Note † — Chapter XXXIII · Truth and Revelation Theories

Even when Coleridge is most ‘the God-intoxicated man’ his remarks to a careful reader suggest that if they could be decoded, as it were, they would provide at the least a basis for interesting speculation. Many adumbrations of this mystical view might be quoted. “There is a communication between mystery and mystery, between the unknown soul and the unknown reality; at one particular point in the texture of life the hidden truth seems to break through the veil”, writes Mr Middleton Murry in an Essay† which as an emotive utterance disguised to resemble an argument is of interest. How this feeling of insight arises we have seen in the foregoing chapter; the sense of immediate revelation of which he treats as “the primary stuff out of which literature is created” is certainly characteristic of the greater kinds of art. And there must be few who have not by one arrangement or another contrived from these visionary moments a philosophy which, for a time, has seemed to them unshakable because for a time emotionally satisfying. But emotional satisfaction gained at the cost of intellectual bondage is unstable. When it does not induce a partial stupor it breaks down. The freely inquiring mind has a fatal way of overthrowing all immediate and mystical intuitions which, instead of being duly subordinate, insist on giving it orders.