1

in all our knowledge by means of principles, 1a priori; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice, (Germanicè, Willkühr), and (distinct both from the moral will, and the choice), the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch. Thence I propose to make a new arrangement of madness, whether as defect, or as excess, of any of these senses or faculties; and thus by appropriate cases to show the difference between ;-1. a man having lost his reason but not his senses or understanding-that is, he sees things as other men see-1 them;—he adapts means to ends, as other men would adapt them, and not seldom, with more sagacity;-but his final end is altogether irrational; 2. his having lost his wits, that is, his understanding or judicial power; but not his reason or the use of his senses ;-(such was Don Quixote; and, therefore, we love and reverence him, while we despise Hudibras): 3. his being out of his senses, as in the case of a hypochondrist, to whom his limbs appear to be of glass;-granting that, all his conduct is both rational, or moral, and prudent: 4. Or the case may be a combination of all three, though I doubt the existence of such a case; or of any two of them: 5. Or lastly, it may be merely such an excess of sensation, as overpowers and suspends all; which is frenzy or raving madness.

A diseased state of an organ of sense, or of the inner organs connected with it, will perpetually tamper with the understanding, and unless there be an energetic and watchful counteraction of the judgment (of which I have known more than one instance, in which the comparing and reflecting judgment has obstinately, though painfully, rejected the full testimony of the senses,) will finally overpower it. But when the organ is obliterated, or totally sus

1 This phrase, a priori, is, in common, most grossly misunderstood, and an absurdity burthened on it which it does not deserve. By knowledge a priori, we do not mean that we can know any thing previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but having once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from without) we then know that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By experience only I know, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.-C.

pended, then the mind applies some other organ to a double use. Passing through Temple Sowerby, in Westmoreland, some ten years back, I was shown a man perfectly blind; and blind from his infancy. Fowell was his name. This man's chief amusement was fishing on the wild and uneven banks of the River Eden, and up the different streams and tarns among the mountains. He had an intimate friend, likewise stone blind, a dexterous card player, who knows every gate and stile far and near throughout the country. These two often coursed together, and the people, here, as every where, fond of the marvellous, affirm that they were the best beaters up of game in the whole country. The every way amiable and estimable John Gough of Kendal is not only an excellent mathematician, but an infallible botanist and zoologist. He has frequently at the first feel corrected the mistakes of the most experienced sportsman with regard to the birds or vermin which they had killed, when it chanced to be a variety or rare species, so completely resembling the common one, that it required great steadiness of observation to detect the difference, even after it had been pointed out. As to plants and flowers, the rapidity of his touch appears fully equal to that of sight; and the accuracy greater. Good heavens! it needs only to look at him! Why his face sees all over! It is all one eye! I almost envied him; for the purity and excellence of his own nature, never broken in upon by those evil looks, (or features, which are looks become fixtures), with which low cunning, habitual cupidity, presumptuous sciolism, and heart-hardening vanity, caledonianize the human face, it is the mere stamp, the undisturbed ectypon of his own soul! Add to this, that he is a Quaker, with all the blest negatives, without any of the silly and factious positives, of that sect, which, with all its bogs and hollows, is still the prime sunshine spot of Christendom in the eye of the true philosopher. When I was in Germany in the year 1798, I read at Hanover, and met with two respectable persons, one a clergyman, the other a physician, who confirmed to me the account of the

'H. N. C. substitutes "coarsen."

