 
In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's "great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that he continued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, getting more and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two events occurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One of these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; the other was the death of his disciple's father, with the result of leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render him independent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will, together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed, imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far as necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his life to the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing the doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, two years after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, and thenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, he applied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour of love. We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr. Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previous collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work had been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit for the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and the probability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written material equal in amount to more than a volume – of course, an entirely different thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available written material existed for setting comprehensively before the public, in Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical system with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there were fragments – for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, and beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the margins and fly-leaves of books. With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to whatsoever the human mind can contemplate – sensuous or supersensuous – of experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under post-diluvian conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self-proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his task with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and political history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and the allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all these subjects," declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, in at least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his labours he thought it convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrew when more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took up Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year and found his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have felt that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, and that, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system of philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under his literary trust to work out that particular application of it which its author had most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he had made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though but roughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of his master's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time to supersede this unpublished compendium, the Religio Laici, as he had styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason – truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remaining years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, left behind him in MS. the work entitled Spiritual Philosophy: founded on the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was published two years later, together with the memoir of the author, from which I have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It consists of two volumes, the first of which is devoted to the exposition of the general principles of Coleridge's philosophy, while the second is entirely theological, and aims at indicating on principles for which the first volume has contended, the essential doctrines of Christianity. The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition (if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of the results of a transcendental intuition) of the essential difference between the reason and the understanding – a distinction which Coleridge has himself elsewhere described as preeminently the gradus ad philosophiam, and might well have called its pons asinorum. In the second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to the establishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted in all philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital to the theology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical basis. This position is that the human will is to be regarded as the one ultimate fact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines himself to the contemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone – so long as he attends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him by the impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can never hope to escape from the famous reductio ad inscibile of Hume. He can never affirm anything more than the existence of those modes of consciousness, or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, that his conscious self is anything apart from the perceptions and concepts to which he is attending. But when he turns from his perceiving and thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware of something deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness; he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independent self-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of a noumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere insuperable between the subject and object, is broken down; that which knows becomes identified with that which is; and in the consciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as something independent of and superior to its own modifications, is not so much affirmed as acquired. The essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in the well-known Cartesian formula. Cogito ergo sum had been shown by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than Cogito ergo cogitationes sunt. But substitute willing for thinking, convert the formula into Volo ergo sum, and it becomes irrefragable. So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green's subsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will as the ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he has thus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For since man, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am, asserts, nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a Spiritual being, and thereby knows what substance truly and properly is – so he contemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking of reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his own person." So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, it is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external world than that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his own person." But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that one is chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist for Transcendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between his philosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a question whether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch which has here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out of place. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher afterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, as such organon, that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it could be redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of the latter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could be complete without at least some brief glance at the details of this notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of the Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who have been trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice to processes of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms of the inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you have done justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no candid student of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a professed disciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiarity with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often compelled, to formulate its positions and recite its processes in somewhat of the same modest and confiding spirit as animates those youthful geometricians who leacn their Euclid by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as may be, trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks to make the Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the truth of Christianity. Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base of Philosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth of the Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to the development of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to the conception of the Idea of God. The argument – if we may apply so definite a name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to something that may perhaps be higher, but is certainly other than the ratiocinative faculty – is founded partly on moral and partly on intellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and the race from the fulfilment of this tendency, – Mr. Green shows how the Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect (for he seems to use all three expressions indiscriminately) is morally prepared for the reception of the truth which his Understanding alone could never have compassed, – the Idea of God. This is in effect neither more nor less than a restatement of that time-honoured argument for the existence of some Being of perfect holiness which has always weighed so much with men of high spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its actually enhancing the intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a Will which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a nature which constantly impels him to those gratifications of will which tend not to self-preservation and progress, but to their contraries. Surely, then, on the strength of the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, here must be some higher archetypal Will, to which human wills, or rather certain selected examples of them, may more and more conform themselves, and in which the union of unlimited efficiency in operation with unqualified purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put it yet another way: The life of the virtuous man is a life auxiliary to the preservation and progress of the race; but his will is under restraint. The will of the vicious man energises freely enough, but his life is hostile to the preservation and progress of the race. Now the natural and essential nisus of all Will is towards absolute freedom. But nothing in life has a natural and essential nisus towards that which tends to its deterioration and extinction. Therefore, there must be some ultimate means of reconciling absolute freedom of the Will with perfectly salutary conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, like his master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, and contenting himself with assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency" which will gradually bring the human will into the required conditions, he here makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude that there must be a self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom and power concur with perfect purity and holiness. So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, it will be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. It has, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves," which has been called Will, originates in some source to which we should be rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such a thing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of the understanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwise than hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes to the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the following simple petitio principii: the power is first assumed to be a Will; it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of Will would escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the less absolute from being self-determined ab intra. For how, he asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will except by conceiving it as se finiens, predetermining itself to the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility of conceiving of Will except as se finiens is his very ground for rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) origin of the cosmos. However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism of Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy – the construction of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics. Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an individual Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to evolve the Idea of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally necessary process from two of the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned introspective act. "For as in our consciousness," he truly says, "we are under the necessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself,' now as the subject thinking and now as the object contemplated in the manifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divine instance as Deus Subjectivus and Deus Objectimis, – that is, the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Being eternally and causatively realised in his Personality." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as necessarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who, as the thinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the contemplated "Me" as the object thought of. Again, the man who reflects on the fact of his consciousness, "which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition of subject and object in the self of which he is conscious, cannot fail to see that the conscious mind requires not only the distinction in order to the act of reflection in itself, but the continual sense of the relative nature of the distinction and of the essential oneness of the mind itself." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves the Idea of the Third Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" implies the perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the contemplated – the "I" and the "Me" – are one. In this manner is the Idea of the Trinity shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out of it by an implication as necessary as that which connects together the three phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act of the individual mind. [1] It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has been made to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed to it could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapters which follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to explain the mysteries of the fall of man and of original sin. Considered in the aspect in which Coleridge himself would have preferred to regard his pupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men to Christianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless enterprise perhaps could have been conceived than that embodied in these volumes. It is like offering a traveller a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Upon the most liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part of educated mankind are capable of so much as comprehending the philosophic doctrine upon which Coleridge seeks to base Christianity, and it is doubtful whether any but a still smaller fraction of these would admit that the foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure. That the writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the master whom he interprets, may serve the cause of religion in another than an intellectual way is possible enough. Not a few of the functions assigned to the Speculative Reason will strike many of us as moral and spiritual rather than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to them is in fact an appeal to man to chasten the lower passions of his nature, and to discipline his unruly will. Exhortations of that kind are religious all the world of philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moral fervour and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefits of Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it would of course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether from the exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded.
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