Part 25 (2/2)
[Sidenote: HAIL AND FAREWELL!]
We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but that may happen with no real breach of friends.h.i.+p. All intervening nature is the _continuum_ of two good and wise men. We are now separated. You have combined a.r.s.enic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you.
[Sidenote: A GENUINE ”ANECDOTE”]
Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on the la.s.ses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would _grow_, as I sow it so plentifully!
[This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.]
[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION]
A thing cannot be one _and_ three at the same time! True! but _time_ does not apply to G.o.d. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for he exists not in time at all--the Eternal!
The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words--O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number--it is _infinite_! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a G.o.d, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all _forms_, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain _a_ by _x_ and then _x_ by _a_--give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul--_ergo_, a body to the body--feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the elephant under the tortoise!
But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters--for the means we are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we by witchcraft of slothful a.s.sociation impose on ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pa.s.s an act by acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and silver itself--and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the difference is woeful.
[Sidenote: TRUTH]
The immense difference between being glad to find Truth _it_, and to find _it_ TRUTH! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to find it true--not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked!
[Sidenote: A TIME TO CRY OUT]
Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad pa.s.sions would make even the most improbable charges plausible.
What _can_ he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult task!) all _scorn_ (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit?
What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and _value_ me according to the comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling you better to defend before others, or more clearly to _onlook_ (_anschauen_) in yourselves the truths to which your n.o.blest being bears witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly unconcerned whether _my name_ be attached to these opinions or (_my_ writings forgotten) another man's.
But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the _Edinburgh Review_? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's and Southey's friend.
[Sidenote: HINTS FOR ”THE FRIEND”]
The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the selenography of Helvetius.
The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be]
compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks and shelves in fury.
Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest certainty--a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced.
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