Flesh in the Age of Reason (61 page)

Increasingly (like Southey, a Church-and-King Tory), Coleridge abandoned Lockean empiricism for German transcendentalist idealism. Looking back to earlier religious traditions, notably Cambridge Platonism, and sideways to Kantian metaphysics, he trashed Locke in favour of a theory of mind which emphasized its innate activity and wisdom; developed a doctrine of the organic (‘esemplastic’) imagination, over and against the passive and mechanical faculty of ‘fancy’; and contended that man was inherently religious. Regarding shallow empiricism as a sorry chapter in ‘the long and ominous eclipse of philosophy’, he would rescue and revive the Neoplatonism ditched by the Lockeans.

Coleridge’s animus against his former creed of materialism grew ever more blazing. ‘Newton was a mere materialist,’ he scoffed in 1801, ‘Mind, in his system, is always
passive
, – a lazy
Looker-on
on an external world.’ Hence the bitterness in later years when he surveyed the aftermath of enlightened philosophy:

State of nature, or the Ourang Outang theology of the origin of the human race, substituted for the Book of Genesis, Ch. I–X. Rights of nature for the duties and privileges of citizens. Idea-less facts, misnamed proofs from history, grounds of experience, etc., substituted for principles and the insight derived from them.… Government by journeymen clubs; by reviews, magazines, and above all by newspapers.

No wonder that barbed satirist Thomas Love Peacock guyed this oracle: ‘there is too much commonplace light in our moral and political literature,’ pronounces Mr Flosky, a Coleridge twin, in
Nightmare Abbey
, ‘and light is a great enemy to mystery.’

All this time Coleridge was blighting his life through his opium habit and the deviousness and despair consequent upon the growing discrepancy between his high ideals and promise on the one hand, and the realities of his tormented, incapacitated existence. Gradually enslaving himself to the poppy, this prophet of mental autonomy thus became the walking falsification of his own new-found philosophy of free will. His life was a somatic shadow of the Christian process of spiritual perdition – and, perhaps, salvation. His opium habits were no secret, and for many he became a bogey figure, a symbol of moral weakness: ‘If Coleridge should be remembered, it will be as a warning,’ wrote Harriet Martineau.

Coleridge, with his budding superfine sensibility seeking sensation, may have first made medicinal use of opium while still at school; he certainly took large quantities for rheumatic fever in 1791 while at Cambridge and graduated to using it recreationally during the 1790s, unaware of, or oblivious to, its side-effects. He recorded sweet dreams and feelings of release. Yet the young poet was soon to feel the pains of opium, too. He began substantial consumption on a regular basis from around 1801, soon after he discovered a potent, opium-based,
proprietary medicine called ‘Kendal Black Drop’. Initially he dosed himself to quell neuralgia associated with ‘gout’ and nervous shooting pains in the limbs and head, unable to bear the agonies these complaints produced on what Humphry Davy would call his ‘excessive sensibility’.

Self-dosing brought emotional and physical sequelae of its own. Letters from the early 1800s testify to appalling insomnia – he feared sleep, since his nightmares were unendurable. Above all, he was seized by a paralysing dread of death. Organically, the habit led to ‘the weakly Bowels of Disease’ – the chronic constipation typical of opium. Many stimulants, including ginger, camphor and rhubarb, were required to counter this. Drugging also ruined his digestion; he could keep the opium down only by first settling his stomach with tumblers of brandy.

While affirming that ‘my state of Health is a Riddle’, Coleridge continued to tell himself and all and sundry that his maladies were straightforwardly organic, and he insisted to his wife that he used opium purely medicinally, to counter ‘the exquisite Affectibility of my Skin’ and assuring her that ‘to a person, with such a Stomach & Bowels as mine, if any stimulus is needful, Opium in the small quantities, I now take it, is incomparably better in every respect better than Beer, Wine, Spirits, or any
fermented
Liquor – nay, far less pernicious than even Tea’. His convoluted vindication concluded with a pathetic coda giving instructions respecting the health of his sons: ‘
It is my particular Wish, that Hartley & Derwent should have as little Tea as possible – & always very weak, with more than half milk
.’

