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
However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism
of Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the
central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy--the construction
of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics.
Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an
individual Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to
evolve the Idea of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally
necessary process from two of the invariable accompaniments of the
above-mentioned introspective act. "For as in our consciousness," he
truly says, "we are under the necessity of distinguishing the relation
of 'myself,' now as the _subject_ thinking and now as the _object_
contemplated in the manifold of thought, so we might express the
relations in the Divine instance as _Deus Subjectivus_ and _Deus
Objectimis,_--that is, the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will,
uttering itself as and contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity
or plenitude of Being eternally and causatively realised in his
Personality." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument)
that the Idea of God the Father as necessarily involves the Idea of God
the Son as the "I" who, as the thinking subject, contemplate myself,
implies the contemplated "Me" as the object thought of. Again, the man
who reflects on the fact of his consciousness, "which discloses to him
the unavoidable opposition of subject and object in the self of which
he is conscious, cannot fail to see that the conscious mind requires
not only the distinction in order to the act of reflection in itself,
but the continual sense of the relative nature of the distinction and
of the essential oneness of the mind itself." Whence it follows (so
runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of the first two
Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves the Idea of the Third
Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" implies the
perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the contemplated--the
"I" and the "Me"--are one. In this manner is the Idea of the Trinity
shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out of it by an
implication as necessary as that which connects together the three
phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act of
the individual mind. [1]
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