uniformity went, as suggested already, special creation and the medieval dualism; with unity, the free unity of a real universe, goes an always creative life and, with regard to the fate of dualism under the newer view, this, even like the creation, has been wonderfully magnified or aggrandized, having become can I count on being understood?-a living principle of duality, a function, instead of remaining in its quondam character of a single dual structure. Evolution has made creation general, and natural as general, and dualism functional, compounding both, one might almost say, to infinity, so that those who have seen in evolution only anti-creationalism and only anti-dualism have certainly been seriously misled by some one, perhaps, as is not unthinkable, by the evolutionists themselves."4

It is as a fundamental principle of life and thought, as vital to-day as it was a century ago, that I am regarding dualism in this study of the principle of the Reconciliation of Opposites. And yet I am centering my attention on a writer who clearly belonged to the last century rather than to this, and to the very beginning of that century. There are two purposes which a study thus focused might well have, and these two purposes must be distinguished.

On the one hand, an attempt might be made to find in the earlier expressions of the principle certain direct suggestions of its later scientific significance. With due allowance for difference in point of view, we might seek between the lines or within the parentheses of former-day criticism, support for the conclusions of modern scientific analysis, and even some hints of positive contribution. Following such a method we should first ask in what sense, according to contemporary aesthetic theory, art may be said to "reconcile opposites." We might analyze, with Miss Puffer, the psychological effect of the structural oppositions found in the concrete work of art,-such oppositions as appear and are reconciled in spatial symmetry, plot conflict, and various forms of contrast. Or, considering the matter sociologically, we might ask in how far modern critics, following Tolstoi's lead," construe art as that transfer of feeling which finds its signifi

'Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. X, pp. 285-286. "The Psychology of Beauty.

What is Art?

cance in reconciling social oppositions,-obliterating class distinctions through the creation of a mutual, understanding sympathy. Or, to follow a different line of modern thought, we might treat the matter as Furry' has done, from the standpoint of epistemology, and investigate the general function of the aesthetic experience in reconciling eternally recurrent though ever-changing thought dualisms. And after some such investigation we might turn back to our earlier critics, hoping to find in their works passages which, when translated, would corroborate or even further develop our contemporary hypotheses.

On the other hand, the purpose of such a study might be to expound some expression of the principle primarily as a product of its own age. In this case we should keep to the historical method, assuming that the careful study of an idea as related to its own time may throw as much light on the significance of its later development as would a direct translation into modern terminology.

The historical method is the one that I have adopted in this study. I am not translating, but am studying Coleridge's own language, and asking what it means that he used just such language. I am not asking, primarily, how much truth of an absolute, scientific kind we can cull from out the mazes of his critical speculations, but rather, accepting all the mazes, I am studying his speculations in their own early nineteenth century form, and am asking what it means that Coleridge thought and talked about art and literature as he did.

Further, since I am assuming that the form of thought is related just as organically as the content to the vital interests of a period or an individual, my method is to some extent logical or formal. The Reconciliation of Opposites taken as a fundamental thought principle, appearing now in one form and now in another, has a formal history well worth investigating. In studying Coleridge's use of the principle I am not so much concerned. about the exact content of his formulae, the terms of his antitheses, as might be expected. I am more interested in analyzing their logic,-in trying to get at the significance of antithesis as a general form of art definition, and in studying the different forms. of opposition and reconciliation involved in Coleridge's critical concepts.

"The Aesthetic Experience.

2. GENERAL DEFINITION OF THE PRINCIPLE

The Reconciliation of Opposites, as an aesthetic principle, can perhaps be best defined and its general logical implications best indicated by carefully distinguishing it from a certain superficially similar formula which, in English criticism, seems to have been its logical as well as its chronological forerunner. Long before the German philosophers and their English disciples began speculating on the reconciliation of opposites involved in the Absolute and in Art, even in the sixteenth century beginnings of English literary criticism, we find writers defining poetry in a way that strangely suggests this philosophic formula, namely, as a combination of Instruction and Delight. Gregory Smith gives typical examples of this formula in his discussion of the sixteenth century apologists; he writes as follows: "In their rough definitions of the purpose of Poetry the defenders are careful not to subordinate the dulce to the utile. The end of Poetry is, with Sidney, 'to teach and delight.' 'It is well known,' says Nash, 'that delight doth prick men forward to the attaining of knowledge, and that true things are rather admired if they be included in some witty fiction, like to pearls that delight more if they be deeper set in gold.' Webbe's plea, which he borrows from Horace, is generally accepted. The perfect perfection of poetry is this, to mingle delight with profit in such wise that a reader might by his reading be a partaker of both." "8

There is certainly a similarity between this Instruction-Delight formula and the later definitions that make art the union of now one and now another pair of opposed elements. Yet logically the definitions are quite distinct and imply vastly different attitudes toward the object." According to the earlier definition it was the virtue of poetry that it combined two admirable prop

Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. I, p. xxv. Cf. Spingarn on Sidney's Defence: "In regard to the object, or function, of poetry, Sidney is at one with Scaliger. The aim of poetry is accomplished by teaching most delightfully a notable morality; or, in a word, by delightful instruction. Not instruction alone, or delight alone, as Horace had said, but instruction made delightful; and it is this dual function which serves not only as the end but as the very test of poetry." (Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, pp. 270-271.)

