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XXXIII: Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, and the Distinction between the Reason and the Understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Since long before the middle of the nineteenth century, F. D. Maurice, Tennyson's friend and a leader of the Broad-Church movement in England, has been considered Coleridge's disciple. Maurice himself frequently admitted his indebtedness to Coleridge. Its exact nature however, has been left uninvestigated. False conceptions of it have arisen, such as the belief that Maurice felt the spell of Coleridge's talk and took the impress of his personality directly, or the belief that Coleridge's “moonshine,” as Carlyle called it, without ever assuming the form of definite ideas, somehow or other had an influence upon the disciple. The first notion is shown to be untrue by the simple fact that Maurice never met Coleridge or listened to his conversation—that he knew Coleridge almost exclusively through his published writings. The second is more difficult to combat, since to do so requires a careful study of the writings of both men. Certain groups of organically related ideas do exist, however, in a very definite form in the writings of both Coleridge and Maurice, and possess a vitality and a substantial character hardly to be associated with moonshine. Such a powerful group of ideas is that concerning Coleridge's distinction between the reason and the understanding.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936
References
1 See the “Dedication” to The Kingdom of Christ from the 2nd London edition (New York and Philadelphia, 1843); Sequel to the Inquiry, What is Revelation? (Cambridge and London, 1860), pp. 178–179; Frederick Maurice, The Life of P. D. Maurice, 3rd ed. (London, 1884) [hereafter referred to as the Life], i, 176, 177, 502, 504–506. Maurice frequently expressed his indebtedness elsewhere.
2 See Sir Edward Strachey, “Recollection of F. D. Maurice,” Cornhill Magazine, lxxv (1897), 537; the “Dedication” to Maurice's The Kingdom of Christ, p. 176; and the Life, i, 176.
3 Literary Remains in Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York, 1884) [hereafter referred to as Shedd], v, 90.
4 On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, Shedd, vi, 62.
5 According to John H. Muirhead, the distinction is as old as Plato; see Coleridge as Philosopher (London, 1930), p. 65.—René Wellek states that a list of those who made use of the distinction before Coleridge would include, in addition to Kant, to whom Coleridge was chiefly indebted for the distinction: Harrington, Hooker, Bacon, Hobbes, Jacobi, Hemsterhuis, Jeremy Taylor, Leighton, John Smith, the Cambridge Platonists, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (Princeton, 1931) p. 103. Coleridge, although he found some assurance in the antiquity of the distinction, was not satisfied to use it just as he found it in any of his predecessors, not even in Kant. He learnt much from them, but his full elaboration of the distinction often goes beyond them. The germ of the distinction, according to J. Shawcross, existed in Coleridge as early as his schoolboy days at Christ's Hospital. “Thus early,” Shawcross writes, “was he awakened to consciousness of that inward discord which it was the task of his life to explain and resolve—the discord engendered by the opposing claims of the senses and intellect on the one hand, and of what he chooses to call the heart on the other.” Introduction to Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), i, xii–xiii. See also the Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (New Haven, 1933), i, 352 ff.
6 Aids to Reflection, Shedd, i, 252.
7 The Friend, Shedd, ii, 143.
8 Aids, Works, i, 261.—Coleridge asked; “Are not reason, discrimination, law, and deliberate choice, the distinguishing characters of humanity?” Idem., p. 137.
9 “The Statesman's Manual: A Lay Sermon,” Shedd, i, 430.
10 Friend, Works, ii, 176.—Coleridge was not consistent in making this very important point, but sometimes asserted that the reason, or the power for the perception of the things of the spirit, although present in all men, is more developed in some than in others. See Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), i, 167–168; ibid., p. 173; Church and State, Works, vi, 66; Friend, Works, ii, 63, 407; and “The Statesman's Manual,” Works, i, 442. His first position is the foundation for Maurice's thought and for the Broad-Church movement; his second is closely related to the Roman Catholic Church's belief in the necessity for a priesthood whose enlightenment is superior to that of the people whom they teach; and to Carlyle's theory of the value of the “hero” to society.
11 “States. Man.,” Works, i, 461.—V. F. Storr writes: “Coleridge … unquestionably did think of God, living and active, as the indwelling life and light of every human personality.” The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 1800–1860 (London, New York, etc., 1913), pp. 326–327. Wellek says that Coleridge agrees with Kant in making the reason equal in all men (Kant in England, pp. 105–106).
12 Friend, Works, ii, 142.—Coleridge's belief that the reason is equal in all men may help to account for the democratic manner of his own criticism, which is addressed to equals, not snobbish like much of later criticism. See I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (New York, 1935), pp. 38–39.
13 Ibid., p. 94.
14 Ibid., p. 448.
15 Aids, Works, i, 128 n.
16 Coleridge said: “I can never too often repeat, that revealed religion is a pleonasm.—Religion is revelation, and revelation the only religion.” Lit. Rem., Works, v, 441.
17 Idem, p. 503.
18 Friend, Works, ii, 530.
19 Idem, p. 32.
20 Lit. Rem., Works, v, 48.
21 Aids, Works, i, 251.
22 Idem, p. 255.
23 Friend, Works, ii, 164 n.
24 Idem, pp. 144–145.
25 Lit. Rem., Works, v, 40.—In this passage Coleridge also objected to calling the reason “super-rational”: “… I should think it more correct to describe the mysteries of faith as plusquam ralionalia than super-rational.”
26 Biog. Lit., i, 190 n.
27 Idem, p. 168.—For a detailed discussion of the Imagination, very closely related to the reason in Coleridge's thinking, and the Immediate, see “The Coalescence of Subject and Object,” Richards, op. cit., pp. 44–71.
