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Hartley, Pistorius, and Coleridge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
This paper announces no great discovery, but it contains fresh material of interest to students of Coleridge, of David Hartley and the philosophical tradition which he represents, and of Anglo-German literary relations. Our starting-point is lines 35-45 of Religious Musings, where Coleridge declares that the life and death of Christ freed the human soul from the bonds of idolatrous fear:
Till of its nobler nature it 'gan feel
Dim recollections; and thence soared to Hope,
Strong to believe whate'er of mystic good
The Eternal dooms for His immortal sons.
From Hope and firmer Faith to perfect Love
Attracted and absorbed: and centered there
God only to behold, and know, and feel,
Till by exclusive consciousness of God
All self-annihilated it shall make
God its Identity: God all in all!
We and our Father one!1
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), pp. 110-111.
2 S. F. Gingerich, Essays in the Romantic Poets (New York, 1924), pp. 23-24.
3 Lawrence Hanson, The Life of S. T. Coleridge. The Early Years (New York, 1939), p. 302.
4 Complete Poetical Works, p. 110, note 2. Throughout this paper italics in quotations are those of the writer quoted.
5 Henriette Pistorius, the wife of Johann Philipp, Hermann's second son, receives the largest share of the article. She was a half-pietistic, half-romantic minor poet, a friend of Arndt and Schleiermacher. What is said of her reminds us of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, who was popular among sentimentally pious Germans of the period.
6 So given in Kayser's Bücher-Lexikon, Efforts to locate this work in American libraries have been unavailing.
7 Observations on Man (1791 quarto), iii, 457.
8 Rudolph Metz, “Bibliographie der Hume-Literatur,” Literarische Berichte aus dem Gebiete der Philosophie, Vol. 15/16, p. 39. I regret my inability to locate this translation, for I should much like to know whether Pistorius included, under this innocent title, some of Hume's essays on more controversial topics. There is no other indication that Pistorius was especially interested in economics.
9 This book is in the Library of Union Theological Seminary, New York City.
10 According to Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie the elder Pistorius died in 1795, three years before the publication of the Belsham translation which the British Museum assigns to him. There is no entry in the Catalogue of Printed Books for Christian Pistorius. The confusion may be traceable to the fact that such words as “Von dem Englischen tibersetzt. Mit einer Vorrede von H. A. Pistorius” may or may not mean that Hermann was responsible for the translation as well as for the Vorrede.
11 Still rarer, however, is a one-volume folio edition of 1791. Like the three-volume quarto of that year, it was published by Joseph Johnson, and it contains exactly the same matter, including the Pistorius notes. There is a copy in the Library of Teachers College, Columbia University. The British Museum possesses the quarto, but not the folio. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library possess neither. That Johnson should have thought it worth while to issue two editions in the same year is indicative of Hartley's popularity at this time, especially since only the year before the same publisher had brought out a second edition of Priestley's abridgement, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (first published 1775).
12 In order to entertain this hypothesis one would have to suppose that Taylor had not yet developed the stylistic eccentricities which characterize his later prose.
13 Observations on Man, iii, ii.
14 Ibid., pp. vi-vii.
15 Ibid., pp. 458-459.
16 Ibid., p. 598
17 Ibid., p. 605.
18 Ibid., p. 675.
19 Ibid., p. 635.
20 Ibid., p. 636.
21 Ibid., pp. 651-653.
22 Ibid., p. 681.
23 Ibid., pp. 691-747.
24 The two traditions are of course closely related. I would merely point out that the religious implications of Newton and Shaftesbury have been greatly emphasized, while those of Hartley have been greatly neglected.
25 Volume i of the Princeton copy which I have used has been provided with a stout library binding, but Volumes ii and iii are quietly falling to pieces in their early-nineteenth-century boards. Nobody thinks that they are of any importance for an understanding of Hartley's system.
26 Observations, ii, 313.
27 J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London, 1930), p. 42.
28 Observations, i, 497.
29 Ibid., ii, 313.
30 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (London, 1939), i, 84.
31 Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Boston and New York, 1895), p. 211.
32 Ibid., p. 169. (To Thomas Poole, Sept. 24, 1796).
33 Complete Poetical Works, p. 123.
34 Observations, ii, 280-282.
35 Ibid., pp. 309-315.
36 Ibid., iii, 653.
37 Ibid., p. 657.
38 Ibid., p. 660. This sentence rather closely paraphrases Hartley's own words in i, 114. See above for the passage.
39 Ibid., p. 669.
40 The praise of Hartley in lines 368-370 of Religious Musings, with the identifying note, was allowed to remain. (Complete Poetical Works, p. 123 and n.) Taken by itself, however, this passage would seem to refer merely to Hartley's psychology, Coleridge never denied that he had once accepted Hartley's necessitarianism and associationism ; what he carefully concealed was the fact that he had ever thought of Hartley as a mystic.
41 Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (London, 1932), i, 166-167.