We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of space, as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence--God, man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed contemplation without passing into an unripe or degenerated humanity.
My mother told my wife that I was a year younger, and that there was a blunder made either in the baptismal register itself or in the transcript sent for my admission into Christ's Hospital; and Mrs. C., who is older than myself, believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in _life_, if not in years, I am, alas! nearer to 68.
[S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. Consequently, on October 20, 1819, he was not yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year October 21, 1819.]
N.B.--A sonnet on the child collecting shells and pebbles on the sea-shore or lake-side, and carrying each with a fresh shout of delight and admiration to the mother's apron, who smiles and assents to each "This is pretty!" "Is not that a nice one?" and then when the prattler is tired of its _conchozetetic_ labours lifts up her apron and throws them out on her apron. Such are our first discoveries both in science and philosophy.--S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 1819.
Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, attempting to explain to himself and to Hartley a feeling of a something not present in Milton's works, that is, in "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes," which he _did_ feel delightedly in the "Lycidas," and (as I added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets compared with the English. And this appeared to me to be the _poet_ appearing and wishing to appear as the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as much as, though more rare than, the father, the brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare with Milton, Chaucer's "Fall of the Leaf" and Spenser throughout, and you cannot but _feel_ what Gillman meant to convey. What is the solution? This, I believe--but I must premise that there is a _synthesis_ of intellectual insight including the mental object, the organ of the correspondent being indivisible, and this (O deep truth!) because the objectivity consists in the universality of its subjectiveness--as when it _sees_, and millions _see_ even so, and the seeing of the millions is what constitutes to _A_ and to each of the millions the _objectivity_ of the sight, the equivalent to a common object--a synthesis of _this_, I say, and of proper external object which we call _fact_. Now, this it is which we find in religion. It is more than philosophical truth--it is other and more than historical fact; it is not made up by the addition of the one to the other, but it is the _identity_ of both, the co-inherence.