During his thirties, Coleridge continued his self-exonerations: his opium was purely a medicament. But, wracked by ‘loneliness, continued Pain, accessory Irritations, and a sense of morbid Despondency’, he became the man of sorrows, victim and martyr – indeed, the Ancient Mariner – destined for ‘self suffering’. Eventually his agonies grew unbearable: ‘For many weeks with only two Intervals, and those but day-long, I have been ill – very ill – confined mostly to my Bed, altogether to my bedroom. In my pain I earnestly wish to die.’

The poet remained acutely self-aware, and, no less importantly, guilt-ridden, about the self-indulgence of the suffering soul who had trespassed so extensively upon the goodwill of friends and family alike. From about 1808 he fitfully forced himself to confront a self that was sick, and at last he openly acknowledged the damaging effects of ‘that accursed drug’, into which he had been ‘seduced’ by ‘the Horrors of Sleep’ and ‘the Dread of sudden Death’. He continued, nevertheless, to insist that he had taken it up purely for medicinal reasons: ‘I was seduced into the use of narcotics… & saw not the truth, till my
Body
had contracted a habit & a necessity.’ And how had this happened? As ever, Coleridge presented himself as victim: he had allowed himself to become habituated because of his ‘
Terror & Cowardice
of
PAIN
& Sudden Death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of Pleasure, or expectation or desire of exciting pleasurable Sensations’. Nevertheless, the effects had been catastrophic, for addiction had produced a bondage of the will, a mental disease. The true evil of opium was that it produced alienation of mind:

By the long long Habit of the accursed Poison my Volition (by which I mean the faculty
instrumental
to the Will, and by which alone the Will can realize itself – it’s Hands, Legs, & Feet, as it were) was compleatly deranged, at times frenzied, dissevered itself from the Will, & become an independent faculty: so that I was perpetually in the state, in which you may have seen paralytic Persons, who attempting to push a step forward in one direction are violently forced round to the opposite.

Bereft of free will, Coleridge thus saw himself, rhetorically at least, as reduced to ‘a species of madness… You bid me rouse myself – go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together, & that will cure him. Alas! (he would reply) that I cannot move my arms is my Complaint & my misery.’

Here is a remarkable perception – a man acknowledging he has been possessed, to the point of paralysis, by a sickness, which in his guilty moments he sees to be self-induced, indeed, an expression of the self: ‘In truth, I have been for years almost a paralytic in mind
from self-dissatisfaction.’ Thus enslaved to this ‘
free-agency-annihilating Poison
’, the poet-philosopher underwent ‘a continued act of thirty years’ Self-poisoning thro’ cowardice of pain’. For the ‘tyranny of habit’, the ‘slavery to opium’ – at rock bottom he had been consuming some five ounces of laudanum a day – wrought self-destruction.

Eventually, from the depths, Coleridge solicited the advice of physicians – something, he said, he had long wished to do but from which he had shrunk: ‘I have however done it at last – and tho’ the result after a severe Trial proved what I had anticipated, yet such is the Blessedness of walking altogether in Light, that my Health & Spirits are better [than] I have known them for years.’ A slave to self, Coleridge could not effect a self-cure, and could be restored only through the agency of a physician, Dr James Gilman, who boarded him at his Highgate home for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

Despite his self-serving protestations, Coleridge’s maladies were not principally external afflictions, but expressions of a self pained and traumatized by inability to act. Illness was a somatization of inner frailty which deflected spiritual conflicts while expressing them: ‘I am a starling self-incaged… and my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & Tomorrow, & Tomorrow.’

Young Coleridge, we noted, was a philosophical and political Godwinian:

Nor will I not thy holy guidance bless,
And hymn thee, Godwin! with an ardent lay,
For that thy Voice, in Passion’s stormy Day,
When wild I roam’d the bleak Heath of Distress,
Bade the bright Form of Justice meet my Way,
And told me, that her name was H
APPINESS
!

The last thirty years of his life were spent, however, by way of self-reinvention, repudiating the materialism about which he had been so enthusiastic and which, in a sense, actually explained the opium addiction which he denied. Religion replaced rationalism. On the last day of 1796, he tells us, ‘I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire, at the foot of the Quantocks, and devoted my thoughts and studies
to the foundations of religion and morals’. His ensuing friendship with Wordsworth led him to a deeper reverence for Nature: ‘Henceforth I shall know/That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure.’ Already in 1801 he noted, while reading the medieval theologian Duns Scotus, ‘I am burning Locke, Hume and Hobbes under his nose. They stink worse than feather or assafoetida.… I am confident that I can prove that the reputation of these three men has been wholly unmerited.’

