Witchcraft, Cures by sympathy, in which you would select and explain the most interesting and best attested facts that have come to your knowledge from books or personal testimony.

You can scarcely conceive how deep an interest I attach to this request; nor how many, beside myself, in the circle of my own acquaintance, have the same feeling. Indeed, my dear Sir! when I reflect, that there is scarcely a chapter of history in which superstition of some kind or other does not form or supply a portion of its contents, I look forward, with unquiet anticipation. to the power of explaining the more frequent and best attested narrations, at least without the necessity of having recourse to the supposition of downright tricks and lying, on one side, or to the Devil and his imps on the other. *

Your obliged Pupil, and affectionate Friend,

J. L

P. S.-Dr. L. of the Museum, is quite of your opinion, that little or nothing of importance to the philosophie naturalist can result from Comparative Anatomy on Cuvier's plan; and that its best trophies will be but lifeless skeletons, till it is studied in combination with a Comparative Physiology. But you ought yourself to vindicate the priority of your claim. But I fear, dear C., that Sic Vos, non Vobis was made for your motto throughout life.

LETTER II. IN ANSWER TO THE ABOVE.

WELL, my dear pupil and fellow-student! I am willing to make the attempt. If the majority of my readers had but the same personal knowledge of me as you have, I should sit down to the work with good cheer. But this is out of the question. Let me, however, suppose you for the moment, as an average reader-address you as such, and attribute to you feelings and language in character.-Do not mistake me, my dear L Not even for a moment, nor under the pretext of mons a non movendo, would I contemplate in connection with your name "id genus lectorum, qui meliores obtrectare malint quam imitari : et quorum similitudinem desperent, eorundem affectent simultatem scilicet uti qui suo nomine obscuri sunt, meo innotescant.'

The passage, which can not fail to remind you of H and his set, is from Apuleius's Lib. Floridorum-the two books of which, by the bye,

The readers I have in view, are of that class who with a sincere, though not very strong desire, of acquiring knowledge, have taken it for granted, that all knowledge of any value respecting the mind is either to be found in three or four books, the eldest not a hundred years old, or may be conveniently taught without any other terms or previous explanations than these works have already rendered familiar among men of education.

Well, friendly reader! as the problem of things little less (it seems to you) than impossible, yet strongly and numerously attested by evidence which it seems impossible to discredit, has interested you, I am willing to attempt the solution. But then it must be under certain conditions. I must be able to hope, I must have sufficient grounds for hoping, that I shall be understood, or rather that I shall be allowed to make myself understood. And as I am gifted with no magnetic power of throwing my reader into the state of clear-seeing (clairvoyance) or luminous vision; as I have not the secret of enabling him to read with the pit of his stomach, or with his finger-ends, nor of calling into act "the cuticular faculty," dormant at the tip of his nose; but must rely on WORDS-I can not form the hope rationally, unless the reader will have patience enough to master the sense in which I use them.

But why employ words that need explanation? And might I not ask in my turn, would you, gentle reader! put the same question to Sir Edward Smith, or any other member of the Linnæan Society, to whom you had applied for instruction in Botany? And yet he would require of you that you should attend to a score of technical terms, and make yourself master of the sense of each, in order to your understanding the distinctive characters of a grass, a mushroom, and a lichen! Now the psychologist, or speculative philosopher, will be content with you, if you will impose on yourself the trouble of understanding and remembering one of the number, in order to understand your own nature. But I will meet your question direct. You ask me, why I use words that need explanation? Because (I reply) on this subject there are no others! Because the darkness and the main difficulties that attend it, are owing to the vagueness and ambiguity of the seem to have been transcribed from his common-place-book of Good Things, happy phrases, &c., that he had not had an opportunity of bringing in in his set writings.

words in common use; and which preclude all explanation for him who has resolved that none is required. Because there is already a falsity in the very phrases, "words in common use;" "the language of common sense." Words of most frequent use they may be, common they are not; but the language of the market, and as such, expressing degrees only, and therefore incompetent to the purpose wherever it becomes necessary to designate the kind independent of all degree. The philosopher may, and often does, employ the same words as in the market; but does this supersede the necessity of a previous explanation? As I referred you before to the botanist, so now to the chemist. Light, heat, charcoal, are every man's words. But fixed or invisible light? The frozen heat? Charcoal in its simplest form as diamond, or as black-lead? Will a stranger to chemistry be worse off, would the chemist's language be less likely to be understood by his using different words for distinct meanings, as carbon, caloric, and the like?

