Although now almost completely unheard of in schools, for a considerably long time logic was regarded as an essential part of the education of youth. Samuel Coleridge followed this tradition in his planned, but never published textbook on logic, which was meant for the basis of education of all young people, who were keen on taking on a public career. Logic as such, Coleridge notes, is the final level in the first stage of education, which was meant not so much to teach anything, but to discipline and nurture the young mind and so to develop necessary mental skills for further life. This first stage should begin with teaching the child to read and then to classify different words into different grammatical categories, thus nurturing the skills of finding similarities and differences.
Logic, this final stage in the preliminary education, is then meant to develop the understanding of the young person. Coleridge’s notion of understanding mixes classical themes with clear Kantian influences. Originally, he notes, understanding or logos was simply a word for wisdom, but in time, true source of higher wisdom or reason was distinguished from understanding as a mere source of learning. Then again, Coleridge continues, understanding was separated from sensibility or pure intuition, which is the foundation of mathematics. This Kantian trinity of reason, understanding and sensibility Coleridge finally incorporates into a Schellingian framework - while in ordinary physics we start with the assumption that objects we sense exist independently of us and affect our sensibility, when dealing with the three faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason, we must instead abstract from all the objects and consider only subject of experience independently of what can be experienced.
Considering then understanding without any relation to its objects, Coleridge notes that we are left with nothing else, but the very forms involved in the use of understanding. Following Kant, he suggests that logic as a study of these forms gives us nothing but a canon, that is, a necessary shape to which the use of understanding must conform. This necessary shape is, unsurprisingly, syllogistic reasoning - for instance, when we first note some feature of a distinct object of understanding, then consider a part of this object and finally conclude that this part has the same feature as the whole object.
Coleridge is still not satisfied with merely stating this necessary shape - that would make for a very short book - but also considers what presuppositions we must assume behind this ability to use syllogistic reasoning. Firstly, he says, we must be able to distinguish objects from one another, either because these objects are naturally separate or because we have the ability abstract an object (say, a colour of a rose from the rose itself). Secondly, all syllogisms assume, Coleridge says, that what is true of some object of understanding is also true of its part. This general principle is something that understanding follows, but it obviously cannot justify it. Here Coleridge in a rather non-Kantian manner harps on the faculty of reason as the source of such immediately evident principles, which understanding can then just assume.
Coleridge goes somewhat further into the difference between understanding and reason. Understanding, as used in logic, Coleridge notes, creates conceptions, that is, unites different experiences by noting similarities they have. Yet, Coleridge continues, this secondary act of unification is dependent on a previous act of unification, in which human mind combines manifolds of sensation into unities, which then are interpreted as being independent of the subject, that is, as objects of experience. This act of distinguishing oneself from an object creates then in a sense the objects, at least as objects from the viewpoint of the human being - note the obvious Fichtean tendencies here. Similarly Fichtean is Coleridge’s next move: the act of distinguishing is dependent on a previous act, in which subject and object coincide, that is, on a human self-consciousness, which is then the basis of human reason, Coleridge says. Yet, making a Schellingian turn, Coleridge notes that this self-consciousness or human reason is not the ultimate ground, but must be dependent on some pure, more perfect type of self-consciousness, namely, God, and the intuitive knowledge of human reason means just human mind being in immediate connection with God’s mind.
Logic as the study of pure understanding, Coleridge says, is then ultimately dependent on the existence of God. To get to the level of logic, the purely self-conscious subject must have differentiated itself from an object, but this is not enough. Subject must then abstract from itself and regard the object as independent - a sort of subject of its own. This subject in the logical sense can then be related to various things we can say about it or to predicates. Thus, Coleridge notes, we create judgements, which are the material for logical conclusions.
Even in this explanation of the presuppositions of humans doing logic Coleridge has surpassed the limits of logic as a mere canon. He then surpasses the limits even more clearly, when he starts to discuss a more extensive notion of logic as a study of criterion of truth, which he calls dialectic. Coleridge follows Kant in noting that it seems impossible to give any concrete and still generally applicable guidelines for recognising true thoughts, beyond the formal demand that true thoughts correspond with their objects or topics - such guidelines would have to abstract from the peculiarities of the topics, although it is just these topics that would provide the criterion of truth.
