Man Not Fundamentally Different From the Animals, 1775

Browsing eighteenth-century philosophy of mind, and science of mind more generally, it is striking how often one comes upon thoughts that Victorianists like to argue only began being articulated post Darwin.  Here's Priestley's Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775).  The soul is a material function of the brain, not an immaterial 'spirit' somehow attached to a material brain.

It will stagger some persons, that so much of the business of thinking should be made to depend upon mere matter, as the doctrine of vibrations supposes. For, in fact, it leaves nothing to the province of any other principle, except the simple power of perception; so that if it were possible that matter could be endued with this property, immateriality, as far as it has been supposed to belong to man, would be excluded altogether. But I do not know that this supposition need give any concern, except to those who maintain that a future life depends upon the immateriality of the human soul. It will not at all alarm those who found all their hopes of a future existence on the Christian doctrine of a resurrection from the dead.

It has been the opinion of many philosophers, and among others of Mr. Locke, that for any thing that we know to the contrary, a capacity of thinking might be given to matter. Dr. Hartley, however, notwithstanding his hypothesis would be much helped by it, seems to think otherwise. He also supposes that there is an intermediate elementary body between the mind and the gross body; which may exist, and be the instrument of giving pleasure or pain to the sentient principle after death. But I own I see no reason why his scheme should be burdened with such an incumbrance as this.

I am rather inclined to think that, though the subject is beyond our comprehension at present, man does not consist of two principles, so essentially different from one another as matter and spirit, which are always described as having not one common property, by means of which they can affect or act upon each other; the one occupying space, and the other not only not occupying the least imaginable portion of space, but incapable of bearing relation to it; insomuch that, properly speaking, my mind is no-more in my body, than it is in the moon. I rather think that the whole man is of some uniform composition, and that the property of perception, as well as the other powers that are termed mental, is the result (whether necessary or not) of such an organical structure as that of the brain. Consequently, that the whole man becomes extinct at death, and that we have no hope of surviving the grave but what is derived from the scheme of revelation. Our having recourse to an immaterial principle, to account for perception and thought, is only saying in other words, that we do not know in what they consist; for no one will fay that he has any conception how the principle of thought can have any more relation to immateriality than to materiality.

This hypothesis is rather favourable to the notion of such organical systems as plants having some degree of sensation. But at this a benevolent mind will rather rejoice than repine. It also makes the lower animals to differ from us in degree only, and not in kind, which is sufficiently agreeable to appearances; but does not necessarily draw after it the belief of their surviving death, as well as ourselves; this privilege being derived to us by a positive constitution, and depending upon the promise of God, communicated by express revelation to man.

Bowles 1

Let's have a look at some William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850):

He was born at King's Sutton, Northamptonshire, where his father was vicar. At the age of fourteen he entered Winchester College, the headmaster at the time being Dr Joseph Warton. In 1781, Bowles left as captain of the school, and went on to Trinity College, Oxford, where he had won a scholarship. Two years later he won the chancellors prize for Latin verse. In 1789 he published, in a very small quarto volume, Fourteen Sonnets, which were received with extraordinary favour, not only by the general public, but by such men as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth. The Sonnets even in form were a revival, a return to an older and purer poetic style, and by their grace of expression, melodious versification, tender tone of feeling and vivid appreciation of the life and beauty of nature, stood out in strong contrast to the elaborated commonplaces which at that time formed the bulk of English poetry. After taking his degree at Oxford, Bowles entered the church, and was appointed in 1792 as vicar of Chicklade in Wiltshire.

Here's the volume; and here's the first.

Bereave me not of these delightful dreams
Which charm'd my youth; or mid her gay career
Of hope, or when the faintly-paining tear
Sat sad on memory's cheek!----though loftier themes
Await the awaken'd mind, to the high prize
Of wisdom, hardly earn'd with toil and pain,
Aspiring patient; yet on life's wide plain
Cast friendless, where unheard some suffrer cries
Hourly, and oft our road is lone and long,
'Twere not a crime, should we awhile delay
Amid the sunny field; and happier they,
Who, as they wander, woo the charm of song
To cheer their path, till they forget to weep;
And the tired sense is hush'd and sinks to sleep.

