Explore "Philosophy of Young Men" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young / men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds, / and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I / rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or / wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of / facts and personal experiences. Mr. -- -- is, I suppose, one of the rising / young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making / remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable / with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute / ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of / selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he / grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, / otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find / them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "But then," said Mr. / -- -- , "_that_ principle of selection came from facts! " -- "To be sure! " I / replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those / antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for / ever, -- but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous / aim or principle. " He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon's induction: / I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps / enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for / the Baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction -- a very different thing.[1]
[Footnote 1: / As far as I can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by / Mr. Coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the Platonic / and Baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the / Friend, from p. 176 to 216. No edition of the Novum Organum should ever be / published without a transcript of it. -- ED.]