosophy. In the following chapters, we shall see that this task of providing an alternative model of nature was one to which Coleridge seriously began to apply himself after 1815.

172 David Williams, Preparatory Studies for Political Reformers, (London, 1810), p. 19, cited in Kramnick, loc. cit., p. 28. p.205

CHAPTER IV: 'AN ACT OR POWER' IN MATTER AND SPIRIT— DYNAMISM AND IDEALISM

IV.1 Introduction

It is well known that in the years after 1815 the mature Coleridge began to seriously promote a natural philosophy in Britain that was heavily dependent on the ideas of German philosophers such as Kant and Coleridge's contemporary, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854). One of the main aims of this natural philosophy (which Coleridge variously referred to as 'dynamic', 'constructive' or 'vital') was to obtain an understanding of the immaterial substratum of nature, rather than mere knowledge of the observable properties of matter. He insisted that his 'dynamic' (or force-based) philosophy ought to replace the prevailing mechanical philosophy of his time, deeming the latter superficial.

The term 'dynamic philosophy' requires some clarification. As used by Coleridge and his German sources, it refers somewhat generally to a physics in which the fundamental ingredients are forces, like attractions and repulsions, typically immaterial, and often acting at a distance. This physics, then, is one that views nature as essentially active, in contrast to the inert universe of the mechanical philosophy. Indeed, the word 'dynamic' - of Greek origin - is equivalent to the Latin-derived 'potential', meaning 'power', thus clearly implying activity. Many of the post-Kantian philosophers and scientists, whose ideas Coleridge adopted, further viewed the manifestation of the basic forces of attraction and repulsion in nature on the analogy of the magnet, and described the interplay of these forces in terms of 'polarity'. They contended that all natural phenomena or processes should be understood as the product of polar Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.206 oppositions. The mature Coleridge's philosophy can in fact be summed up as a belief that nature and the human mind are permeated with activity, and that all phenomena are the product of a fundamental tension in the world.

Coleridge of course was no scientist, so it is important to recognize that his account of the dynamic philosophy was not derived from his own investigations, but to a large extent borrowed from others' more systematic accounts. Some of these accounts were also by non-scientists, such as Kant and Schelling, and were more concerned with a rational demonstration of dynamism than with experimental proof for it. Other sources, however, were by practising scientists, and purported to offer empirical confirmation of the fundamental status of forces in nature.

In his lifetime, moreover, Coleridge did not publish any systematic treatise on the dynamic philosophy, but repeatedly championed it fragmentarily, in a number of post-1815 works that also dealt with other subjects of a literary, philosophical, religious and political character, such as his revised 1818 edition of The Friend. Nevertheless, a substantial essay on the topic, Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life (1848), was published posthumously. This, together with detailed accounts in letters, notebooks, marginalia, and the unpublished Opus Maximum(1)- a major work intended as a summing-up of his whole philosophy - are the principal sources for Coleridge's views on the dynamic philosophy.

What all of these sources reveal is that his reasons for recommending the philosophy were varied. There were, for example, technical reasons. For, like many others at the time, he considered mechanism to be a failure in its own terms, unable

1 The manuscript of the Opus Maximum, in three volumes, is in the Victoria College Library at the University of Toronto. I have not had the opportunity to consult this work. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.207 even to provide plausible accounts of some important properties of the material world. Indeed, we have already noted that his condemnation of the Newtonian aether involved criticism of the technical details of mechanistic explanations (pp. 78-80). Below, we shall in fact see that he saw a dynamic natural philosophy as offering an explanation of phenomena far more satisfactory than that provided by mechanism.

Yet there were clearly also other, non-technical reasons for Coleridge's promotion of dynamism. Undoubtedly, one motive for advancing this alternative to the mechanical philosophy was religious. For the underlying immaterial forces revealed by a dynamic philosophy seemed more supportive of a religious view that nature is pervaded by spirit. However, we have repeatedly observed that Coleridge's defences of religion had a distinct socio-political dimension, and in the previous chapters we noted that his public condemnation of atheistic and materialistic natural philosophies was to a large degree motivated by concern about their social consequences. In this (though particularly in the following) chapter we shall see that there is a good deal of evidence to show that his promotion of a dynamic natural philosophy performed a similar function. In 1815, the Napoleonic wars had ended, and Britain was entering a particularly unstable period, marked by high unemployment and rising social unrest. This was the period leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, in which the House of Commons was made more representative and the suffrage extended.(2) Coleridge saw it as urgent to offer a cogent alternative to the natural philosophies that he saw as underpinning rising liberal and radical ideologies. This alternative to mechanism presented itself to him in the form of the Naturphilosophie ('nature philosophy' but not 'natural philosophy') that was an integral part of Schelling's idealism.

2 See, for example: Halévy, Liberal Awakening, p. 4 et seq.; Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 660-1, 673-83, 693-700. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.208

Coleridge's debt to Schelling and the latter's scientific followers has been well documented by several commentators,(3) but the political dimension of Coleridge's interest in Naturphilosophie has not yet been observed.

The principal aim of this earlier chapter, however, will be to explain the scientific and philosophical basis of Coleridge's dynamic philosophy, and, in particular, its derivation from Schelling's idealist Naturphilosophie. The chapter will also observe a very early fascination with immaterialistic natural philosophies, dating from the time of Coleridge's enthusiasm for Priestley's 'materialism'. It thus documents an important continuity in Coleridge's thinking - a continuity enduring from the mid-1790s through to the 1830s, and not yet dealt with in the literature, either. Likewise, the important similarities between Priestley's cosmology and those of the German philosophers to whom Coleridge was attracted seem not to have been canvassed by scholars in the field. Both positions presented a view of nature as fundamentally constituted by immaterial forces of attractions and repulsions. The difference was that in Priestley's physics there appeared to be no ontological distinction between matter and spirit, whereas in Naturphilosophie matter was subordinate to spirit.

A related continuity in Coleridge's thought that will be investigated in the present chapter was his lifelong interest in idealist philosophies: that is, philosophies that take what we know to be primarily structured by our minds, and not by the external, sensory world. We shall see that the young Coleridge's absorption in Platonic philosophies and in Berkeley's immaterialism was indicative of an early predilection for

3 In particular by: Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science; Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature, pp. 160-203; and Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism, pp. 192-237. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.209 idealism, and it was the idealist framework that especially appealed to him after 1800 in thinkers like Kant and Schelling. We shall also see that Naturphilosophie was thoroughly grounded in an idealist epistemology, and this was a major reason for Coleridge's attraction to it.

The chapter will also explore Coleridge's enthusiasm for a dynamic direction he came to detect in British science. As a young man in the late 1790s, he established a close friendship with Humphry Davy, and eagerly followed the budding chemist's work at the Royal Institution from 1801. Later, in the 1818 Friend, Coleridge promoted the chemistry of Davy and some of the latter's colleagues as illustration of the dynamic direction science ought to take. In that work, he also advanced the physiology of the eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist, John Hunter, as another important specimen of dynamism. The mature Coleridge was excited about such developments, for they corroborated his own views on science largely derived from Schelling's dynamic Naturphilosophie.

This chapter will begin, then, with an account of Coleridge's relatively early espousal of immaterialistic cosmologies in the mid-1790s. In particular, the pantheism in his thought of this era will be outlined and its appeal to him explained in terms of its radical political implications. The following sections will go on to investigate his growing interest (from 1800) in the dynamic natural philosophies and idealist systems of thought of German philosophers such as Kant and Schelling. The speculative framework of Naturphilosophie will then be canvassed, followed by a discussion of Coleridge's advocacy of British dynamism. Finally, his promotion of Schelling's Naturphilosophie in the Theory of Life will be examined. We shall see that Coleridge followed Schelling in insisting that nature is fundamentally Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.210 active and that all phenomena can be explained in terms of a universal law of polarity.

IV.2 The Young Coleridge, 'Monads' and Pantheism

From the time of his earliest statements about natural philosophy in the mid-1790s, even when he was enthusiastic about mechanism, Coleridge embraced an immaterialistic physics. This is obvious in his support for Priestley's force-based view of nature, as it is also from his criticism of the 'mechanic philosophy' in the lines he contributed to Southey's Joan of Arc. There, for instance, in a section following the condemnation of Newton's aether (see pp. 78-80), he advocated a physics which gave a central role to the influence of immaterial agencies in nature. In this immaterialistic conception of the world, God is the most important kind of agency, but there are also other spiritual agencies at work: 'self-conscious minds', executing the design of an 'all-conscious Spirit', even though each one seems individually 'to pursue its own self-centering end':(4)

Some nurse the infant diamond in the mine; Some roll the genial juices thro' the oak; Some drive the mutinous clouds to clash in air; And rushing on the storm with whirlwind speed Yoke the red lightning to their vollying car.

Such agencies are also portrayed as having a role in human affairs, although Coleridge did not make much of this notion here. He merely remarked that the 'eternal good' is realized through their 'complex interests weaving human fates'.(5)

Piper has shown that the central idea expressed here of spiritual agencies acting in nature was immediately derived from

4 Southey, Joan of Arc, Bk. 2, ll. 44-5, 49-54, pp. 42-3.

5 Ibid., ll. 59, 57, p. 43. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.211 the young Coleridge's reading of Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1791).(6) In this work, Darwin had depicted the forces of nature as the mythical spirits of Rosicrucian occultism, 'Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs, and Salamanders', but used this mythical structure as nothing more than a poetic device. It provided 'a proper machinery for a Botanic poem', he said, and he did not (it seems) actually believe that a spiritual realm influenced nature in this way.(7) Yet Coleridge found in Darwin's allegorical framework a means of representing his own conception of nature as animated by real, spiritual agencies.

In Joan of Arc, Coleridge also referred to these agencies as 'monads', a term with obvious Leibnizian resonances. Indeed, Coleridge's 'self-conscious minds', like Leibniz's monads, are immaterial, active substances. Moreover, their independence, regulated by an 'all-conscious Spirit', is similar to Leibniz's notion that God co-ordinates nature indirectly, by means of a pre-established harmony.(8) But there is in fact no evidence that Coleridge had read Leibniz at the time, and Piper concludes that the young poet's use of the term 'monad' was in part an affirmation of Priestley's cosmology.(9) Yet, while Coleridge clearly saw his speculations about the immaterial world in Joan of Arc as congruous with Priestley's physics, neither the term 'monad' nor the exact idea contained in Coleridge's use of it figure in such key statements of Priestley's metaphysical position as the Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit or the

6 Piper, Active Universe, pp. 40-1.

7 Darwin, Botanic Garden, Pt. 1, p. vii. Another of Darwin's reasons for using these Rosicrucian symbols was because 'they were originally the names of hieroglyphic figures representing the elements'. Ibid. On Darwin's use of myth, see Primer, 'Darwin's Temple of Nature'.

8 See Leibniz, New Essays, pp. 55, 440, 443, 473-4.

9 Piper, Active Universe, pp. 39-40. Piper indicates here that another potential source for Coleridge's 'monads' is the sixteenth-century Neoplatonist, Giordano Bruno, but again notes that there is no evidence that Coleridge had read Bruno at that time. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.212 published debate with Richard Price on materialism and necessitarianism.

Such a notion is, however, apparent in another text familiar to Coleridge in this period - Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe - which is also discussed by Piper.(10) In this work, Cudworth argued that God does not intervene directly in nature, but acts through a delegated spiritual intermediary that Cudworth called a 'Plastick Nature'. This immaterial, 'Plastick Nature' had various theological and philosophical advantages for Cudworth. It retained a role for spiritual causation in nature, and also enabled one to explain phenomena of an organic kind that could not be well-accounted for by the mechanical philosophy. Furthermore, it made theological sense to Cudworth to have such a spiritual intermediary, because a perfect Deity could presumably not be held responsible for nature's imperfections and neither would it befit Him to have to attend to every trivial feature of nature's workings.(11)

Piper suggests that Cudworth's 'Plastick Nature' most probably informed the young Coleridge's cosmology,(12) and, in Coleridge's poem 'Religious Musings' (1794-6), we in fact find the word 'plastic' closely associated with the term 'monad'. Toward the end of that poem, Coleridge apostrophized the spirits 'of plastic power, that interfused/ Roll through the grosser and material mass/ In organizing surge! Holies of God!/ (And what if Monads of the infinite mind?)'(13) However, as Piper points out, there is a fundamental difference here between Cudworth's 'Plastick Nature' and

10 See: Whalley, 'Bristol Library Borrowings', pp. 120, 124; Piper, Active Universe, pp. 43-6.

11 Cudworth, True Intellectual System, vol. 1, pp. 147-51, 163-4. Cf. Hutchison, 'Supernaturalism', pp. 319-23.

12 Piper, Active Universe, pp. 43-6.

13 'Religious Musings', ll. 405-8, PW,1, p. 124. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.213

Coleridge's 'monads'. Unlike the latter, the 'Plastick Nature' was definitely not part 'of the infinite mind'.(14)

It seems, then, that there is no clear solution to the problem of sources for Coleridge's 'monads'. One thing that emerges here, however, from the suggestion that such agencies constitute 'the infinite mind' is a tendency toward an unorthodox, pantheistic conflation of God and nature.

Such a pantheistic tendency is particularly evident in another of Coleridge's poems from this period, 'The Eolian Harp' (1795), in which the notion of a 'plastic' spirit animating nature is also apparent. There, the young poet speculated(15)

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

This is a fairly explicit description of pantheism, and Coleridge was aware of its heterodoxy. For, in spite of his manifest attraction to it, in the lines that follow these, he disavowed his heretical opinions and affirmed his faith in a personal transcendent Deity 'who with his saving mercies healéd me,/ A sinful and most miserable man'.(16)

Piper has argued that this pantheistic tendency in Coleridge's early cosmology also stemmed from Priestley(17) -a claim that is principally based on a later manuscript note by Coleridge to lines from 'The Destiny of Nations' (1796), a poem that incorporated most of his contribution to Southey's Joan of

14 See Piper, Active Universe,p.46.

15 'The Eolian Harp', ll. 44-8, PW,1, p. 102.

16 Ibid., ll. 61-2. On Coleridge's uneasy relationship with pantheism, see McFarland, Pantheist Tradition.

17 Piper, Active Universe, pp. 32-3. 36, 39-40. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.214

Arc. In the lines in question, Joan is represented as praising God, the 'All-conscious Presence of the Universe!/ Nature's vast ever-acting Energy!'(18) In his later annotation to these lines, Coleridge first defended them as possessing 'a sane sense', but acknowledged that 'they are easily, and more naturally interpreted with a very false and dangerous one.' He went on to explain this ambiguity as due to his having been, at the time of the poem's composition, a follower of Joseph Priestley and the latter's Unitarian creed: 'one of the Mongrels, the Josephidites [Josephides = the Son of Joseph], a proper name of distinction from those who believe in, as well as believe Christ the only begotten Son of the Living God before all Time.'(19) Coleridge, then, was insinuating that pantheism was an integral part of the Unitarianism which he had embraced as a young man though later rejected. Piper accepts this rationale and explains Coleridge's early cosmology as influenced by pantheistic tendencies found in Priestley and in Unitarianism.

There are, however, some problems with this explanation. Firstly, it presumes that Priestley's cosmology was typically Unitarian. This was not the case, as is attested by the well- known published debate between the Socinian Priestley and his friend Richard Price - an Arian Unitarian - over Priestley's theological views.(20) Secondly, it is not clear that Priestley's cosmology really was pantheistic. In the 1777 Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, for example, Priestley attacked Andrew Baxter for what he claimed was a failure to make a clear enough distinction between God and nature. Baxter, according to Priestley, had made God the direct source of matter's activity,

18 'The Destiny of Nations', ll. 460-1, PW,1, pp. 146-7.

19 Ibid., p. 147n.1.

20 This debate was entitled A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence between Dr. Price, and Dr. Priestley (1778). Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.215 which Priestley claimed was tantamount to identifying God with nature, as in the pantheistic philosophy of Giordano Bruno. By contrast, his own account (he maintained) made the active powers in nature separate from, though still dependent upon, God.(21) In the second, 1782 edition of the Disquisitions, he added a disclaimer that his views were not at all like those of that most eminent of pantheists, Spinoza. The difference between their positions, Priestley insisted, was that his own system presupposed 'a source of infinite power, and superior intelligence, from which all inferior beings are derived; that every inferior intelligent being has a consciousness distinct from that of the supreme intelligence'.(22)

Nevertheless, Priestley's disavowal of Spinozism implies that he had been attacked on such grounds, and it is easy to understand how his thought might be construed as pantheistic. For we have seen (pp. 24-26) that he denied any real distinction between matter and spirit, and, although God was specifically excluded from this ontological levelling, within a traditional dualistic perspective this suggested that God too was indistinct from matter.

The young Coleridge, however, did not apparently see his own Unitarianism or Priestley's cosmology as fundamentally pantheistic, notwithstanding his later note to 'The Destiny of Nations'. This is clear from a 1796 letter, in which he expressed irritation at discovering pantheistic notions in what he otherwise viewed as Priestley's exemplary theology and natural

21 Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), pp. 8-10. A similar accusation that Baxter's natural philosophy tended toward 'making God the soul of the world' was made in the article on 'Earth' in the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, cited in Hughes, 'Science in English Encyclopædias', p. 365. In this article it was also implied that Priestley, Boscovich and Michell might run into similar theological difficulties because of their radical immaterialism. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 6, p. 233.

22 Priestley, Disquisitions (1782), vol. 1, p. 42, cited in Piper, Active Universe,p.37. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.216 philosophy. 'How is it', Coleridge grumbled, 'that Dr Priestley is not an atheist? - He asserts in three different Places, that God not only does, but is, everything.'(23) This suggests that Coleridge in this period saw his own (and Priestley's broader views) as largely inconsistent with an outlook that conflated God and nature. Thus, while there clearly was a pantheistic tendency in Coleridge's early thought it is not at all clear that it was derived from Priestley, as Coleridge subsequently asserted in his annotation to 'The Destiny of Nations'. Yet we shall see below that Coleridge later came to view a Unitarian denial of Christ's transcendence as having the same theological and moral implications as the pantheistic idea that God is not distinct from the universe.

