Coleridge and Sanderson

Notebook entry 3032 there has never been traced to its source. Until now, that is: it's Coleridge summarising the following passage from a Robert Sanderson sermon:

It then remaineth to understand this text and chapter of that other and later kind of spiritual gifts; those graces of edification, (or gratiæ gratis date) whereby men are enabled in their several callings, according to the quality and measure of the graces they have received, to be profitable members of the public body, either in church or commonwealth. Under which appellation, (the very first natural powers and faculties of the soul only excepted, which flowing à principiis speciei, are in all men the same and like, I comprehend all other secondary endowments and abilities whatsoever of the reasonable soul, which are capable of the degrees of more and less, and of better and worse, together with all subsidiary helps any way conducing to the exercise of any of them; whether they be, First, supernatural graces, given by immediate and extraordinary infusion from God, such as were the gifts of tongues, and of miracles, and of healings, and of prophecy properly so called, and many other like, which were frequent in the infancy of the church, and when this epistle was written, according as the necessity of those primitive times considered, God saw it expedient for his church; or whether they be, Secondly, such as philosophers call natural dispositions, such as are promptness of wit, quickness of conceit, fastness of memory, clearness of understanding, soundness of judgment, readiness of speech, and other like, which flow immediately à principiis individui, from the individual condition, constitution, and temperature of particular persons. Thirdly, such as philosophers call intellectual habits; which is when those natural dispositions are so improved and perfected by education, art, industry, observation, or experience, that men become thereby skilful linguists, subtle disputers, copious orators, profound divines, powerful preachers, expert lawyers, physicians, historians, statesmen, commanders, artizans, or excellent in any science, profession, or faculty, whatsoever.) [Sanderson, ‘The Third Sermon: Ad Clerum’; delivered in Lincoln, 13th March 1620]

The text for this sermon was 1 Corinthians 12:7: ‘But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.’ This is interesting, because the relationship of the ‘species’ and the ‘individuum’ is important to the Biographia Literaria, and it suggests that Sanderson fed-into Coleridge's thinking for that book. (He does say, in ch. 10 of that book, that he has ‘followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition’, but that's the only time the theologian's name is mentioned). It interests me that STC jots down the first two of Sanderson's distinctions but not the third. There is something of a problematic, as the phrase goes, in Biographia with respect to Coleridean dyads and triads. So for instance, his ‘primary imagination’, ‘secondary imagination’ and ‘fancy’ distinction in ch 12 becomes, Sara Coleridge tells us, a dyad at some later point in his thought: he apparently annotated his copy to cross out the first and amalgamate the two kinds of imagination together.

Later in this same sermon, Sanderson says ‘prayer without study is presumption, and study without prayer atheism: the one bootless the other fruitless’, which seems to me a very Coleridgean sentiment. It might be worth excavating exactly what STC took from Sanderson, actually.