Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Chapter VII [of XXII]                                                     [To read other chapters, click here.]

Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory—Of the original
mistake or equivocation which procured its admission—Memoria technica.

We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law—if law it may
be called, which would itself be a slave of chances—with even that
appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of
human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to
forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that
subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which
flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the
will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this
blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of
which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of
association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real
separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the
Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For
these did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley's scheme, the
soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals
or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It
involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be
not indeed, os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between
substances that have no one property in common, without any of the
convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of
the Dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the
Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the
consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of
the breeze and the harp though this again is the mere remotion of one
absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is
harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?—an
ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving
creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and
the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed
stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand
times subtler than ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine
ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high overleap all
bound." Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I
am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as truly said
to be written by Saint Paul's church, as by me: for it is the mere
motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion
from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand
themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists
or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the
minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone,
have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless
beholding of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a
beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible
creation of a something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the
mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone
consists the poor worthless I! The sum total of my moral and
intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to
extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of
configurative motion, which form what we call notions, and notions of
notions. Of such philosophy well might Butler say—

          The metaphysic's but a puppet motion
          That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
          The copy of a copy and lame draught
          Unnaturally taken from a thought
          That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
          And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
          That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls
          By another name, and makes it true or false;
          Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
          By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.
                                                                   ['Miscellaneous Thoughts']

The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in
reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only
true artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with
my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man
revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with
Mr. Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his
Roderick, and the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of
all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and
by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will
be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections
and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or
thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or
prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In
all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything,
which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself
does.

The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will,
must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as
the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to
appear to itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the
association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary
sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the
impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can
exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and
attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the
will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of
them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea
at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and
effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere
sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the
images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal
degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology.

Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these
consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have
since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and
pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of
God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to
the principle or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his
foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first
volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal
medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of
the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent
of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and
sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral
being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors
of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have
proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be
certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own.
Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance
determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It
does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally
false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex
antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there
are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not.
Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour
nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all
its moral and religious consequences; some—

          ———who deem themselves most free,
          When they within this gross and visible sphere
          Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
          Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
          With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
          Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
          Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all
          Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
          Untenanting creation of its God!

Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,
before they can become wiser.

The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to
discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a
faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed.
These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their
common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes
and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a
faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of
my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes
but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes
must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight
possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of
this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity,
(Leibnitz's Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of
mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena
considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as
the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every voluntary movement
we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It
must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and
which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist
it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the
gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act,
voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot,
which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his
mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case,
while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process
completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small
water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted
shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the
brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up
against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion,
now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather
strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no
unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.
There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other
are active and passive; and this is not possible without an
intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In
philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty
in all its degrees and determinations, the imagination. But, in common
language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the
name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior
voluntary control over it.

Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of
association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the
parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with
all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an
incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential
substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall
find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of
association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all
association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately
think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with
gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word,
being that which had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I
may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may
arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In
the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in
time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and
equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint
operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so
too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity
in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the
mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity;
for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of
consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence.
I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time;
for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the
opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident
of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing
them in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and
the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever
makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than
the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to
others equally linked together by the common condition of
contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical
term) of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying
[25] the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to
any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness,
if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an
artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion
and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual
subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to
the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of
cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to
notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able
to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition
free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to
passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these
are the only Arts of Memory.


[Here ends chapter 7.  To read other chapters of Biographia Literaria, click here.]


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FOOTNOTES  [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[25] I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary
nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton and
others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely
appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without
ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would
often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position
of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a
beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close
philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,
intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.


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