The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first
but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou.
Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists during the
suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be
best understood, by conceiving them as somnambulists. This is a deep
meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest
proof,--namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou
is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou,
and yet not the same. And this again is only possible by putting them in
opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to
this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the
other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself
as equal to myself, for in the very act of constituting myself 'I', I
take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is,
of any application of the will. If then, I 'minus' the will be the
'thesis'; [2] Thou 'plus' will must be the 'antithesis', but the
equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness
in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of
conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You
no They, These or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials
and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is
evident that the con-science is the root of all consciousness,--'a
fortiori', the precondition of all experience,--and that the conscience
cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. Soon,
however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other
impulses beside the dictates of conscience; that there are powers within
us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in
tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many
things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected, and utterly
excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being
subjugated, as beasts of burthen; and others again, as, for instance,
the social tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and
excitations of the intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The
preservation of our loyalty and fealty under these trials and against
these rivals constitutes the second sense of Faith; and we shall need
but one more point of view to complete its full import. This is the
consideration of what is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer
is ready. As in the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the
twin constituents is to be taken as 'plus' will, the other as 'minus'
will, so is it here: and it is obvious that the reason or
'super'-individual of each man, whereby he is man, is the factor we are
to take as 'minus' will; and that the individual will or personalizing
principle of free agency (arbitrement is Milton's word) is the factor
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