Here's Bowles' short preface:

The following Trifles were chiefly suggested by some Picturesque Objects which presented themselves to the Author in a Tour to the Northern Parts of this Islands and on the Continent. They were before committed too hastily to the Press; but the favourable Reception which they experienced, has induced him to revise them, and, with the Addition of a few more, to make them less unworthy of the Publick Eye.

It having been said that these Pieces were written in Imitation of the little Poems of Mrs. Smyth, the Author hopes be may be excused adding, that many of them were written prior to Mrs. Smyth's Publication. He is conscious of their great Inferiority to those beautiful and elegant Compositions; but, such as they are, they were certainly written from his own Feelings.

So: the feeling is certainly there, if a tad too decorously restrained ('faintly-paining tear') for modern tastes, perhaps. But the first thing that strikes me about this sonnet is its Empsonian ambiguity of phrasing. 'hardly earn'd with toil and pain' presumably means 'strenuously earn'd with toil and pain', but flirts with 'barely earned'; the 'patient' of 'Aspiring patient' could be either noun or adverb (presumably it's the latter) and the 'sense' referred to in the last line ('And the tired sense is hush'd and sinks to sleep') could be the senses of the poet, or the singers on the road, or the sense contained in the song, worn out by endless repetition.

Now, I'm not sure I see that this sort of ambiguity serves the larger thrust of the poem.  Indeed it's not immediately obvious what that larger thrust is. The sonnet is addressed 'To A Friend'; it is presumably that friend who is proposing to 'bereave' the speaker of his youthful dreams ('Grow up, Bowles! Concentrate on loftier matters!'). In generic sense, I guess, this is 'pastoral' as opposed to 'epic' poetry; or rural ballads as opposed to scientific and philosophical enquiry. But the same poem that starts with an imperative not to be bereaved ends with a celebration of the ways in which is is good to be bereaved -- to, in other words, be distracted from one's sadness. And the central lines around which the poem hinges -- from the implied urging of the 'friend' to abandon this youthful stuff, to the statement of its existentially analgesic worth -- happens with some lines that are just baffling. 'Unheard some suffrer cries/Hourly'; if he's unheard then how do we know he's suffering? (If a suffrer falls in the forest and nobody's is there  to hear him ...). 'Oft our road is lone and long,' -- but you're not lone; you're specifically addressing this poem to a friend.

These semantic tangles seems to me expressive of a deeper uncertainty. The poem itself is genuinely being pulled in two directions: foreward into a grander future, and backwards (the old-fashioned, small-scale sonnet) into a local, rural, sentimental past.

Alph the Sacred River

From 'Kubla Khan', of course. Ted Hughes, in his brilliant and batty introduction to his Selection of Coleridge's verse, dilates upon his theory that the 'alph' here is the letter, and short for 'the alphabet' as a whole, and that the reference to 'alph, the sacred river' is STC's way of invoking poetry itself as flowing from this exotic source. (This is not a theory original to Hughes, of course; although it was there that I personally first encountered it).

Now, this is a bit of Coleridgeana that is arcane even by my standards (and, as this blog has shown over the last few weeks, I'm no stranger to abstruse Coleridge references), but in the light of this notion, I mention only this: that Johann Albert Salmon describes John Chrysostom’s writings as flumen sanctus eloquentiae, ‘a sacred river of eloquence’ [Johannes Albertus Salmon, Apologeticum Tentamen (1788), 44]. Might Coleridge have seen the phrase there? 'Kubla' is a poem uttered from a golden mouth, if ever poem was.

Five WWI couplets

1. The Origins of the First World War

These treaty-networks were not pertinent
Until some bugger capped Franz Ferdinand.


2: Two couplets on John Parr

The posh voice says: 'our first fight was at Mons.
That cyclist fellow raly had no chance.'

August '14 a rifle stops John Parr.
Late '18 says: 'how far we've come! How far!'


3. The Battle of the Somme

The god of war came to the Somme;
He looked, and said ‘OM NOM NOM NOM’


4.

