Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (review)

HUMANITIES 249 undermining the confidence of every political position. This edition (a reprint of the 1887 Philadelphia edition, with minimal modernizing) is, as the Press itself unashamedly proclaims, >a delight to handle.= Chapman includes a chronology and three >contextualizing= documents, the latter designed to remind us that real people (i.e. nonnovelists ) were talking about women=s opportunities and radical philosophical threats to good order in the late-eighteenth-century United States. We are given excerpts from Judith Sargent Murray=s On the Equality of the Sexes (1790), John Robison=s Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (1798), and Jedediah Morse=s >A Sermon Exhibiting the Present Dangers, and Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the United States= (1799). (The Robison piece, it might be worth noting, has resurfaced in recent years on the reading lists of certain American militia movements, a fact revealed during the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.) I was confused by the second section of the Works Cited, which claims to contain >Bibliographic Checklists of Works by C.B. Brown= but which appears to contain checklists of works about Brown. I would like to have seen in the bibliography the Peter Lang edition of Brown=s Literary Essays and Reviews, edited by Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (where, among many other short pieces, one will find Brown=s review of Noah Webster=s Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases 1799). These minor gripes aside, I am very pleased to see this edition. I have already used it in a graduate class on early American literature where both the introduction and the Robison excerpt proved very useful in framing and informing discussion. Constantia=s catastrophe is our spoil. (PAUL DOWNES) Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lectures 1818B1819: On the History of Philosophy. Edited by J.R. de J. Jackson. Number 8 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 volumes Princeton University Press. Volume 1: cxlvi, 458; volume 2: xii, 571. US $195.00 It is at least triply appropriate to notice this new edition of Coleridge=s 1818B19 philosophical lectures in the >Letters in Canada= issue of UTQ. Its two volumes constitute the eighth numbered title in the ongoing Princeton /Bollingen Collected Works of Coleridge, an edition of enormous scope, importance, and usefulness that was begun in the 1960s under the general editorship of Kathleen Coburn, of the University of Toronto, and has been associated with Toronto for more than three decades. The principal manuscript on which the present texts of Coleridge=s lectures are based was discovered by Coburn in England in 1933 and brought to Toronto, where it is now part of the renowned Coleridge Collection of Victoria University 250 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Library. And the editor of these new texts, J.R. de J. Jackson, is another distinguished professor at Toronto and a worthy successor to Coburn as the pre-eminent North American Coleridge scholar. Coleridge gave these lectures, fourteen in all, at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand, London, on successive Mondays between 14 December 1818 and 29 March 1819, alternating the last seven with lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, and other classics of medieval and Renaissance literature delivered on the Thursdays between 11 February and 25 March. In the two and a half years preceding these series, Coleridge had published nine volumes of poetry and prose, including Christabel and Kubla Khan, Sibylline Leaves, The Statesman=s Manual, the second Lay Sermon, Biographia Literaria, and a three-volume second edition of The Friend. His early collaborator Wordsworth had produced The Excursion in 1814 and a collected Poems in 1815, and would go on to issue several significant works in 1819B20, but Coleridge at the end of 1818 was both more esteemed and more interestingly controversial as a writer and thinker. The lectures, which in Jackson=s introductory description are >the most complete record we have of any of Coleridge=s public lectures,= present the gamut of Western philosophy, from Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Locke and the responses to Locke by modern German philosophers . They constitute...