The passivity and activity of the mind in ‘ The Eolian Harp ’

127

And yet, his effort to combine materialism and idealism has a tension at its heart. First, the notion of God as ‘one intellectual breeze’ in nature causes the problem of pantheism. Right after the vision of ‘God of all’, the poet mentions that Sara disapproves of his idea: ‘thy more serious eye a mild reproof.’ Rejecting ‘such thoughts’, she ‘biddest me walk humbly with my God’ (ll. 51-2). He regards the notion as ‘vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring’ (ll. 57). It will later be seen how the poet deals with the problem of pantheism. Secondly, the issue of the passivity and activity of the mind arises. In his later period, one of the reasons why Coleridge rejected Hartley’s ideas is that the process of association seemed to imply a passive and mechanical approach to perception and mental acts.128 _{In Coleridge’s view, Hartley’s notion of associationism, in}

which ‘all the reality’ is dependent upon ‘the primary sensations’ and ‘the impressions’, is only involved in ‘controlling, determining, and modifying the phantasmal chaos of association’. Rather than ‘distinct powers’, for example, ‘will’ and ‘reason’, it is a ‘blind mechanism’ and ‘mere lawlessness’, and therefore ‘our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory.’129 _{In this respect, for}

Coleridge, association is a passive process which is not able to formulate the mind.

If we look at the early versions of ‘The Eolian Harp’, we find how the poet was struggling with the issue of the passivity and activity of the mind. In the

128

See, Barbara Bowen Oberg, ‘David Hartley and the Association of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 441-454 (p. 450); Allen, David Hartley, pp. 72-73; Richardson,

British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, p. 29; John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 233- 234.

129 _{BL I}

version of 1817, we can notice the sense of passivity in that ‘many a thought uncall’d and undetain’d / And many idle flitting phantasies, / Traverse my indolent and passive brain’ (ll. 39-41). But the second draft of the poem (1797) expresses the idea of passivity more clearly. Instead of ‘passive brain’, the draft uses ‘passive Mind’ explicitly. In addition, the different understandings of ‘organic Harps’ imply a tension between passivity and activity. Unlike the final version, the second draft provides a longer version of the famous culminating metaphysical vision:

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d,

That tremble into thought, as o’ev them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (the final version of 1817) And what if All of animated Life

Be but as Instruments diversly fram’d

That tremble into thought, while thro’ them breathes One infinite and intellectual Breeze,

And all in different Heights so aptly hung, That Murmurs indistinct and Bursts sublime, Shrill Discords and most soothing Melodies, Harmonious from Creation’s vast concent— Thus God would be the universal Soul, Mechaniz’d matter as th’ organic harps

And each one’s Tunes be that, which each calls I (l, 36-46) (the second draft)

Here attention should be given to the understanding of ‘organic Harps’. Whereas the Harps are described simply as ‘diversely fram’d’ in the final

version, the second draft stresses the diversity of the harps by articulating the sense of their individualities in detail. All the harps are different from one another on the grounds that they hang ‘aptly’ ‘all in different Heights’, and each one’s tunes reveal ‘I’. Magnuson makes an interesting comment on the ‘I’ of the second draft. If the ‘I’ is like a tune which is ‘wild’, ‘various’, and ‘random’, then selfhood is ‘an indefinite collection of random notes, unpredictable, unconnected, and without a unifying consciousness’.130 _{Here the ‘I’ as ‘an indefinite collection}

of random notes’ seems to imply the passivity of the mind over and against the notion of God as ‘the universal Soul’.131

Coleridge himself is aware of the disharmony of ‘diversely fram’d harps’,

130

Magnuson, Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville: Univesity Press of Virginia, 1974), pp. 2-3.

131

Interestingly, the ‘I’ as an indefinite collection of random notes reminds us of Hume’s idea of human consciousness as ‘a bundle or collection of different perceptions’. For Hume, the imagination is ‘the foundation of all our experience’ in the sense that we can discover ‘a stable world’ ‘only through the workings of the imagination’. He mentions that ‘I am naturally led to regard the world, as something real and durable, and as preserving its existence, even when it is no longer present to my perception’. He, however, argues that this real and durable world is a fiction: ‘The smooth passage of the imagination along the ideas of the resembling perceptions makes us ascribe to them a perfect identity. The interrupted manner of their appearance makes us consider them as so many resembling, but still distinct beings, which appear after certain intervals. The perplexity arising from this contradiction produces a propension to unite these broken appearances by the fiction of a continu’d existence’. See, David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 252, 197, 205. Also, Cairns Craig, ‘Coleridge, Hume, and the chains of the Romantic imagination’, in

Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Ian Duncan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 20-37 (p. 32); But Coleridge very much opposed Hume’s skepticism. On the one hand, he was interested in Hume’s thoughts: ‘The subject of my meditations ha[s] been the Relations of Thoughts to Things, in the language of Hume, of Ideas to Impressions’ (CL II, p. 672, a letter to Humphry Davy in February 1801). On the other hand, unlike Hume, Coleridge tried to develop the nature of the human self in terms of the possibility of its link with an objective existence or the transcendence. For Him, the primary imagination is ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (BL I, p. 304). Accordingly, the primary imagination appears to the ‘the faculty which mediates between sensation and perception, actively ordering these faculties into a body of knowledge. Without this principle they would simply be a mere chaos of sense impressions’. See, Peter J. Kitson, ‘Beyond the Enlightenment: The Philosophical, Scientific and Religious Inheritance’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Duncan Wu, Blackwell Publishing,

1999. <

http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=959/book?id=g9780631198529_97806311985 29> [accessed 10 May 2013].

but he is able to perceive harmony out of such disharmony. Their ‘Murmurs’ are ‘indistinct’, but ‘Bursts sublime’; they create ‘Shrill Discords’, but ‘most soothing Melodies, / Harmonious from Creation’s vast concent—’. These ‘diversely fram’d harps’ are ‘Mechaniz’d matter’, which implies the passivity of the mind in relation to Hartley’s mechanistic understanding of the mind, but ‘One infinite and intellectual Breeze’ creates the unity of the universe. In spite of ‘Shrill Discords’, the passive mind can produce a sense of unity owing to the unifying force of God. In this strange cluster of images that seem to contain contradictions Coleridge is working his way towards or trying to find a way to express an idea of God as the unifying force behind this discord.

In consequence, the differences between the second draft and the final version hint that the poet is struggling between the ideas of the passivity and the activity of the mind. While the passivity stands out in the early version, it becomes less conspicuous in the final version. Whether it is passivity or activity, there is no doubt that Coleridge’s main concern is to convey the unity of the universe. On the one hand, the second draft produces the unity of the universe in a mechanistic sense through the interaction between ‘Mechaniz’d matter’ and ‘One infinite and intellectual Breeze’. On the other hand, the final version creates the idea of ‘the one Life’ through the interaction between ‘that simplest Lute’ and ‘the desultory breeze’ even before the vision of ‘organic Harps’. And ‘the one Life’ brings about the sense of joy and love contrasted with the sense of mechanism. Yet, the fact that brain is described as ‘passive’ and Coleridge’s ‘organic Harps’ are subject to ‘one intellectual breeze’ suggests an anxiety about the status of the activity of the mind. In this respect, William Scheuerle

points out rightly that the vision of ‘organic Harps’ is not a hymn, but a question about the exercise of the mind.132 _{Furthermore, that issue causes another}

tension between an external world and the mind. If an external world is dependent upon the creativity of the mind, its meaning can be regarded simply as a projection of the mind. The complexities of this problem are explored more fully in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’.