Part I: the Birth of the Self
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Notes PART I: THE BIRTH OF THE SELF CHAPTER ONE: QUERULOUS EGOTISM I. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), The Works of Thomas Reid, 4 vols (Charleston, Mass., 1813-15) n and III, repro as I vol. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) p. 179 (n.x). 2. Ibid., p. 138 (n.viii). 3. See Coleridge's essay 'On the Philosophic Import of the Words OBJECT and SUBJECT', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, x (1821) 246--52: 'The egoist, or ultra-idealist, affirms all objects to be subjective' - though Coleridge distinguishes here between Berkeley and those of his disciples who would hold that 'the objective subsists wholly and solely in the universal subject God' (p. 249). 4. For a parallel to the distinction made between 'egoism' and 'egotism', see Coleridge's distinction between 'Presumption' and 'Arrogance' (Friend [CCJ, I, 26--7). 5. SamuelJohnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755) I, A-K (no p. nos). The citation of Addison is from The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 4 vols (Oxford, 1965) IV, 519-22 (no. 562). Further references are given after quotations in the text. Addison ascribes the word to 'the Gentlemen of Port-Royal . .. [who] banished the way of speaking in the First Person out of all their works, as arising from Vain-Glory and Self-Conceit' (p. 519). However, George Steiner says that 'it appears neither in the Logique nor in the Grammaire de Port Royal (translated into English in 1676)' - 'Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms: "Egoism" and "Egotism" " Essays in Criticism, n (1952) 444-52 (p. 447). 6. British Critic, VIII (1796) 527-36 (p. 536). 7. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-lettres, 2 vols (London, 1783) I, 400-1 (Lecture XIX). Further references are given after quotations in the text. Coleridge borrowed vol. n of Blair's Lectures between 29 Jan and 26 Feb 1796. See George Whalley, 'The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793-8', Library, 5th ser., IV (1949) 116--26 (p. 125). 8. Adam Smith, 'A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages', in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edn, with additions and corrections, 2 vols (London and Edinburgh, 1790) n, 434-5. Further references are given after quotations in the text. The Theory of Moral Sentiments has appeared as vol. I of the Glasgow 200 Notes 201 Edn, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976) but the 1790 edn is preferred because it prints the 'Dissertation', to be included in vol. IV of the Glasgow Edn. 9. Coleridge, 'On Faith', Literary Remains, ed. H. N. Coleridge, 4 vols (London, 1836--9) IV, 434. 10. Shaftesbury, An Enquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, ed. David Walford, Philosophical Classics (Manchester, 1977) p. 13 (r.iii). II. Ibid., p. 48 (II.i). 12. On the Opus Maximum MS see Laurence S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1977) esp. pp. 199-250. On the translation of the terms of eighteenth-century moral debate into the terms of Romantic discourse, see Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1946) pp. 141-7. It might be said that the dichotomy for which I argue below is such a translation or transmutation, in which 'selfishness' becomes ego(t)ism and the 'sympathy' ofShaftesbury and Adam Smith Keats's 'negative capability'. 13. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London, 1956), and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1976); E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europel789-1848 (1962; repr. London, 1977) p. 13. For a study of verbal change in the eighteenth century, see Susie I. Tucker, Protean Shape: A Stu4J in Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary and Usage (London, 1967). 14. J. Dykes Campbell, 'Coleridge's Quotations', Athenaeum, no. 3382 (20 Aug 1892) 259-60 (p. 259). 15. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meanings of Words (London, 1795) pp. 19,65,56, 118,64. 16. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, p. 149, says that Coleridge coined the term 'self-realization' . 17. MaIjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the 'New Science' upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Evanston, 111., 1950) p. 149. 18. Cf. CN, I, 787 and n; CL, I, 386--7. 19. Ian Hacking, Wiry Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge, 1975) p. 29. Cf. Coleridge's note in ch. 5 of the Biographia, BL [CC), I, 96--8*. 20. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed.John M. Robertson, 2 vols (1900; repr. Gloucester, Mass., 1963) II, 275-6 (Miscellany IV.i). 21. Coleridge, 'On Faith', Literary Remains, IV, 426. 22. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Clarendon Edn (Oxford, 1975) p. 343 (1. ii. 27). Further references to this edn are given after quotations in the text. 23. 'On Personal Identity', The Works ofJoseph Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone, 2 vols (Oxford, 1897) I, 318. 