The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
N. B. Nothing in Scripture, nothing in reason, commands or authorizes us
to assume or suppose any bodiless creature. It is the incommunicable
attribute of God. But all bodies are not flesh, nor need we suppose that
all bodies are corruptible. 'There are bodies celestial'. In the three
following paragraphs of this sermon, we trace wild fantastic positions
grounded on the arbitrary notion of man as a mixture of heterogeneous
components, which Des Cartes shortly afterwards carried into its
extremes. On this doctrine the man is a mere phenomenal result, a sort
of brandy-sop or toddy-punch. It is a doctrine unsanctioned by, and
indeed inconsistent with, the Scriptures. It is not true that body
'plus' soul makes man. Man is not the 'syntheton' or composition of body
and soul, as the two component units. No; man is the unit, the
'prothesis', and body and soul are the two poles, the positive and
negative, the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' of the man; even as attraction
and repulsion are the two poles in and by which one and the same magnet
manifests itself.
Ib. p. 146. B.
For it is not so great a depopulation to translate a city from
merchants to husbandmen, from shops to ploughs, as it is from many
husbandmen to one shepherd; and yet that hath been often done.
For example, in the Highlands of Scotland in our own day.
Ib. p. 148. A.
The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was. It tells me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons' graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it
distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst
not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble
thine eyes, if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath
blown the dust of the churchyard unto the church, and the man sweeps
out the dust of the church into the church-yard, who will undertake to
sift those dusts again, and to pronounce;--this is the patrician, this
is the noble, flour, and this the yeomanly, this the plebeian, bran.
[8]
Very beautiful indeed.
Ib. p. 149. C.
But when I lie under the hands of that enemy, that hath reserved
himself to the last, to my last bed; then when I shall be able to stir
no limb in any other measure than a fever or a palsy shall shake them;
when everlasting darkness shall have an inchoation in the present
dimness of mine eyes, and the everlasting gnashing in the present
chattering of my teeth, and the everlasting worm in the present
gnawing of the agonies of my body and anguishes of my mind; when the
last enemy shall watch my remediless body, and my disconsolate soul
there,--there, where not the physician in his way, perchance not the
priest in his, shall be able to give any assistance; and when he hath
sported himself with my misery, &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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