The most dead, greatest harm and fullest hate:
It's no coincidence this war's called great.

Coleridge quotes Jeremy Taylor

Well, this is just sloppy work by scholars and editors.  In a footnote to chapter 5 of the Biographia, Coleridge quotes a passage from Jeremy Taylor (1613-67), specifically from his ‘Sermon XXXVII: ‘The Mercy of the Divine Judgments; or, God’s Method in Curing Sinners’ [originally published in Twenty-five Sermons (1653)]. This is what Coleridge writes:

The reader will not be displeased with the following interesting exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one band, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the idea."

Here's what Nigel Leask says:

Adapted from Jeremy Taylor's Sermons Preached at Golden Grove, XII (1688), but the last sentence seems to be Coleridge's own. [379]

Let's not blame Leask; all he's doing is copying the information from Engell and Bates's standard Princeton Univ. Press's edition. But this is all wrong.  Some of it is wrong in a silly way (quoting from a sermon supposedly delivered more than twenty years after Taylor died).  Some of it is wrong in a slapdash way. The ‘But we rarely meet with such spirits … love the purity of the idea’ sentence is assumed to be Coleridge's own composition, since it doesn't follow the '...love of God' sentence in Taylor's original.  That Coleridge made this bit of his quotation up is a notion I've seen repeated blithely in secondary criticism. But it's not Coleridge's sentence, it's Taylor's. I'm now going to quote the original passage. See if you can spot the rogue sentence. Pay attention, now:

But we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible and delicious compositions, and love the purity of the idea. St. Lewis the king sent Ivo bishop of Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic and melancholic, with fire in one band, and water in the other. He asked her what those symbols meant. She answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.

That's right! It's at the beginning of the passage! The fact that Coleridge has reordered the order of these sentences has completely bamboozled Coleridge scholarship!  This does not reflect glory upon Coleridge scholarship.

More interesting, I think, is just how flowery Coleridge, via misty remembrance or deliberate craft, renders Taylor's plainer prose in quotation.  It's a means, formerly, of embodying his point about the sensible and the delicious.

Canning's Elegy for his Son, 1820

Canning had been a minister in Pitt's and Castlereigh's cabinet throughout the early years of the 19th-century, but he withdrew himself to Paris (tried to resign, in fact, but was unable) over Queen Caroline's trial. Whilst he was there his son George died at the brutally premature age of 19. Canning wrote the following elegy:

Though short thy span, God's unimpeach'd decrees,
Which made that shorten'd span one long disease,
Yet merciful in chastening, gave thee scope
For mild, redeeming virtues, Faith and Hope;
Meek Resignation; pious Charity
And, since this world was not the world for thee,
Far from thy path removed, with partial care,
Strife, Glory, Gain, and Pleasure's flowery snare,
Bade Earth's temptations pass thee harmless by,
And fix'd on Heaven thine unadverted eye!
Oh! mark'd from birth, and nurtur'd for the skies!
In youth, with more than learning's wisdom, wise!
As sainted martyrs, patient to endure!
Simple as unweari'd infancy and pure!
Pure from all stain (save that of human clay,
Which Christ's atoning blood hath wash'd away!)
By mortal sufferings now no more oppress'd,
Mount sinless Spirit, to thy destined rest!
While I—reversed our nature's kindlier doom
Pour forth a father's sorrows on thy tomb.

It's touching stuff; an effect only slightly diminished by the reflection that Canning has nicked the final image from Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), where he [Burke, that is] talks of the loss of his own son, Richard: 'I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me a posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety, which he would have performed to me.'

Canning writes a 20-line poem to memorialise the death of his 19-year old son; which makes the last, 20th line (on the father's grief) in a manner of speaking doubly posthumously framed -- a formal embodiment of the belatedness out of which any elegy is composed.

He served as Prime Minister for the last few months of his life, in 1827.

