My two centimes-Those who took the job early on were fooled. Those who take it now are fools. I am saddened that so few people have discernment today. Coleridge decried the partisans of the “rights of men,” who mistook their universal abstractions for the actual rights of Englishmen. Thus, he noted that “[i]t is the chief of many blessings derived from the insular character and circumstances of our country, that our social institutions have formed themselves out of our proper needs and interests” There is a universal, knowable Idea of the state, but here one can see that the Idea may unfold in a specific manner, such as being conformable to the peculiar nature of the English. The unfolding of the Idea is much like the evolution of the common law: It is informed by universal principles of justice as reasoned out by generations of human communities, but it is also sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the English people. The unwritten constitution of the English had emerged through centuries of collective reasoning and experience, not through the a priori abstractions of a few hubristic men. Thomas Paine quipped that a country only has a constitution if one could put it in his pocket; Coleridge saw the folly inherent in such a claim, for one could not abrogate, or easily compartmentalize, the reason of the ages. Even America’s Constitution, though written, wasn’t based on the reason of the day: It was deeply indebted to its British predecessor, which Hamilton had called the “best in the world.”
Now, in his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge made a distinction between the “Understanding,” which he termed the “mere reflective faculty” as it only deals with human experience, and “Reason,” which he understood as being able to apprehend the Idea of the human and the truths that accompany it. In On the Constitution, Coleridge makes a similar distinction between ideas and conceptions, the latter being “a conscious act of the understanding, bringing any given object or impression into the same class with any number of other objects, or impressions, by means of some character or characters common to them all” (4). For Coleridge, this was the worldly reason employed by Enlightenment thinkers—they failed to understand fundamental truths about our existence, and so the “period which how far it deserved the name, so complacently affixed to it by the contemporaries, of ‘this enlightened age,’ may be doubted” (6). Their mechanistic philosophies, attacks on free will, and deist rejections of Christianity were faulty from the beginning, because of their failure to recognize true ideas. Coleridge noted that whether you are speaking to a student or a neighbor on the existence of free will, amidst other ideas, you must
attend to their actions, their feelings, and even to their words: and you will be in ill luck, if ten minutes pass without affording you full and satisfactory proof, that the idea of man’s moral freedom possesses and modifies their whole practical being, in all they say, in all they feel, in all they do and are done to; even as the spirit of life, which is contained in no vessel, because it permeates all.
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