it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a
living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The other are but
empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter,
less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hillside pasture-
field seen in the transparent lake below. Alas! for the flocks that are to be led
3. Those things that are educed?i.e., brought 5. Divine threats of punishment for sins. forth, evolved. 6. Alas! a poverty-stricken philosophy leads to a
4. Slightly altered from the prophet Ezekiel's poverty-stricken religion (Latin). vision of the Chariot of God, when he had been 7. I.e., the Scriptures read entirely literally.
'among the captives by the river of Chebar' (Eze-8. Which is always tautegorical (Greek). Coleridge
kiel 1.1?20). Ezekiel was among the Jews who had coined this word and elsewhere defined 'tautegor
been taken into captivity in Babylonia by King ical' as 'expressing the same subject but with a dif-
Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C.E. He was put in a ference.'
community of Jewish captives at Tel-Abib on the 9. That which pertains to the species.
banks of the Chebar canal.
.
490 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
forth to such pastures! 'It shall even he as when the hungry dreameth, and
behold! he eateth; but he waketh and his soul is empty: or as when the thirsty
444
dreameth, and behold he drinketh; but he awaketh and is faint!'1
* * * The fact therefore, that the mind of man in its own primary and con
stitutional forms represents the laws of nature, is a mystery which of itself
should suffice to make us religious:2 for it is a problem of which God is the
only solution, God, the one before all, and of all, and through all!?True nat
ural philosophy is comprised in the study of the science and language of sym
bols. The power delegated to nature is all in every part: and by a symbol I
mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of
fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents.
Thus our Lord speaks symbolically when he says that 'the eye is the light of
the body.'3 The genuine naturalist is a dramatic poet in his own line: and such
as our myriad-minded Shakespeare is, compared with the Racines and Meta
stases,4 such and by a similar process of self-transformation would the man
be, compared with the Doctors of the mechanic school,5 who should construct
his physiology on the heaven-descended, Know Thyself.6
[THE SATANIC HERO]7
* * * In its state of immanence (or indwelling) in reason and religion, the
WILL appears indifferently, as wisdom or as love: two names of the same
power, the former more intelligential,8 the latter more spiritual, the former
more frequent in the Old, the latter in the New Testament. But in its utmost
abstraction and consequent state of reprobation,9 the Will becomes satanic
pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to itself, and
remorseless despotism relatively to others; the more hopeless as the more
obdurate by its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and
pain and pleasure; in short, by the fearful resolve to find in itself alone the
one absolute motive of action, under which all other motives from within and from without must be either subordinated or crushed.
This is the character which Milton has so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise Lost. Alas! too often has it been embodied in real life! Too often has it given a dark and savage grandeur to the historic page! And wherever it has appeared, under whatever circumstances of time and country, the same ingredients have gone to its composition; and it has been identified by the same attributes. Hope in which there is no Cheerfulness; Steadfastness within and immovable Resolve, with outward Restlessness and whirling Activity; Violence with Guile; Temerity with Cunning; and, as the result of all, Interminableness of Object with perfect Indifference of
