Philosophers From England

"For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains, And disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains."

"New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large."

"Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law."

"Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam."

"Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live."

"Truth...never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth."

"So little care they of beasts to make them men, that by their sorcerous doctrine of formalities, they take the way to transform them out of Christian men into judaizing beasts. Had they but taught the land, or suffered it to be taught, as Christ would it should have been in all plenteous dispensation of the word, then the poor mechanic might have so accustomed his ear to good teaching, as to have discerned between faithful teachers and false. But now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness; just as the Pharisees their true fathers were wont, who could not endure that the people should be thought competent judges of Christ's doctrine, although we know they judged far better than those great rabbis: yet “this people,” said they, “that know not the law is accursed.”"

"I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words."

"His words ... like so many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at command."

"He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem."

"By labor and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die."

"A poet soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him."

"Where the bright seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow."

"Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,"

"O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray Warbl'st at eve, when all the woods are still."

"Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race: Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross."

"Under the shady roof Of branching elm star-proof."

"Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie."

"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground."

"Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms, Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, If ever deed of honour did thee please, Guard them, and him within protect from harms."

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!"

"And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."

"What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones, The labor of an age in pilèd stones, Or that his hallowed relics should be hid Under a star-y-pointing pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?"

"Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few."

"While history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age, and found it respond to him, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth. It has indeed been only since the death of Coleridge that these results of his writings have fully shown themselves; but they were very evident when they were once seen, and discovered the tendencies which had been working in his mind from the first."

"The peculiarity of the Germano-Coleridgian school is, that they saw beyond the immediate controversy, to the fundamental principles involved in all such controversies. They were the first (except a solitary thinker here and there) who inquired with any comprehensiveness or depth, into the inductive laws of the existence and growth of human society."

"He has been the great awakener in this country of the spirit of philosophy, within the bounds of traditional opinions."

"The name of Coleridge is one of the few English names of our time which are likely to be oftener pronounced, and to be symbolical of more important things, in proportion as the inward workings of the age manifest themselves more and more in outward facts."

"His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Arch angel a little damaged ... Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, & the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of 50 ordinary Persons."

"The genius of Coleridge is like a sunken treasure ship, and Coleridge a diver too timid and lazy to bring its riches to the surface."

"He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet."

"For Coleridge, the principle of the British constitution was the harmonious balance between permanence and progression or law and liberty. The landed interest and the House of Lords provided permanence and stability, the mercantile classes and the House of Commons ensured progression and personal freedom, and the Monarch supplied unity and cohesion. But all this depended upon a continuing improvement in civilization which was the responsibility of the national Church, "the third great venerable estate of the realm". The Church had a vital educational duty and function. It should through education provide everyone with the chance of bettering their children and impart the knowledge necessary to qualify "every nature" to be "the free subject of a civilised realm". Coleridge pointed out that for nearly 150 years Englishmen had been freer than the citizens of any other known country. This was due to our "insular privilege of a self-evolving constitution"."

"Coleridge...became indeed the greatest of Burke's followers. Like Burke, he was intensely religious. Religion, he believed, was always "the centre of gravity in a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves". Though a metaphysician, he thought metaphysics had no place in politics; and he was as hostile as Burke to abstract political systems allegedly based on pure reason... Hence for Coleridge Jacobinism was a monstrous hybrid, "made up in part of despotism and in part of abstract reason misapplied to objects that belong entirely to experience and the understanding". Jacobinism pandered to the brute passions of the mob in order to erect a society and government based on abstract reason instead of on established institutions and experience. England, in contrast, had the good fortune to possess social institutions that had "formed themselves out of our proper needs and interests...""

"The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a "ruined man" is itself a vocation."

"Coleridge was perhaps the most celebrated of all drinkers of laudanum, and splendid studies have been written of its influence on his Muse. Nobody seems to have paid attention to its influence on his bowels, for laudanum was a rare constipator. How much of The Ancient Mariner was the result of intestinal stasis?"

"His championship of the cause of factory children was an interesting result of his belief in the sanctity of individuality, and the right of the individual in a civilized community to a certain minimum standard of civilized existence. Making all allowances for the by no means idyllic conditions existing under the domestic system, it still remains true that the exploitation of child labour under the most appalling conditions is one of the darkest pages in the history of the industrial revolution. Coleridge says that he had been "an eye-witness of the direful effects", and that they had "weighed on his feelings from earliest manhood" ... Coleridge took an active part in the agitation on behalf of Peel's Factory Children Bill of 1818."

"It was a great revolution in ideas when Coleridge and his friends began to talk not about the rights of property but about its social duties, to criticize the economic operation of individualism from the point of view of the whole community, and to suggest that the State had sometimes the duty of interfering in economic matters and even of limiting unrestricted rights of property... The economists' doctrines, Coleridge concludes, are simply a cover for the self-interest of the rich, to be ignored whenever it suits their purpose."

"Less active a politician, but a deeper philosopher, Coleridge continually reminds us of Burke. If the mantle of the author of the Reflections descended on anyone it was on the former young Pantisocrat. The political philosophy of Coleridge is that of Burke modified and developed on all sides, and, we may claim, not altogether losing in value in the process."

"He is a kind, good soul, full of religion and affection and poetry and animal magnetism. His cardinal sin is that he wants will. He has no resolution. He shrinks from pain or labour in any of its shapes. His very atti- tude bespeaks this. He never straightens his knee-joints. He stoops with his fat, ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread, but shovel and slide. My father would call it "skluffing." He is also always busied to keep, by strong and frequent inhalations, the water of his mouth from over-flowing, and his eyes have a look of anxious impotence. He would do with all his heart, but he knows he dares not. The conversation of the man is much as I anticipated — a forest of thoughts, some true, many false, more part dubious, all of them ingenious in some degree, often in a high degree. But there is no method in his talk; he wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him; and, what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises. He cannot speak, he can only tal-k (so he names it). Hence I found him unprofitable, even tedious; but we parted very good friends, I promising to go back and see him some evening a promise which I fully intend to keep. I sent him a copy of Meister, about which we had some friendly talk. I reckon him a man of great and useless genius: a strange, not at all a great man."

"And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation – I wish he would explain his Explanation."

"Above all things I entreat you to preserve your faith in Christ. It is my wealth in poverty, my joy in sorrow, my peace amid tumult. For all the evil I have committed, my gracious pardon; and for every effort, my exceeding great reward. I have found it to be so. I can smile with pity at the infidel whose vanity makes him dream that I should barter such a blessing for the few subtleties from the school of the cold-blooded sophists."

"How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death — & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility over the sorrows of our human Brethren and Sisteren, we are in fact, tho' perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own End — for who sincerely pities Sea-sickness, Toothache, or a fit of the Gout in a lusty Good-liver of 50?"

"Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady in the long run, and to take her revenge too — transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portrait of Yesterday."

"In wonder all philosophy began, in wonder it ends. ... But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance, the last is the parent of adoration."

"“They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish “the Light that lighteth every man,” and which “shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i.e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible (i.e., by super-inducing on the animal instinct the principle of self-consciousness)"

"The anxiety to be admired is a loveless passion ... , loud on the hustings, gay in the ball-room, mute and sullen at the family fireside."

"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse, that distinguishes in order to divide. In the former, we may contemplate the source of superstition and idolatry; in the latter of schism, heresy, and a seditious and sectarian spirit."

"Manly energy … is the proper rendering [for αρετην], and not virtue, at least in the present and ordinary acceptation of the word."

"Truths … are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors."