what nearer approach to the Platonic, Emanuel Kant belonged; to the former Bacon and Leibnitz, and, in his riper and better years, Berkeley. And to this I profess myself an adherent-nihil novum, vel inauditum, audemus; though, as every man has a face of his own, without being more or less than a man, so is every true philosopher an original, without ceasing to be an inmate of Academus or of the Lyceum. But as to caution, I will just tell you how I proceeded myself twenty years and more ago, when I first felt a curiosity about Kant, and was fully aware that to master his meaning, as a system, would be a work of great labor and long time. First, I asked myself, have I the labor and the time in my power? Secondly, if so, and if it would be of adequate importance to me if true, by what means can I arrive at a rational presumption for or against? I inquired after all the more popular writings of Kant-read them with delight. I then read the Prefaces of several of his systematic works, as the Prolegomena, &c. Here too every part, I understood, and that was nearly the whole, was replete with sound and plain, though bold and to me novel truths; and I followed Socrates' adage respecting Heraclitus: all I understand is excellent, and I am bound to presume that the rest is at least worth the trouble of trying whether it be not equally so. In other words, until I understand a writer's ignorance, I presume myself ignorant of his understanding. Permit me to refer you to a chapter on this subject in my Literary Life.* Yet I by no means recommend to you an extension of your philosophic researches beyond Kant. In him is contained all that can be learned, and as to the results, you have a firm faith in God, the responsible Will of Man and Immortality; and Kant will demonstrate to you, that this faith is acquiesced in, indeed, nay, confirmed by the Reason and Understanding, but grounded on Postulates authorized and substantiated solely by the Moral Being. They are likewise mine: and whether the Ideas are regulative only, as Aristotle and Kant teach, or constitutive and actual, as Pythagoras and Plato, is of living interest to the philosopher by profession alone. Both systems are equally true, if only the former abstain from denying universally what is denied individually. He, for whom Ideas are constitutive, will in effect be a Platonist; and in those for whom they are regulative only, * Biographia Literaria, chap. xii. p. 322.—S. C. ..OTES ON THE PALINGENESIEN OF JEAN PAUL. 401 Platonism is but a hollow affectation. Dryden could not have been a Platonist: Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, Michel Angelo and Rafael could not have been other than Platonists. Lord Bacon, who never read Plato's works, taught pure Platonism in his great work, the Novum Organum, and abuses his divine predecessor for fantastic nonsense, which he had been the first to explode. Accept my best respects, &c. 14 Jan. 1814. Highgate. S. T. COLERIDGE. NOTES ON THE PALING ENESIEN OF JEAN PAUL. WRITTEN IN THE BLANK LEAF AT THE BEGINNING. -S ist zu merken, dass die Sprache in diesem Buch nicht sey wie in gewöhnlich Bette, darin der Gedankenstrom ordentlich and ehrbar hinströmt, sondern wie ein Verwüstung in Damm and Deichen.* Two Revolutions, the Gallican, which sacrifices the individuals to the Idea or to the State, and in time of need, even the latter themselves;-and the Kantian-Moralist (Kantisch-Moralische), which abandons the affection of human Love altogether, because it can so little be described as merit; these draw and station us forlorn human creatures ever further and more lonesomely one from another, each on a frosty uninhabited island: nay, the Gallican, which excites and arms feelings against feelings, does it less than the Critical, which teaches us to disarm and to dispense with them altogether; and which neither allows Love to pass for the spring of virtue, nor virtue for the source of Love.t-Transl. But surely Kant's aim was not to give a full Sittenlehre, or * It is observable that the language in this book is not as in an ordinary channel, wherein the stream of thought flows on in a seemly and regular manner, but like a violent flood rushing against dyke and mole. Zwei Revoluzionen, diè gallische, welche der Idee oder dem Staate diè Individuen, and im Nothsal dièsen selber opfert, und die kantisch-moralische, welche den Affekt der Menschenliebe liegen lässet, weil er so wenig wie Verdienste geboten werden kan, diese ziehen und stellen uns verlassene Menschen immer weiter und einsamer aus cinander, jeden nur auf ein frostiges unbewohntes Eiland; ja die gallische, die nur Gefühle gegen Gefühle bewafnet und aufhezt, thut es weniger als die kritische, die sie entwafnen und entbehren lehrt, und die weder die Liebe als Quelle der Tugend noch dièse als Quelle von jener gelten lassen kan. system of practical material morality, but the à priori formEthice formalis: which was then a most necessary work, and the only mode of quelling at once both Necessitarians and Meritmongers, and the idol common to both, Eudæmonism. If his followers have stood still in lazy adoration, instead of following up the road thus opened out to them, it is their fault, not Kant's. S. T. C. FROM BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, OCT. 1821. LETTER FROM MR. COLERIDGE. DEAR SIR,—In the third letter (in the little parcel) which I have headed with your name, you will find my reasons for wishing these five letters, and a sixth, which will follow in my next, on the plan and code of a Magazine, which should unite the utile and dulce, to appear in the first instance. My next will consist of very different articles, apparently; namely, the First Book of my True History from Fairy Land, or the World Without, and the World Within. 