But the case is stronger. The chemist is compelled to make words, in order to prevent or remove some error connected with the common word; and this too an error, the continuance of which was incompatible with the first principles and clementary truths of the science he is to teach. You must submit to regard yourself ignorant even of the words, air and water; and will find, that they are not chemically intelligible without the terms, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, or others equivalent. Now it is even so with the knowledge, which you would have me to communicate. There are certain prejudices of the common, i. e. of the average sense of men, the exposure of which is the first step, the indispensable preliminary, of all rational psychology and these can not be exposed but by selecting and adhering to some one word, in which we may be able to trace the growth and modifications of the opinion or belief conveyed in this, or similar words, not by any revolution or positive change of the original sense, but by the transfer of this sense and the difference in the appli

cation.

Where there is but one word for two or more diverse or disparate meanings in a language (or though there should be several, yet if perfect synonymes, they count but for one word), the language is so far defective. And this is a defect of frequent occurrence in all languages, prior to the cultivation of science, logic,

and philology, especially of the two latter and among a free, lively, and ingenious people, such as the Greeks were, sophistry and the influence of sophists are the inevitable result. To check this evil by striking at its root in the ambiguity of words, Plato wrote the greater part of his published works, which do not so much contain his own system of philosophy, as the negative conditions of reasoning aright on any system. And yet more obviously is it the case with the Metaphysics, Analytics, &c. of Aristotle, which have been well described by Lambert as a dictionary of general terms, the process throughout being, first, to discover and establish definite meanings, and then to appropriate to each a several word. The sciences will take care, each of its own nomenclature; but the interests of the language at large fall under the special guardianship of logic and rational psychology. Where these have fallen into neglect or disrepute, from exclusive pursuit of wealth, excess of the commercial spirit, or whatever other cause disposes men in general to attach an exclusive value to immediate and palpable utility, the dictionary may swell, but the language will decline. Few are the books published within the last fifty years, that would not supply their quota of proofs, that so it is with our own mother English. The bricks and stones are in abundance, but the cement none or naught. That which is indeed the common language exists everywhere as the menstruum, and nowhere as the whole-See Biographia Literaria*—while the language complimented with this name, is, as I have already said, in fact the language of the market. Every science, every trade, has its technical nomenclature; every folly has its fancy-words; every vice its own slang—and is the science of humanity to be the one exception? Is philosophy to work without tools? to have no straw wherewith to make the bricks for her mansion-house, but what she may pick up on the high-road, or steal, with all its impurities and sophistications, from the litter of the cattle-market?

For the present, however, my demands on your patience are very limited.—If as the price of much entertainment to follow, and I trust of something besides of less transitory interest, you will fairly attend to the history of two scholastic terms, OBJECT and SUBJECT, with their derivatives; you shall have my promise that I will not on any future occasion ask you to be attentive, * P. 409.-S. O.

without trying not to be myself dull. That it may cost you no more trouble than necessary, I have brought it under the eye in numbered paragraphs, with scholia or commentary to such as seemed to require it.

Yours most affectionately,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

ON THE PHILOSOPHIC IMPORT OF THE WORDS, OBJECT AND SUBJECT.

§ 1.

Existence is a simple intuition, underived and indecomponible. It is no idea, no particular form, much less any determination or modification of the possible: it is nothing that can be educed from the logical conception of a thing, as its predicate it is no property of a thing, but its reality itself; or, as the Latin would more conveniently express it-Nulla rei proprietas est, sed ipsa ejus realitas.

SCHOLIUM.

To

Herein lies the sophism in Des Cartes' celebrated demonstration of the existence of the Supreme Being from the idea. In the idea of God are contained all attributes that belong to the perfection of a being but existence is such therefore, God's existence is contained in the idea of God. this it is a sufficient answer, that existence is not an attribute. It might be shown too, from the barrenness of the demonstration, by identifying the deduction with the premise, i. e. for reducing the minor or term included to a mere repetition of the major or term including. For in fact the syllogism ought to stand thus: the idea of God comprises the idea of all attributes that belong to perfection; but the idea of existence is such therefore the idea of his existence is included in the idea of God.-Now, existence is no idea, but a fact: or, though we had an idea of existence, still the proof of a correspondence to a reality would be wanting, i. e. the very point would be wanting which it was the purpose of the demonstration to supply. Still the idea of the fact is not the fact itself. Besides, the term, idea, is here improperly substituted for the mere supposition of a logical subject, necessarily presumed in order to the conceivableness (cogitabilitas) of any qualities, properties, or