phy on this point was tolerably clear. But how does Coleridge define an idea? "A distinguishable power, self-affirmed, and seen in unity with the eternal essence, is, according to Plato, an idea." The Friend, Vol. III. Essay 9. This is an exquisite specimen of Coleridgian darkness. A distinguishable power, (genus generalissimum,) self-affirmed, (meaning, nobody knows what,) and seen in its unity, (what sort of unity? and if perfectly united, how distinguished?) with the eternal essence, (what essence? the eternal reason in the abstract, or the eternal God?) is an idea. Go now, ye novices, pass the pons asinorum, and know forever what is the modern sense attached to the word IDEA.

Nor has this sublime writer borrowed his notions from those old English authors, whom he so often quotes, such as More, Cudworth, and the rest of the writers of the Platonic school, who resided at Cambridge at the close of the seventeenth century. They are no more like Coleridge, than Kant is like Hobbes, or Augustine like Dr. Paley. The true source of Coleridge's philosophy, (if it deserves that name,) is, the German metaphysicians, such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling; though it must be confessed, he is far more provident and wary than they. They were incautious enough to draw out their speculations into a system, fully developed, standing in battle-array, provoking attack, and liable to be overthrown. But their English disciple, more wary, and, in this, more wise, just gives us a peep of his speculations,-shows us his philosophy in fragments, and thus avoids those objections which are always fatal to a false system, when fully seen.

We have time and space only to notice two features in Coleridge's philosophy, which we consider, if not absolutely false, yet erroneous and misleading.

The first is, the celebrated distinction between the reason and the understanding. This is a doctrine which Coleridge has borrowed from Kant. That celebrated philosopher, in his Critic of Pure Reason, had distinguished three sources of our knowledge,sense, understanding, and reason. Sense is the faculty, which receives the matter of all the phenomena of nature. It is, therefore, passive; and it has only two modes or forms of receiving. It consists, therefore, of the two receptives, time and space. Understanding is an active faculty, that gives laws to nature; and reason is a faculty, which acts quite independently of time and space. The objects of reason are ideas, which not only do not exist in,

*The English reader will find an account equally true and poetic, of Plato's eternal ideas, in the first book of Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, beginning thus:

"Ere the radiant sun

Sprung from the east, or mid the vault of night,
The moon suspended her serener lamp," etc.

but never can enter, time and space. This reason, it will be perceived, is a very high faculty, which is above sense, and above understanding, and plays its machinery in the upper garret of the brain. The system seems to be, so far as an American understanding can comprehend it, in some degree, not unlike Berkeley's; or rather, it is combining Locke's and Berkeley's systems together. A world, existing out of time and space, must be very much like Berkeley's world of ideas. At any rate, it will be seen, how closely the philosophy of Kant resembles that of Coleridge. "The sense," says he, "vis sensativa vel intuitiva, perceives: vis regulatrix, (the understanding, in its own peculiar operation,) conceives vis rationalis, (the reason, or rationalized understanding,) comprehends. The first is impressed through the organs of sense; the second combines these multifarious impressions into individual notions, and, by reducing these notions to rules, according to the analogy of all its former notices, constitutes experience; the third subordinates both these notions and rules of experience, to ABSOLUTE PRINCIPLES and necessary LAWS. If the reader will look into the "Aids to Reflection," p. 142, Burlington edition, he will see a tabular view of the distinction between reason and understanding; a distinction, which one of the warm admirers of this new philosophy, declares, it is worth a whole life to impress on mankind; and which, if he is correct, we believe is not worth a jot more than it will certainly cost.

Two questions may be asked, respecting this important distinction. In the first place, Does it mean any thing? and, secondly, If it means any thing, what does it mean?