Where, then, did the pantheistic tendencies in Coleridge's early cosmology come from? There is no ready answer to this question, but one might come closer to finding it by asking why Coleridge was attracted to such a way of viewing nature, particularly when it was publicly frowned upon. A clue is provided once again by looking at the way in which natural philosophy was linked with politics, for there were distinct political implications in a pantheistic view of nature. The challenges it posed were in fact typical of the Enlightenment. To begin with, it brought into question ecclesiastical authority. For if everything and every person were a part of God, the spiritual mediation of the Christian church was superfluous. Such an idea clearly threatened the Church's position as well as that of the political hierarchy it sanctioned. Moreover, the idea that God was present in every person implied more equal access to knowledge of His will. So, any attempt to justify

23 CL,1, p. 192: to the Rev. John Edwards, 20 March 1796. The young Coleridge's high regard for Priestley's theology is indicated by a 1798 letter that has already been cited, in which Coleridge wrote, 'I regard every experiment that Priestly made in Chemistry, as giving wings to his more sublime theological works.' Ibid., p. 372: to John Prior Estlin, 16 January 1798. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.217 political inequality on the basis of special insight into God's intentions was open to question.(24) On a deeper level, the belief that God was in everything blurred the dualistic distinction between spirit and matter, used in late eighteenth- century Britain to defend the authority of the religious and political Establishments (see above, pp. 104-109). One can see, then, that pantheism was harmonious with the young Coleridge's Unitarian hostility to the Church of England, his Pantisocratic communitarianism, and his view of Jesus as a champion of 'the rights of Man' (cf. above, pp. 30, 31, 41-45). A pantheistic view of nature would thus have sustained the religious and political ideals he was advocating in the mid-1790s.(25)

Throughout the rest of the post-revolutionary decade, pantheism continued to remain attractive to Coleridge, despite his occasional reservations about it, and around 1799 he became deeply interested in the notoriously pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza.(26) This new interest was inspired by contact with the

24 Cf.: Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 80, 224; Beiser, Fate of Reason, pp. 50-2, 336. Beiser notes that, in Germany, a widespread perception of a connection between pantheism and radical politics was conspicuous from the sixteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries. He suggests that there was a significant continuity between later German pantheism and the radical demands of the Reformation. He points out that the historical criticism of the Bible championed in Spinoza's Tractatus theologicus politicus had to a large extent undermined the Reformation idea that the Bible was the medium by which one could know God's will. Pantheism, Beiser contends, overcame this obstacle, through the idea that God's wishes could be known even more directly, by experiencing the divinity within oneself.

25 The political importance of Coleridge's pantheism has previously been suggested by Wylie in an analysis of 'Religious Musings'. Wylie points out that one passage of Coleridge's poem implies a connection between a pantheistic vision of the world - in which all are a part of God - and the French revolutionary message of universal 'fraternity'. In this passage, Coleridge claimed that it is 'the sublime of man ... to know ourselves/ Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!/ This fraternises man, this constitutes/ Our charities and bearings. But 'tis God/ Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole'. Wylie, Young Coleridge, p. 102; 'Religious Musings', ll. 126-31, PW,1, pp. 113-14.

26 In a letter to Southey, he described himself as 'sunk in Spinoza ... undisturbed as a Toad in a Rock'. CL,1, p. 534: to Robert Southey, (continued...) Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.218 intellectual scene in Germany during the ten months he spent travelling in 1798 and 1799. For, in late eighteenth-century Germany, Spinoza's philosophy was keenly discussed, with the philosophical community passionately divided over its merits. In particular, a new generation of thinkers, inspired in part by Kant, had expressed its support for Spinoza,(27) and this no doubt influenced the young, impressionable Coleridge.

This German connection once again reveals the broadly theologico-political stakes in pantheism. Certainly, there was a purely metaphysical dimension to the debate surrounding Spinoza that emerged in late eighteenth-century Germany, but those antagonistic to pantheism were explicit that what especially worried them was the way this philosophy could be used to subvert religious and political authority.(28) There is an obvious parallel here with the contemporary debate in Britain (examined in Chapter II) surrounding 'Jacobin science'.

A disillusionment with Spinoza and pantheism only becomes evident in Coleridge's writings around 1805 - after his political change of heart - and is related to a growing hostility to Unitarianism and its moral and political implications. Thus, in a letter of 1806, he complained that(29)

Unitarianism in its' immediate intelligential ... consequences, is Atheism or Spinosism - God becomes a mere power in darkness, even as Gravitation, and instead of a moral Religion of practical Influence we shall have only a physical Theory to gratify ideal curiosity ... .

26(...continued) 30 September 1799. See also ibid., p. 551: to Robert Southey, 24 December 1799.

27 See: Beiser, Fate of Reason, pp. 44-126, 158-63; Zammito, Genesis of Kant's Critique, pp. 228-47.

28 Beiser, Fate of Reason, pp. 49-52, 76-7, 85; Zammito, Genesis of Kant's Critique, pp. 11-12, 228-9, 240-2.

29 CL,2, p. 1196: to Thomas Clarkson, 13 October 1806. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.219

Coleridge had now come to believe that both Unitarianism and pantheism lacked the moral authority provided by the idea of a personal, transcendent God - an idea upheld by the Anglican Church and sustained by a dualistic ontology. On the other hand, cosmologies such as those of Priestley and Spinoza rendered dangerously ambiguous the politically important, hierarchical distinction between spirit and matter.

What is important to note here for our picture of the young Coleridge's philosophy of nature is that, first of all, on a metaphysical level, pantheism was compatible with his belief that nature is activated by spirit and thus with the immaterialistic cosmology to which he was drawn in Priestley. Secondly, on a theological and political level, both Priestley's physics and a pantheistic view of the world seemed to deny a hierarchy in nature, and this had radical political implications. Coleridge's subsequent repudiation of Priestley and Spinoza in the years after 1800 was informed by an awareness of these implications.

IV.3 Dynamism

So, from 1800 onwards, Coleridge began to seriously apply himself to a study of the idealist philosophies of the Germans - Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Schelling, and the scientific followers of Schelling's programme of Naturphilosophie. One of the things that particularly appealed to him in these thinkers was the same immaterialistic emphasis to which he had earlier been drawn in Priestley. For, like the latter, these thinkers viewed the fundamental components of nature as immaterial forces, the action of which produced 'material' phenomena. There were no solid, extended atoms in this view of nature nor material aethers. The only serious reservation that the mature Coleridge expressed about some of Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.220 these force-based or 'dynamic' cosmologies, as we shall see, concerned a pantheistic tendency he detected in them.

The term 'dynamic' derives from the Greek word for 'potential' (as in Aristotle's philosophy) and had been used by Leibniz to describe a metaphysics based on innate activity. An outline of what he called this 'new science of dynamics' was provided in the 1695 Specimen dynamicum, in which Leibniz argued that the existence of what we call matter could only be explained by assuming underlying forces in nature. He maintained that the 'matter' of the mechanists must be derived from(30)

something prior to extension, namely, a natural force everywhere implanted by the Author of nature ... [which] must constitute the inmost nature of the body, since it is the character of substance to act, and extension means only the continuation or the diffusion of a striving and counterstriving already presupposed by it ... .

The idea that force is an important ingredient in physics gained wide acceptance during the eighteenth century, and this was not only due to Leibniz. For a natural philosophy based on forces had also been given enormous credence by Newton, though Newton had retained a role for solid, extended matter in his scheme of nature, and equivocated on the real nature of force. Newton's physics also differed from that of Leibniz in the important function Newton gave to spiritual agencies which he referred to as 'active principles'.(31) Leibniz had endeavoured to exclude such agencies from the province of natural philosophy, and, in his well-known debate with Samuel Clarke, condemned what he saw as Newton's excessive supernaturalism.(32) Nevertheless, the immaterialistic emphasis in Newton's physics influenced the development of some important force-based philosophies in late

30 Leibniz, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, p. 712.

31 See McGuire, 'Newton's Invisible Realm'.

32 Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, pp. 29-30, 42-3. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.221 eighteenth-century Britain, including that of Priestley.(33) Priestley's 'dynamic physics, however, was derived partly also - as he explicitly acknowledged - from Boscovich, a major representative of the continental dynamic tradition stemming from Leibniz.(34)

The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German idealist philosophies to which Coleridge was attracted were also building upon the dynamic physics of both Leibniz and Newton, particularly as mediated through Kant. In early works, Kant had critically discussed and offered his own modifications to the positions of both thinkers.(35) His mature conclusions on the role of forces in physics were presented in his 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in which he argued against a mechanical explanation of nature in favour of a 'dynamical natural philosophy':(36)

that mode of explication which derives the specific variety of matter not from matters as machines, i.e., as mere tools of external moving forces, but from the proper moving forces of attraction and repulsion originally belonging to these matters ... .

The young Schelling followed the dynamic interpretation of nature of Kant and Leibniz, and asserted in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797:1803) that 'matter and bodies' could only be conceived as the 'products of opposing forces, or rather,

33 See Heimann and McGuire, 'Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers'.

34 Priestley, Disquisitions (1777), pp. 19-20. Boscovich, however, was also indebted to Newton, and (like Kant after him) endeavoured to find a compromise between the positions of both Leibniz and Newton. See Jammer, Concepts of Force, pp. 170-8. Interestingly, Boscovich was particularly influential on Scottish philosophers and scientific thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the Common Sense philosophers whose views Priestley publicly attacked. See Olson, 'Reception of Boscovich's Ideas'.

35 See Calinger, 'Kant and Newtonian Science', pp. 349-54.

36 Kant, Metaphysical Foundations,p.91. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.222 are themselves nothing else but these forces.'(37) Schelling, however, was critical of Newton, for adopting what Schelling (with some justice) saw as a predominantly mechanistic, rather than a dynamic, view of nature. He complained that the British scientist had unnecessarily postulated the existence of solid, impenetrable particles, when one could quite adequately account for natural phenomena on the basis of forces alone.(38)

We have observed that Coleridge's mature advocacy of dynamism was not a novel development in his thought: he had earlier embraced Priestley's dynamic physics. Yet, he wrote as if it were new, and refused to consider his erstwhile hero, Priestley, as an important participant in this dynamic tradition. This attitude to Priestley was like that Coleridge demonstrated towards Newton, whose role in a dynamic physics he also tended to ignore. According to Coleridge, it was Kant - and definitely not Newton - whose early work was 'the first product of the Dynamic Philosophy in the Physical Sciences, from the time ... of Giordano Bruno'.(39) I have argued elsewhere that this relegation of Newton to a back seat in the development of dynamic natural philosophy was motivated by Coleridge's hostility to a 'materialistic' version of 'Newtonian' physics, of which he had come to see Priestley as the most recent major proponent. Newton's part in the origination of this physics eventually led Coleridge to represent the British scientist as opposed to an

37 Schelling, Ideas, p. 156.

38 Ibid., pp. 153-60. Newton's mechanistic atomism, Schelling suggested, was due to a theological prejudice. For mechanism, he indicated, required 'the action of God'. Ibid., p. 160. Hutchison has demonstrated that much seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy was in fact radically supernaturalistic, and so could be harmonized with orthodox Christian theology. See Hutchison, 'Supernaturalism'.

39 CC,9, p. 400. The works of Kant to which Coleridge was referring were the Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747) and the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.223 immaterialistic dynamic philosophy.(40) It is nonetheless curious that Coleridge considered Priestley's cosmology to be so unlike those of the German thinkers he admired. How he saw their cosmologies as differing, therefore, requires some clarification.

Unfortunately, this difference is not spelt out by Coleridge in any detail. At some stage, as we have seen, he came to disapprove of what he claimed was Priestley's pantheism, but this was a complaint he was also to make about Schelling and the latter's programme of Naturphilosophie. Moreover, he was not afraid to admit that a key figure in the dynamic tradition he was promoting was Bruno, whose pantheism was well known. It is unlikely, then, that pantheism was a sufficient reason for Coleridge's exclusion of Priestley from the genealogy of dynamic philosophy. I have indicated in the aforementioned paper that the difference can in fact be accounted for partly on axiological grounds.(41) For what Coleridge found objectionable in Priestley's monistic physics was a denial of the pre-eminence of spirit over matter: for Priestley, matter and spirit were ontologically equivalent. One might even interpret Priestley's system as affirming the primacy of matter, for he repeatedly referred to his system as a kind of 'materialism' (see above, pp. 26, 61), thus implying that spirit could be reduced to matter, rather than the other way around. Indeed, in the Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge indicated that Priestley had initially presupposed the existence of matter which he then divested 'of all its material qualities' and 'substituted spiritual powers'.(42) By contrast, in the German philosophers, 'spirit' was the fundamental category to which the idea of

40 Sysak, 'Coleridge's Construction', pp. 71-2, 75-6.

41 Ibid., pp. 74-5.

42 CC,7, vol. 1, p. 136. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.224

'matter' was subordinated. For the mature Coleridge, it was this which fundamentally differentiated Priestley from the Germans.

The question remains as to why Coleridge's mature understanding of Priestley's physics was so different from his earlier thinking in the 1790s. Once again, an answer to this is provided by considering the political dimension of natural philosophy. In Chapter II we saw that, in Britain after the French Revolution, there was an ideological motivation behind some important complaints about natural philosophies that denied a primary role for spirit. Robison, for example, defended a hierarchical, dualistic physics against what he believed was a revolutionary strategy of Priestley and some French scientists to do away with dualism. The dualistic postulation of an autonomous realm of spirit provided the ruling elite with a convenient sanction for its authority, which Priestley and his friends were undermining. By condemning Priestley's monism, the conservative Coleridge can be seen as echoing Robison's political concerns about Priestley's science.(43)

Nevertheless, Coleridge never accepted the dualism of the mechanical philosophy, and in fact criticized it in the Biographia Literaria. There, he argued (much as Priestley had done in the Disquisitions) that the Cartesian removal of mind from matter posed insurmountable problems as to how these heterogeneous substances could interact.(44) The solution, as he saw it, was again not unlike that proposed by Priestley: matter and spirit should be viewed as different manifestations of the same underlying substance. This settled the puzzle of matter-

43 Interestingly, Robison thought very highly of Boscovich's dynamism, and argued that such dynamic explanations were preferable to aetherial ones. For the latter (he claimed) had been used as the basis for materialistic systems of thought. See Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, pp. 280-1.

44 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 129-30. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.225 spirit interaction, and seemed, moreover, to be supported by empirical facts. Coleridge argued that(45)

since impenetrability is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum.

Now, while the ontology proposed here by Coleridge resembled that of Priestley, its 'modes, or degrees in perfection' indicated a hierarchy that was absent in Priestley's monism. For Coleridge, spirit was superior to matter, even though they shared 'a common substratum'. His mature ontology thus preserved the hierarchical structure of dualism, with its authoritarian connotations, but without its technical problems.

IV.4 Idealism

This dynamic ontology, explicitly adopted by the mature Coleridge, was underpinned by an idealist philosophy in which our knowledge about the world is taken to be primarily structured by our minds. For Coleridge and the German thinkers he was championing, this idealist perspective had an important ethical dimension. For, in contrast to a mechanistic view of the mind as passively conditioned by the external environment, idealists took the mind to be active in producing knowledge and behaviour. Their dynamic psychology implied that human actions were not wholly constrained by the apparently deterministic causal relations found in nature, but could, to some extent, be freely chosen. So, whereas a mechanistic psychology portrayed human behaviour as governed by external sensations of pleasure and pain, a dynamic psychology suggested that human beings were not

45 Ibid. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.226 entirely at the mercy of their senses and could choose to act otherwise than from self-interest. An idealist view of the mind, then, was opposed to the mechanistic psychologies of eighteenth- century Necessitarians such as Hartley and Priestley, and this was no doubt another motive for the mature Coleridge's hostility to Priestley's natural philosophy.

In his recent biography of Coleridge, Holmes draws attention to this ethical dimension of Coleridge's thinking on psychology. He portrays Coleridge's interest in dynamism as related to the exploration of the creative faculty of the Imagination - the faculty that exemplified for Coleridge and other Romantics the reality of human free will in opposition to eighteenth-century determinism. Holmes rightly observes that this affirmation of idealism was also of profound religious importance to Coleridge.(46) In no way denying these motivations, my purpose is to add another one. For we have repeatedly seen that there were distinct political reasons for Coleridge's rejection of the mechanical philosophy.

Like his interest in dynamism, idealism was not a totally new feature of Coleridge's thought. Indeed, we have observed that, as early as the mid-1790s, he was attracted to a Platonic conception of knowledge, according to which the fundamental structure of the phenomenal world (the 'forms' or 'ideas') is amenable to rational inspection only, and is forever beyond the reach of sensory experience. A penchant for other philosophies that similarly took the view that all knowledge is dependent on

46 Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 394, 410-11. In this second part of his biography of Coleridge, Holmes represents Coleridge's thinking about religion as a personal quest to come to terms with suffering. While there is obviously a lot of truth in this, Holmes thereby neglects a significant social dimension of Coleridge's writing pertaining to religion. For we have seen that Coleridge's religious recommendations were often expressed in opposition to the utilitarian morality he observed around him, and which he feared was producing a more fragmented, individualistic society. This socio-political aspect of Coleridge's religious, philosophical, and scientific thought is not dealt with in Holmes's otherwise engaging study. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.227 our minds was further apparent in Coleridge's enthusiasm for Berkeley's immaterialism (in the years 1796-98). In a letter of late 1796 to Poole, Coleridge ranged Berkeley with Hartley and the seventeenth-century bishop, Jeremy Taylor, as the men he most admired. Shortly after this, in a letter to Thelwall, he declared himself to be 'a Berkleian', and in a note to a passage of his poem, 'Religious Musings' (1794-6), in which a spiritual reality underlying this life is alluded to, he indicated that such a notion could only be understood by 'those, who, like the Author, believe and feel the sublime system of Berkley'.(47)

Coleridge's serious study of Kant and Schelling from the early 1800s can only have confirmed this idealist tendency in his thinking. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had argued that our knowledge of an external reality is restricted to our mental representations of this reality via perception: one can only know the sensible appearances of things, or 'phenomena', not the things in themselves, or 'noumena', as Kant called them.(48) Kant thus rejected the possibility of knowing the ultimate reality on which our experience is based. This was not to deny the existence of such a reality, but only our capacity to apprehend its actual nature. According to his perspective, our whole empirical reality is filtered through our minds - a position which he termed 'transcendental idealism', the 'transcendental'

47 CL,1, p. 245: to Thomas Poole, 1 November 1796; ibid., p. 278: to John Thelwall, 17 December 1796; PW,1, p. 124n.2. On Coleridge and Berkeley, see also Deschamps, Pensée de Coleridge, pp. 422-6.

48 The main sources for my discussion of Kant here are: Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, pp. 47-125; Roberts, German Philosophy, pp. 9-55. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.228 here referring to the a priori conditions which 'transcend' or govern our knowledge and experience. 'Everything intuited in space or time,' Kant wrote,(49)

and therefore all objects of any experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which, in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.

One of the main purposes of Kant's idealist scheme was to firmly establish the conditions and limits of human knowledge as a way of guarding against Hume's radical scepticism. For Hume had persuasively argued that there was no way of demonstrating a certain connection between our perceptions and the objects of our experience. This not only undermined the claims of science to know an objective, external world, but also brought into serious doubt rationalist affirmations concerning knowledge of a moral and religious nature. Prompted by Hume's sceptical arguments, Kant maintained that it was important to distinguish between knowledge of phenomena - derived largely from the senses and seemingly subject to a causal determinism - and practical or moral knowledge, created by human beings as free agents who are able to make unconditioned moral choices and determine spiritual goals.(50)

Here Kant was suggesting an important distinction - later seized upon by Coleridge and made the linch-pin of his own idealist moral and political philosophies (see above, pp. 167- 174) - between an empirical world apprehended by the faculty of

49 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 491 B 519. For the distinction between 'noumena' and 'phenomena', see ibid., B 294-315. Kant's philosophy is sometimes read as having a fundamentally ontological orientation. On the continuing debate over whether Kant's critical project was epistemological or ontological in its aims, see Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, pp. 61-2.