28 Lit. Rem., Works, v, 537.
29 Idem, p. 402.
30 Aids, Works, i, 156–157.
31 Idem, p. 265.
32 Idem, p. 278 n.
33 Idem, p. 257.
34 Idem, pp. 290–291.
35 Idem, pp. 210–211.
36 States, Man., Works, i, 456. Coleridge also called the understanding “the faculty which, generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to the past” (Lit. Rem., Works, v, 82).
37 Aids, Works, i, 129.
38 Lit. Rem., Works, v, 181.
39 Friend, Works, ii, 164 n.
40 Idem, p. 186.
42 Lit. Rem., Work, v, 272.
43 Idem, p 367.
44 Church and State, Works, vi. 103.
45 Aid, Works, i. 268. Cf. also Church and State, Works, vi. 62.
46 Friend, Works, ii, 145.
47 Lit. Rem., Works, v, 286.
48 Idem, pp. 198–199.
49 Biog. Lit., i, 168.
50 Idem, p. 101.
51 Lit. Rem, Works, v, 38.
52 Wellek says: “… there are two reasons according to Coleridge—one of which is actually identical with Kant's theoretical Reason and another which takes the name Reason from Kant, but is substantially the ‘intellectual intuition’ of all Platonists and of Schelling” (Kant in England, p. 105).
53 Aids, Works, i, 241–242.
54 Biog. Lit., i, 193.
55 Aids, Works, i, 215.—Wellek objects that “Reason under Coleridge's hands returned to its old meaning of intellectual intuition, the limits between practical and theoretical reason are erased thereby and the whole flood of traditional metaphysics can again celebrate its triumphant entry” (Kant in England, p. 108). But Coleridge was just as discriminating in what he accepted from past divines, including the Cambridge Platonists, as he was in what he accepted from Kant, as his Literary Remains and Aids give abundant evidence. It was, however, one of his merits as a philosopher that he was able to indicate how the traditional and the progressive might be reconciled without a denial of the inflexible nature of truth. Storr distinguishes thus between Coleridge and Kant. “For Kant the Ideas of the Reason, God, Freedom, Immortality, were merely regulative ideas. They could never, that is, be the objects of knowledge; could never form part of a system of rationalised experience. We were compelled by our moral constitution to postulate, their existence, but we could never prove that they were or were not. They floated above us as a beautiful vision which we could never speculatively grasp. But for Coleridge they were real, and we could grasp them. Reason … was the instrument of apprehension. Spiritual experience could be reasonably referred to an objective basis upon which it reposed. It was just in the realm of our common moral and religious experience that we came into living contact with the supersensible realities of the spiritual world.” (Op. cit., p. 325.)
56 Storr asks how Coleridge relates the reason to the imagination. “Coleridge does not identify them. But there can be little doubt that, if he had set out to construct a formal system of philosophy, he would have treated them as springing from the same root, as being distinguishable functions of one undivided personality.” (Op. cit., p. 328 n.) For a penetrating analysis and, to a great extent, verification in the light of modern psychology and criticism of Coleridge's conception of the imagination, see I. A. Richards' recent study Coleridge on Imagination. The imagination, as Richards analyzes it, is like the reason in that it has the power both of perceiving the reality which is beyond the senses and of identifying itself with that reality, in that it brings unity into man's mind and soul and functions in conjunction with the whole man rather than as a separate faculty, and in that its power can be utilized only by seeking inward. Cf. also Coleridge's The Statesman's Manual, Works, i, 460–461.
57 (From the 2nd London ed.; New York and Philadelphia, 1843), pp. 10–12.
58 See J. M. Hoppin, “Frederick Denison Maurice,” Bibliotheca Sacra, xxii (Oct., 1865), 653–654.
59 The Kingdom of Christ, pp. 168–170.
60 What Is Revelation? (London, 1859), pp. 125 ff.
61 Idem, pp. 3–4.
62 Sequel to the Inquiry What Is Revelation? (Cambridge and London, 1860), p. 185.
63 Idem, p. 184.
64 Idem, p. 198.
65 What Is Revelation?, p. 198.—For an analysis of the controversy between Mansel and Maurice, see an article by Henry C. Hitchcock entitled “Broad Church Theology,” Bibliotheca Sacra, xlviii (Oct., 1891), 630–651. Hitchcock traces the whole controversy back to Kant. Coleridge, he says, “transported the honey from the German hive,” without the poison; while Hamilton, the teacher of Mansel, did the opposite. Maurice, according to Hitchcock, found in replying to Mansel “the crowning opportunity and honor of his life.” Storr states that Mansel, unlike Coleridge and Maurice, never understood that the reason comprised the whole man. “And reason is something more than the bare, logical instrument which Mansel makes it. It is the expression of the whole man. It is human personality in the fulness of its powers, striving by conscious reflection to understand its own nature and that of the world around it.” Op. cit., p. 422. For another defense of Maurice's position against Mansel, see Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant, and Its Progress in Great Britain Since 1825, trans. by J. F. Smith (London and New York, 1890), pp. 328–329. John Stuart Mill also attacked Mansel in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865).
66 Theological Essays (3rd ed.; London and New York, 1871), pp. 464–466. Maurice declared that Kant respected the understanding as much as Locke did, even though he also acknowledged the existence of the reason. See Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (new ed.; London and New York, 1890), ii, 621.
67 Mor. and Meta. Phil., ii, 214–216.
68 Life, i, 334.
69 Kingdom of Christ, p. 186. Women, according to Maurice, tend more to rely on their feelings and intuition; men on their understanding (Life, i, 87).
70 Kingdom of Christ, p. 399.
71 Sequel to What Is Revelation, p. 207.
72 Life, i, 517–518.
73 Theol. Essays, p. 379.
74 The Friendship of Books, ed. with a preface by Thos. Hughes (London and New York, 1889), p. 294.
75 Theol. Essays, p. 209.