'For the analysis of the principle of antithesis that follows the writer is indebted to sundry articles and lectures by Professor A. H. Lloyd, especially the article entitled The Logic of Antithesis, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. VIII, pp. 281-289.

erties frequently sundered, sometimes loosely conceived as opposed. But Instruction and Delight were in no sense logical opposites-Poetry was not the logical reconciler of opposites. There was no real antithesis, no principle of opposition.

Nor should we expect to find real antithesis in these earlier definitions. The critics were altogether too much interested in one of the terms of the definition, Instruction, to use the form of antithesis, opposition and reconciliation. For in all antithesis there is balance, hence a feeling of indifference towards the terms of the antithesis. One term is as good as the other, and, in as far as they are conceived as real opposites, or the mutually exclusive terms of some universe of discourse, no considerable value is attached to either. For the fact that concepts of any sort are placed in antithesis means, logically, that the value of their traditional meanings as separate concepts is being superseded by some new undefined value that is vaguely felt to embody, hence reconcile, the two opposites; and through this new, larger conception, the individual terms are acquiring new meanings, new, undefined values, are being raised to the new plane of the reconciling concept.10 It follows that we use antithesis in a definition, that is, define an object as the union of necessarily opposed concepts, only when our prime interest is in the new undefined value that inheres in the object and is both rendering indifferent and transforming the terms of the antithesis.

The attitude that gives rise to the antithetic definition is not the attitude that characterized the sixteenth century apologists for .poetry. In the English criticism that issued in the InstructionDelight definition of poetry we find that the interest was centered, the real values inhered, in the terms of the definition, in the elements of instruction and delight as these had been traditionally understood, rather than in poetry as a new, transforming concept. It was the function of poetry that was being considered, and this meant to the critics the relation of poetry to certain already defined elements of life; it was these well defined elements-one of them in particular, in which the interest centered. Poetry was not standing in its own right in an aesthetic realm; it was being subordinated to other realms, primarily to that of morality. "The

10 Lloyd, The Logic of Antithesis.

11

In the following survey I am simply calling attention to certain characteristics of early English criticism that are clearly defined by Gregory Smith in the introduction to his Elizabethan Critical Essays and by J. E. Spingarn in his Literary Criticism in the Renaissance.

first problem of Renaissance criticism," Professor Spingarn writes, "was the justification of imaginative literature. The existence and continuity of the aesthetic consciousness, and perhaps, in a less degree, of the critical faculty, throughout the Middle Ages, can hardly be denied; yet distrust of literature was keenest among the very class of men in whom the critical faculty might be presupposed, and it was as the handmaid of philosophy, and most of all as the vassal of theology, that poetry was chiefly valued. In other words, the criteria by which imaginative literature was judged during the Middle Ages were not literary criteria." And the period of English criticism represented by Sidney's Defence, the period with which we are here concerned, was, he explains, "prepared for by the attacks which the Puritans directed against poetry, and especially the drama." Discussing the same period, Gregory Smith notes "that the greater forces which stimulated this literary defence were themselves unliterary. The justification, in order to meet such attacks, was naturally forced to take its stand on extraneous grounds.

9914

To put the matter more formally, Instruction and Delight were not the logical opposites of any universe of discourse. Poetry had not come into its own completely enough to serve as such a universe. It could not stand in its own self-sufficiency and perform the function of transvaluation that belongs to the reconciling concept of any antithesis. The very fact that the actual contest of the critics was so bitter, indicates that the concepts under consideration,-Instruction, Truth, Morality, and Delight, were still so narrowly conceived that they were susceptible merely of a compromising combination, not of that real reconciliation with their opposites which means transformation.15

The formula of the Reconciliation of Opposites, as distinct from any formula of combination, is one that could come into use only after a somewhat dogmatic morality had given place to aesthetic and philosophic bases of criticism. It manifests a spec

"Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, p. 3.

13 Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, p. 265.

14 Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. I, p. xiv.

15 Just as the formal definition shows an inorganic combination of the elements Instruction and Delight, so more concrete analysis reveals an essentially inorganic conception of the relation between the two. Nash's figure of the gold setting and the pearl, cited above, is representative of the general attitude. The insistence upon an allegorical interpretation of literature is an instance of the same inorganic dualism.