50 Hume, Treatise, Bk. 1, Pt. 3, Sec. 14, (pp. 205-23); Tarnas, Western Mind, pp. 337-51; Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, pp. 51-6. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.229

'understanding' ('Verstand') and a purely intelligible world accessible through the faculty of 'reason' ('Vernunft'). In expressing such a distinction in his philosophy, Kant had been partly inspired by Rousseau who had similarly insisted that one needed to make a strict demarcation between an ostensibly deterministic world of phenomena that could be investigated by experimental science and an autonomous sphere of human choice.(51) In his famous Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), Rousseau wrote that one should not view a human being as just a kind of 'ingenious machine'. While physical science, he allowed, might enable one to account for some of the seemingly mechanical processes involved in perception and thought, it could not explain the apparent freedom of human volition:(52)

for physics may explain, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing or rather of choosing, and in the feeling of this power, nothing is to be found but acts which are purely spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism.

The moral and political importance of such a distinction in Kant's idealism is made clear in his interpretation of Plato. For Kant, the value of Plato's philosophy was that it emphasized the human capacity to think beyond the limitations of experience. Kant claimed that this was in fact what Plato had in mind by putting forward the doctrine of 'ideas'.(53)

Plato made use of the expression 'idea' in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the concepts of understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in experience

51 On Rousseau's influence on Kant, see Cassirer, Kant's Life, pp. 86-90, 235-6.

52 Rousseau, Discourse, pp. 169-70, cited in Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, p. 110. Cf. Hampson, The Enlightenment, pp. 197-8.

53 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 370, cited in Roberts, German Philosophy,p.34. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.230

nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it. For Plato ideas are archetypes of the things themselves ... .

Unlike Plato, however, Kant did not see such supersensuous 'archetypes' as having an existence separate from the mind; they were purely mental constructions. But this did not detract from their importance. For it still indicated that reason, and not sense-bound experience, could alone furnish a basis for ethics and for politics. For Kant, moral ideals are found nowhere in experience, nor is the political ideal of 'a constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others'. Kant maintained that Plato had recognized this important political function of 'ideas', and he recommended that the Republic be read as an expression of a freely created ideal to which political structures might be approximated, rather than be judged as something fanciful and unrealizable.(54)

Kant's emphasis on the autonomy of the mind with respect to experience was attractive to a younger generation of German philosophers that included Fichte, Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). These philosophers, however, thought that Kant's claims belied the idealist basis of his project. If all that can reliably be known is contained in the mind, they argued, it is nonsensical to posit a world of things in themselves which lies outside the scope of mental activity. This epistemological dualism, they believed, was misplaced in a philosophy which aspired to be truly idealist. Moreover, the reality of Kant's noumenal realm was open to question as well as its utility. Kant had after all admitted that belief in its existence was a matter of faith and not of certainty. He had

54 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 371-4, discussed in Roberts, German Philosophy, p. 34. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 568/ B 596, A 570/ B 598. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.231 argued that there was no way of proving the existence of a world beyond phenomena, and especially of such metaphysical entities as God, the soul and an afterlife. In other words, Kant had not provided a definitive solution to the problems of scepticism and psychological determinism. His idealist critics also complained that he had not given any justification for the specific a priori conditions he had presented as grounding empirical knowledge. The Kantian project, then, was largely unfinished, and these young idealists saw their task as one of completing it.(55)

The young Schelling's solution to some of the problems he perceived in Kant's critical philosophy was set out in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. His reasoning, following Fichte,(56) began with the idealist premise that the basis of all knowledge must be the self. Now what fundamentally characterizes this self, Schelling asserted, is 'an original activity' ('ursprüngliche Thätigkeit'). This, he claimed, is quite a different position from that of philosophers who assume 'thinking' or 'representing' to be the primary mental attributes. For thought and representation, he maintained, presuppose the existence of something other than the self to be thought and represented; so they cannot be primary. Nor can the passivity implied in perception be an essential property of the self, as passivity presumes the existence of something else in relation to which this passivity is produced.(57) The most fundamental attribute of the self, then, is its unrestricted activity. Schelling argued that the encounter between this originally active self and something other than the self is what gives rise to consciousness. For, in such an encounter, the self becomes aware of a limitation to its activity, and thus simultaneously

55 Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, pp. 129-51.

56 See Fichte, Science of Knowledge (1794), passim.

57 Schelling, Ideas, pp. 173-5. My interpretation of Schelling is indebted to Robert Stern's Introduction to the Ideas, esp. pp. xv-xx. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.232 becomes conscious of that which constrains it and of itself as a constrained entity:(58)

it is only vis-à-vis the object that the original activity in me first becomes thinking, or self-conscious presentation. With the first consciousness of an external world, the consciousness of myself is also present, and conversely, with the first moment of my self-consciousness, the real world appears before me. The belief in the reality outside me arises and grows with the belief in my own self; one is as necessary as the other; both - not speculatively separated, but in their fullest, most intimate co-operation - are the element of my life and all my activity.

What is important in this account, and indicative of Schelling's radical difference from Kant, is that nature here is not viewed as something independent of the self. For Schelling, the objective world of nature is inextricably bound up with subjectivity: the subjective exists solely by virtue of there being some object, and the objective exists solely in the presence of a subject. Both are united in the mental act of intuition. It was thus pointless to talk, as Kant did, of a nature whose essence is forever beyond our grasp. According to Schelling, it is only in our perception that nature exists for us.

Schelling's idealist position appealed to Coleridge who attempted to summarize it in the twelfth chapter of his Biographia Literaria (1817). Here, Coleridge also drew upon other early works of Schelling (in particular the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism) as well as upon ideas from Kant, Fichte and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819). The argument presented by Coleridge was, he indicated, a 'transcendental' one. Its purpose was thus to establish the primary conditions of knowledge, and so provide a solid basis for a thoroughly idealist

58 Ibid., p. 174. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.233 epistemology. Like Schelling, Coleridge believed that this had to be done without positing (like Kant) arbitrary, a priori principles. Translating Schelling, Coleridge wrote,(59)

the transcendental philosopher does not enquire, what ultimate ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be something therefore, which can itself be known.

Coleridge argued, following Schelling, that there must be one ultimate principle or ground of our knowledge. This, however, can consist in neither a subject alone nor an object alone, for both terms presuppose the other. It must therefore consist in something that is at the same time both subject and object, and such an identity, Coleridge claimed, can only be found in the self or, more precisely, in self-consciousness.(60) Now, this proposition that self-consciousness is the ultimate ground of all knowledge has significant implications. If it is true, Coleridge explained, then in order to prove the reality of an external world and the truth of our representations of it, one has to show 'that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself.'(61) Below, we shall see how Coleridge proposed to do this. But what is important to note here is that he was joining Fichte and Schelling in attempting to show that knowledge of nature is not restricted (as Kant insisted) to the arguable reality of 'phenomena' - of our perception of things - but, on the contrary, has a secure foundation. Moreover, the self's autonomy is guaranteed by this grounding of knowledge in self- consciousness. For self-consciousness implies that knowledge is only possible by virtue of the self's freedom to perceive itself,

59 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 283-4. Cf. Schelling, System, p. 16. The text of Schelling referred to here and in subsequent notes is Heath's English translation of Schelling's System.

60 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 269-73, and editors' notes.

61 Ibid., p. 278. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.234 in other words, because of a will.(62) We have seen that this autonomous activity of the self was deemed crucial for establishing the possibility of a moral realm that is independent of the seeming determinism of nature, and that Kant (in the eyes of Fichte, Schelling and others) had not provided a secure foundation for such autonomy. The idealism advocated here by Coleridge thus had an objective that was not merely epistemological, but also ethical.(63)

IV.5 Naturphilosophie and the Fundamental Characteristics of the External World

While knowledge of the self could be quickly affirmed within Schelling's idealist framework, it was far more difficult to show that a world external to the self could be known with any certainty. To show this, what had to be demonstrated was that knowledge of nature was derivable from knowledge of the self. This was one of the main tasks the young Schelling set himself, and his arguments attempting this provided the basis for the scientific programme of Naturphilosophie. In this section, we shall see how Schelling's idealism sustained this dynamic view of nature, promoted by Coleridge and others in the early nineteenth century.

One of the most important discussions of the idealist foundations of Naturphilosophie appeared in Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism. In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge famously duplicated and summarized some of Schelling's arguments. The line of reasoning expounded by Schelling, and reiterated by Coleridge, amounts to this. We have a firm belief in the

62 Ibid., pp. 279-80.

63 This ethical goal of idealism is indicated in Fichte, Science of Knowledge, pp. 40-2. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.235 existence of something outside our selves. But since the only fact we can be certain of is our own existence, this belief in an objective world must be taken to be merely a prejudice. Yet, the feeling of certainty we have about the reality of an objective world must, insisted Schelling and Coleridge, stem from something in our experience. So, it in fact must derive from the only absolute certainty we possess: that of our own existence. Even more than this, they claimed, the objective world must in a sense be identical with the self. 'To demonstrate this identity', affirmed Coleridge in a close paraphrase of Schelling, 'is the office and object of ... [transcendental] philosophy.'(64)

There were two principal ways of undertaking this task, Coleridge (following Schelling) argued. In cognition, he maintained, there is no separation between subject and object: they 'are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.' To explain this union, therefore, one must begin by speculatively separating these two aspects of knowledge. One is then left with the choice of explaining knowledge from the initial standpoint of the subjective or the objective. If one begins with the objective or 'nature', one has to show how phenomena come to be 'spiritualized'; that is, how nature can come to be represented by theories and laws constructed by the human mind. This, Coleridge and Schelling claimed, is the task of speculative natural philosophy (Naturphilosophie) as opposed to empirical natural science (Naturwissenschaft).(65) The latter, they noted,

64 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 258-60. See Schelling, System,p.8.

65 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 255-6; Schelling, System, pp. 5-6. From parallel passages in Schelling provided in The Collected Works edition of the Biographia Literaria used here, it is apparent that Schelling's distinction between Naturwissenschaft and Naturphilosophie is not always observed by Coleridge. While Coleridge seems to be consistent in his rendering of Schelling's term 'Naturphilosophie' as 'natural philosophy', he sometimes translates Schelling's 'Naturwissenschaft' as 'natural philosophy' and sometimes as 'natural science'. See the (continued...) Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.236 had nonetheless already moved towards a speculative or theoretical view of nature, as illustrated by the practice of describing optical phenomena in abstract geometrical terms (interpreted as constructs of the human mind). It could also be seen in the treatment of magnetic and gravitational motions as the product of immaterial or spiritual forces, which Kant had insisted were the only way we could understand matter.(66) So, there was good evidence that pointed to an identity between nature and mind, and such evidence clearly indicated, Coleridge argued - again drawing upon Schelling -(67)

that even natural science, which commences with the material phænomenon as the reality and substance of things existing, does yet by the necessity of theorising unconsciously, and as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles of fundamental science.

The second way of showing the identity between the subjective and the objective begins with the subjective element of knowledge or the self.(68) We saw above how Schelling had begun to tackle this aspect of his transcendental project in the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, in which he showed how a world of matter independent of the self could possibly be conceived as real from an idealist standpoint. The chapter from that work in which he put forward the argument outlined above in fact bore the title, 'First Origin of the Concept of Matter, from the Nature of Perception and the Human Mind'. Having explained this, it was however necessary to show how nature takes the particular forms by which we represent it.

65(...continued) passages from Schelling in the notes in CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 253-4, 256.

66 See Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, Chapter 2.

67 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 256-7; Schelling, System,p.6.

68 CC,7, vol. 1, pp. 257-8; Schelling System, pp. 6-7. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.237

Schelling's reasoning took the following lines. The basic condition for the world to become an object of our experience is (as we have seen) the encounter between the self and the non-self - the encounter which also results in self-consciousness. Now this encounter, he argued, which from a transcendental perspective brings the world to our awareness, would have to be seen as integral to the world once one leaves the transcendental point of view. In other words, as the object on the transcendental plane is the result of opposing tendencies, it will seem to retain this same fundamental characteristic of polar opposition from an empirical standpoint. 'The understanding', Schelling wrote, thus '... presupposes [opposing activities in matter understood as 'forces'] to be real, since they necessarily proceed from the nature of our mind, and of intuition itself.'(69) Force, then, is an essential property we attribute to matter, because dynamic opposition is a primary condition of all our experience.

Such an idealist derivation of force from the initial conditions of experience supported the dynamic view of nature that Schelling, following Leibniz, Kant and others, had begun to advocate from the mid-1790s. Schelling, however, went further than his predecessors by arguing that dynamic opposition, or what he referred to as 'polarity', pervaded the whole of nature, and we shall see below that Coleridge followed him in this. Thus, 'the first principle of a philosophical doctrine of nature', Schelling affirmed in his 1798 On the World Soul,is'togo in search of polarity and dualism throughout all nature.'(70) In the Ideas, he likewise insisted that polarity was ubiquitous in nature, and to prove his point cited numerous instances of polar

69 Schelling, Ideas, p. 182.

70 Cited in Schelling, Ideas, pp. ix-x. By 'dualism' here Schelling meant polarity, and not an ontological dualism between matter and spirit. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.238 opposition between different kinds of attractive and repulsive forces. He indicated, for example, that polarity is exhibited in various chemical phenomena, magnetism and electricity.(71) The deduction of force from the nature of intuition, however, does not in itself explain how all these phenomena come to be perceived by the mind as qualitatively distinct. Indeed, the sensation of force that arises with intuition, Schelling asserted, is indeterminate; from it one merely has an awareness of the self's activity being limited: 'a consciousness of the state of passivity that I am in.' One can envisage matter in this 'wholly indeterminate relationship' with the self, Schelling suggested, as being in a state of dynamic 'equilibrium'. Perception of qualitative differences in matter would thus have to come about, he argued, through a disturbance of this equilibrium. Phenomena would then be differentiated from one another by varying intensities of the polar forces by which they are produced.(72) So, the dynamic process by which nature is made intelligible to us would be repeated again and again, but at increasingly complex levels.

The most basic of these levels, or 'potencies', as Schelling called them, is that of matter as mass: the result of a fundamental opposition in nature between attractive and repulsive forces. Schelling saw this opposition as having the same character as that between the self and the non-self in the production of consciousness. Just as in the latter the original activity of the self is unlimited until curbed by the non-self, in nature the repulsive or expansive force is similarly unlimited until brought into check by the attractive force. This dynamic process repeats itself, and at the next level or potency in nature, magnetic, electrical and chemical phenomena are produced.

71 Schelling, Ideas, pp. 65-7, 98, 114-21, 123, 128, 204-5, 268-70.

72 Ibid., pp. 215-16. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.239

At the third and final potency, the organic phenomena of reproduction, irritability and sensibility are generated in different degrees.(73) For Schelling, empirical confirmation of such a speculative construction of nature would indicate that there is in fact an identity between nature and the self and thus that our 'spiritual' representation of nature is true. Nature, then, would no longer need to be viewed as having an uncertain basis in a hypothetical realm of things-in-themselves, and as contingent upon imperfect, human faculties of sense and perception. Evidence that dynamic opposition lies at the basis of all natural phenomena would also show that there is a fundamental continuity in nature: that the same principles can be used to explain both inanimate and animate nature, and even phenomena of a higher order, such as human intelligence.

Schelling's programme of Naturphilosophie was embraced by a number of scientific thinkers who took up his recommendation to look for polarity or dynamic opposition throughout nature. It is well known, for instance, that Naturphilosophie was taken seriously by physicists such as Hans Christian Oersted and Johann Wilhelm Ritter, and seemed to bear some fruit. Oersted, for instance, credited his discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism to his faith in a universal law of polarity in nature. In an account of his work in chemistry and electromagnetism, Oersted claimed that he had shown 'that not only chemical affinities, but also heat and light are produced by the same two powers, which probably might be only two different forms of one primordial power', and that he had been convinced that 'magnetical effects were produced by the same powers'.(74)

73 Ibid., pp. 137-8.

74 This account appeared in an article on 'Thermo-electricity' for Volume XVIII (1830) of The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, pp. 573-89, cited in Snelders, 'Oersted's Discovery', p. 235. See also: Stauffer, 'Oersted's Discovery of Electromagnetism'; Gower, 'Speculation in Physics', pp. 339-49. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.240

Ritter, likewise, was led to discover the ultraviolet end of the spectrum out of a conviction that a polar equivalent of infrared rays, recently discovered by John Herschel, must exist.(75) The scientist Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) advanced the cause of Naturphilosophie in his influential journal, Isis von Oken (1817- 48), and in a number of major works developed a thoroughly polar philosophy of nature.(76) His Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (1809) was later translated into English under the title, Elements of Physiophilosophy (1847). In this work, Oken declared that 'polarity is the first force which appears in the world. ... There is no world, and in general nothing without polar force.'(77) He attacked a mechanistic view of nature, maintaining that motion could only be accounted for dynamically, not mechanically.(78)

A mechanical motion, which might be produced ad infinitum by mechanical impulses, is an absurdity. There is nowhere a purely mechanical motion; nothing, as it is at present in the world, has become so by impulse; an internal act, a polar tension lies at the bottom of all motion.

In the Elements, Oken proceeded to explain a huge variety of physical, chemical, geological and biological phenomena, all according to Schelling's polar framework.

The question arises as to why these followers of Naturphilosophie were attracted to it as an alternative to the prevailing scientific framework of the times. Part of the answer lies in the promise of Schelling's programme to account for a number of phenomena for which explanations were wanting or

75 Wetzels, 'Johann Wilhelm Ritter'. See also Gower, 'Speculation in Physics', pp. 327-39.

76 Kertesz, 'Notes on Isis'.

77 Oken, Elements, p. 21. The Elements was based on the third edition (1843) of the Lehrbuch.

78 Ibid., p. 22. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.241 deficient. Newtonian natural philosophy had provided a successful mathematical means of describing the behaviour of some phenomena, but it had not been able to account for presumed basic constituents of these phenomena such as atoms, immaterial forces, and the aether. Schelling, on the other hand, had supplied not only a coherent interpretation of force as the primary ingredient of all natural phenomena, but also a way of solving significant problems that had plagued modern scientific thought since Descartes. For instance, how could mind and matter - two heterogeneous substances - interact? And how could one explain apparently non-mechanistic phenomena in living things, such as growth and reproduction, not to mention intelligence? Schelling's Naturphilosophie seemed to provide answers to such problems.

Another probable reason for its appeal to scientific thinkers was that it offered a total picture of nature at a point in the history of European science when disciplines were becoming ever more specialized and scientific knowledge was rapidly advancing.(79) Indeed, in the accounts of their science, the Naturphilosophen insisted that they were engaged in a search for unity throughout the whole of nature. This was not to say, however, that they passed over nature's differences and variety. On the contrary, the Romantic movement - of which Naturphilosophie is usually regarded as a scientific counterpart - is noted for its fascination with the world's diversity and its celebration of difference and individuality.(80) And, as Hutchison has suggested, the Romantic search for unity in nature stemmed from an acute and growing awareness of nature's

79 See, for example, Cannon, Science in Culture, pp. 145-53.

80 See Schenk, European Romantics, pp. 14-21. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.242 complexity - an awareness that produced a need to find order within this complexity.(81)

Naturphilosophie was certainly attractive to the mature Coleridge for all of these reasons. But, most of all, it appealed to him because it offered a compelling, immaterialistic alternative to the prevailing systems of natural philosophy. It could be reconciled with a spiritual cosmology, and we have seen that such a cosmology was essential to support the religious, moral and political perspectives that Coleridge was advocating in early nineteenth-century Britain.

