Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge Samuel Taylor
incline to disapprove the intermarriage of first cousins; but the church has decided otherwise on the authority of Augustine, and that seems enough upon such a point.
You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage.
February 24. 1827
Blumenbach makes five races; Kant, three. Blumenbach's scale of dignity may be thus figured:—
1. Caucasian or European.
2. Malay ================= 2. American
3. Negro ========================== 3. Mongolian, Asiatic
There was, I conceive, one great Iapetic original of language, under which Greek, Latin, and other European dialects, and, perhaps, Sanscrit, range as species. The Iapetic race, [Greek: Iaones]; separated into two branches; one, with a tendency to migrate south-west,—Greeks, Italians, &c.; and the other north-west,—Goths, Germans, Swedes, &c. The Hebrew is Semitic.
Hebrew, in point of force and purity, seems at its height in Isaiah. It is most corrupt in Daniel, and not much less so in Ecclesiastes; which I cannot believe to have been actually composed by Solomon, but rather suppose to have been so attributed by the Jews, in their passion for ascribing all works of that sort to their grand monurque.
March 10. 1827
The people of all other nations, but the Jewish, seem to look backwards and also to exist for the present; but in the Jewish scheme every thing is prospective and preparatory; nothing, however trifling, is done for itself alone, but all is typical of something yet to come.
I would rather call the book of Proverbs Solomonian than as actually a work of Solomon's. So I apprehend many of the Psalms to be Davidical only, not David's own compositions.
You may state the Pantheism of Spinosa, in contrast with the Hebrew or Christian scheme, shortly, as thus:—
Spinosism.
W-G = 0; i.e. the World without God is an impossible idea.
G-W = 0; i.e. God without the World is so likewise.
Hebrew or Christian scheme.
W-G = 0; i.e. The same as Spinosa's premiss.
But G-W = G; i.e. God without the World is God the self-subsistent.
March 12. 1827
I have no doubt that the real object closest to the hearts of the leading Irish Romanists is the destruction of the Irish Protestant church, and the re-establishment of their own. I think more is involved in the manner than the matter of legislating upon the civil disabilities of the members of the church of Rome; and, for one, I should he willing to vote for a removal of those disabilities, with two or three exceptions, upon a solemn declaration being made legislatively in parliament, that at no time, nor under any circumstances, could or should a branch of the Romish hierarchy, as at present constituted, become an estate of this realm.20
Internal or mental energy and external or corporeal modificability are in inverse proportions. In man, internal energy is greater than in any other animal; and you will see that he is less changed by climate than any animal. For the highest and lowest specimens of man are not one half as much apart from each other as the different kinds even of dogs, animals of great internal energy themselves.
For an instance of Shakspeare's power in minimis, I generally quote James Gurney's character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!21 And pray look at Skelton's Richard Sparrow also!
Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent deserves your study. It is very interesting.
The latest book of travels I know, written in the spirit of the old travellers, is Bartram's account of his tour in the Floridas. It is a work of high merit every way.22
March 13. 1827
A pun will sometimes facilitate explanation, as thus;—the Understanding is that which stands under the phenomenon, and gives it objectivity. You know what a thing is by it. It is also worthy of remark, that the Hebrew word for the understanding, Bineh, comes from a root meaning between or distinguishing.
March 18. 1827
There are seven parts of speech, and they agree with the five grand and universal divisions into which all things finite, by which I mean to exclude the idea of God, will be found to fall; that is, as you will often see it stated in my writings, especially in the Aids to Reflection23:—
Prothesis.
1.
Thesis. Mesothesis. Antithesis.
2. 4. 3.
Synthesis.
5.
Conceive it thus:—
1. Prothesis, the noun-verb, or verb-substantive, I am, which is the previous form, and implies identity of being and act.
2. Thesis, the noun.
3. Antithesis, the verb.
Note, each of these may be converted; that is, they are only opposed to each other.
4. Mesothesis, the infinitive mood, or the indifference of the verb and noun, it being either the one or the other, or both at the same time, in different relations.
5. Synthesis, the participle, or the community of verb and noun; being and acting at once.
Now, modify the noun by the verb, that is, by an act, and you have—
6. The adnoun, or adjective.
Modify the verb by the noun, that is, by being, and you have—
7. The adverb.
Interjections are parts of sound, not of speech. Conjunctions are the same as prepositions; but they are prefixed to a sentence, or to a member of a sentence, instead of to a single word.
The inflections of nouns are modifications as to place; the inflections of verbs, as to time.
The genitive case denotes dependence; the dative, transmission. It is absurd to talk of verbs governing. In Thucydides, I believe, every case has been found absolute.24
Dative:—[Greek: –]
Thuc.VIII. 24. This is the Latin usage.
Accusative.—I do not remember an instance of the proper accusative absolute in Thucydides; but it seems not uncommon in other authors: [Greek: –]
Yet all such instances may be nominatives; for I cannot find an example of the accusative absolute in the masculine or feminine gender, where the difference of inflexion would show the case.—ED.]
The inflections of the tenses of a verb are formed by adjuncts of the verb substantive. In Greek it is obvious. The E is the prefix significative of a past time.
June 15. 1827
Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, but I am in the habit of realizing to myself Magnetism as length; Electricity as breadth
See Church and State, second part, p. 189.
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The very
"Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, &c. By William Bartram." Philadelphia, 1791. London, 1792. 8vo. The expedition was made at the request of Dr. Fothergill, the Quaker physician, in 1773, and was particularly directed to botanical discoveries.—ED.
P. 170. 2d edition.
Nominative absolute:—[Greek: theon de phozos ae anthropon nomos, oudeis apeirge, to men krinontes en homoio kai sezein kai mae—ton de hamartaematon.]—Thuc. II. 53.