24. Locke has been defended against Butler's charge of circularity by David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Oxford, 1980) pp. 149-89. See also Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Selj(Edinburgh, 1981), which defends the views of Reid and Butler on 'personal identity' against the 'empiricist' views of Locke and Hume. 25. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1978) p. 630 (Appendix). Further references to 202 Notes this edn are given after quotations in the text. In this section all but the last, which is again from the Appendix, are from I.iv.6. 26. Cf. Hobbes's Leviathan, I.ii, in which 'imagination' and 'fancy' are synonyms, the referent of which is 'nothing but decaying sense' - The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, II vols (1839; repro Darmstadt, 1966) III, 4. 27. Isaac D'lsraeli, An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (London, 1785) pp. 121-2. 28. The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackew:;ie 174~1831, ed. Harold William Thompson (London, 1927). See, for example, pp. 38, 133, 184, 245. The 'egotisms' were to be a separate book but, according to Thompson, 'evidently ... [Mackenzie] had no clear idea in his own mind of the distinction between an anecdote and an egotism' (p. xxxii). 29. Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, ed. Henrietta Litchfield, 2 vols (London, 1915) II, 284. 30. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. J. W. Gough, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1966) p. 67. 31. I discuss some of Coleridge's political journalism in Part IV below, but see the following: E. P. Thompson, 'Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon', in Power and Consciousness, ed. C. C. O'Brien and W. D. Vanech (London and New York, 1969) pp. 149-82; George Watson, 'The Revol u tionary You th of Wordsworth and Coleridge', Critical Quarterly, XVIII (1976) 49-66, and the reply by John Beer, Critical Quarterly, XIX (1977) 79-87. 32. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin ofour Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London, 1958) p. 38 (Lvi). Further references are given after quotations in the text. 33. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949) p. 8. In his The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, 1962), Colin Murray Turbayne calls this statement 'about the best definition of metaphor known to me' (p. 18). CHAPTER TWO: THE CRUCIBLE AND THE FIRE I. David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty and his Expectations (1749), repro Scholars' Reprints and Facsimiles, 2 vols in I (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), I, 371 (III.iii.89). 2. For Coleridge on the will, see CL, VI, 986; PL, p. 362; BL [CC], I, 293-4; CN, II, 2382. On the will in Tetens's and Schelling's theories of Dichtkraft, see the chapter 'Imagination and Will' inJ ames Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981) pp. 123-8. On the usurpation of the will, see Coleridge, 'On Faith', Literary Remains, IV, 430; EOT [CC], II, 80. In general see Michael G. Cooke, The Romantic Will (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1976). 3. For the relation of such a statement to an 'ethics offeeling' in Rousseau see Louis I. Bredvold, The Natural History ofSensibility (Detroit, 1962) pp. 23-6. 4. Paradise Lost, V. 469-88, cited from Alastair Fowler's edn, Longman Annotated English Poets, 6th impression (London, 1981) pp. 286-7. All Notes 203 quotations are from this edn. Further references will give book and line number after quotations in the text. 5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge, ed. and trs. Peter Heath and John Lachs (1970; repro with corrections, Cambridge, 1982) p. 33. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 6. F. W.J. Schelling, System ofTranscendentalldealism (1800), trs. Peter Heath (Charlottesville, Va., 1978) p. 36. Further references are given after quotations in the text. 7. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. H. N. and Sara Coleridge, 2 vols in 3 (London, 1847) I.i, 271-3n. 8. Coleridge and Southey, Omniana, ed. Robert Gittings (Fontwell, Sussex, 1969) p. 29. 9. For the way in which our responses to the art object are affected by its fragmentariness, see the very suggestive discussion of the history of responses to the Venus de Milo in Peter Fuller's Art and Psychoanalysis (London, 1980) ch. 2, esp. pp. 104-129. Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trs. Catherine Porter (Oxford, 1982) p. 170: 'Let us recall ... that the romantics' favorite genres are specifically the dialogue and the fragment, the one for its unfinished character, the other for the way it stages the search for and the elaboration of ideas: both share in the same valorization of production with respect to the product.' See also Thomas MacFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, NJ, 1981), which hints at a theory of much Romantic writing being 'diasparactive'.