IV.6 Dynamic Chemistry and Physiology in Britain

Coleridge's notebooks, letters and marginalia attest to his serious engagement with the theoretical framework of German Naturphilosophie, and its application by scientists such as Oken, Oersted and Henrik Steffens to chemistry, physiology and geology in particular. Yet there was also a new dynamic direction in British science that was not explicitly building upon Schelling's scheme of nature, and Coleridge recognized this. In particular, he saw an important expression of such dynamism in the chemistry of Humphry Davy (1778-1829).

Coleridge had in fact been a close friend of Davy, meeting him in 1799 when the budding chemist was working as superintendent of Thomas Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution near Bristol. Apart from their common interest in science, Davy was also a keen poet, and was even entrusted with the proof-reading of the second (1800) edition of Coleridge and Wordsworth's famous Romantic anthology, the Lyrical Ballads. Davy also established lasting friendships with Thomas Wedgwood and Thomas Poole, both

81 Hutchison, 'Idiosyncrasy', pp. 131, 161-2. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.243 of whom were close friends of Coleridge.(82) When Davy went on to lecture at the Royal Institution from 1801, Coleridge attended some of his lectures the following year and took copious notes that show a deep fascination with chemical phenomena.(83) Later, in 1808, Davy helped arrange for Coleridge to give a series of lectures on poetry at the Royal Institution. This lecture series was important for Coleridge, as it marked the renewal of a public career in Britain after his absence in Malta and Italy between 1804 and 1806. Holmes notes that these literary lectures also led to an association in the public eye of the poet-philosopher, Coleridge, with the scientist, Davy. Davy attended Coleridge's lectures and later ones on Shakespeare and Milton in 1811-12 at the London Philosophical Society.(84) Coleridge's contact with Davy and the latter's chemistry, Holmes suggests, influenced some of Coleridge's important formulations on the character of aesthetic perception and the human mind.(85) For example, in an 1814 essay on the fine arts, Coleridge described in dynamic terms characteristic of Davy's electro-chemical experimentation what he saw as an exemplary blending of energy and formal, rule-bound composition in Raphael's fresco 'Galatea'. This painting exhibited, Coleridge maintained,(86)

82 See: Knight, Humphry Davy, pp. 21-2, 45, 48, 52-3, 181-2; Holmes, Early Visions, pp. 245, 257, 259-60, 273, 276, 297-8, 303, 312, 346. On Coleridge's scientific connection with Davy, see also Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 20-35,, 78-9, 175-80, 189-91, 194-8.

83 See CN,1 (and editor's notes), entries 1098 and 1099: January- February 1802.

84 Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 107-8, 119, 130, 136-7, 267. See also Holmes, 'Coleridge Experiment'.

85 Ibid., pp. 129-30, 361. For some other interesting examples of this, see Holmes, 'Coleridge Experiment', pp. 314-15, 318-20. On some of the reciprocal influences and the friendship between Coleridge and Davy, see also Lefebure, 'Philosophic Alchemist'.

86 CC,11, vol. 1, p. 374, cited in Holmes, Darker Reflections, p. 361. That the electro-chemical metaphors here were specifically inspired by Davy's work is not absolutely certain. But it seems plausible in view of Coleridge's continuing friendship with Davy after returning from Malta - leading up to Coleridge's Royal Institution lectures - (continued...) Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.244

the balance, the perfect reconciliation, ... between these two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and of the confining FORM! How entirely is the stiffness that would have resulted from the obvious regularity of the latter, fused and (if I may hazard so bold a metaphor) almost volatilized by the interpenetration and electrical flashes of the former.

Especially important here is that Davy seems to have shared Coleridge's conviction that nature's activity had an immaterial, dynamic basis. In his Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), for instance, Davy argued that 'the various forms of matter, and the changes of these forms, depend upon active powers, such as gravitation, cohesion, calorific repulsion or heat, chemical attraction, and electrical attraction'.(87) Davy also held the view that the forces underlying material phenomena were polar in character, a view that seems to have come from his experimental work with electricity. Knight suggests that this polar view of nature may also have been stimulated by early discussions with Coleridge about Naturphilosophie.(88) Coleridge certainly perceived a harmony between his and Davy's views, as is made

86(...continued) and his ongoing interest in Davy's chemical discoveries.

87 Davy, Works, vol. 4, p. 46.

88 Knight, Transcendental Part of Chemistry, pp. 47-8, 50-3, 67-70; idem, Humphry Davy, pp. 39-40, 58. See also Gower, 'Speculation in Physics', p. 325. While observing that the origin of the young Davy's earliest dynamic pronouncements in 1796 is somewhat of a puzzle, Levere argues that Davy's overall dynamic view of matter had its basis in a Newtonian tradition of atoms and forces, and not German philosophy. Levere, Affinity and Matter, chapter 2, esp. pp. 25-34. But Davy would have encountered German ideas through Beddoes who had the most recent German philosophical and scientific books and periodicals in his extensive library and had reviewed many of these. See Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes, pp. 48-9, 93-4, 115-18, 139-40, 188, 222-3. We have already seen that Beddoes was instrumental in encouraging Coleridge to visit Germany in 1798-99, a trip that was crucial in Coleridge's developing interest in German thought (see above, p. 103). It was after this trip that Coleridge met Davy at the Pneumatic Institution. Levere notes that Beddoes also rejected imponderable fluids in chemistry in favour of forces. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature,p.60. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.245 clear in a letter of 1807. According to Coleridge, Davy thought(89)

that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation. ... when this has been proved, it will then only remain to resolve this into some Law of vital Intellect - and all human Knowledge will be Science and Metaphysics the only Science.

Davy's dynamic science, importantly, had an explicitly political application. Berman has shown that the Royal Institution, where Davy lectured and conducted research from 1801 to 1812, was patronized during this period by the aristocratic, landowning classes. They hoped that the Institution would lead to improvements in agriculture, related industries such as tanning, and mining - commercial activities, to be sure, but all associated with the landed interest.(90) Davy's science might thus be seen as part of an 'Establishment science', in contrast to the 'Jacobin science' canvassed in Chapter II. Indeed, close links had deliberately been forged between such an 'Establishment science' and the state by Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society from 1778 to 1820 and intent on exercising his sway over science in order to promote the interests of imperial Britain and the ruling, landed classes. Banks, himself a landowner, had in fact helped set up the Royal Institution for this purpose - to demonstrate that science could be harnessed to the economic and political goals of the Establishment.(91) The mature Coleridge would certainly have approved of the political tenor of the Institution and its science at this time.

89 CL,3, p. 38: to Dorothy Wordsworth, 24 November 1807.

90 Berman, Royal Institution, chapters2&3.

91 See: Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, esp. pp.116-17, 128-9; Berman, Royal Institution, pp. 15-17, 40-7, 49-68. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.246

In the revised, 1818 edition of The Friend, Coleridge explicitly praised Davy, future president of the Royal Society, and Davy's chemical colleagues, Charles Hatchett and William Hyde Wollaston, for pursuing a dynamic direction in their science: for having shown that natural phenomena were the result of immaterial principles or 'powers', ultimately depending upon a single 'law'.(92) Hatchett and Wollaston were both prominent chemists and friends of Davy. In particular, Davy was connected with Hatchett through the Royal Institution and the Society for Animal Chemistry of which both Davy and Hatchett were founding members.(93) These three chemists had revealed, Coleridge indicated, the fundamental chemical constitution of such phenomena as 'water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient sparkles'. In a later note (where he also cited this passage) Coleridge suggested that chemical decomposition of 'the Flame of the Gas Light, and the River-Water' lent weight to the idea that phenomena were the product of underlying, dynamic principles of combination: they were not the result of mere mechanical addition of elements, but were produced by a dynamic 'synthesis' of these elements into something totally different.(94) The dynamic origin of phenomena

92 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 470-1. Coleridge had met Wollaston socially, but did not know him well. See CC,5, p. 410: to Thomas Allsop, early February 1825. Coleridge also knew Hatchett personally. In a notebook entry, he reminded himself 'to ask Mr Hatchett' about the weight of a 'purple powder' produced by an electrical discharge through gold wire. This query was based on Coleridge's reading of William Thomas Brande's just published Manual of Chemistry (1819). Brande lectured at the Royal Institution and was Hatchett's son-in- law and former student. CN,4, entry 4564: June 1819, and editor’s note.

93 Knight, Humphry Davy, pp. 7-8, 46-8, 53, 74-7, 114, 135; Berman, Royal Institution, pp. 28, 89, 131; Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 52-4.

94 CC,4, vol.1, pp. 470-1. CN,4, entry 4929: 1822/1827. Cf. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 176-8. Elsewhere in The Friend, Coleridge indicated that 'Water is neither Oxgen nor Hydrogen, nor yet is it a commixture of both; but the Synthesis or Indifference of the two ... It is the object of the mechanical atomistic Psilosophy to confound Synthesis with synartesis, or rather with mere juxta- (continued...) Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.247 was also demonstrated for Coleridge by recent investigations showing that diamond was a form of carbon. In papers published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and in his Elements of Chemical Philosophy, Davy had described experiments which proved that charcoal and diamond were composed of the same 'carbonaceous principle'. For upon combustion both absorbed approximately the same amount of oxygen and gave off 'carbonic acid' (carbon dioxide).(95) For Coleridge, Davy's research on the diamond was evidence for the dynamic idea that the qualitative differences in phenomena were due to forces beyond matter, for the same matter could have very different properties.

So, for Coleridge, the work of the British chemists exemplified the transition from mechanism to dynamism. Yet he had his reservations. In a note of 1812 or afterwards, he had indicated that he felt Davy did not completely espouse a dynamic view of nature, lamenting that his friend had become 'an Atomist'.(96) That dynamism in British chemistry was in danger of losing out to atomism and materialism was later expressed in Coleridge's 1817 letter to Lord Liverpool (discussed above, pp. 187-191). There Coleridge first praised 'the late successful researches of the Chemists', but immediately went on to bemoan 'the recent relapse ... of the Chemists to the atomistic scheme, and the almost unanimous acceptance of Dalton's Theory in

94(...continued) position of Corpuscles separated by invisible Interspaces.' CC,4, vol. 1, p. 94. 'Psilosophy' is Coleridge's coinage, meaning bare or mere (psilos) wisdom (sophia). The O.E.D. gives no listing for 'synartesis'.

95 Davy, Works: vol. 5, pp. 170-5, 220-2, 478-91; vol. 4, pp. 221-32.

96 CC,12, vol. 1, p.572: marginalia on the 1781 English edition of The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher, cited in Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, p. 35. At this time Coleridge and Davy were certainly no longer on the same intimate terms. For, in a notebook entry of 1814 or 1815, Coleridge wrote that he and Davy had 'been for many years at a great distance from each other', though there had been 'no real breach of Friendship'. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.248

England'.(97) Coleridge here was perhaps referring to the fact that chemists such as Davy and Wollaston, whom he admired, were prepared to countenance Dalton's work for its empirical usefulness, although they did not accept the reality of Dalton's atoms.(98) Since Davy and his colleagues were eminent figures in British science, playing a leading role in the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, this apparent endorsement of Dalton must have seemed to Coleridge a severe blow for dynamism in Britain and can explain his disillusionment with the British chemists in his letter to Lord Liverpool. Levere has in fact noted Coleridge's expressed disenchantment around 1817 and afterwards with both the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, indicating in particular that Coleridge objected to what he judged to be materialistic tendencies in Davy's successor at the Royal Institution, William Thomas Brande.(99) Coleridge's objections to Brande and the Royal Institution probably also had another, more explicitly political motivation. For Berman has observed that in the years while Brande was lecturing at the Institution, from 1813 on, its scientific focus was becoming increasingly commercial, and its governorship was passing from the landed aristocracy to the new professional classes with strong Utilitarian connections and a concern to bring about social and administrative reforms.(100) Coleridge would no doubt have been hostile to the Institution's growing utilitarian preoccupations and new, non-aristocratic power base.

Coleridge's specific discontent with Davy is also revealed at this time in the accusation that Davy's experimental work was

97 CL,4, p. 760: to Lord Liverpool, 28 July 1817. See also CN,4 (and editors' notes), entries 4573, 4646: June 1819.

98 See Knight, Humphry Davy, pp. 75-80; idem, Atoms and Elements, pp. 18-21, 23-33.

99 Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 77-8; CN,4, entry 4646: 1820.

100 Berman, Royal Institution, chapter 4. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.249 unoriginal and redundant, for his chemical discoveries had apparently been anticipated many years earlier by the theories of Schelling and the latter's followers, and even by Coleridge himself! The theoretical scheme of German Naturphilosophie, Coleridge explained in a letter of 1818 to his Swedenborgian friend Charles Augustus Tulk, enabled the solution of 'all known chemical facts', many of which had already 'been discovered (& far more accurately) before Davy's experiments.'(101) In his letter to Liverpool, Coleridge complained more generally that(102)

since the year 1798 every experiment of importance had been distinctly preannounced by the founders or restorers of the constructive or dynamic philosophy, in the only country where a man can exercise his understanding in the light of his reason, without being supposed to be out of his senses [i.e. Germany].

Nevertheless Coleridge continued to be interested in the findings of British chemists and (as his notebooks attest) closely followed their work while repeatedly measuring it against the theoretical scheme of Naturphilosophie.(103)

So, how can we account for Coleridge's high praise in The Friend in the very same decade for Davy, Hatchett and Wollaston? The mature Coleridge's view of Davy in fact varied, and in 1823 we find him reiterating an earlier positive view of his that Davy was 'the Father and Founder of philosophic Alchemy, the Man who born a Poet first converted Poetry into Science and realized what

101 CL,4, p. 808: to C. A. Tulk, 12 January 1818. In marginal notes to works by the Naturphilosoph Henrik Steffens, Coleridge claimed that much of Davy's chemistry had been predicted by Steffens, so could be considered as 'plagiarisms'. See Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 179-80. The same sentiments are expressed in CL,5, p. 130: to Charles Aders, December 1820. See also CN,4, entry 4560n.

102 CL,4, p. 761: to Lord Liverpool, 28 July 1817.

103 See, for example, CN,4 (and editors' notes), entries 4560-1, 4563-5, 4577, 4580: June 1819; entries 4645-7: 1820; entry 4814: 1821. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.250 few men possessed Genius enough to fancy.'.(104) The criticisms of Davy and the British chemists might best be explained as due to Coleridge's deep disappointment that, while they were fulfilling his hopes of a dynamic science in some respects, they were not in others. For Coleridge, it seems, British chemistry was still too embedded in a mechanistic, Newtonian natural philosophical mould, and needed to follow more closely the German, dynamic example. The Naturphilosophen, he believed, had steered clear of atomism and other mechanistic tendencies.(105)

In the 1818 Friend, Coleridge went on to praise what he saw as a recent native dynamic tendency in comparative anatomy and physiology. The main proponent of this biological dynamism was the eminent eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist, John Hunter (1728-1793). In a long footnote in The Friend, Coleridge claimed that what was particularly important in Hunter's views was the idea that life is due to an immaterial 'principle or agent' which is independent of, and antecedent to, material organization.(106) Hunter, in a Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-Shot Wounds (1794), had challenged a view that life is found only in organized bodies, a view that might easily lead to the conclusion that life must somehow be the product of organization. For Hunter, however, material organization was like a mechanism, so could not possibly give rise to life: the organs had to be set in

104 CL,5, p. 309: to Dr. Williamson, 11 November 1823. The earlier view of Davy as 'the illustrious Father and Founder of philosophic Alchemy' was expressed in The Friend of 1809-10. CC,4, vol. 2, p. 252. In his unpublished manuscript, 'Logic', Coleridge similarly referred to 'Sir H. Davy, the founder of philosophic, as Wollaston of scientific, chemistry'. CC,13, pp. 216-17. Coleridge here was discussing Davy's research on muriatic (hydrochloric) acid, which disproved the Lavoisian position that oxygen is the principle of acidity. See Knight, Transcendental Part of Chemistry, pp. 126-39.

105 Cf. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 68-81.

106 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 493-4. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.251 motion by a vital 'principle' in order to fulfill their specific functions.(107)

An organ is a peculiar conformation of matter ... to answer some purpose, the operation of which is mechanical; but, mere organization can do nothing, even in mechanics, it must still have something corresponding to a living principle; namely, some power.

The idea that life is due to a 'principle' or 'power' that is independent of organization was subsantiated for Hunter by consideration of the properties of blood. Blood, he claimed, is 'the most simple body we know of, endowed with the principle of life'; indeed, blood nourished the organism and all its parts. Yet, it did not seem to be an organized body, or to have the capability of self-movement that is characteristic of organized bodies. Clearly, then, the 'living principle' contained in blood was independent of organization.(108)

Hunter here implied that his views about blood were contentious in scientific circles, but it was not just as 'science' that such ideas were debated. For Hunter was expressing his position in the context of a passionate debate about mechanism and materialism, a debate in which many European intellectuals were participating,(109) and that seems to have become more urgent in the politically uncertain period following the French Revolution. We have already seen (p. 70) that in the 1790s, the radical John Thelwall took issue with Hunter's 'Vital Principle', arguing that life was a function of material organization. We also observed that, for Coleridge and others, materialism like that of Thelwall was closely linked to extreme political radicalism. We shall see below that, some twenty years

107 Hunter, Treatise, p. 78.

108 Ibid., pp. 77-8. On Hunter's views, see Hall, Ideas of Life and Matter, vol. 2, pp.107-18.

109 See, for example, Zammito, Genesis of Kant's Critique, pp. 189, 191, 203-10, 215-48, and above, pp. 208, 209 and Chapter II, passim. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.252 later, the issue of the nature of life was still debated and the political implications of the issue were still apparent.

In The Friend, Coleridge claimed that the reality of Hunter's 'vital principle' was aptly demonstrated by the organization of specimens in the Hunterian Museum, housed in the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Hunter's anatomical specimens were so arranged, Coleridge indicated, as to demonstrate the fundamental relationship between apparently disparate, organic phenomena, a relationship that could only be explained as due to the same 'principle' or 'power' operating in different species.(110) Hunter's disciple and brother-in-law, the surgeon Everard Home, described Hunter's arrangement and the principles upon which it was based in some 1814 Lectures on Comparative Anatomy. Home explained that the specimens in the Museum had been intentionally set out to enable the viewer to compare the organs of different animal and plant species, and to show the increasing complexity of organs as one ascends the chain of being. The first series of specimens were related to the means of motion in animal and plant species, with the aim of exhibiting analogous structures. Following this was a series showing the different organs of digestion and circulation. Then came a series on the brain, nervous system, and sensory apparatus. The next series showed the protective coverings of animals, and the final series the relationships between the generative organs of various species.(111) For Coleridge, Hunter's museum of comparative anatomy demonstrated that life preceded material organization, because the same fundamental principles could be observed in the similarity of anatomical structures across different species.

110 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 493-4. 473-4. See also Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 47, 92-3, 210.

111 Home, Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 1-23. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.253

Much the same conclusion had been expressed by another prominent follower of Hunter, the surgeon John Abernethy, who championed Hunter's views in lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons. In some of these, published in 1814 as An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter's Theory of Life, Abernethy argued,(112)

in surveying the great chain of living beings, we find life connected with a vast variety of organisation, yet exercising the same functions in each; a circumstance from which we may ... naturally conclude, that life does not depend on organisation. Mr. Hunter, who so patiently and accurately examined the different links of this great chain, which seems to connect even man with the common matter of the universe, was of this opinion.