As to the first of these questions,-a question which the reader ought always to have on the tip of his tongue, when he peruses this author,—we shall candidly own, that we believe he had something more in his mind, than Ambrose Parey† had, when he pictured the salamander, and gave a recipe for her bite. We hardly ever heard a man bewildering himself about the operations of his mind, in a philosophy too deep for our inspection, or too high for our grasp, but what we believed, that the man had some object of consciousness floating before his mind, though perhaps difficult for

* Friend, Essay v. Vol. I.

"The salamander is black, variegated with spots, star-fashion. The cure of his bite, is, to procure vomit, to loose the bowels with a glyster, and to give them (i. e. the bitten,) treacle and mithiidate in potions.”—Parey's Works, translated by Th. Johnson, London, 1634, p. 793. He then gives a picture of the salamander. As this name is now given to a kind of lizard, and as Parey's picture of the animal looks somewhat like a lizard, it is not improbable, that the imaginary animal, the salamander of fire, came from an inaccurate observation of nature. Somebody picked up some sticks, or chips, in which a lizard was found, put them into the fire, saw the animal crawl out, and then supposed it to be generated in the fourth element.

him to express, and impossible for us to understand. If a man, crossing a church-yard at midnight, assures us, with quivering lips and dilated eyes, that he has seen a ghost; it is no part of our philosophy, to attribute it all to imagination: we suppose he has actually seen a white stone, or a painted post. So when a man comes with some mental distinction, which we have never thought or heard of before, we suppose, there must be some crack in his mind, and perhaps in all minds which he has contemplated, and enlarged, until it becomes au important faculty, or phenomenon, in human nature. We might illustrate this point, by a ready example. Some of the Germans have a notion, that there is a strange kind of inspiration, a sort of prophetic spirit, by which some minds are led to predict the coming of great events, before they happen. It is a thought which poets have played with. Thus Shakspeare, in Richard II, makes the queen say, previous to her husband's return from Ireland and dethronement,

So in a translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, by Coleridge him

"As the sun,

Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before events;
And in to-day, already walks to-morrow.

That which we lead of the fourth Henry's death,

Did ever rise and haunt me, like a tale

Of my own future destiny. The king

Felt in his breast the phantom of the knife,
Long ere Ravaillac armed himself therewith.
His quiet mind forsook him," etc.

There is no end to the mystification, which a German imagination would throw around this fact, for fact no doubt it is. But it may easily be explained, on the most natural principles. The mind often gets an impression from many little items,-atoms of evidence, which produce a half-conviction, while the individual never pauses to state them to himself. Thus merchants will have an impression, that a man is going to fail in bankruptcy, and he does fail. Perhaps no one who fore-surmised the disaster, ever stated to himself all the various circumstances which led to that impression. In the case of the queen of Richard II, (supposing the painting of the poet to be fact,) she must have had a presentiment, the grounds of which she would hardly dare to state to herself, that the

wildness and improvidence of her husband would lead to some misfortune. And no wonder, that Henry IV, in the factions and heresies which tore his kingdom asunder, and knowing, too, that there were devotees of the church around him, who had consecrated, by the most awful rites of religion, their daggers to assassination, should see, in his anxious imagination, the spirit of the event stride before the event. When a mystic, therefore, talks about animal magnetism, and natural inspiration, we have only to look through his philosophy, to the real operations of nature, which his peculiar language amplifies and disguises. In like manner, we suppose, there is a real meaning to the distinction between reason and understanding, as the subject lies in the mind of this new school of minute philosophers.

