Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previous
collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared
in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work had
been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit for
the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and the
probability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written material
equal in amount to more than a volume--of course, an entirely different
thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available written
material existed for setting comprehensively before the public, in
Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical system
with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there were
fragments--for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, and
beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the
margins and fly-leaves of books.
With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise
the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than
such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and
explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all
correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to
whatsoever the human mind can contemplate--sensuous or supersensuous--of
experience, purpose, or imagination.
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