The dynamic direction in comparative anatomy and physiology suggested by Hunter, Coleridge announced in The Friend, had been fruitfully pursued by Abernethy, Home and Charles Hatchett.(113) Levere has indicated that Coleridge was especially impressed by Hatchett's chemical analyses of organic substances, such as albumen, shell and bone. In these analyses, Coleridge found evidence for a dynamic development in nature from the inorganic through to the organic.(114)

Coleridge clearly was excited about communicating his support in The Friend for the British chemists and surgeons, because their work showed that dynamic natural philosophy already had distinguished supporters in Britain, so ought to be taken seriously.(115) Their research, moreover, provided compelling

112 Abernethy, Works, vol.3, p. 53.

113 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 474-5.

114 Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 199-200. See CN,4 (and editors’ notes), entry 4580: June 1819; entries 4645 and 4646: 1820.

115 In The Friend, Coleridge also praised the comparative anatomy of Georges Cuvier as another example of dynamism in science, claiming (with some satisfaction) that Cuvier was not of pure French stock and had been educated in Germany rather than France. CC,4, vol. 1, p. 475. Later, in his Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge again (continued...) Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.254 evidence for the theoretical programme of Naturphilosophie which Coleridge increasingly used to formulate his own dynamic account of nature.

IV.7 Coleridge's Dynamic Theory of Life

Coleridge's adherence to Schelling's Naturphilosophie is particularly evident in the Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, first published in 1848, but composed towards the end of 1816.(116) This work had two principal, related aims. The first was to refute a mechanistic notion, then being promoted in Britain and linked to political radicalism, that life was the result of structural properties in matter. The second was to show, using Schelling's framework, that vital phenomena could be explained far better dynamically - by assuming the operation of an immaterial principle, single yet polar, operating throughout nature. Indeed, we shall see that the Theory of Life aimed to demonstrate that nature was fundamentally active, and that a universal principle or law of polarity could account for the great diversity of phenomena, including those of the human realm.

The Theory of Life began with criticism of tautological definitions of life such as that of Marie-François-Xavier Bichat who maintained, in a well-known formula, that 'life is the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted'. Coleridge then went on to discuss theories which defined life in terms of characteristic vital functions such as the assimilation of nourishment into bodily matter. These theories, he claimed,

115(...continued) publicly praised Davy, Hunter and Hatchett, along with Oersted and the Swedish chemist, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, as illustration of a new dynamic direction in science. CC,9, pp. 395, 397.

116 CC,11, vol. 1, p. 481. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.255 merely provided an account of properties found in living objects, and failed to give a genuine definition of life in terms of a 'law' that would explain why life and its various manifestations had come into being in the first place. He insisted that 'it is the essence of a scientific definition to be causative ... by announcing the law of action in the particular case, in subordination to the common law of which all the phaenomena are modifications or results.'(117)

Coleridge went on to briefly delineate some dominant trends in the history of natural philosophy, beginning with the Scholastics' occult qualities and substantial forms, followed by Descartes' mechanical philosophy, and ending with eighteenth- century developments in physics and chemistry.(118) The purpose of this was to highlight what he considered to be an undesirable tendency in philosophy - especially in that of his time - to adopt one interpretation of nature to the exclusion of all other perspectives. This was an argument he put forward elsewhere,(119) and we noted above (pp. 91, 92) that such a predilection for diversity was characteristic of Romanticism. Indeed, we saw that Goethe made a very similar complaint about the undesirable dominance of a single theoretical position in science.

Coleridge claimed that, in Scholastic philosophy, a dominant speculative or non-empirical tendency had been present. However, with the Reformation, a major beneficial change occurred and 'experimental philosophy was soon mapped out for posterity by the ... genius of Bacon'. But the tendency to view things from one point of view only, Coleridge asserted, was again apparent in the attempt - inspired by William Gilbert's discoveries - to explain

117 Ibid., pp. 488-93.

118 Ibid., pp. 496-500.

119 See, for example, PL, pp. 339-43, which closely follows this section of the Theory of Life. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.256 all nature in terms of magnetism. Subsequently, Coleridge maintained, 'Descartes ... placed the science of mechanism on the philosophic throne', after which Newton's mathematical explanation of phenomena 'gave almost a religious sanction to the corpuscular system and mechanical theory.' Thereafter, Coleridge lamented, mechanism 'became synonymous with philosopy itself', extending its authority into medicine, physiology and chemistry.(120)

This dominant mechanistic view of the world, Coleridge protested, still prevailed in the early nineteenth century, and was particularly evident in Lavoisier's new analytical chemistry, which had 'reduced the infinite variety of chemical phenomena to the actions, reactions, and interchanges of a few elementary substances'. Coleridge was worried about the popularity of this chemistry and about what he perceived as its influence in other fields, especially in physiology, where its reductive procedure, he complained, was being adopted.(121)

A mechanistic reductionism in physiology was dangerously apparent, he believed, in the views of his countryman, William Lawrence, whose 1816 lectures to the Royal College of Surgeons had largely prompted Coleridge to write the Theory of Life.In his lectures, Lawrence had criticized the opinion of his former mentor, John Abernethy, that life was produced by a vital principle which, Abernethy suggested, took the form of an electrical fluid. Lawrence maintained that life should instead be explained as the product of physical and chemical organization. Coleridge took sides with Abernethy in the ensuing dispute with Lawrence, not only because he disapproved of Lawrence's outspoken materialism, but also because he strongly objected to Lawrence's liberal politics, and saw the two issues

120 CC,11, vol. 1, pp. 496-8.

121 Ibid., pp. 499-500. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.257 as interconnected. Although Abernethy's appeal to a materialistic vital principle was also problematical for Coleridge, he would have approved of Abernethy's political conservatism and expressed sympathies for a science that harmonized with religion. The political stakes in the debate quickly became explicit in its subsequent episodes. Lawrence was accused of being in league with French scientists and of importing a radical ideology into Britain.(122) While Coleridge himself did not directly attack Lawrence's politics, his siding with Abernethy and the conservatives was a plain indication that he too was specifically concerned about the debate's political implications.

Coleridge's repudiation in the Theory of Life of Lawrence's position was succinct. It was nonsense, Coleridge asserted, to argue that life was the product of organized structure when the latter clearly was an attribute of life. He then attacked those who postulated vital 'fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal' for similarly putting the cart before the horse - the activity of such agencies was part of the phenomenon to be explained.(123) This was in fact the problem Coleridge saw in Abernethy's electrical fluid, though he here could not afford to criticize his ally against Lawrence. Privately, however, he admitted that he had complained to Abernethy that such fluids merely 'solved Phaenomena by Phaenomena that immediately become part of the Problem to be solved'.(124) Nevertheless, Coleridge went on in the Theory of Life to argue that it was justifiable to view 'the power of life' as analogous to 'the powers which manifest themselves to us under certain conditions in the forms of electricity, or chemical

122 See: Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 46-52; Desmond, Politics of Evolution, pp. 117-21, 255-7.

123 CC,11, vol. 1, pp. 501-2.

124 CL,4, p. 809: to C. A. Tulk, 12 January 1818. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.258 attraction'. The value of the analogy, he maintained, of course had to be put to the test, and we shall see that this was one of the tasks he proposed to accomplish in the Theory of Life.(125)

Having dealt with what he regarded as the chief inadequacies of a materialistic account of life, Coleridge went on to outline his own position. A definition of life, he began, would have to 'consist in the reduction of the idea of Life to its simplest and most comprehensive form or mode of action'. Such a definition would then be tested by applying it to increasingly complex instances of phenomena.(126) He suggested that the phenomena examined would not be confined to organic nature, but would also include the inorganic world. The reason for this, he indicated, was that there were no good grounds for assuming that the active properties found in seemingly inanimate objects were different in kind from those found in living things. There was a fundamental likeness, he contended, between the 'irritability' of metals apparent in galvanic processes, the stimulability of primitive organisms such as fungi or lichens, and the 'excitability' of human organisms.(127) All of them displayed that immaterial 'natural force' promoted by Leibniz in the Specimen dynamicum. The difference between them was simply one of degree.

Here Coleridge was employing terminology derived from two major, eighteenth-century, scientific figures: the Swiss physician and anatomist, Albrecht von Haller, and the Scottish physician, John Brown. Haller had investigated muscle fibres and discovered that they possessed an inherent tendency to contract, independently of the nervous system. He called this tendency

125 CC,11, vol. 1, p. 503.

126 Ibid., pp. 504-5.

127 Ibid., pp. 507-8. Coleridge similarly argued against Lawrence that the presence of basic material properties such as cohesion and elasticity in animal bodies was sufficient to show that there was no fundamental discontinuity between the supposedly inorganic and organic realms. Ibid., pp. 511-12. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.259

'irritability'.(128) Brown had argued that the chief property of life was 'excitability': the innate propensity of an organism to be stimulated into action by external or internal factors. Brown's medical fame rested on his claim that stimulation of the organism must be neither too great nor too little in order for it to maintain health. Most physiological complaints, he argued, were due to understimulation, and he recommended remedies that bolstered the organism, in contrast to devitalizing treatments such as bloodletting typically used at the time.(129) Coleridge probably had encountered Brown's theories through Thomas Beddoes who had adopted Brown's system to a degree, and had edited Brown's Elements of Medicine.(130) But the use of Brunonian terminology in the Theory of Life was more directly indebted to Schelling who had incorporated Brown's theories into his own system and had studied their application in medicine.(131)

It was Schelling's Naturphilosophie upon which Coleridge principally drew to argue that a unique, immaterial principle of life pervaded the whole of nature. In the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, Schelling had claimed that 'there is a hierarchy of life in Nature. Even in mere organized matter there is life, but a life of a more restricted kind.'(132) For Coleridge, this conviction that there was an ontological continuity between inorganic and organic nature was significantly reinforced, as Levere has shown, through reading the works of one of Schelling's best known disciples, the Naturphilosoph, Henrik Steffens. For

128 Gasking, Experimental Biology, pp. 93-4.

129 Neubauer, 'Dr. John Brown', pp. 369-70.

130 See Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes, pp. 24-5, 109, 138, 172.

131 Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 202-3. On the influence of Brown on Schelling, see: Schelling, University Studies, pp. 135, 139-40; Tsouyopoulos, 'John Brown's Ideas', pp. 65, 67-72; Neubauer, 'Dr. John Brown', pp. 372-3, 375-8.

132 Schelling, Ideas, p. 35. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.260

Steffens had taken on board Schelling's assumption that polarity was omnipresent in nature, and, along with many others, had endeavoured to map out polar oppositions and their genesis from the most basic kinds of phenomena through increasingly complex levels of material organization.(133) We have noted that one of the major attractions for Coleridge in such a natural philosophy was that it did away with an indefensible dualism between matter and spirit. Spirit, as manifested in vital phenomena and intelligence, was not something inexplicably superadded to matter: it was present in the activity of nature from the lowest stages of organization, in what was commonly considered to be inanimate matter, up to the highest level of physiological and psychological organization in the human species. Coleridge here had a compelling alternative to materialistic natural philosophies.

There was of course a danger that such a philosophy be construed as a variety of hylozoism that dispensed with the need for a divine Creator, or as a pantheistic conflation of spirit and nature. Coleridge was aware of such tendencies and detected them in the Naturphilosophen. Oken, for example, had maintained that 'God's act of self-manifestation' was the first instance of polarity. Taking issue with this, Coleridge wrote, 'here lies the fundamental Falsity of the Natur-philosophie. - It places Polarity in the Eternal, in God. All its other Errors are consequences of this.'(134) Nevertheless, he regarded the basic scheme of Schelling and Steffens as not incompatible with

133 Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 161-2, 212, 217-18.

134 CC,12, vol. 3, p. 1055: 1818 marginalia on Oken's Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (1809). Oken, in this work's English translation, indicated that 'galvanism is the principle of life. There is no other vital force than the galvanic polarity.' Oken, Elements, p. 182. On Coleridge's concern about pantheism in Naturphilosophie, see also: CN,3, entries: 4429: August-September 1818; 4445, 4449: October 1818; CL,4: pp. 873-6, 883: to J. H. Green, 30 September 1818; to C. A. Tulk, 24 November 1818. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.261

Christianity. For God, Coleridge believed, was undoubtedly 'the ground or cause' of nature's activity.(135)

The definitions of life that Coleridge put forward in his work were primarily derived from Schelling and Steffens, though also apparently inspired by Coleridge's reading of earlier, non- mechanistic cosmologies. 'The most comprehensive formula to which the notion of life is reducible,' Coleridge asserted, 'would be that of the internal copula of bodies, or (if we may venture to borrow a phrase from the Platonic school) the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many.' He went on to 'define life as the principle of individuation, or the power which unites a given all into a whole that is presupposed by all its parts.'(136) The central idea being expressed here is that 'life' is an immaterial 'principle' or 'power' in nature that produces new, independent entities by inwardly joining previously distinct elements. The idea of 'individuation', Levere indicates, is found in Schelling and Steffens. But there are also resonances in the first formulation above, as Coleridge himself notes, with a Neoplatonic contrast between unity and multiplicity: the one and the many.(137) Indeed, the idea of there being a fundamental, unitary tendency that is productive of the variety found in nature bears a resemblance to the Neoplatonic concept of the 'One' or the 'Good' which, by its very perfection, spills over into the world and creates the multiplicity of forms there found.(138)

135 CC,11, vol. 1, p. 503.

136 Ibid., p. 510.

137 See Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, pp. 217, 264.

138 See Lovejoy, Chain of Being, pp. 62-3. Lovejoy points out, however, that the Plotinic creation occurs in a descending order, beginning with the most spiritually evolved forms toward increasingly material forms. By contrast, the Naturphilosophen viewed the creative process of the Absolute as proceeding from simpler to ever more complex forms. Ibid., pp. 316-26. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.262

Coleridge went on to indicate how the principle of life or 'tendency to individuation' would result in different forms in nature, with individuality - gauged by 'the number and interdependence of the parts' in an entity - progressively increasing. The individuating tendency would be minimal, he claimed, in the lowest degree of nature, exemplified by metals. It would gradually increase through the next level, typified by crystals, and through the following one, characterized by peat and corals. This latter stage, he indicated, was a bridge to the animal and plant worlds of the final stage, where individuation would intensify and reach an apex in the human organism.(139)

Having sketched out how the individuating tendency of life would work, Coleridge announced that 'its most general law' was 'polarity, or the essential dualism of Nature, arising out of its productive unity, and still tending to reaffirm it, either as equilibrium, indifference, or identity.'(140) This was a recognizable restatement of Schelling's idealist derivation of natural philosophy. Just as polar opposition is necessary to check the pre-conscious self's primordial active tendency, it is similarly required in nature to curb an originally indeterminate activity. We observed above that in the general scheme proposed here, new kinds of phenomena are produced whenever nature's intrinsic activity is constrained by an opposing tendency. Out of such an opposition a new 'identity' or 'synthesis' emerges, and nature is then in a state of dynamic 'equilibrium' or 'indifference'. The intrinsic activity of nature subsequently reasserts itself only to be curtailed at the following stage in another synthesis, and so on.(141) 'Life', Coleridge wrote at the end of his Theory of Life, 'supposes a positive or universal

139 CC,11, vol. 1, pp. 512-16.

140 Ibid., p. 518.

141 Ibid., pp. 518-20. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.263 principle in Nature, with a negative principle in every particular animal, the latter, or limitative power, constantly acting to individualize, and, as it were, figure the former.'(142)

Levere has indicated that the central ideas put forward in the Theory of Life were promoted from the mid-1820s by Coleridge's eminent scientific friend, the surgeon Joseph Henry Green (1791-1863) in lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons.(143) Coleridge had met Green, together with the German poet Ludwig Tieck, in 1817, and must have been delighted to discover that the young surgeon shared his interest in German philosophy. Indeed, in 1806 when he was only fifteen, Green had spent three years in Germany, accompanied by his mother, with the aim of furthering his education. In 1817, encouraged by Tieck (and after meeting Coleridge), he went to Berlin for a brief period to study German philosophy, and, especially, to learn more about Schelling. Green became a close friend and confidant of Coleridge. Together they discussed science and philosophy, and Green was later entrusted with completion of the Opus Maximum. From 1824 to 1828, Green held the important post of Hunterian lecturer in comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons.(144) The similarity between his thinking and that of Coleridge as expressed in the Theory of Life is apparent from an 1827 lecture on the comparative anatomy of birds. There, Green described 'the ascending scale' of organic nature as the result of a fundamental tension between 'two great tendencies'.(145)

142 Ibid., p. 557.

143 Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, p. 44.

144 Holmes, Darker Reflections, pp. 450, 465, 469, 488, 503, 539, 548, 550, 555; Sloan, 'Edge of Evolution', pp. 17-18.

145 From 'Joseph Henry Green's Introductory Hunterian Lecture on the Comparative Anatomy of the Birds, 27 March 1827', in Owen, Hunterian Lectures, p. 310. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.264

In each stage of the ascending scale of living beings we see, with evidence increasing directly as the ascent, at once the opposition and the harmony of the two great tendencies which must be regarded as the manufacturers or constitutive agents in this great work of nature, namely - that of Nature tending to, integrate all into one Comprehensive whole, ... & on the other hand the tendency to individuality in the parts ... .

Green went on to insist that Hunter's arrangements in comparative anatomy illustrated the workings of dynamic 'powers' and showed 'that individuality and integration to a whole are the great polar forces of organic nature'.(146)

So for Coleridge there was abundant empirical confirmation of polarity in nature. Not only in chemistry and electricity, but in physiology and comparative anatomy as well. All of this appeared to him to demonstrate that the fundamental truths of nature were discoverable a priori (through ideal construction) and thus that the transcendental method of German Naturphilosophie was sound.

This had two major implications that will be examined in the following chapter. Firstly, it strongly suggested that an idealist epistemology should be adopted to establish other kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, and we shall see that Coleridge advanced such an epistemology in his mature politics. Secondly, the success of Naturphilosophie implied that, if nature is in fact determined by the same basic principles that govern the conditions of human consciousness, there ought to be some notable similarities between the natural and human realms. So, the organic unity of nature expressing a tendency to

146 Ibid., pp. 311-12. Significantly, the young Richard Owen attended Green's lectures on comparative anatomy, and so would have encountered these ideas derived from German dynamic philosophy. Indeed, in Owen's 1837 Hunterian lectures, we find him explaining life as due to a divinely informed, 'organizing energy' or 'power'. Ibid., p. 220 et. seq. Rupke discusses the influence of Naturphilosophie on Owen, noting that Owen saw polarity as an important force in organic phenomena. Rupke, Richard Owen, chapter 4. Ch.IV: 'An Act or Power' p.265 individuation in increasingly complex forms, and the principle of polarity that underlies this tendency, ought to be exhibited in human societies. We shall indeed observe that Coleridge saw such tendencies derived from Naturphilosophie as operating in history and politics. His dynamic philosophy, then, provided a scientific sanction for his mature social philosophy. p.266

CHAPTER V: 'PRESERVING THE METHOD OF NATURE IN THE CONDUCT OF THE STATE'— COLERIDGE'S DYNAMIC POLITICS

V.1 Introduction

Coleridge's dynamic politics was directly opposed to the mechanistic one we saw him complaining about in Chapter III. There we observed that he saw mechanism as sustaining liberal and utilitarian philosophies based ultimately on self-interest. Below, we shall see that he similarly used a dynamic philosophy to support his own conservative politics in which much more importance was given to social duties than to individual rights. This political division between liberals and conservatives was a crucial one in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and was famously summed up by John Stuart Mill in an 1840 essay on Coleridge. There Mill asserted that 'every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean'. By this, Mill meant that everyone was either a progressive like Bentham, whose politics were built upon the individual pursuit of happiness, or a conservative like Coleridge, emphasizing the subservience of individual interests to the greater interests of the state.(1) This is of course remarkably like Coleridge's characterization of the contrast between the philosophies of a 'commercial G. Britain' and his own, and we shall see that Mill's claim similarly reflected the difference between a mechanistic politics - based on atomistic self-interest - and a dynamic politics - emphasizing duties over rights.

