English Men of Letters: ColeridgeTraill, H. D. (Henry Duff)
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English Men of Letters: Coleridge
Traill, H. D. (Henry Duff)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise
the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than
such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and
explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all
correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to
whatsoever the human mind can contemplate--sensuous or
supersensuous--of experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under
post-diluvian conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish
his self-proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked
his task with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and
political history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology,
physics, and the allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics,
pathology, all these subjects," declares his biographer, "were
thoughtfully studied by him, in at least their basial principles and
metaphysics, and most were elaborately written of, as though for the
divisions of some vast cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his
labours he thought it convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he
began to study Hebrew when more than sixty years old, and still later
in life he took up Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his
seventieth year and found his health beginning to fail him that Mr.
Green seems to have felt that his design, in its more ambitious scope,
must be abandoned, and that, in the impossibility of applying the
Coleridgian system of philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his
imperative duty under his literary trust to work out that particular
application of it which its author had most at heart. Already, in an
unpublished work which he had made it the first care of his trusteeship
to compose, he had, though but roughly and imperfectly, as he
considered, exhibited the relation of his master's doctrines to
revealed religion, and it had now become time to supersede this
unpublished compendium, the _Religio Laici_, as he had styled it, by a
fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, that
"Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest
philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence,
the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal
truths of reason--truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature
and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere
discover for himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the
few remaining years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of
seventy-two, left behind him in MS. the work entitled _Spiritual
Philosophy: founded on the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor
Coleridge,_ which was published two years later, together with the
memoir of the author, from which I have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It
consists of two volumes, the first of which is devoted to the
exposition of the general principles of Coleridge's philosophy, while
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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