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
That the doctrines asserted in this and the two or three following pages
cannot be denied or explained away, without removing (as the modern
Unitarians), or (as the Arminians) unsettling and undermining, the
foundations of the Faith, I am fully convinced; and equally so, that
nothing is gained by the change, the very same logical consequences
being deducible from the tenets of the Church Arminians;--scarcely more
so, indeed, from those which they still hold in common with Luther,
Zuinglius, Calvin, Knox, and Cranmer and the other Fathers of the
Reformation in England, and which are therefore most unfairly entitled
Calvinism--than from those which they have attempted to substitute in
their place. Nay, the shock given to the moral sense by these
consequences is, to my feelings, aggravated in the Arminian doctrine by
the thin yet dishonest disguise. Meantime the consequences appear to me,
in point of logic, legitimately concluded from the terms of the
premisses. What shall we say then? Where lies the fault? In the original
doctrines expressed in the premisses? God forbid. In the particular
deductions, logically considered? But these we have found legitimate.
Where then? I answer in deducing any consequences by such a process, and
according to such rules. The rules are alien and inapplicable; the
process presumptuous, yea, preposterous. The error, [Greek: to prôton
pseudos], lies in the false assumption of a logical deducibility at all,
in this instance.
First:--because the terms from which the conclusion must be
drawn-('termini in majore præmissi, a quibus scientialiter et
scientifice demonstrandum erat') are accommodations and not
scientific--that is, proper and adequate, not 'per idem', but 'per quam
maxime simile', or rather 'quam maxime dissimile':
Secondly;--because the truths in question are transcendant, and have
their evidence, if any, in the ideas themselves, and for the reason; and
do not and cannot derive it from the conceptions of the understanding,
which cannot comprehend the truths, but is to be comprehended in and by
them, ('John' i. 5.):
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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