Prefatory Note CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I Some Aspects of Coleridge's Philosophical III STANFORD LIBRARY INTRODUCTION I. STATEMENT OF THE POINT OF VIEW Such an aesthetic principle as that of the Union or Reconciliation of Opposites is likely to be most highly valued in an age that habitually talks in terms of the great fundamental opposites or antitheses, with keen consciousness of the element of opposition, that is, in a dualistic age. As Yrjö Hirn has indicated,1 summarizing Bosanquet's theory, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century conception of art as that which reconciled or mediated between certain acknowledged opposites, was a most welcome conception to philosophers of the old dualistic school, "who had to struggle with what seemed to them an irreconcilable opposition between reason and the senses," and to the ethical observer caught in the meshes of the "narrow antagonism between body and spirit." To a less dualistic age this conception is of less significance. Quoting further from Hirn, with reference to the mediating aesthetic faculty or the judgment of taste: "In proportion. . . as general science has been able to do away with the old dualism of higher and lower faculties, the judgment of taste has necessarily lost importance. In the development of monistic philosophy and monistic morals we may thus see one important factor by the influence of which aesthetics has been ousted from its central position." Without concerning ourselves here with the general fate of aesthetics, we must at least agree that so much is being said, of recent years, about the relativity of opposition, criticism is so persistently nullifying all absolute lines of demarcation, that there is some tendency to relegate all dualistic categories to the past. Certainly the intellectual dualism that preceded the nineteenth century's evolutionary theory is now frequently considered as something useful in its day but once and for all outgrown, and a corresponding judgment is passed upon all the metaphysical "reveling in ideas of the absolute" that marked the early attempts to reconcile the terms of the dualism. This is doubtless as it should be: the particular form of theorizing about opposites and their reconciliation that prevailed in YRANGLI MA the early nineteenth century can never exactly recur; dualism, if by the term is meant the dualistic theory of a past period, may well have departed forever. But dualism conceived in the larger sense, as a principle of thinking, has suffered no such fate. With reference to the larger meaning of dualism, and its necessary persistence in one form or another, I accept the interpretation given. in Professor Dewey's essay, The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge, and that in Professor Lloyd's sociological study, Conformity, Consistency, and Truth. In explaining the inevitable persistence of dualism, Professor Dewey writes: "The distinctions which the philosophers raise, the oppositions which they erect, the weary treadmill which they pursue between sensation and thought, subject and object, mind and matter, are not invented ad hoc, but are simply the concise reports and condensed formulae of points of view and of practical conflicts having their source in the very nature of modern life, and which must be met and solved if modern life is to go on its way untroubled, with clear consciousness of what it is about. . . . More especially I suggest that the tendency for all points at issue to precipitate in the opposition of sensationalism and rationalism is due to the fact that sensation and reason stand for the two forces contending for mastery in social life: the radical and the conservative. The reason that the contest does not end, the reason for the necessity of the combination of the two in the resultant statement, is that both factors are necessary in action; one stands for stimulus, for initiative; the other for control, for direction." Professor Dewey has here translated dualism from the terms of metaphysics into those of sociology and psychology, but the dualism is still there; it is a principle and a principle not only of thought but of life. Showing how, under evolutionism, dualism has come to be a "living principle" instead of a “given structure," Professor Lloyd writes: "The difference between mind and matter, subject and object, spiritual life and natural life, is now a difference that means, not the existence of two separate and mutually exclusive worlds or orders or substances, but the wealth, the inexhaustible life, the rich potentiality, even the creative activity of one." After showing that this creative activity means a living unity instead of the uniformity that went with the old dualistic notion of creation, he continues: "Evolution, as it is at last coming to be appraised, has thus given us a real universe, not merely a uniform one. With |