2. The commencement of the Annals and Philosophy of Superstition; for the completion of which I am waiting only for a very curious folio, in Mr. ** * s possession. 3. The life of Holty, a German poet, of true genius, who died in early manhood; with specimens of his poems, translated, or freely imitated in English verse. It would have been more in the mode to have addressed myself to the Editor, but I could not give up this one opportunity of assuring you that I am, my dear Sir, With every friendly wish, your obliged, S. T. COLERIDGE. Mr. Blackwood. SELECTION FROM MR. COLERIDGE'S LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE WITH FRIENDS, AND MEN OF LETTERS. No. I. LETTER I. FROM A PROFESSIONAL FRIEND. MY DEAR AND HONORED SIR,-I was much struck with your Excerpta from Porta, Eckartshausen, and others, as to the effect of the ceremonial drinks and unguents, on the (female) practitioners of the black arts, whose witchcraft you believe to have consisted in the unhappy craft of bewitching themselves. I at least know of no reason, why to these toxications (especially when taken through the skin, and to the cataleptic state induced by them), we should not attribute the poor wretches' own belief of their guilt. I can conceive, indeed, of no other mode of accounting-I do not say for their suspicious last dying avowals at the stake; but for their private and voluntary confessions on their death-beds, which made a convert of your old favorite, Sir T. Brown. Perhaps my professional pursuits, and medical studies, may have predisposed me to be interested; but my mind has been in an eddy ever since I left you. The connections of the subject with classical and with druidical superstitions, pointed out by you the Circeia pocula-the herbal spells of the Haxæ, or Druidesses-the somniloquism of the prophetesses, under the coercion of the Scandinavian enchanters-the dependence of the Greek oracles on mineral waters, and stupefying vapors from the earth, as stated by Plutarch, and more than once alluded to by Euripides-the vast spread of the same, or similar usages, from Greenland even to the southernmost point of America;—you sent me home with enough to think of!—But, more than all, I was struck and interested with your concluding remark, that these, and most other superstitions, were, in your belief, but the CADAVER ET PUTRIMENTA OF A DEFUNCT NATURAL PHILOSOPHY.-Why not rather the imperfect rudiments? I asked. You promised me your reasons, and a fuller explanation. But let me speak out my whole wish; and call on you to redeem the pledges you gave, so long back as October, 1809, that you would devote a series of papers to the subject of Dreams, Visions, Presentations, Ghosts. Witchcraft, Cures by sympathy, in which you would select and explain the most interesting and best attested facts that have come to your knowledge from books or personal testimony. You can scarcely conceive how deep an interest I attach to this request; nor how many, beside myself, in the circle of my own acquaintance, have the same feeling. Indeed, my dear Sir! when I reflect, that there is scarcely a chapter of history in which superstition of some kind or other does not form or supply a portion of its contents, I look forward, with unquiet anticipation, to the power of explaining the more frequent and best attested narrations, at least without the necessity of having recourse to the supposition of downright tricks and lying, on one side, or to the Devil and his imps on the other. * * * * Your obliged Pupil, and affectionate Friend, J. L P. S.-Dr. L. of the Museum, is quite of your opinion, that little or nothing of importance to the philosophic naturalist can result from Comparative Anatomy on Cuvier's plan; and that its best trophies will be but lifeless skeletons, till it is studied in combination with a Comparative Physiology. But you ought yourself to vindicate the priority of your claim. But I fear, dear C., that Sic Vos, non Vobis was made for your motto throughout life. LETTER II. IN ANSWER TO TIE ABOVE. WELL, my dear pupil and fellow-student! I am willing to make the attempt. If the majority of my readers had but the same personal knowledge of me as you have, I should sit down to the work with good cheer. But this is out of the question. Let me, however, suppose you for the moment, as an average reader-address you as such, and attribute to you feelings and language in character.-Do not mistake me, my dear L Not even for a moment, nor under the pretext of mons a non movendo, would I contemplate in connection with your name "id genus lectorum, qui meliores obtrectare malint quam imitari: et quorum similitudinem desperent, eorundem affectent simultatem scilicet uti qui suo nomine obscuri sunt, meo innotescant."* * The passage, which can not fail to remind you of H— and his set, is from Apuleius's Lib. Floridorum-the two books of which, by the bye, |