Logic by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (review)

represent fragments of a single psyche. It is another to state flatly that Alvar (in Remorse) represents 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself: and that Ordonio (his younger brother) 'represents the erratic despair of Coleridge in his moods of dejection.' The conflict can certainly be read psychologically , but this biographical insistence is tactless and unnecessary. Generally , the treatment of characters as allegorical is handled in terms of rather crude equations by which innocent heroines 'represent' 'Innocence: or Eve, or unfallen nature. If this simple aIlegorization works, then it seems to me that one would be justified in dismissing all the plays outright. The point may be valid, but it needs more tactful, careful expression. According to the book's basic thematic paradigm, each play enacts a version of rebellion against the Father followed by some consideration of the attempt to regain paradise through union with spirit and nature. The diagrams in the conclusion, showing the various relations of the hero to the realms of spirit, nature, and the demonic, are suggestive without being convincing as readings of the individual plays. I have trouble finding a connection between this very thematic treatment of Romantic tragedy and the book's attempt to isolate a genre for discussion. In the introduction 'the influence of Gothic melodrama and its infectious sentimentality ' is cited as a reason for the weakness of Romantic tragedy. Yet this infection is the central interest of Gottlieb's book: her theme of paradise lost is most apparent in the Gothic novel and in poetry and plays influenced by it, and her book is therefore concerned less with Romantic tragedy in particular than with general themes in all varieties of Romantic narrative. A stronger sense of this context would make it a better book. It does have some interest for readers of Romantic literature as a study of themes and narrative patterns, but it says little about tragedy specifically, and it is seriously weakened by problems of style and presentation. (ANNE McWHIR) Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Logic. Edited by R.j.dej. jackson Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, volume '3. Bollingen series LXXV Princeton University Press IRoutledge & Kegan Paul. lxvii, 420. $30.00 From 1803 to about 1822 Coleridge was working off and on at a 'Logosophia: part of which was to be a treatise on philosophical logic which could be used in the education of persons 'in ordinary life, the Senate, Pulpit, Bar, etc.' This treatise has at long last been published under the editorship of Professor Jackson of the University of Toronto. An unkind critic might ask whether it would have been published at all if it were not for the colossal labour of love of Dr Kathleen Coburn and her associates in turning all Coleridge's books and manuscripts into volumes HUMANITIES 423 of the Collected Works. I think we must own that it is hard to imagine the persons for whom Coleridge said he was writing turning to it in his day as a guide to thinking. It is fairly difficult reading, especially in the later parts. In our day it could stand up as a work on Kantian philosophical logic, though of course logic itself as a formal study has changed almost beyond recognition from the concentrationon the syllogism (which Coleridge understood very well). And Kantian studies have by now produced a host of books on transcendental lOgic. If we read this work now, it will be for what it tells us about Coleridge's own mind. And that is a good deal, more than justifying publication. It shows him capable of sustained philosophical thinking, and if there are a number of passages which are virtually translations from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, these are assimilated into a continuous exposition, with as much acknowledgment as might have been thought necessary by the conventions of the time. What he is giving is not an all-round introduction to logic; it is an exposition of Kant's transcendental method, with a very real appreciation of how even the rudimentary comparisons and classifications, which are at the base of any thinking, are only possible through original powers of the mind. Coleridge saw the Kantian critique as indeed a 'prolegomenon to any...