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
I have been twenty-six years convinced that dichotomizing will not do
it, but that the divine Trinity in Unity hath expressed itself in the
whole frame of nature and morality * * *. But he, Mr. George Lawson,
had not hit on the true method of the 'vestigia Trinitatis', &c.
Among Baxter's philosophical merits, we ought not to overlook, that the
substitution of Trichotomy for the old and still general plan of
Dichotomy in the method and disposition of Logic, which forms so
prominent and substantial an excellence in Kant's Critique of the Pure
Reason, of the Judgment, and the rest of his works, belongs originally
to Richard Baxter, a century before Kant;--and this not as a hint, but
as a fully evolved and systematically applied principle. Nay, more than
this:--Baxter grounded it on an absolute idea presupposed in all
intelligential acts: whereas Kant takes it only as a fact in which he
seems to anticipate or suspect some yet deeper truth latent, and
hereafter to be discovered.
On recollection, however, I am disposed to consider 'this' alone as
Baxter's peculiar claim, I have not indeed any distinct memory of
Giordano Bruno's 'Logice Venatrix Veritatis'; but doubtless the
principle of Trichotomy is necessarily involved in the Polar Logic,
which again is the same with the Pythagorean 'Tetractys', that is, the
eternal fountain or source of nature; and this being sacred to
contemplations of identity, and prior in order of thought to all
division, is so far from interfering with Trichotomy as the universal
form of division (more correctly of distinctive distribution in logic)
that it implies it. 'Prothesis' being by the very term anterior to
'Thesis' can be no part of it. Thus in
'Prothesis'
'Thesis' 'Antithesis'
'Synthesis'
we have the Tetrad indeed in the intellectual and intuitive
contemplation, but a Triad in discursive arrangement, and a Tri-unity in
result. [3]
Ib. p. 144.
Seeing the great difficulties that lie in the way of increasing
charities so as to meet the increase of population, or even so as to
follow it, and the manifold desirableness of parish Churches, with the
material dignity that in a right state of Christian order would attach
to them, as compared with meeting-houses, chapels, and the like--all
more or less 'privati juris', I have often felt disposed to wish that
the large majestic Church, central to each given parish, might have been
appropriated to Public Prayer, to the mysteries of Baptism and the
Lord's Supper, and to the 'quasi sacramenta', Marriage, Penance,
Confirmation, Ordination, and to the continued reading aloud, or
occasional chanting, of the Scriptures during the intervals of the
different Services, which ought to be so often performed as to suffice
successively for the whole population; and that on the other hand the
chapels and the like should be entirely devoted to teaching and
expounding.
Ib. p. 153.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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