But what do they mean? and how would an Englishman express the same thing? It will be recollected, by all who are acquainted with Mr. Locke's philosophy, that he points out two sources of our ideas,-sensation and reflection: sensation giving us all our conceptions of matter and its qualities, and reflection communicating the operations and properties of mind. That I have a will, a conscience; that I have hopes and fears, desires and aversions; all this I discover, by the mind reflecting on its own operations; and if it be true, that the man has any passions or feelings, any form of consciousness, or train of operations, not imparted to the brutes, why of course it must learn these operations by its own consciousness, or, in other words, by immediate intuition. Now we would respectfully ask, (for on such an author, it becomes not us to be dogmatical,) Whether Coleridge's reason, not discursive, in all its decisions appealing to itself, and having a direct aspect of truth, is any thing more than a reflexive mind, conscious of its own operations? Or, in other words, is it any thing more than the faculty by which we have these ideas of reflection? The whole mystery seems to be this: the mind sometimes turns its eye on the material world, surveys its operations, learns its laws, and makes its powers subservient to its purposes; and sometimes it looks inward on itself, learns its own powers, and surveys the agreement or discrepancy among its own ideas. The former of these operations, Coleridge would attribute to the understanding, the latter to the reason; but with about as much propriety, as a one-eyed man would call his eye two faculties, because it was sometimes turned towards the heavens, and sometimes towards the earth,sometimes surveyed the land, and sometimes the sea. We have always held, before the books of Coleridge crossed the Atlantic, and we shall hold the same, when they are buried beneath all the waters of oblivion, that the simplest way of viewing this subject is, to regard the mind as one, though employed, as occasion demands,

in viewing phenomena of a different train,-the world without, and the world within.

Then, as to the mystical fact, that reason must be wholly absent or wholly present; that while a man may impair his understanding he must wholly lose or wholly retain his reason; what does it amount to? The premises of Coleridge's reason, (or Locke's ideas of reflection,) are laid in the mind,-in mental operations,—just as much as sweetness or bitterness are laid in the taste. If we take away, therefore, their existence there, we of course take away all perception of them, and all inferences from them. For example, let us suppose, what Mr. Coleridge supposes, that man alone, of all terrestrial beings, has a will to be moved by a motive; and that beasts, when they seem to decide, are drawn only by appetite. The lion snatches his prey, when he sees it immediately before his eye, but is incapable of being moved by a distinct invisible motive.* It is very evident, if this be so, that where there is no will, there can be no perception of it; no perception of its consequences; no feelings of praise and blame, which are effects of right or wrong decisions of the will. But any farther than this goes, why may not the mind perceive the agreement or disagreement of its own ideas with a greater or less clearness, according to the strength or weakness of its powers. We cannot understand, either, how reason, according to Coleridge's definition of it, can never be dis

* Mr. Coleridge has, with his usual judgment, involved his philosophy with a fact in nature, about which neither he nor we know any thing; and, what is more, never can know. He views it all-important, in order to prove the distinction between reason and understanding, that he should show, that beasts, whatever surprising sagacity they may display, have no reason, though they may have abundance of understanding. A brute has no will, distinct from an appetite,-has no reason, distinct from understanding. He defines will, that which may be moved by a motive; and a motive is not an immediate benefit. Now every spider's web seems to confute this theory. A lion couches for his prey near some spring, it is said; and though it may be appetite which impels him, when hungry, to seize on his prey, yet it would seem to rise into a motive, when he so skillfully selects a place where his prey is so likely to be found. An elderly lady in Connecticut, of undoubted veracity, once told us a story of her horse: "The horse, sir," said she, " had more REASON (she had never read Coleridge,) and patience than some men. He had a very bad sore on his breast; he was very high-spirited and unmanageable; and whenever any person, a stranger, entered the stable, it was impossible to go near him; and yet that horse would suffer his master (her husband) to go to his rack and put a rowel through his breast, while every limb quivered, and he gave every sign of being in an agony of most excruciating pain. Ah, sir," said she," he knew his master did it for his good; and he had more REASON than some men have." Whether the horse had reason, it is not necessary to say; but who has a right to say, that he did not act from a motive? The fact is, we know very little what God made the brutes for, or what he will do with them. Any argument derived from the capacities or incapacities of brutes, is founded so totally on our ignorance, that, in any philosophy but that of Coleridge's, it ought to go for nothing. But of his system, it may truly be said, there is a place for every thing, and every thing is in its place.