218 IDEA OF THE PROMETHEUS OF ÆSCHYLUS.

tion of the light which my theory throws both on the sense and the beauty of numerous passages of this stupendous poem, I must reserve for a future communication.

NOTES.*

v. 15. pápayyı:-' in a coomb, or combe.' v. 17.

ἐξωριάζειν γὰρ πατρὸς λόγους βαρύ.

Evapiály, as the editor confesses, is a word introduced into the text against the authority of all editions and manuscripts. I should prefer opálev, notwithstanding its being a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον. The ε-seems to my tact too free and easy a word;and yet our 'to trifle with' appears the exact meaning.

SUMMARY OF AN ESSAY

ON THE FUNDAMENTAL POSITION OF THE MYSTERIES IN RELATION TO GREEK TRAGEDY.

HE Position, to the establishment of which

THE

Mr. Coleridge regards his essay as the Prolegomena, is that the Greek Tragedy stood in the same relation to the Mysteries, as the Epic Song,

Written in Bp. Blomfield's edition, and communicated by Mr. Cary. Ed.

and the Fine Arts to the Temple Worship, or the Religion of the State; that the proper function of the Tragic Poet was under the disguise of popular superstitions, and using the popular Mythology as his stuff and drapery to communicate so much and no more of the doctrines preserved in the Mysteries as should counteract the demoralizing influence of the state religion, without disturbing the public tranquillity, or weakening the reverence for the laws, or bringing into contempt the ancestral and local usages and traditions on which the patriotism of the citizens mainly rested, or that nationality in its intensest form which was little less than essential in the constitution of a Greek republic. Το establish this position it was necessary to explain the nature of these secret doctrines, or at least the fundamental principles of the faith and philosophy of Elensis and Samothrace. The Samothracian Mysteries Mr. Coleridge supposes to have been of Phoenician origin, and both these and the Elensinian to have retained the religious belief of the more ancient inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, prior to their union with the Hellenes and the Egyptian colonies that it comprised sundry relics and fragments of the Patriarchal Faith, the traditions historical and prophetic of the Noetic Family, though corrupted and depraved by their combination with the system of Pantheism, or the Worship of the Universe as God (Jupiter est quodcunque vides) which Mr. Coleridge contends to have been the

C

first great Apostacy of the Ancient World. But a religion founded on Pantheism, is of necessity a religion founded on philosophy, i. e. an attempt to determine the origin of nature by the unaided strength of the human intellect, however unsound and false that philosophy may have been. And of this the sacred books of the Indian Priests afford at once proof and instance. Again: the earlier the date of any philosophic scheme, the more subjective will it be found-in other words the earliest reasoners sought in their own minds the form, measure and substance of all other power. Abstracting from whatever was individual and accidental, from whatever distinguished one human mind from another, they fixed their attention exclusively on the characters which belong to all rational beings, and which therefore they contemplated as mind itself, mind in its essence. And however averse a scholar of the present day may be to these first fruits of speculative thought, as metaphysics, a knowledge of their contents and distinctive tenets is indispensable as history. At all events without this knowledge he will in vain attempt to understand the spirit and genius of the arts, institutions and governing minds of ancient Greece. The difficulty of comprehending any scheme of opinion is proportionate to its greater or lesser unlikeness to the principles and modes of reasoning in which our own minds have been formed. Where the difference is so great as almost to amount to contrariety,

no clearness in the exhibition of the scheme will remove the sense, or rather, perhaps the sensation, of strangeness from the hearer's mind. Even beyond its utmost demerits it will appear obscure, unreal, visionary. This difficulty the author anticipates as an obstacle to the ready comprehension of the first principles of the eldest philosophy, and the esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries; but to the necessity of overcoming this the only obstacle, the thoughtful inquirer must resign himself, as the condition under which alone he may expect to solve a series of problems the most interesting of all that the records of ancient history propose or suggest.

The fundamental position of the Mysteries, Mr. Coleridge contends, consists in affirming that the productive powers or laws of nature are essentially the same with the active powers of the mind -in other words that mind, or Nous, under which term they combine the universal attributes of reason and will, is a principle of forms or patterns, endued with a tendency to manifest itself as such; and that this mind or eternal essence exists in two modes of being. Namely, either the form and the productive power, which gives it outward and phonomenal reality, are united in equal and adequate proportions, in which case it is what the eldest philosophers, and the moderns in imitation of them, call a law of nature: or the form remaining the same, but with the productive power in unequal or inadequate proportions, whether the diminution be

effected by the mind's own act or original determination not to put forth this inherent power, or whether the power have been repressed, and as it were driven inward by the violence of a superior force from without, and in this case it was called by the most Ancient School "Intelligible Number," by a later School "Idea," or Mind—кar' ¿¿oxnv. To this position a second was added, namely, that the form could not put forth its productive or self-realizing power without ceasing at the same moment to exist for itself,—i. e. to exist, and know itself as existing. The formative power was as it were alienated from itself and absorbed in the product. It existed as an instinctive, essentially intelligential, but not self-knowing, power. It was law, Jupiter, or (when contemplated plurally) the Dii Majores. On the other hand, to possess its own being consciously, the form must remain single and only inwardly productive. To exist for itself, it must continue to exist by itself. It must be an idea; but an idea in the primary sense of the term, the sense attached to it by the oldest Italian School and by Plato, not as a synonyme of, but in contra-distinction from, image, conception or notion: as a true entity of all entities the most actual, of all essences the most essential.

Now on this Antithesis of idea and law, that is of mind as an unproductive but self-knowing power, and of mind as a productive but unconscious power, the whole religion of pantheism as disclosed in the Mysteries turns, as on its axis, bi-polar.