Note 98 — AIDS TO REFLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF A MANLY CHARACTER, ON THE SEVERAL GROUNDS OF PRUDENCE, MORALITY, AND RELIGION. (continued 5)

The philosopher, whom the Inquisition would have burnt alive as an atheist, had not Leo X. and Cardinal Bembo decided that the work might be formidable to those semi-pagan Christians who regarded Revelation as a mere make-weight to their boasted Religion of Nature; but contained nothing dangerous to the Catholic Church or offensive to a true believer. [He was born in 1462, and died in 1525.—H. N. C.]

[99] A discourse by Prof. J. H. Green. This, "On Instinct," was afterwards printed by Prof. Green with his 'Vital Dynamics,' 1840. We give it as so published in the Appendix to the present edition; though, of course, the "report," apparently verbal, on which Coleridge's remarks of 1825 are founded, may have differed somewhat from the Professor's text as published in 1840.—Ed.

[100] The word, Instinct, brings together a number of facts into one class by the assertion of a common ground, the nature of which ground it determines negatively only—that is, the word does not explain what this common ground is; but simply indicates that there is such a ground, and that it is different in kind from that in which the responsible and consciously voluntary actions of men originate. Thus, in its true and primary import, Instinct stands in antithesis to Reason; and the perplexity and contradictory statements into which so many meritorious naturalists, and popular writers on natural history (Priscilla Wakefield, Kirby, Spence, Hüber, and even Reimarus) have fallen on this subject, arise wholly from their taking the word in opposition to Understanding. I notice this, because I would not lose any opportunity of impressing on the mind of my youthful readers the important truth that language (as the embodied and articulated Spirit of the Race, as the growth and emanation of a People, and not the work of any individual wit or will) is often inadequate, sometimes deficient, but never false or delusive. We have only to master the true origin and original import of any native and abiding word, to find in it, if not the solution of the facts expressed by it, yet a finger-mark pointing to the road on which this solution is to be sought.

[101] Neque quiquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint quam ut satisfactionem intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores quam ut placari queant. Adhuc non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur qui nihil aliud quærit nisi quod calumnietur. (Erasmi Epist. ad Dorpium.) At all events, the paragraph passing through the medium of my own prepossessions, if any fault be found with it, the fault probably, and the blame certainly, belongs to the reporter.

[102] And which (I may add) in a more enlightened age, and in a Protestant country, impelled more than one German University to anathematize Fr. Hoffman's discovery of carbonic acid gas, and of its effects on animal life, as hostile to religion, and tending to atheism! Three or four students at the university of Jena, in the attempt to raise a spirit for the discovery of a supposed hidden treasure, were strangled or poisoned by the fumes of the charcoal they had been burning in a close garden-house of a vineyard near Jena, while employed in their magic fumigations and charms. One only was restored to life: and from his account of the noises and spectres (in his ears and eyes) as he was losing his senses, it was taken for granted that the bad spirit had destroyed them. Frederic Hoffman admitted that it was a very bad spirit that had tempted them, the Spirit of Avarice and Folly; and that a very noxious Spirit (gas, or geist,) was the immediate cause of their death. But he contended that this latter spirit was the spirit of charcoal, which would have produced the same effect, had the young men been chaunting psalms instead of incantations: and acquitted the devil of all direct concern in the business. The Theological Faculty took the alarm: even physicians pretended to be horror-stricken at Hoffman's audacity. The controversy and its appendages embittered several years of this great and good man's life.