Aids to Reflection

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Feb 2006 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AIDS TO REFLECTION. INTRODUCTORY APHORISMS. APHORISM I. In philosophy equally as in poetry, it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors. APHORISM II. There is one sure way of giving freshness and importance to the most common-place maxims'that of reflecting on them in direct reference to our own state and conduct, to our own past and future being. APHOEISM III. To restore a common-place truth to its firstuncommon lustre, you need only translate it into action. But to do this, you must have reflected on its truth. APHORISM IV. LEIGHTON AND COLERIDGE. It is the advice of the wise man, Dwell at home, or, with yourself; and though there are very few that do this, yet it is surprising that the greatest part of mankind cannot be prevailed upon, at least to visit themselves sometimes; hut, according to the saying of the wise Solomon, The eyes of the fool are in the ends of the earth. A reflecting mind, says an ancient writer, is the spring and source of every good thing. Omnis boni principium intellectus cogitabundus. It is at once the disgrace and the misery of men, that they live without forethought. Suppose yourself fronting, a mirror. Now what the objects behind you are to their images at the same apparent distance before you, such is reflection to fore-thought. As a man without fore-thought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so f...

About the author

Born in Ottery St. Mary, England, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge studied revolutionary ideas at Cambridge before leaving to enlist in the Dragoons. After his plans to start a communist society in the United States with his friend Robert Southey, later named poet laureate of England, were botched, Coleridge instead turned his attention to teaching and journalism in Bristol. Coleridge married Southey's sister-in-law Sara Fricker, and they moved to Nether Stowey, where they became close friends with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. From this friendship a new poetry emerged, one that focused on Neoclassic artificiality. In later years, their relationship became strained, partly due to Coleridge's moral collapse brought on by opium use, but more importantly because of his rejection of Wordworth's animistic views of nature. In 1809, Coleridge began a weekly paper, The Friend, and settled in London, writing and lecturing. In 1816, he published Kubla Kahn. Coleridge reported that he composed this brief fragment, considered by many to be one of the best poems ever written lyrically and metrically, while under the influence of opium, and that he mentally lost the remainder of the poem when he roused himself to answer an ill-timed knock at his door. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and his sonnet Ozymandias are all respected as inventive and widely influential Romantic pieces. Coleridge's prose works, especially Biographia Literaria, were also broadly read in his day. Coleridge died in 1834.