The principal aim of this chapter is thus to show how the dynamic philosophy and its idealist epistemology sustained the

1 Mill, Dissertations, vol. 1, pp. 397, 330-4, 358-63, 413-27, 436-42. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.267 mature Coleridge's politics. To begin with, empirical confirmation of Naturphilosophie gave enormous credibility to its epistemology. Since the latter bore fruit in science, Coleridge believed that one ought also to adopt it for other kinds of knowledge. Thus, we shall see below that he insisted the nation should apply an idealist method in its social and political philosophies: the true 'constitution' of states (he maintained) could only be known via an idealist epistemology. Coleridge's advocacy of an idealist approach in the sciences is well known to scholars, but the political significance of this advocacy has not been dealt with.

The dynamic philosophy also supported Coleridge's politics in a more direct way, via the traditional idea that the laws or principles that govern nature ought to be imitated by human societies. This idea was prominent in Naturphilosophie. Schelling had argued that the essential principles of external nature were identical to those that underlay the conditions of human consciousness. Proof that such principles operated in nature, he added, strongly implied that they ought also to be found in human societies - the direct products of human consciousness. We shall accordingly discover that in Coleridge's last major work, On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of each, the key notions of Naturphilosophie are explicitly used to support his conservative political agenda. He contended indeed that the fundamental principle of polarity is exhibited in the state in the form of a tension between a 'power' of 'permanence' - represented by the landed classes - and a 'power' of 'progression' - represented by the commercial and professional classes. An overbalance of one of these two 'powers', he claimed, will undermine a nation's political stability, so one must be especially careful to ensure Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.268 that the forces of 'permanence' are not overwhelmed by those of 'progression'.

Another important dynamic idea, found in Naturphilosophie, and applied by Coleridge to politics, was the idea of the organism. Indeed, we noted above (p. 185) that Coleridge used the idea to argue that states ought to possess the intrinsic unity and interdependence of parts characteristic of living organisms. The special 'organized' mode of being that characterizes living creatures had been discussed by Kant,(2) who explained it as a mental construct we impose upon nature to make sense of phenomena that cannot be explained mechanistically. Schelling and Coleridge, however, treated this idea as a real feature of nature, and claimed that human societies too were fundamentally 'organic'. This implied that the state, like an organism, possessed an intrinsic unity, reality indeed. Thus, the state as a whole was a genuine entity, so capable of overriding the particular interests of individuals. The masses, then, ought to be obedient, and relinquish their rights for the greater good of the whole.

This chapter will begin, however, with Coleridge's arguments in support of the dynamic philosophy's idealist epistemology, particularly as expressed in his 1818 'Essays on the Principles of Method'. These essays were mainly concerned with justifying the use of such an epistemology in science, but we shall see that they implied a much broader application of the same epistemology to religion, politics and ethics. We shall go on to note that this epistemology was distinctly elitist, a feature that was also typical of Schelling's philosophy. For both Coleridge and Schelling, only a very small minority could come to know the scientific and political truths revealed through such an

2 Kant's phrase is 'organisierte Wesen'. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.269 epistemology. Democracy in the sciences and in society, then, should be opposed.

In the sections thereafter, the application to politics of the key ideas of polarity and the organism will be examined. We shall see that Coleridge's dynamic insistence that cohesion in matter is not purely mechanical, but due to polar forces of attraction and repulsion was mirrored in his view of society. The latter was not a product of individualistic self-interest, but actively held together by opposing tendencies or 'powers'. So, while admitting tension, dynamism thus emphasized unity, a characteristic also obvious in the idea of the organism. For Coleridge, then, the dynamic philosophy offered an attractive alternative to a mechanistic model of nature and its 'Epicurean' social analogue, in which there was no principle of connection or intrinsic unity. Although the 'medieval' belief that society should be viewed on the analogy with nature might seem unusual for the time, we shall see that such a belief was shared by many other conservative thinkers of the period, such as Burke and Hegel, who also invoked a dynamic view of nature to sustain their political positions. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.270

V.2 Coleridge's 'Essays on Method'

An important addition to Coleridge's re-worked 1818 edition of The Friend was his 'Essays on the Principles of Method', which outlined the idealist epistemological framework of his mature natural and social philosophies, and, in particular, defended an idealist approach in scientific investigation.(3) This defence is significant, for we shall see that Coleridge was in effect contesting the then popular empirical approach in the sciences, thus insinuating that the latter was inadequate in all other spheres of inquiry as well.

In these essays, Coleridge maintained that two principal approaches have been used in natural philosophy. One derives theories from observation. He disliked this approach, however, arguing that it frequently involves an endless collection and cataloguing of observational data according to superficial classifications that ignore the true 'laws' governing phenomena. This approach was illustrated, he claimed, in the botanical system of Linnaeus, which, while fruitful, had resulted in an unnecessary waste of energy. This could have been avoided, Coleridge argued, had the Swedish naturalist been less obsessed with observation and sought after 'a central phænomenon' by which all other phenomena could be explained.(4)

The other main approach in natural philosophy involves a direct apprehension or intuitive grasp of nature's 'laws', without significant empirical input. Coleridge indicated that such an approach was supported by recent important disoveries

3 A version of these essays had been published earlier in the year, as a 'General Introduction; or, A Preliminary Treatise on Method' in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana (1818-45). Coleridge was not entirely happy with this version because of alterations the publisher had made to the arrangement and content of his treatise. See CC,4, vol. 1, pp. lxxxii-lxxxiv.

4CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 464-75. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.271 which showed that the key concepts of nature, such as 'force', are 'deduced ... by the reason' 'independently' of experience.(5) Furthermore, he maintained, genuine progress in the sciences can only happen when observation is guided by a conscious search for a universal 'idea' or 'law' in nature. So, he argued, the phenomena of electricity could only properly be understood once the law of polarity operating throughout the whole of nature had been proposed.(6)

The question of course arises as to how such 'laws' are to reach the human mind, and Coleridge answered this in a thoroughly Platonic way. He began by referring to such knowledge as unconsciously sought for, as if the successful mind is directed by an 'instinct'. This instinctive seeking, he indicated more precisely, is a 'striving after unity of principle through all the diversity of forms'. It is akin to 'a feeling resembling that which accompanies our endeavors to recollect a forgotten name; when we seem at once to have and not to have it; which the memory feels but cannot find.'(7) Here Coleridge was strongly implying a kind of Platonic anamnesis - that the knowledge spontaneously sought after is somehow present in the mind, though not conscious. Indeed (he claimed) the mind has a priori knowledge of the laws of nature, for both the contents of mind and of nature originate in the same transcendent realm of Platonic 'ideas':(8)

5 Ibid., pp. 458-62.

6 Ibid., pp. 478-9. Coleridge does not mention Schelling here, but indicates that the crucial year for the discovery of this idea was 1798 - the year in which Schelling's On the World Soul was published. The editor's note here that Coleridge was thinking about the work of Volta and Laplace does not tally with this date.

7 Ibid., pp. 470-1.

8 Ibid., p. 463. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.272

What is the ground of the coincidence between reason and experience? Or between the laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect? The only answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, compels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once the ideal of the reason and the cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both.

Proof that the mind possesses such a priori knowledge, Coleridge suggested (following Plato), is demonstrated by mathematics. For the abstract relations discovered in mathematics can be used to describe and predict concrete phenomena in nature. This belief was enunciated by Coleridge in one of his Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19, in which he must have surprised some of his readers by his characterization of Francis Bacon as one of the most important modern proponents of an idealist methodology in science. 'The true Baconic philosophy', Coleridge announced,(9)

consists ... in a profound meditation on those laws which the pure reason in man reveals to him, with the confident anticipation and faith that to this will be found to correspond certain laws in nature. If there be aught that can be said to be purely in the human mind, it is surely those acts of its own imagination which the mathematician avails himself of ... . Out of these simple acts the mind ... raises that wonderful superstructure of geometry and then looking abroad into nature finds that in its own nature it has been fathoming nature, and that nature itself is but the greater mirror in which he beholds his own present and his own past being in the law ... while he feels the necessity of that one great Being whose eternal reason is the ground and absolute condition of the ideas in the mind, and no less the ground and the absolute cause of all the correspondent realities in nature ... and so Lord Bacon has told us, all science aproaches to its perfection in proportion as it immaterializes objects.

Coleridge was adamant that Bacon had an important place in the genealogy of idealist ways of thinking that stretched from

9PL, pp. 333-4. On varying interpretations of Bacon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Yeo, 'Idol of the Market-Place'. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.273

Plato to Kant and Schelling, and in his 'Essays on Method' he dubbed Bacon the 'British Plato'. For Bacon, he argued, had shown that the laws of nature were discoverable by purifying the mind of all prejudices and illusions ('idols', as Bacon famously called them) particularly those due to the senses. By such a process one could reach a clear knowledge of the 'central phænomena' in nature which, for Coleridge, were the 'objective' equivalent of Plato's 'subjectively' apprehended 'ideas' in 'the divine mind'.(10) Coleridge later summed this up in the following way: 'that which, contemplated objectively (i.e. as existing externally to the mind), we call a LAW; the same contemplated subjectively (i.e. as existing in a subject or mind), is an idea.'(11) Bacon, as Coleridge represented him, thus confirmed what the Naturphilosophen had set out to demonstrate - that an idealist epistemology provided a solid foundation for science.

V.3 The Politics of Idealism

To Coleridge, this approach to knowledge applied well outside science. Yet verification of such an idealist epistemology through science lent authority, he insisted, to its application elsewhere. So he concluded that moral, religious, and political questions must also be answered via such an epistemology.

This conclusion is clear from his complaints (canvassed in Chapter III) about the way in which the sensationalism of the mechanical philosophy lent weight to emerging liberal and utilitarian philosophies with democratic tendencies. That on the other hand, he saw the opposing dynamic Naturphilosophie as similarly sustaining his own conservative, elitist politics is

10 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 488-93.

11 CC,10, p. 13. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.274 plain from a number of his writings after 1815, when he seriously began to promote the adoption of this idealist approach to nature.

Illustration of the political importance Coleridge attached to this idealist philosophy is provided, for example, in his 1817 letter to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool (also discussed in Chapter III). For Coleridge insisted to his presumably perplexed correspondent that the only remedy for the moral and social disintegration generated by the mechanical philosophy was to be found in 'the Dynamic Theory of the eldest Philosophy'. By this, he meant the tradition of Plato and Pythagoras, revived by Schelling and the latter's scientific disciples.(12) The prevailing system of philosophy (he claimed) had a profound effect on the social fabric of a nation: in the Republic, Plato had warned against introducing novelty into the established systems of education and culture, for 'the music and literature of a country cannot be altered without major political changes'.(13) Coleridge similarly exhorted the prime minister that it was imperative for the political well-being of the nation to turn to older systems of thought - those influential in Britain prior to the impact of Locke. As we observed above in our discussion of Coleridge's objections to the mechanical philosophy (pp. 178, 179), what he was in fact advocating was the revitalization of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophies, a

12 CL,2, p. 760: to Lord Liverpool, 28 July 1817. Another example of Coleridge's belief that Schelling was reviving this 'eldest philosophy' is found in an 1815 letter, in which Coleridge indicated that he was planning to write 'a philosophical History of Philosophy', starting from Pythagoras through to 'the revival of the eldest Philosopy, which I call dynamic or constructive as opposed to the material and mechanical systems still predominant'. CL,4, p. 589: to John May, 27 September 1815. In his 1817 Biographia Literaria, Coleridge similarly claimed that the 'Dynamic Philosophy' was 'no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures.' CC,7, vol. 1, p. 263.

13 CL,2, p. 762; Plato, Republic, 424. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.275 revitalization he perceived as dynamic, and which he found in Schelling's idealist Naturphilosophie.

Coleridge's presumption that an idealist approach, confirmed by the sciences, ought to be applied in politics is also explicit in the eight 'Essays on Method'. So in the last of these he reiterated the complaints (noted in the previous chapter) about the overbalance of trade in the nation and the accompanying authority of knowledge derived from the senses. He urged that Britain attach less importance to 'trade' and more to 'literature' - the latter reflecting the life of the mind - and insisted that priority always be given to the cultivation of an inner, spiritual reality. For 'under the ascendency of the mental and moral character the commercial relations may thrive to the utmost desirable point, while the reverse is ruinous to both, and sooner or later effectuates the fall or debasement of the country itself'. Coleridge acknowledged, however, that such reasoning was likely to prove unattractive in a country that prospered from trade.(14)

In this same essay, he repeated his claim that the 'laws' of nature can be directly apprehended by the mind, because both have their spiritual origin in God. He also cited excerpts from Wordsworth's famous 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' (1807), to again indicate that the discovery of laws in nature is akin to Platonic remembering - to a process of rediscovering what has always been present in the mind or soul.(15) The essay concluded with a paraphrase of Plotinus: 'the material universe ... is but one vast complex MYTHOS (i.e. symbolical representation)' of, presumably,

14 CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 507-8.

15 Ibid., pp. 509-11. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.276 spiritual or divine reality.(16) For Coleridge, then, nature was the 'material' manifestation of 'ideas' that constituted the foundation of existence. Like Plato and Plotinus, he believed that the phenomenal world issued from a more fundamental, immaterial reality, not accessible to the senses.

Further evidence of Coleridge's advocacy of an idealist method in social philosophies is provided in the most developed exposition of his idealist politics: On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each, with Aids Toward a Right Judgement on the Late Catholic Bill.(17) There he maintained that there were social truths or 'ideas', comparable to physical laws, which were inherent in human nature.(18) Such 'ideas', he insisted, had always existed in people's minds, and could not be derived empirically. 'An idea', he explained, was(19)

that conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form, or mode, in which the thing may happen to exist at this or at that time; nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms

16 Ibid., p. 524. In an editorial note, Barbara Rooke rightly indicates that the idea expressed here is found in Plotinus, Enneads, 2.9.8, and 5.8.7.

17 The second edition of this work, published in 1830, is the one referred to here. The first edition was published in 1829. One of the original intentions of this work was to argue against the proposed emancipation of Catholics from legal discrimination. The main reason Coleridge and many others had for opposing emancipation was their concern about the political influence of Rome, a foreign power, on British affairs. In On the Constitution of the Church and State, Coleridge insisted on the importance of institutions that had evolved on British soil. In 1829, however, (the year in which his book was published) the British parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Bill which granted Catholics the right to vote and become members of parliament. On the question of Catholic emancipation in early nineteenth-century Britain, see Halévy, Liberal Awakening, pp. 239-309, esp. pp. 262-77.

18 This was very close to the old Stoic notion of a universal 'law of nature', established by God throughout the universe and manifested in the consciences of all humankind. See Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 149-50, 164-6. See also above, pp. 163-166.

19 CC,10, p. 12. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.277

or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim.

One such 'idea' was what Coleridge called 'an ever- originating social contract'. He claimed that this idea was implied in a universal belief in the dignity of all human beings: that people ought not to be treated as things or 'means to an end', but as 'always ... included in the end'. This fundamental belief (he argued) prompted all human beings instinctively to oppose any kind of servitude, although not all could articulate the grounds for this belief. Referring to Rousseau, he condemned the view that government is based on an 'Original Social Contract'. For the 'sense of moral obligation' that can alone sustain any such contract (he maintained) is ahistorical: it is contained in 'the very constitution of our humanity, which supposes the social state'.(20)

Here Coleridge was making two objections. The first is suggested by his contention that a 'social contract' must be 'ever-originating'. So, any particular historical compact between citizens cannot be eternally and universally valid, but must vary with different circumstances and different societies. This is yet another example of the Romantic opposition to uniformitarianism and preference for diversity (see above, pp. 91, 92). Coleridge's second objection was to the notion, distinctly implied in the eighteenth-century conception of the social contract, that a state is something artificial, constructed by human beings out of a need for self-preservation. He opposed such a notion, for (like Aristotle) he viewed the state as something natural and saw sociability and morality as inherent in human nature.

20 Ibid., pp. 14-15. Cf. CC,4, vol. 1, pp. 173-5. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.278

He went on to assert that the idea of a state's 'Constitution' had similarly been misrepresented, for this idea too was not dependent upon historical precedent. On the contrary, it was prior to and informed the course of history. It was an intrinsic 'principle' of human nature, 'existing ... in the minds and consciences of the persons, whose duties it prescribes, and whose rights it determines.'(21) So, for Coleridge, such social and political 'ideas' were not derived from experience, but were ingrained in human nature. They were informing ideals or 'ultimate aims', pre-existing in the human mind and antecedent to the establishment of social institutions; they were, furthermore, only approximately realized in the sensible world.

V.4 The Idealist Elite

One of the important questions raised by this idealist view of knowledge concerns the criteria for obtaining it. Coleridge indicated that, while social truths were acknowledged by everyone implicitly, only a minority could consciously apprehend and articulate them. He asserted that 'it is the privilege of the few to possess an idea: of the generality of men, it might be more truly affirmed, that they are possessed by it.'(22)

But what distinguished those who were capable of grasping 'ideas' from those who could not? Coleridge's answer to this was once again provided by referring to the important epistemological distinction between the faculties of Reason and Understanding. Knowledge of 'ultimate ends' or 'moral Ideas', he affirmed, could only be obtained via the Reason. The empirical Understanding, on

21 CC,10, p. 19.

22 Ibid., p. 13. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.279 the other hand, could only provide knowledge of 'such ends as are in their turn means to other ends.' The value of the Understanding, Coleridge indicated, was exemplified by the technological advances being made in Britain. 'We live', he declared, 'under the dynasty of the understanding: and this is its golden age.'(23) There were, however, serious dangers in this increasing reliance on the Understanding. For this faculty's practical accomplishments had led to an erroneous belief that the kind of knowledge it supplied was the most valuable kind. Consequently, he warned, there had been a disturbing increase in educational organizations with secular and liberal tendencies, such as Nonconformist schools and Mechanics' Institutes.(24)

In order to counterbalance such tendencies, Coleridge insisted that religious and moral education was necessary, and, in On the Constitution of the Church and State, he proposed the establishment of an elite body of intellectuals (very much like Plato's 'guardians') which he termed the 'Clerisy' or 'National Church'. Through their knowledge of the truths supplied by the Reason, those who made up the Clerisy would alone be qualified to guide the nation. Coleridge warned his political adversaries - 'the Liberalists and Utilitarians' - of the consequences of ignoring the Reason. For social stability (he maintained) depended upon the masses' being educated in the moral and religious truths derived from this faculty and disseminated by a political elite:(25)

You begin, therefore, with the attempt to popularize science: but you will only effect its plebification.It is folly to think of making all, or the many, philosophers, or even men of science and systematic knowledge. But it is duty and wisdom to aim at making as

23 Ibid., pp. 123, 59.

24 Ibid., p. 69.

25 Ibid., pp. 69-70. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.280

many as possible soberly and steadily religious; - inasmuch as the morality which the state requires in its citizens for its own well-being and ideal immortality ... can only exist for the people in the form of religion. But the existence of a true philosophy, or the power and habit of contemplating particulars in the unity and fontal mirror of the idea - this in the rulers and teachers of a nation is indispensable to a sound state of religion in all classes.

