This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and
proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's
dream from the beginning." Only a few months before his death, we find him
writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of
your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your
and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it
exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the
Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons
of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as
the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or
the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of
which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God
to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization,
containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the
Powers and Forces, are complete." Twenty years earlier, he had written to
Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most
important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then
to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on
the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine." Of
this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto
volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the
Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of
metaphysical and theological speculation." But out of those fragments no
system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green,
devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the
_magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind
"thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by
crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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