world, and the utter gloom of Johnson, and many no less virtuous, contrasted with the cheerfulness or fortitude which thousands of the irreligious, and not a few of the most abandoned, display in their last moments, might be expected to find a two-edged weapon a rather dangerous thing to play with; but in any case may be reminded of the statement of Bonstetten, whose character for veracity has never been impeached, who "denied positively," says Lord Broughton, reporting a conversation he had held with that distinguished friend of Gray and other illustrious men, "the truth of the story which originated with one of Voltaire's medical attendants, namely, that he died a death of terror and despair; and he added, that the physician himself confessed the pious imposture-and what is more strange, excused it."* Instead of Voltaire dying a death of terror and despair, there is abundant evidence that he died, much as he had lived, a death of volatility and wit.

A SIMILAR species of annotation to that so befitting the effusions of this many-gifted author, would not be amiss for a large portion of the works, speculative or controversial, produced in a former epoch, and addressed to a particular class of circumstances or opinions. Few indeed deserve the pains, but most that deserve require them. The elder writers in theology, so passively accepted by many for their spiritual insight or their genius, stand pre-eminently in need of such a process; without which, or the excision of parts, or better still perhaps, a selection of fragments or choicer passages from their productions, the question of their endurance in any living form were not over-difficult to decide. Who can read the Table Talk of Luther, for instance, pithy, vigorous, and deeply devout as it is, without being ever and anon repelled by its crudities, its fictions, its arrogance, and one-sided presentations of divine things? Even Coleridge, who may almost be said to belong to the present generation, * Italy, vol. i. p. 5.

U

and who, take him for all in all, was about the most amply endowed of his contemporaries, awaits from some reverent and accomplished hand a critical dissection of the kind; the more imperiously for the wonderful grasp and subtlety of his intellect, so wide-seeing and philosophic in some directions, so far behind himself and the most advanced of his coævals in others. Certainly the prose compositions of this remarkable genius, for which he deserted the fair fields of poesy, where his best title to fame was won, too often leave an impression of regret that a mind so capacious and original should have bent itself down to the narrowness of systems and the perversities of party; and in the vain endeavour to resuscitate the dead, or invest traditional phantasies with a halo of absolute truth, been betrayed into utterances and views of which a person with a twentieth of his mental power would have no particular reason to be proud.

A noticeable feature indeed, more or less characterising the critico-theological disquisitions of Coleridge, is the sort of compromise, unconsciously perhaps attempted, between ancient formulas and phraseology, and the deductions of later and more philosophic thought; the former, seldom taken in their popular or most natural signification for whatever they are worth, being coloured anew, refined, or altogether transmuted in spirit, in fulfilment of a necessity which marks but a certain era in the progress of intellectual conviction. The phenomenon is in substance a reproduction, through a metaphysical instead of an allegorical medium, of principles that lay at the root of the Alexandrian theosophies, which wove various results of Grecian speculation on the web of Jewish and Christian consciousness: a species of ideal metempsychosis, superinduced on antique forms of belief by the subtler and more penetrating class of minds, endeavouring to combine prescription and philosophy by a process which, expanding the limited, or investing the past with a significance not its own, is common enough in periods of mental transition, but to which there would be no tendency to resort

if men were as free in the pursuit of truth as in the prosecution of objects involving no prejudiced or interested claims.

It is curious to remark the prominence assigned by Coleridge to a distinction between Reason and the Understanding, the wonder not lying in the distinction itself, fairly enough sustainable according to his own acceptation of the terms, but in its alleged ability to solve enigmas that have puzzled or repelled all thinking brains from the moment of their utterance to the present hour; while the surprise is not lessened on discovering that the mysterious solvent, in spite of the feats it was destined to perform, vanishes into air in the hands of the operator, who has not even essayed the demonstration of its higher virtues; nor, so far as conjecture may be hazarded on so hypothetical a topic, could the demonstration be achieved by mortal wit, except through the illusive medium of some petitio principii, or the virtual metamorphosis of the question. At all events, the distinction between Reason and the Understanding, however important in philosophy, were but unphilosophically dealt with if the former, on the score of its grand mystic superiority, is made to serve as a shelter to forms of thought which, related it may be to subjects that have a bearing on Reason, or the higher part of man's spiritual nature, shun the scrutiny of the lower, or the Understanding in which they originate. For this were to assert, not a difference between the two, or the pre-eminence of one above the other, but the right of certain speculative views to exemption from the ordeal of that critical or discursive faculty to whose jurisdiction they exclusively belong.

The moral and intellectual life of Coleridge, comprehending a thorough examination of his opinions, metaphysical and religious, the points where they hold to truth, their aberrations, and their deficiencies, would form a not unworthy theme for a genius kindred and sympathetic-it were idle to say commensurate with his own.

COSMOGONY; OR, NOTIONS OF
PRIMEVAL EPOCHS.

2

T first view the opinion may seem very plausible, that the matter of the world is eternal, according

to the ancient formula, Ex nihilo nihil fit—“ out of nothing, nothing can be produced." Yet on narrower inspection, scarcely any opinion appears more absurd, as resting on a dogma that, so interpreted, assumes the very position which requires to be established, and which is decisively confuted by the admission of the Divine omnipotence, in the sense of an attribute to which nothing is impossible that does not imply,—what it were futile to suppose without evidence, a self-contradiction or incongruity. The axiom indeed, in its oriental origin, had no signification of an atheistic nature, being only an expression of the principle that every effect must have a cause; principle which-understood, as logically must be meant, with exception of the first link in the chain, or rather without reference to the Being conceived as self-existent and eternal, to whom all such terms as effect, event, fit, or the like, are inapplicable-admits no inference respecting matter but the necessity of its production by some foreign power; though at the same time a principle that, taken as an abstract theory of Causation, or in proof of the existence of a God, would be but an assumption of the point at issue, leading on from cause to cause ad infinitum. It is on separate grounds

that the demonstration must rest, that the world, or the primordial element of things, is not itself the uncaused Cause.

It may be noted, in passing, that the validity of the argument would be unaffected by any aspect under which the Ideal theory might present itself to speculative thought, in relation to this or other kindred problems. For were the whole scene but a mental phantasmagoria, it must have had a commencement with the minds receiving the impression: and the only inquiry then would be, Are there minds independent of a primal or uncreated Mind?

As a metaphysical question, indeed, it might be difficult to prove the impossibility of a something, call it matter or what we may, being co-eternal with the Deity; distinct from, yet dependent upon him; somewhat perhaps as an effluence, or radiation of light from a luminous object. The acute and original Tucker, I find, propounds such a view. After specifying various instances of human ignorance, he says: "Nor can we know any more concerning the time than the manner of creation, or determine whether the creatures may not have been co-eternal with the Creator: for though they be effects requiring an efficient cause to produce them, yet an effect may well be eternal where the cause is so. I could easily believe the Thames to have run eternally if I could persuade myself that the springs supplying it had flowed for ever: and if there had always been a sun, there would have been no beginning of day-light. So, though the creation depended upon a superior power for its existence, it may nevertheless have subsisted from everlasting, because that power was never wanting whereon it might depend.' The theory would not be essentially touched by the averment, that creation must imply an act of Will on the part of God; for the exercise of his Will, in the case supposed, might, for aught that could be shown, be coæval with his existence, or as inseparable from it-to use a previous illustration-as light from a luminous body.

*Light of Nature Pursued.