Back to Coleridge: rem credimus, modum nescimus

No getting away from this at the moment.  I was looking through Coleridge's marginalia on Donne [in George Whalley (ed), Coleridge, Marginalia II: Camden to Hutton (Princeton Univ. Press 1984), 281], where STC annotates the following passage from Donne's Sermon IV (on Luke 2:2-30)

When thou commest to this seale of thy peace, the Sacrament, pray that God will give thee that light, that may direct and establish thee, in necessary and fundamental! things; that is, the light of faith to see, that the Body and Bloud of Christ, is applied to thee, in that action; But for the manner, how the Body and Bloud of Christ is there, wait his leisure, if he have not yet manifested that to thee: Grieve not at that, wonder not at that, presse not for that; for hee hath not manifested that, not the way, not the manner of the presence in the Sacrament, to the Church to starve.

STC writes: 'O! I have ever felt & for many years thought, that this rem credimus, modum nescimus, is but a poor evasion. It is a seems to me an attempt so to admit an irrational proposition as to have the credit of denying it.' Whalley translates the Latin phrase: 'We believe what is done, but we do not know how it is done'.  He notes that 'C. also used it in [ie., the marginalia upon] Jeremy TAYLOR, Polemicall Discourses i.227' (he might have added: he uses it in a marginalium upon Sherlock too).  But he cannot locate the Latin: 'the source of the Latin phrase is not traced.'

Well, I traced it.  In fact, it is from Dalmatian cleric Marco Antonio Dominis (1560–1624).  I came across it, as it were, second hand:

Absurdè dicitur: Rem credimus, modum nescimus. Nam verba materialia non sunt res ipsa, quae creditur. [Adrian van Walenburch and Peter van Walenburch, De articulis fidei necessariis, essentialibus, seu fundamentalibus (1666), 246]

'It is absurd to say We believe what is done, but we do not know how it is done; for the words describing material things are not the things themselves, which is what is believed.' This is the Bavarian (Catholic) Van Walenburch brothers  attacking the writing of 'Marcus Antonius de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro' -- famous in his day for being a Catholic who had come to England and converted to Protestantism. It is Marcus Antonius who says 'rem igitur credimus, modum nescimus' [De republica ecclesiastica 7:12, p.320], which the van Walenburchs here mock. The specific thing that prompts Marcus Antonius' reflection is the story of Christ's descent into hell: we're not sure of the specifics of this voyage, he says, but we believe it nonetheless: 'Non enim certum habemus, eam particulam Symboli Apostolici, qua descensum Christi ad inferos fatetir … rem igitur credimus, modum nescimus.'

Here is an account of the Archbishop's career from The Monthly Review [48 (1805), 333] which Coleridge may have seen:

The most extraordinary character noticed in the biography [An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Royal Hospital and the Royal Military Asylum at Chelsea] is that of the Archbishop of Spalatro, who was admitted a Member of this College by the King's Letters patent in 1622: "Marcus Antonius de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, came over to England in 1616, and professed the protestant religion, asserting that he had discovered various errors in the tenets of the church of Rome, and published his work, De Republica Ecclesiastica: his powers of disputation were strong and acute, his society much courted by the learned and the great, and his sermons attractive and greatly admired. Fuller, who is virulent in his abuse of him, says, that his sole object in coming to England was the attainment of wealth and preferment. King James gave him, soon after his arrival, the deanery of Windsor, the rich living of Illesley, in Berkshire, and made him master of the Savoy. With these, however, he was not contented; but upon the report of the death of Toby Matthew, Archbishop of York, he solicited the king for the vacant archbishoprick; this being refused, he made application for leave to retire to Rome. After much, deliberation, he was ordered to quit the kingdom in twenty days, as he had been found guilty of holding a secret correspondence with the pope, without the king's knowledge. After living some time in poverty and obscurity at Rome, on a small pension allowed him by Pope Gregory XV. he died there in 1625, and his body was afterwards publicly burnt for heresy. Fuller sums up his character with observing—" that he had too much wit and learning to be a cordial papist, and too little honesty and religion to be a sincere protestant."

Bonus interesting fact: De Dominis is lampooned in Thomas Middleton's 1624 play A Game at Chess as the 'Fat Bishop of Spalato' who changes faiths whenever it suits him.