Coleridge wrote that his 'Clerisy' was to be the 'third great venerable estate of the realm', after that of the landed classes and that of the entrepreneurial classes. It was to ensure the harmonious co-operation of these other two classes, by 'cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science'. One of the Clerisy's major tasks (echoing Burke's conservative recommendations) would be 'to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to connect the present with the future'. More importantly, it would also be responsible for providing moral education that would enable the members of the society to understand their rights and duties.(26)

From all of this it is plain that the mature Coleridge's idealist epistemology, sustained by Naturphilosophie, was radically elitist. Moreover, this elitism was as applicable to scientific, as it was to political, knowledge. Such elitism was conspicuous too in Schelling, and was especially evident in the German philosopher's Lectures on the Method of University Studies, delivered at the university of Jena in 1802. There, for example, Schelling announced that 'the realm of the sciences is not a democracy, still less an ochlocracy [i.e. rule by the

26 Ibid., pp. 42-4. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.281 crowd], but an aristocracy in the best sense of the word.'(27) Revealingly, Schelling's views were very similar to those of Coleridge regarding the social dangers of a misguided philosophy and epistemology, and they explicitly foreshadowed the political use made by Coleridge of the distinction between the faculties of Reason and Understanding.

In his lectures, Schelling claimed that a true 'idealist' philosophy cannot threaten the state because a state's constitution should reflect the reality revealed by such a philosophy. 'The constitution of the state', he declared, 'is modeled on the constitution of the realm of the Ideas.' More fully,(28)

in the [Ideas] the absolute is the power from which all things flow, the monarch; the Ideas represent not the nobility or the people - for these two notions have no reality except as opposites of each other - but the entire body of the free citizens; the individual material things are the slaves and bondsmen. There is a similar hierarchy in the sciences. Philosophy lives only in the Ideas; it leaves dealing with particular real things to physicists, astronomers, etc.

There were, however, schools of thought that falsely lay claim to being philosophy and these (Schelling argued) were politically dangerous. He asserted that 'there is one philosophical tendency that is pernicious to the state and another that undermines its foundations.' The first tendency placed 'ordinary knowledge' and the 'common understanding' above 'absolute knowledge' and 'reason'. It thus ignored the true nature of reality which could only be known via an idealist epistemology. This anti- hierarchical tendency, Schelling maintained, had revealed itself most clearly in France during the Enlightenment and the Revolution. 'No nation', he claimed, 'has succeeded better than

27 Schelling, University Studies,p.30.

28 Ibid., p. 55. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.282 the French in this elevation of the ratiocinative understanding above reason'. The consequence of this aggrandizement of the understanding was 'ochlocracy in the realm of the sciences and sooner or later ... mob rule in every other domain.'(29)

The second tendency that posed a danger to the state (Schelling went on) was one that advocated utility as the sole criterion for measuring human achievement. He complained that such a criterion was likely to vary with changing notions of what constitutes utility. Furthermore, this criterion (he indicated) led people to give more value to technological inventions and commercial ventures than to philosophy and culture. The self- interest of governments indicated in such ventures, he warned, encourages a similarly self-interested conduct in individuals, and this results in a very superficial connection between a state and its citizens.(30)

These criticisms bear a remarkable resemblance to those Coleridge later made about the mechanical philosophy, and seem to have had the same targets in mind: an anti-hierarchical, 'Jacobin' philosophy, and a utilitarian, 'Epicurean' morality, both sustained by a sensationalist epistemology and mechanistic science, and serving commercial interests. Judging by reports of the diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson (who attended the philosopher's lectures while studying in Jena in 1802 and 1803) Schelling was overtly critical in his lectures of the same British, scientific tradition condemned by Coleridge: that of Newton, Locke, Priestley and Darwin.(31)

The elitist nature of Coleridge's idealist philosophy is conspicuous in his other mature writings. In 1808, for instance,

29 Ibid., pp. 51-3.

30 Ibid., pp. 53-4.

31 Robinson, Diary, vol. 1, pp. 128, 166. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.283 he wrote of his periodical publication, The Friend, that it was not 'for the multitude of men; but for those, who ether by Rank, or Fortune, or Offical situation, or by Talents & Habits of Reflection, are to influence the multitude'(32) The Biographia Literaria was similarly clear about a hierarchy in knowledge. Not everybody was capable, Coleridge there insisted, of gaining knowledge of the most important truths. For, just as 'the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense ... the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit; tho' the latter organs are not developed in all alike.'(33) This stance was of course very Platonic, and in the Republic we find prefigured the kind of arguments being promoted in Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Church and State and in Schelling's Lectures on the Method of University Studies. Plato argued that government ideally should be in the hands of a philosophical elite, and in terms similar to those we find in the above quotations, insisted that only those who have sufficiently disciplined their minds should rule.(34)

V.5 'Polar' Politics

We have seen that, for Coleridge, scientific confirmation of Naturphilosophie lent weight to the validity of applying its idealist epistemology elsewhere, notably in politics. But this

32 CL,3, p. 141: to Daniel Stuart, 12 December 1808.

33 CC,7, vol. 1, p. 242. Here Coleridge also claimed 'that philosophy cannot be intelligible to all, even of the most learned and cultivated classes. [For] a system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man (i.e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness.' Ibid., pp. 242-3.

34 See Plato, Republic, 473-529. Knights also discusses this Platonic dimension of Coleridge's mature philosophy. See Knights, Idea of the Clerisy, pp. 22-5, 48-9. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.284 philosophy also supported his politics more directly, through its dynamic ontology. We noted in Chapter III (pp. 190, 191) that Coleridge viewed the atomistic ontology of the mechanical philosophy as buttressing individualistic doctrines of natural rights. His specific complaint was that this ontology provided no means of accounting for cohesion or organization in nature. Thus, just as the mechanists' atoms were devoid of inherent powers of combination and cohesion, liberal political theories similarly represented individuals as isolated and independent, without any inherent sociable tendencies. For Coleridge and others, by contrast, a dynamic universe was inherently unified, through opposing, yet complementary, forces of attraction and repulsion, so could be used to sustain a more traditional picture of society as having an intrinsic unity and common purpose.

This idea that a dynamic view of nature supported an ideology that stressed social unity was not confined to Coleridge. Indeed, Beach has offered some compelling examples of this idea in other British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pope's 1733 Essay on Man, for example, presents a view of matter as possessing inherent sociable tendencies that operate through all levels of the 'chain of being'. Pope's view enlists the Newtonian concept of universal attraction as well as Cudworth's notion of a 'Plastick Nature', in order to advance the idea that all nature's activity is directed toward the single goal of drawing all things together in a harmonious whole.(35)

Here then we rest: "The Universal Cause Acts to one end, but acts by various laws." ... Look round our World; behold the chain of Love Combining all below and all above. See plastic Nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend ...

35 Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 3, ll. 1-2, 7-10, 13-14, 21-3, pp. 92-4; cited in Beach, Concept of Nature,p.55. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.285

See Matter next, with various life endu'd, Press to one centre still, the gen'ral Good. ... Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-preserving Soul Connects each being ... .

In Wordsworth's 1814 poem, 'The Excursion', we similarly find a view of nature as active and possessing an intrinsic tendency to join all things for 'the general Good'.(36)

To every Form of being is assigned ... An active Principle: - howe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things, in all natures; in the stars Of azure heaven, the undenduring clouds, In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks, The moving waters, and the invisible air. Whate'er exists hath properties that spread Beyond itself, communicating good ... Spirit that knows no insulated spot, No chasm, no solitude; from link to link It circulates, the Soul of all the worlds.

The importance for Coleridge of the idea of unity in a dynamic philosophy comes across clearly in his definition of polarity in the Theory of Life, as 'the essential dualism of Nature, arising out of its productive unity, and still tending to reaffirm it, either as equilibrium, indifference, or identity.'(37) What is different here from the recommendations of dynamism by Pope and Wordsworth is the recognition of a tension within nature, a tension that Coleridge also detected in the human realm. For he used the idea of polarity to argue that a state's cohesion or unity is a function of a fundamental balance between conservative forces of tradition and progressive ones of change.

36 Wordsworth, 'The Excursion', Bk. 9, ll. 1, 3-11, 13-15, Poems, vol. 2, p. 268; cited in Beach, Concept of Nature,p.47.

37 CC,11, vol. 1, p. 518. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.286

The link between his natural and social philosophies was made explicit in the Theory of Life. There he declared that polarity was 'the law and actuating principle of all other truths, whether physical or intellectual.'(38) He went on to explain how this 'law' brought about the increasingly complex forms of nature, culminating in the human species, and, finally, the latter's cultural products. The high point reached through 'individuation' or the polar production of new forms in the world was illustrated, he claimed, in the various aspects of human culture.(39)

In social and political life this acme is inter- dependence; in moral life it is independence; in intellectual life it is genius. Nor does the form of polarity, which has accompanied the law of individuation up its whole ascent, desert it here. As the height, so the depth. The intensities must be at once opposite and equal. As the liberty, so must be the reverence for law. As the independence, so must be the service and the submission to the Supreme Will!

Here the imagery of tension and complementarity is conspicuous, demonstrating how the idea of polarity thoroughly informed the mature Coleridge's politics. Indeed such polar politics is described in detail in On the Constitution of the Church and State. Toward the beginning of that work, he claimed that in every 'body politic' there are two fundamental opposing tendencies or 'antagonist powers' of 'PERMANENCE' and 'PROGRESSION'. He likened these tendencies to the poles of a magnet which, while opposed, are necessary and complementary aspects of a single phenomenon. In a state, he argued, the tendency to permanence is represented by the landed interest, maintained from one generation to the next by inheritance. The tendency to progression, on the other hand, is exemplified by

38 Ibid., p. 534.

39 Ibid., p. 551. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.287 those whose wealth is not derived from the land: 'the four classes of the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional.'(40) Both tendencies, he insisted, are necessary for the well-being of any state, and a suitable equilibrium between them must be maintained. A good balance, he implied, had been reached in Britain, where favourable geographical and historical circumstances had facilitated a beneficial 'evolution' of the 'idea' of the state.(41)

Later on in this work, conflicting tendencies in the nation as a whole were similarly depicted in terms of a dynamic tension between opposing 'forces' or 'powers'. Coleridge's explanation of these 'forces' drew directly upon notions found in his Theory of Life. While he claimed that his explanation was purely analogous, he treated the polar 'forces' he described as really operative in the nation. A healthy 'Body Politic', he maintained, is contingent upon two conditions. The first is that there be 'a due proportion of the free and permeative life and energy of the Nation to the organized forces brought within containing channels'. This 'free and permeative life and energy of the Nation', he explained, could be compared to the 'vital forces' of the organic world, which in turn are like the 'imponderable agents' responsible for the seemingly non-living phenomena of magnetism and galvanism. He implied that there was a natural balance between these immaterial 'vital forces' and the liquid matter in an organism's vascular system ('the organized forces brought within containing channels' referred to above). Correspondingly, Coleridge argued, there ought to be a 'Balance' in the nation (due to a 'polarization') between the 'vital

40 CC,10, pp. 24-5. Coleridge also referred to these latter classes collectively as the 'Personal' or 'Monied' interest, distinguished from the class of landowners by the fact that their property is impermanent and intangible rather than fixed and concrete. Ibid., pp. 27-8, 88-9.

41 Ibid., pp. 23-31. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.288 forces' of culture, knowledge and unfranchised wealth on the one hand, and the 'containing channels' of the state's political and legal institutions on the other. An imbalance between the two kinds of force would have unfortunate consequences. For instance, in the political and cultural environment of the ancient Hellenic democracies, an overbalance of the permeative forces had led to the disintegration of the body politic's 'organic structures'. In republican Venice, on the other hand, a predominance of organization had resulted in a lifeless rigidity in the institutions of the state - 'an ossification of the arteries' - and the citizens had come to lose all their political rights.(42)

The idea of polarity is also noticeable in Coleridge's description of the second of his conditions for a country's political well-being. This was again expressed as an opposition, this time between the 'potential' and 'actual' 'powers' of a nation. Such an opposition, Coleridge once more claimed, was evident in Britain's history where the people's 'potential power' to contest their government had long been present as a latent counterweight to the 'actual power' delegated by the people to those who ruled over them. He maintained that a sound balance between these two 'powers' had been realized in the form of Britain's constitutional monarchy. Whereas 'an Absolute Monarchy' and 'a democratic Republic' are similar, he argued, in that both these forms of government leave no place for opposition: 'in both alike, the Nation, or People, delegates its whole power. Nothing is left obscure, nothing suffered to remain in the Idea [of the Constitution], unevolved and only acknowledged as an existing, yet indeterminable Right.'(43)

42 Ibid., pp. 85-6, 95.

43 Ibid., pp. 95-6. This was not unlike the positions of both Plato and Burke who similarly warned against monarchy and democracy in their (continued...) Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.289

It is important to recognize that Coleridge's use of the idea of 'balance' in his dynamic politics was to some degree rhetorical. Certainly, in On the Constitution of the Church and State, he argued for a sharing of power between the landed and mercantile classes. But his opposition to reform strongly suggests that he didn't believe the relationship should be equal. 'Balance' was an idea that would have won Coleridge approval, but was probably not what he really meant. For his aim was to defend the pre-eminence of the traditional, landed interest at a time when its power was seriously being contested by the forces of a new 'commercial G. Britain'.

Interestingly, Coleridge's polar conception of the body politic had a precedent in the political thought of Burke. Some forty years before Coleridge advanced his mature conception of the state as a 'balance' between conflicting forces of 'permanence' and 'progression', Burke asserted in the Reflections that there were two fundamental tendencies at work in the state which he referred to as 'the two principles of conservation and correction'.(44) He went on to explain the operation of these principles in terms very much like those used by Coleridge. Before the Revolution, Burke argued, France had an almost perfect social constitution, containing(45)

that variety of parts ... all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, ... that action and counteraction, which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.

43(...continued) extreme forms. See: Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 78-9; Burke, Reflections,p.78.

44 Burke, Reflections,p.20.

45 Ibid., p. 33. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.290

The resemblance of this worldview to that of Coleridge is striking. It not only anticipates the polar framework of Coleridge's idealist politics, but confirms again that Burke too saw nature as providing a basis for politics. England's constitution, Burke boasted, followed 'the pattern of nature ... Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts'.(46) Any transformation in the state, this implies, should imitate nature, where a fundamental unity is always maintained and change is gradual:(47)

the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy ... Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete.

In Burke, then, Coleridge had a possible model for his dynamic politics. It is by no means clear, though, that his political application of polarity came from Burke, for he does not explicitly mention Burke in this connection. He does however show tremendous enthusiasm throughout his mature writings for German idealism, which makes the latter a more plausible source for his polar politics. In the end, this is not the vital issue, for what really matters is that Coleridge, Burke and others used dynamism to support their conservative political agenda.

46 Ibid., p. 31.

47 Ibid., p. 32. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.291

V.6 The Organic State

The importance of a philosophy that accounts for unity in nature and the social significance of this, is apparent also in the idea of the organism, an idea prominent in the dynamic philosophy and confirmed by its idealist epistemology. The idealist basis of this notion is expressed particularly clearly by Kant. In the second part of the 1790 Critique of Judgement, Kant discussed the idea of the organism at some length. The broad aim of this part of his Critique, entitled 'Critique of Teleological Judgement', was to investigate the principle of teleology in nature.(48) There Kant argued that, on the basis of an analogy with our own minds, finality or purpose is a quality we attribute to nature, so as to make sense of living phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of mechanistic cause and effect relations. This does not mean that nature really is governed by purpose or a kind of consciousness, but simply that we ascribe such a purpose to aspects of it. Kant insisted that to thus view things in nature as if they were directed by a conscious purpose is a 'regulative' principle of our thinking: it enables us to conceptualize our experience by applying a framework of rules to the phenomena in question; it is not 'constitutive', for it does not disclose to us the real constitution of nature. The 'final causes' we read into nature, he indicated, are 'ideal causes', while the 'efficient causes' investigated by mechanistic science may be considered 'real'.

For Kant, those things in nature to which we assign purpose are organisms. The special characteristic of an organism is that it is 'both cause and effect of itself', for each part of it seems to have the development of the whole as its goal, while at the same time being the product of a 'formative' principle found

48 The following summary is based on Kant, Critique of Judgement, Pt. 2, pp. 3-5, 18-24, 28. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.292

within the whole. He proposed the following definition: 'an organized natural product is one in which every part is reciprocally both end and means.' He also argued that this idea of organization in nature could be used as a fitting analogy for a 'state' or 'body politic',(49)

for in a whole of this kind certainly no member should be a mere means, but should also be an end, and, seeing that he contributes to the possibility of the entire body, should have his position and function in turn defined by the idea of the whole.

These ideas - that an organism is characterized by an interdependence of parts and that the purposes of the whole direct and unify the actions of its parts - are prominent in the mature Coleridge's philosophy. Coleridge, however, went further than Kant by viewing the idea of the organism as not merely a projection of our minds onto nature, but as a real feature of the world. In a passage from the Philosophical Lectures, Coleridge spelt out what he saw as the defining characteristic of an organism - the notion that a whole is greater than, and so in a sense, prior to, its parts. There, he claimed that the entire universe in fact ought to be viewed as an 'organic' entity, expressing a greater, unifying purpose through all its individual parts.(50)

Is not the whole power of the universe concerned in every atom that falls and takes its place as a living particle there? ... Depend on it, whatever is grand, whatever is truly organic and living, the whole is prior to the parts.

Here Coleridge went on to indicate that states were similarly organic, having a unity and purpose to which the individuals who

49 Ibid., p. 23.

50 PL, pp. 195-6. Cf. above, p. 128. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.293 make them up are subservient. 'That man is unworthy of being a citizen of a state', he declared,(51)

who does not know the citizens are for the sake of the state, not the state for the sake of the immediate flux of persons who form at that time the people. Who does not know what a poor worthless creature man would be if it were not for the unity of human nature being preserved from age to age through the godlike form of the state? Who does not carry it further on, and judge of all things in proportion as they partake of unity? Who judge of the democratic elements as far by the individual ?

Coleridge insisted that this organic view of the state was antithetical to the liberal, atomistic one sanctioned by the mechanical philosophy. The latter, he complained, sustained the natural rights ideology of the French revolutionaries. 'We have only to put one word for the other, and in the mechanical philosophy to give the whole system of the French Revolution.'(52)

Coleridge's conviction that states ought to be viewed as 'organic', having a 'moral' unity and purpose that transcend the particular interests and purposes of their constituent parts, is also made clear in On the Constitution of the Church and State. There, for instance, he maintained that the 'right idea of a STATE, or Body Politic' is that in which 'the integral parts, classes, or orders are so balanced, or interdependent, as to constitute, more or less, a moral unit, an organic whole'.(53) One of the important implications of this view (found also in Kant's recommendation above of an organic conception of the body

51 Ibid., p. 196. The angle bracketing here indicates Kathleen Coburn's editorial completion of missing text, based on Coleridge's lecture notes, marginalia, and publications. See ibid., p. 20.