сс

upper-stall master at Hanover, written by himself, and countersigned by all his medical attendants. As far as I recollect, he had fallen from his horse on his head, and in consequence of the blow lost both his sight and hearing for nearly three years, and continued for the greater part of this period in a state of nervous fever. His understanding, however, remained unimpaired and unaffected, and his entire consciousness, as to outward impressions, being confined to the sense of touch, he at length became capable of reading any book (if printed, as most German books are, on coarse paper) with his fingers, in much the same manner in which the piano-forte is played, and latterly with an almost incredible rapidity. Likewise by placing his hand, with the fingers all extended, at a small distance from the lips of any person that spoke slowly and distinctly to him, he learned to recognize each letter by its different effects on his nerves, and thus spelt the words as they were uttered: and then1 returned the requisite answers, either by signs of finger-language to those of his own family, or to strangers by writing. It was particularly noticed both by himself from his sensations, and by his medical attendants from observation, that the letter R, if pronounced full and strong, and recurring once or more in the same word, produced a small spasm, or twitch in his hand and fingers. At the end of three years he recovered both his health and senses, and with the necessity soon lost the power, which he had thus acquired.

2

Sir George Etherege, etc.

Often and often had I read Gay's Beggar's Opera, and always delighted with its poignant wit and original satire, and if not without noticing its immorality, yet without any offence from it. Some years ago, I for the first time saw it represented in one of the London theatres; and such

1 The words" and then," &c. to "writing," have slipped out of H. N. Coleridge's text.

2 "Always been" Coleridge probably wrote.

were the horror and disgust with which it impressed me, so grossly did it outrage all the best feelings of my nature, that even the angelic voice and perfect science of Mrs. Billington lost half their1 charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learned the immense difference between reading and seeing a play;-no wonder, indeed; for who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence which he could not have even read aloud, or have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle ?-In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,—phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight realm of idea, which is the confine, the intermundium, as it were, of existence and non-existence. Merely that the thoughts have become audible, by blending with them a sense of outness, gives them a sort of reality. What then,-when by every contrivance of scenery, appropriate dresses, accordant and auxiliary looks and gestures, and the variety of persons on the stage, realities are employed to carry the imitation of reality as near as possible to perfect delusion? If a manly modesty shrinks from uttering an indecent phrase before a wife or sister in a private room, what must be the effect when a repetition of such treasons (for all gross and libidinous allusions are emphatically treasons against the very foundations of human society, against all its endearing charities, and all the mother virtues,) is hazarded before a mixed multitude in a public theatre? When every innocent female must blush at once with pain at the thoughts she rejects, and with indignant shame at those, which the foul hearts of others may attribute to her!

Thus too with regard to the comedies of Wycherly, Vanburgh, and Etherege, I used to please myself with the flattering comparison of the manners universal at pre

1 Coleridge has "its."

sent among all classes above the lowest with those of our ancestors even of the highest ranks. But if for a moment I think of those comedies as having been acted, I lose all sense of comparison in the shame, that human nature could at any time have endured such outrages to its dignity; and if conjugal affection and the sweet name of sister were too weak, that yet filial piety, the gratitude for a mother's holy love, should not have risen and hissed into infamy1 these traitors to their own natural gifts, who lampooned the noblest passions of humanity, in order to pander for its lowest appetites.

As far, however, as one bad thing can be palliated by comparison with a worse, this may be said, in extenuation of these writers; that the mischief which they can do even on the stage, is trifling compared with that style of writing which began in the pest-house of French literature, and has of late been imported by the Littles of the age, which consists in a perpetual tampering with the morals without offending the decencies. And yet the admirers of these publications, nay, the authors themselves, have the assurance to complain of Shakspere (for I will not refer to one yet far deeper blasphemy)—Shakspere, whose most objectionable passages are but grossnesses against lust, and these written in a gross age; while three-fourths of their whole works are delicacies for its support and sustenance. Lastly, that I may leave the reader in better humour with the name at the head of this article, I shall quote one scene from Etherege's Love in a Tub, which for exquisite, genuine, original humour, is worth all the rest of his plays, though two or three of his witty contemporaries were thrown in among them, as a make weight. The scene might be entitled, "the different ways in which the very same story may be told, without any variation in matter of fact;" for the least attentive reader will perceive the perfect identity of the footboy's account with the Frenchman's own statement in contradiction to it.

Unhappily printed "infancy" in the "Remains."