Note 156 — AIDS TO REFLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF A MANLY CHARACTER, ON THE SEVERAL GROUNDS OF PRUDENCE, MORALITY, AND RELIGION. (continued 7)
Reading edition
See Preliminary to Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion, &c.—Ed.
[157] So in first edition, 1825.—Ed.
[158] Of which our he was made flesh, is an inadequate translation.—The Church of England in this as in other doctrinal points, has preserved the golden mean between the superstitious reverence of the Romanists, and the avowed contempt of the Sectarians, for the writings of the Fathers, and the authority and unimpeached traditions of the Church during the first three or four centuries. And how, consistently with this honourable characteristic of our Church, a minister of the same could, on the Sacramentary scheme now in fashion, return even a plausible answer to Arnauld's great work on Transubstantiation (not without reason the boast of the Romish Church), exceeds my powers of conjecture.
[159] These were the afterwards published 'On the Church and State, according to the Idea of Each,' 1830, and 'Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,' 1840. The latter we republish in the present volume; see p. 285.—Ed.
[160] Will the reader forgive me if I attempt at once to illustrate and relieve the subject by annexing the first stanza of the poem composed in the same year in which I wrote the Ancient Mariner and the first book of Christabel?
"Encinctur'd with a twine of leaves, That leafy twine his only dress! A lovely boy was plucking fruits In a moonlight wilderness.[161] The moon was bright, the air was free, And fruits and flowers together grew On many a shrub and many a tree: And all put on a gentle hue, Hanging in the shadowy air Like a picture rich and rare. It was a climate where, they say, The night is more belov'd than day. But who that beauteous boy beguil'd, That beauteous boy to linger here? Alone, by night, a little child, In place so silent and so wild— Has he no friend, no loving mother near?" Wanderings of Cain.
[161] "By moonlight, in a wilderness."—'Poetical Works,' edit. 1863.—Ed.
[162] See p. 40.—Ed.
[163] Such is the conception of body in Des Cartes' own system, body is every where confounded with matter, and might in the Cartesian sense be defined, Space or Extension, with the attribute of Visibility. As Des Cartes at the same time zealously asserted the existence of intelligential beings, the reality and independent Self-subsidence of the soul, Berkeleyanism or Spinosism was the immediate and necessary consequence. Assume a plurality of self-subsisting souls, and we have Berkeleyanism; assume one only (unam et unicam substantiam), and you have Spinosism, that is, the assertion of one infinite self-subsistent, with the two attributes of thinking and appearing. Cogitatio infinita sine centro, et omniformis apparitio. How far the Newtonian vis inertiæ (interpreted any otherwise than as an arbitrary term = x y z, to represent the unknown but necessary supplement or integration of the Cartesian notion of body) has patched up the flaw, I leave for more competent judges to decide. But should any one of my Readers feel an interest in the speculative principles of Natural Philosophy, and should be master of the German language, I warmly recommend for his perusal the earliest known publication of the great founder of the Critical Philosophy (written in the twenty-second year of his age!), on the then eager controversy between the Leibnitzian and the French and English Mathematicians, respecting the living forces—Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte: 1747—in which Kant demonstrates the right reasoning to be with the latter; but the Truth of Fact, the evidence of Experience, with the former; and gives the explanation, namely: Body, or Corporeal Nature, is something else and more than geometrical extension, even with the addition of a vis inertiæ. And Leibnitz, with the Bernouillis, erred in the attempt to demonstrate geometrically a problem not susceptible of geometrical construction.—The tract, with the succeeding Himmels-system, may with propriety be placed, after the Principia of Newton, among the striking instances of early Genius; and as the first product of the Dynamic Philosophy in the Physical Sciences, from the time, at least, of Giordano Bruno, whom the idolaters burnt for an Atheist, at Rome, in the year 1600. See the 'Friend,' pp. 151-55. [Or pp. 69 70, Bohn's edition.—Ed.]
[164] For Newton's own doubtfully suggested ether, or most subtle fluid, as the ground and immediate Agent in the phenomena of universal gravitation, was either not adopted or soon abandoned by his disciples; not only as introducing, against his own canons of right reasoning, an ens imaginarium into physical science, a suffiction in the place of a legitimate supposition; but because the substance (assuming it to exist) must itself form part of the problem, it was meant to solve. Meantime Leibnitz's pre-established harmony, which originated in Spinosa, found no acceptance; and, lastly, the notion of a corpuscular substance, with properties put into it, like a pincushion hidden by the pins, could pass with the unthinking only for any thing more than a confession of ignorance, or technical terms expressing a hiatus of scientific insight.
[165] Apul. Metam. 1.—H. N. C.