52 Ibid., p. 195. This passage has been cited more fully in Chapter III, p. 191 above.

53 CC,10, p. 107. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.294 politic) is that the individual needs of a state's citizens must coincide with the greater needs of the state as a whole. This was of course central to Burke's conservative politics, and we shall later see that Burke in fact explicitly used organic imagery to defend his position against the individualism of late eighteenth-century natural rights doctrines.

The idea expressed in these passages - that a state has an overarching purpose with which the aims of its citizens must be brought into harmony - has a long history in political thought. It is found, for example, in the ancient Greek tradition that Coleridge often invoked, especially in Plato. In Plato, moreover, the idea that the state has a unity and purpose that lies beyond the temporal manifestation of individual desires and motivations is explicitly conveyed via the analogy of the human organism.

Thus, in the Republic, Plato compared the functions of the different classes of citizens in his ideal state to a hierarchy of psychological faculties.(54) He argued that the highest class of citizens, consisting of the philosopher ruler(s), is like wisdom or reason. The second class of soldiers or 'auxiliaries', whose role is to ensure that the rulers' wishes are executed, are compared to courage or the will. The final and lowest class is that of the workers, whose corresponding faculty is the appetite or desire. Just as harmony in the individual is produced by the reason and the will keeping desire in check, harmony in the state, Plato maintained, is achieved through obedience of the inferior classes to the philosopher ruler(s). He went on to discuss the parallel between justice in the state and justice in the individual - a parallel presumed throughout the Republic. Justice in the individual, he claimed, is produced when each

54 The following is based on Plato, Republic, 427-449. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.295 faculty performs the role it is designed for. Reason of course is naturally meant to rule and the other faculties to obey. Justice, Plato suggested, could be compared to good health and injustice to disease. Now, as injustice or disease in the individual occurs when the appetite tries to overrule reason and the will, injustice in the state arises, he argued, when the members of a particular class usurp the functions of another class to which their nature or education has not suited them. Justice in the state, he concluded, results when the members of a class carry out no other function than that appropriate to their class. What is important here is that the state is seen as having an overriding purpose to which all its citizens must be subservient.(55)

In the Timaeus, Plato added a physiological counterpart to this psychological hierarchy. He portrayed reason as located in the head, courage in the chest, and appetite in the abdomen.(56) While he did not overtly apply this bodily analogy to society, there are clear echoes here of the political message of the Republic: that the masses should obey their rulers. Plato argued, for example, that the gods had located courage in the region of the chest so that(57)

it would be well-placed to listen to the commands of reason and combine with it in forcibly restraining the appetites when they refused to obey the word of command from the citadel. They stationed the heart, which links the veins and is the source of the blood which circulates through the body's members, in the guardroom, in order that when passion was roused to boiling point by news of wrong being done, whether by external action or internally by the appetites, commands and threats should circulate quickly through the body's narrow ways, and any sentient part of it listen obediently and submit to the control of the best.

55 Cf. Hutchison, 'Why does Plato urge rulers to study astronomy', pp. 41-3.

56 Plato, Timaeus, 69-70.

57 Ibid., 70. Cf. Hutchison, 'Political Iconology', pp. 102-4. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.296

Such an organic view of the state appears over and over again in history. One notable example is provided by Shakespeare's Coriolanus, where the image is persistent. There in one famous passage the doctrine is used by Menenius Agrippa (Coriolanus's friend) to explain to a Roman citizen why the latter's hostility to the senate is misguided. Menenius tells a story about a revolt by the members of the body against the belly. They are disgruntled by the fact that they have less nourishment than the belly, which, however, appears to do nothing. To the complaints of the body's members the belly replies that, although it has initial access to the food introduced into the body, this is only because its role is to nourish the whole body.(58)

True is it, my incorporate friends ... That I receive the general food at first Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the storehouse and the shop Of the whole body. But, if you do remember, I send it through the rivers of your blood, Even to the court, the heart, to th' seat o' th' brain'; And, through the cranks and offices of man, The strongest nerves and small inferior veins From me receive that natural competency Whereby they live. ... Though all at once cannot See what I do deliver out to each, Yet I can make my audit up, that all From me do back receive the flour of all, And leave me but the bran.

The discontented citizen is a little puzzled by the moral of Menenius's story. So Menenius explains that the belly represents the senate and the unhappy members are the ungrateful citizens who are ignorant of the belly's benevolence.(59) Once again, the organic metaphor is used to convey the message that, just like a living body, a state is made up of interdependent parts all of which make a contribution to the well-being of the whole and all

58 Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act 1, Scene 1, ll. 128-38, 140-4.

59 Ibid., ll. 146-52. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.297 of which have a special function or duty to carry out. So, the masses ought to be obedient and suppress their interests for the greater good of the whole. There is no need to pass political power further down the scale.

An organic model of the body politic is also conspicuous in politically conservative literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is especially obvious in Burke. Moreover, we saw above (p. 276) that Burke seemed to endorse a dynamic view of nature. This impression is confirmed by another passage from the Reflections, in which Burke suggested that in human societies there were inherent, spiritual tendencies or 'powers', analogous to the active properties in matter. Such 'powers', he indicated, were selfless and directed toward the common good. They accordingly served to unite humanity, just as the active properties in nature unified matter. So to suppress these 'powers' would be like trying to tear apart the fabric of nature and would have similarly disastrous consequences. Thus in the medieval monasteries, Burke maintained,(60)

was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes ... men denied to self-interests ... To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism. These energies always existed in nature, and they were always discernible.

The central idea expressed here, that social unity can only be preserved if self-interest is relinquished, is also found in

60 Burke, Reflections, pp. 153-4. It is quite remarkable that Burke anticipated Coleridge by using examples taken from chemistry and the physics of electricity and magnetism to sustain his conservative politics. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.298

Burke's repeated use of the organic analogy. As mentioned above (p. 280), an organic model appealed to Burke because it suggested that the individuals who make up a state ought all to be working toward the same common goal, and that the well-being of the whole should override the particular interests of the individual (and especially lower) parts. It was therefore misguided to challenge the state - as the French revolutionaries had done - on the basis of individual rights.

Another reason for the appeal of this model to Burke was that an organism grows and changes, implying continuity. When applied to politics, this idea suggested that revolution was wrong. An organic model of the state strongly implied that one should resist abrupt change, and retain traditions and institutions that have developed gradually, in the 'natural' course of history. An example of Burke's use of such an idea is found toward the beginning of the Reflections, in a section attacking Richard Price's interpretation of the English constitution, especially the claim that the accession of William to the throne after the 1688 Revolution meant that the British monarchy is subject to popular choice.(61) In his argument against the radical Dissenter, Burke insisted on the principle of hereditary succession, while conceding the need for occasional adjustments to the state's constitution. He argued, however, that such adjustments should not be too radical: they should be 'confined to the peccant part only ... without a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass, for the purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society.'(62) This latter path, Burke complained, was that taken by the French, whose revolution Price had wholeheartedly supported, whereas the

61 Ibid., pp. 11-24.

62 Ibid., p. 19. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.299

English at the time of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution,(63)

did not ... dissolve the whole fabric [of the nation]. On the contrary, ... they regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people.

The image of the state offered here by Burke is that of a sick body. If a part of this body is defective, it can only be treated by leaving the healthy parts of the body intact. It would be ridiculous (such reasoning goes) to treat a person with a sore toe by amputating a leg.(64)

It is revealing that in the passage above Burke suggested that the revolutionary alternative to this 'natural' revitalization of the body politic was like a disorganized state of 'organic moleculae'. For this was a term that had been made current by Buffon, and we have already seen (p. 94) that Burke disapproved of Buffon's science and the politics it supported. Buffon had used the term 'organic molecules' to refer to the elementary, active constituents of organisms, and Roger has indicated that Buffon's idea was widely debated in the latter part of the eighteenth century and criticized for its materialistic overtones. For, while Buffon was not an atheist,

63 Ibid., p. 20.

64 Burke's organic analogy is elucidated in Kant's discussion of the characteristics of an organism. 'A part of a tree ... generates itself in such a way that the preservation of one part is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the other parts. ... the leaves are certainly products of the tree, but they also maintain it in turn; for repeated defoliation would kill it, and its growth is dependent upon the action of the leaves on the trunk. ... nature comes, in these forms of life, to her own aid in the case of injury, where the want of one part necessary for the maintenance of the neighbouring parts is made good by the rest ...'. Kant, Critique of Judgement, Pt. 2, p. 19. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.300 his idea was interpreted as a purely materialistic dynamicism, implying that activity in nature was nothing but a quality of matter and not given by God.(65) By linking Buffon's idea with revolutionary anarchy, Burke seemed to be suggesting that social cohesion is undermined by metaphysical schemes that reject spirit.

Later on in the Reflections, Burke compared a state's constitution to the body of a father which, when injured, ought to be handled with 'pious awe and trembling solicitude.' But the French revolutionaries, Burke complained, were like 'children ... who are prompt ... to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that ... they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life.'(66) Following this passage, Burke again attacked what he saw as a revolutionary tendency 'to dissolve [any community] into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles.'(67) This was a clear attack on Epicureanism. So Burke was inferring a link between the Epicurean matter theory that underpinned the mechanical philosophy and the Epicurean ethics of self-interest evident in individualistic natural rights theories. A state that bases itself on a mechanistic, Epicurean view of the world (he was suggesting) cannot have real unity; this can only be provided by an organic view of the state.

It is worth comparing Burke's organic picture of the body politic with that of the 'Epicurean' Hobbes. At the beginning of Leviathan, Hobbes likened states to 'Automata' or 'Artificiall',

65 Roger, Buffon, pp. 128-9, 135-8, 340-4, 346-7. The mature Coleridge similarly disapproved of Priestley's seemingly materialistic foray into dynamism. I have discussed this tension between spiritual and material dynamicism in Sysak, 'Coleridge's Construction', pp. 74-5.

66 Burke, Reflections,p.93.

67 Ibid., p. 94. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.301 mechanical bodies.(68) The obvious major difference here is that, for Burke, the state is real, not artificial. Hobbes's man-made body politic suggests that it can be taken apart and reconstructed at will, which is opposed to Burke's idea of the state as a living entity that will suffer irreparable damage if subjected to radical change.

Burke's description above of the French mutilation of their body politic was followed by the well-known passage, cited in Chapter II (p. 108), on the 'great primæval contract of eternal society' which joins past, present and future generations in an indissoluble bond. He contrasted the organic continuity and interconnection provided by such a 'contract' with the transience and superficiality of other 'subordinate contracts' made on a purely commercial or expedient basis. States, he argued, 'ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee ... or some other such low concern, ... to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.'(69) A society based on short-term, selfish considerations, then, offered neither the connection nor the sense of spiritual continuity that were distinctive of the organic social model upheld by Burke. Such a mercenary society, however, seemed to him to have been ushered in by the French Revolution, and he repeatedly deplored the loss of a past era in which (he alleged) spiritual leadership and a sense of common purpose were widespread.

In late eighteenth-century Germany, an organic conception of society, overtly opposed to views of the French Enlightenment, was also promoted. Thinkers like Herder and Hamann, for example, challenged uniformitarian social and scientific philosophies.

68 Hobbes, Leviathan,p.81.

69 Burke, Reflections,p.93. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.302

They insisted that every culture was unique by virtue of its own language, history and religion, and that these diverse aspects of a culture could not be artificially separated from it, for they together formed an 'organic' whole.(70)

Illustrating such a tendency, early in the next century, Schelling put forward an explictly organic view of the state, in his Lectures on the Method of University Studies. Echoing Kant's conception of the organism, he argued that 'a state is perfect if every citizen, while a means in relation to the whole, is also an end in himself.'(71) For Schelling (as we saw above, p. 268), the perfect state had to be derived from 'the realm of the Ideas', and he asserted that this task had only previously be undertaken by Plato in the Republic, where the state 'is entirely ideal - spiritualized, so to speak'.(72) Indeed, Schelling's state, like Plato's, was opposed to individualism, and he attacked the latter in one of its main modern incarnations as the doctrine of natural rights. In particular he complained that Fichte, in the latter's Foundations of Natural Right According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (1796-7), had wrongly advanced a view that the main purpose of government is to protect the rights of its citizens. Such an idea, Schelling claimed, represented the state as something artificial and mechanical, and denied the unifying, organic character of states. For a system 'which aims only at safeguarding rights', Schelling contended,(73)

is ... separated from all positive institutions intended to further the vigor, the regular rhythm, and the beauty

70 Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, pp. 129-30. See also Schenk, European Romantics, pp. 15-16.

71 Schelling, University Studies,p.25.

72 Ibid., pp. 112, 145.

73 Ibid., p. 113. On Fichte's view of the state as the guarantor of citizens' rights, see Aris, Political Thought in Germany, pp. 118-123. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.303

of public life ... But emphasis on the finite aspects transforms the organic unity of the state into an endless mechanism in which nothing unconditioned can be found.

Around the same time, other German intellectuals such as Adam Müller (1779-1829) eagerly embraced the teachings of Burke and, like him, employed dynamic terminology to argue for unity in the state. 'The state', Müller maintained in lectures of 1808-9, 'is the intimate association ... of the total internal and external life of a nation into a great, energetic, infinitely active and living whole.'(74) Just like his contemporary, Coleridge, Müller contrasted this dynamic view of the state with that promoted by the French revolutionaries, the philosophes, the physiocrats and Adam Smith. He accused all the latter of viewing the state abstractly and of improperly adopting a too rational, scientific approach in politics. He complained that 'physiocrats, encyclopaedists, the whole sect of philosophers has been the real cause of the illusion that science can use the state for its experiments'. He also criticized one Ritter von Schlözer for proposing a distinctly mechanistic view of the state. According to Müller, Schlözer had written that 'the most instructive manner of discussing the theory of the state is to treat the state like an artificial machine ...'.(75)

Hegel similarly advanced a view of the state from a specifically idealist standpoint, which emphasized the individual's relationship to the community. Hegel too suggested a connection between the mechanical philosophy and individualistic natural rights doctrines. Like Burke, Coleridge and many others, he condemned liberal theories of rights which he saw as embodied in French Jacobinism. He complained that such theories portrayed the state as something atomistic and mechanical, rather than as a living, organic

74 Müller, Elements of Politics (Public lectures of 1808-9), cited in Reiss, ed., German Romantics, p. 150.

75 Reiss, ed., German Romantics, pp. 155, 150-1. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.304

entity.(76) The state in such theories, he protested, was 'not an organization but a machine. The "people" is not here the organic body of a common and rich life, but an atomistic, life-impoverished multitude.'(77) Later, in terms very similar to Coleridge's critique of liberal philosophies, Hegel's followers condemned the Rights of Man doctrine as encouraging a kind of social atomism. For instance, Moses Hess - one of the Young Hegelians - observed that, in this philosophy,(78)

practical egoism was sanctioned in that men were declared to be single individuals, and true men to be abstract, naked persons; The Rights of Man were proclaimed as the rights of independent men, and so as the independence of men from each other.

Like Burke and many nineteenth-century British thinkers, the Young Hegelians, including Marx, counterposed the individualism of contemporary liberal philosophies to what they argued were the more salutary, interdependent relations of medieval, European society.(79) Coleridge's criticism of natural rights thus anticipated, along with Burke and Hegel, the Marxian analysis of the alienation of the citizen in the new industrial bourgeois society. Indeed, in terms remarkably like those we observed in

76 Sabine, Political Theory, pp. 648-55, 660-1; Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, pp. 174-7.

77 G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, (trans. T. M. Knox; Philadelpia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1975), pp. 65-6, cited in Cristaudo, Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, p. 174.

78 M. Hess, Philosophische und sozialistische Aufsätze, 1837-1850, (ed. Cornu und Mönke; Berlin, 1961), p. 339. Hess also criticized the ideology of liberal capitalism which he and many others saw as stemming from individualistic natural rights theories. He complained about those 'complete and conscious egoists who sanction in free competition the war of all against all and in the so-called Rights of Man the rights of isolated individuals ...'. Ibid., p. 345. Cited in McLellan, Young Hegelians, pp. 155, 156.

79 Ibid., pp. 155-6. For one of the earliest examples in Germany of this exaltation of the medieval, see Novalis, Christianity or Europe. See also Aris, Political Thought in Germany, pp. 308-18. For an excellent discussion of medievalism in nineteenth-century Britain, see Chandler, Dream of Order. Ch.V: 'The Method of Nature'p.305

Coleridge's 1805 condemnation of a 'commercial G. Britain', Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848) complained that(80)

the bourgeoisie ... has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest ... It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom - free trade.

What is clear from all of this is that many thinkers in the decades following the French revolution saw politics and ethics as linked to a reading of nature. If nature was misrepresented - an offence Coleridge and Burke imputed to those who explained nature in mechanistic or materialistic terms - there would be disastrous social consequences. For Burke, Coleridge, Schelling, Hegel and others, the right reading of nature was one that emphasized unity, and such a reading was provided by a dynamic philosophy.

80 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, pp. 37-8, cited in Chandler, Dream of Order,p.4. p.306

CONCLUSION

We have now completed the tasks promised in the introduction. Close examination of the primary literature has shown us that Coleridge's thinking about science always had an important socio- political dimension. Moreover, we have seen that the belief that natural philosophy significantly affected politics, and that the former was in fact being used to justify the latter, was widely shared at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In particular, we noted that many claimed that the mechanical philosophy was linked to the new liberal capitalist ideology of the period. What is of particular value in Coleridge's criticism is that he clearly spells out for us the various ways in which he saw this philosophy as sustaining liberal politics.

His articulation of the social uses of mechanism informs us that a key concern, expressed also by others at the time, involved the growing epistemic authority of science. This concern is further evidence for the well-known but ambiguous friction between science and religion in early modern Europe. But, for Coleridge, there was also a significant moral dimension to this ascendancy of science. For the sensationalist epistemology of the prevailing mechanistic philosophy, he argued, was being used to legitimize a commercial ideology - the Epicurean view that human beings are motivated primarily by self- interest. While subverting the Christian belief in a higher, disinterested morality, this Epicurean ethics was especially abhorrent to Coleridge because it also implied that there was no real principle of social unity. It was no accident, he insisted, that the individualistic, liberal, social model reflected the atomistic ontology of the mechanical philosophy. Conclusion p.307

Coleridge, like others, saw the special virtue of the dynamic philosophy as highlighting the importance of an immaterial or spiritual realm in nature. This had obvious religious significance. But we observed that this philosophy also provided a natural basis for a conservative politics that emphasized a hierarchical social order and the obedience of the masses, in opposition to Enlightenment individualism. This social use of science reveals two things in particular. Firstly, it demonstrates a widespread belief in the social authority of science. Secondly, it sheds light on the very important transition in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science from mechanical to dynamic modes of explanation. My examination of Coleridge and others shows that there were also major social reasons for favouring a dynamic philosophy. p.308

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Author/s: Sysak, Janusz Aleksander

Title: The natural philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Date: 2000

Citation: Sysak, J. A. (2000). The natural philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. PhD thesis, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, The University of Melbourne.

Publication Status: Unpublished

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