Thus, Coleridge concludes, there appears to be only three meaningful answers for the question of truth. Firstly, God is truth in a strong sense that his thoughts are instantly real. This answer is then not useful for understanding truth of human thoughts, especially if they remain on the level of understanding. Secondly, we can note that for human mind true thoughts must be put into a shape compatible with logic. Yet, this second answer is just a negative criterion, since many consistent thoughts can still be untrue. Thirdly, Coleridge notes, we may speak of true words, if they correspond with thoughts we try to convey with them. Here the most we can do is to rely on common understanding of language speakers, or in more complex cases, on experts of certain topics.
The empty criterion of logic and the grammatical discussion of the meaning of words must then be filled with some material to make some positive sense of truth. One possible material would be the higher truth revealed by human reason, but this material in a sense surpasses what we can understand, Coleridge suggests. The second possible source of material for knowledge is provided by sensations, which allow us to infer the existence of an independent reality or nature. Yet, sensations as such do not constitute knowledge nor even experience, but experience contains also a subjective element, provided by the human mind. It is then the isolation of this subjective element, which Coleridge sees as the primary task of logic as dialectic.
Coleridge’s dialectic follows essentially the lead of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He first notes that human mind and especially form of sensibility is involved even in the production of perceptions, by situating them in a spatio-temporal framework. Without this framework, Coleridge implies, sensations would be just unordered chaos, but like a kaleidoscope makes junk into beautiful images, form of sensibility arranges sensations into an ordered whole. This operation of our sensibility is so natural to us that we cannot even imagine what it would be like, if sensations weren't spatio-temporally ordered.
Human mind does not stop at mere spatio-temporal perceptions, but also makes judgements about things perceived. Here, Coleridge introduces the division of judgements into analytical and synthetical, although his first example of this division is rather peculiar - Coleridge mentions that if we are thinking about a certain house and then consider our representation and find new, previously unclear details, this is still an analytic judgement, while connecting the representation of house to a completely new representation is then synthetic judgement. In any case, quite in Kantian fashion Coleridge notes that while all analytical judgements are based on the principle of non-contradiction,the truth of synthetical judgements is based on something else. Some of these synthetical judgements are derived from experience and their truth is based on them, but the possibility of synthetic judgement, not based on experience, must still be tested.
Just like Kant, Coleridge attaches the question of synthetical a priori judgements to Hume’s challenge against the notion of causality, and again like Kant, Coleridge notes that if Hume had considered mathematics to be something more than merely analytical science, he might have had different opinion about the causality also. Following the footsteps of the German philosopher, Coleridge remarks that just by considering two numbers - especially if they are very large - we cannot find out their sum, unless we actively combine the numbers in a calculation. Despite this non-analytical nature of mathematical truths, Coleridge thinks they are clearly non-experiential, because of their necessity. The foundation of this necessity, he says, is the spatio-temporal form of sensibility, which affects all our experiences.
Yet, Coleridge says, mere form of sensibility does not by itself explain how we can perform mathematics. Indeed, he continues, when we are studying mathematics, we are not engaging with mere figures and numbers, but also with thoughts concerning figures and numbers. For instance, we apply the notion of quantity in discussing mathematics. This notion must again be something non-empirical, because we can use it in such a necessary science as mathematics. Then again, it is not an intuition, but a concept, thus, Coleridge concludes, its source must be understanding, instead of sensibility. Coleridge is quickly lead to the twelve Kantian categories, derived from twelve forms of judgements. Here Coleridge’s logic abruptly breaks off, without him reaching the planned third part, which would have dealt with an even stronger notion of logic as an organon for discovering truths.
Coleridge’s logic, in the form as it now exists, is a rather strange hodgepodge of disparate fielements. Majority of the work is influenced by and often even copied from Kant’s works. Yet, at key points Coleridge appears to break the limits that Kant set for any meaningful philosophy. Indeed, we are missing a clear account how a person chained to the level of understanding can be raised up to the level where human thinking supposedly meets the divine thought.
