PAGE 9
Samuel T. Coleridge
by
He approached the vital issue from the inside, taught the conservative to think, and thus opened the eyes of the aristocrats without exciting their fears or unduly arousing their wrath.
Self-preservation prompts men to move in the line of least resistance. And that any man should ever have put his safety in peril by questioning the authority of those able and ready to confiscate his property and take away his life is very strange. Such a person must belong to one of two types. He must be either a revolutionist–one who would supplant existing authority with his own, thus knowingly and willingly hazarding all–or he is an innocent, indiscreet individual, absolutely devoid of all interest in the main chance.
Coleridge belonged to the last-mentioned type. Genius needs a keeper. Here was a man so absorbed in abstract thought, so intent on attaining high and holy truth, that he neglected his friends, neglected his family, neglected himself until his body refused to obey the helm. It is easy to find fault with such a man, but to refuse to grant an admiring recognition of his worth, on account of what he was not, is an error, pardonable only to the rude, crude and vulgar. The cultivated mind sees the good and fixes attention on that.
Coleridge formulated no system, solved no complex problems, made no brilliant discoveries. But his habit of analysis enriched the world beyond power to compute. He taught men to think and separate truth from error. He was not popular, for he did not adapt himself to the many. His business was to teach teachers–he conducted a Normal School, and taught teachers how to teach. Coleridge went to the very bottom of a subject, and his subtle mind refused to take anything for granted. He approached every proposition with an unprejudiced mind. In his “Aids to Reflection,” he says, “He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and then end in loving himself better than all.”
The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion. Every observer must have noticed the tenuous, cobweb quality of reasons that are deemed sufficient to the person who thinks he knows, or whose interests lie in a certain direction. The limitations of men seem to make it necessary that pure truth should come to us through men who are stripped for eternity. Kant, the villager who never traveled more than a day’s walk from his birthplace, and Coleridge, the homeless and houseless aristocrat, with no selfish interests in the material world, view things without prejudice.
The method of Coleridge, from his youth, was to divide the whole into parts. Then he begins to eliminate, and divides down, rejecting all things that are not the thing, until he finds the thing. He begins all inquiries by supposing that nothing is known on the subject. He will not grant you that murder and robbery are bad–you must show why they are bad, and if you can not explain, he will take the subject up and divide it into heads for you.
First, the effect on the sufferer. Second, the evil to the doer. Third, the danger of a bad example. Fourth, the injury to society through the feeling of insecurity. Fifth, the pain given to the families of both doer and sufferer. Next he will look for excuses for the crime and give all the credit he can; and then finally strike a balance and give a conclusion.
One of Coleridge’s best points was in calling attention to what constitutes proof; he saw all fallacies and discovered at a glance illusions in logic that had long been palmed off on the world as truth. He saw the gulf that lies between coincidence and sequence, and hastened the day when the old-time pedant with his mighty tomes and tiresome sermons about nothing should be no more. And so today, in the Year of Grace Nineteen Hundred, the man who writes must have something to say, and he who speaks must have a message. “Coleridge,” says Principal Shairp, “was the originator and creator of the higher criticism.” The race has gained ground, made head upon the whole; and thanks to the thinkers gone, there are thinkers now in every community who weigh, sift, try and decide. No statement made by an interested party can go unchallenged. “How do you know?” and “Why?” we ask.