The mature Coleridge diagnosed what had gone wrong with the enlightened thinking to which he himself had fallen a dupe. He recast the sorry saga of eighteenth-century empirical thought as ‘the long and ominous eclipse of philosophy; the usurpation of that venerable name by physical and psychological empiricism’. Empirical science, he admitted, had been attended by enormous achievements, and so it had come to dominate thought; life had been reduced to formulas, and mind to the empirical basement of Locke’s psychology. What emerged was a false view of man as an atomized individual, unrelated to past or future, living in isolation and lacking spirituality – roughly Burke’s view. To counter this, Coleridge urged a return to that great Neoplatonic tradition: ‘Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Philip and Algernon Sidney, Milton and Barrow were Platonists.’

In a series of public lectures, delivered in London in 1818, Coleridge returned to the master: ‘Plato! I really feel, unaffectedly, an awe when I mention his name.’ The essence of Plato’s philosophy, he declared, was that

he taught the idea, namely the possibility, and the duty of all who would arrive at the greatest perfection of the human mind, of striving to contemplate things not in the phenomenon… but lastly and chiefly as they exist in the Supreme Mind, independent of all material division, distinct and yet indivisible.

Behind the evanescence of appearances there lay an inner reality, from which it followed that ‘there is a moral government in the world – that things neither happen by chance nor yet by any blind agency of necessity’. Not just through the senses, knowledge might also be arrived at by a kind of revelation ‘which neither our senses, nor our
understanding, nor our reason, could give us the least conception of’. This led him to conclude

that without a congenial philosophy there can be no general religion, that a philosophy among the higher classes is an essential condition to the true state of religion among all classes, and that religion is the great centre of gravity in all countries and in all ages, and according as it is good or bad, whether religion or irreligion, so all the other powers of the state necessarily accommodate themselves to it.

Transcendental idealism would thus shore up the system.

One baleful consequence of empirical science had been the triumph of materialism. The logical upshot of scientific materialism, Coleridge warned, would be the exclusion of religion. He returned to what was always for him the heart of the matter. For materialism

destroys the possibility of free agency, it destroys the great distinction between the mere human and the mere animals of nature, namely the powers of originating an act. All things are brought, even the powers of life are brought, into a common link of causes and effects that we observe in a machine, and all the powers of thought into those of life, being all reasoned away into modes of sensation, and the will itself into nothing but a current, a fancy determined by the accidental copulations of certain internal stimuli.… It is by [man’s] bold denial of this, by an inward assertion, ‘I am not the creature of nature merely, nor a subject of nature, but I detach myself from her. I oppose myself as man to nature, and my destination is to conquer and subdue her, to be lord of light and fire and the elements; and what my mind can comprehend that I will make my eye to see.… And why? Because I am a free being.’

One might sense a subtext of Coleridge blaming materialism for seducing himself into a weakness which had destroyed his will.

Fortified thus by Christianity and Plato – and the laudanum bottle – Coleridge reasserted man as a spiritual being, the Lord of Nature but for ever distinct from it because he was a moral creature, with powers of free choice.

Private events have public consequences. Many philosophical
radicals embraced the enlightened package of Locke, Hartley and so forth – man as a product of circumstances, as infinitely malleable and educable, hence indefinitely progressive. Some abandoned such thinking when the French Revolution turned to terror. Coleridge was one. But his volte-face was particularly vehement. That was because he had been reduced to agony and abjection by an opium habit which left him unable to face himself. The adoption, in the depths, of the most stringent Christian Platonic idealism, with its doctrine of reason, free will and the separate soul, was his only recourse. It was, at one level, a heroic deception, a gigantic pretence. Yet at another it was the belief which truly gave him hope: one day he might actually, once more, be able to live out the reality of that creed. Out of Coleridge’s crisis emerged a body of thinking about the soul and self which then became inspirational for Nineteenth-Century culture – as John Stuart Mill acknowledged when he divided the thinkers of his day into the rival camps of Benthamites and Coleridgeans.