Whose Marginalia Are These?

 

Hmm. Anyway: the story so far—I was chasing-up something pursuant to Coleridge's reading of Bishop Joseph Butler, the eighteenth-century Anglican theologian and moral philosopher. We know Coleridge read Butler; he several times refers to him, and George Whalley's multi-volume edition of STC's Marginalia records some notes he made in a copy of Butler's The Analogy of Religion (1736), perhaps (Whalley suggests) between 1808 and 1815 [CC 12:1, 867-9]. Whalley notes that the actual volume into which the notes were made is ‘not located’ and prints the three marginalia from his own ‘Lost List’ (a handlist Whalley prepared of ‘books known to have been annotated by Coleridge but not located at the time this edition went to press’; mostly these are marginalia copied-out from STC's books by others in other places).

So: for instance, Coleridge annotated this passage, in the first chapter of Butler's book (‘Of a Future Life’):

All presumption of death’s being the destruction of living beings, must go upon supposition that they are compounded; and so, discerptible. But since consciousness is a single and indivisible power, it should seem that the subject in which it resides must be so too. For were the motion of any particle of matter absolutely one and indivisible, so as that it should imply a contradiction to suppose part of this motion to exist, and part not to exist, i.e. part of this matter to move, and part to be at rest, then its power of motion would be indivisible; and so also would the subject in which the power inheres, namely, the particle of matter: for if this could be divided into two, one part might be moved and the other at rest, which is contrary to the supposition. In like manner it has been argued, and, for any thing appearing to the contrary, justly, that since the perception or consciousness, which we have of our own existence, is indivisible, so as that it is a contradiction to suppose one part of it should be here and the other there; the perceptive power, or the power of consciousness, is indivisible too: and consequently the subject in which it resides, i.e. the conscious Being.

This is what STC wrote:

Is the motion of a bullet from a gun divisible? If not, here is an indivisible action of a discerptible substance. I note this to shew the folly and danger of drawing arguments respecting the mind from the observed properties of matter—but (or/ and) in strict logic the whole must end in a paralogism, or idem pro alio [‘the same [term] for a different thing’] for what do we know of motion but as an act of our own consciousness—but as our consciousness so modified.

Now: Google have scanned various nineteenth-century editions of Butler's Analogy of Religion into Google Books (that excellent resource), including the London 1829 edition whose title page is at the head of this post, which I happened to be reading. Its first portion is quite extensively annotated, although (a) no name is written anywhere that might identify by whom, and (b) alas, most of the marginalia have been rendered too faint to read by the scanning process, perhaps because they were originally written in pencil (STC annotated books in pencil and pen, depending on what he had to hand). Click to embiggen, though it won't do you much good.

It's tantalising. Now, its very possible these notes were not written by STC, but it's not impossible they were, and it would be nice to be more sure. In one instance only (I think I'm right in saying) the Google Books scan actually captures a legible marginalium. It is, interestingly, attached to the same passage Whalley records STC as engaging with, which I quote above. Here's the whole page. You'll see an illegible pencil marginalium on the left, and a clearer, ink one at the bottom.

The left-hand marginalium is not, I think, long enough to be the passage Whalley records above (and indeed: though he doesn't have the actual volume, Whalley calculates it must be a 1788 or 1791, not an 1829, edition of Butler's work). But STC very often annotated the same book in different editions at different times, so that wouldn't disqualify this, on its own, from being Coleridge's. Here's a closer view of the bottom note:

So far as I can make it out, this says: ‘we find in old age the mental faculties almost invariably failing with the corporeal, not with reception of new ideas, which would be accommodated by weakness of the means of sensation’. Does that look like Coleridge's handwriting to you?

I'm honestly not sure. It's certainly a Coleridgean sentiment: Whalley records a later marginalium, annotating a passage in which Taylor argues: ‘Further, there are instances of mortal diseases, which do not at all affect our present intellectual powers; and this affords a presumption, that those diseases will not destroy these present powers. Indeed it appears that there is no presumption that the dissolution of the body is the destruction of the living agent. By the same reasoning, it must appear too, that there is no presumption, from their mutually affecting each other, that the dissolution of the body is the destruction of our present reflecting powers: indeed instances of their not affecting each other, afford a presumption of the contrary.’ To which Coleridge objected:

This is surely a sophism. We do not imagine that the lungs are instruments of thought or of love—but of breathing—but we now that breathing is a necessary condition of tyhe motion & proper warmth of the blood—& these of the proper functions of the brain. What wonder then if a man's brain should remain a fit instrument for thinking, while the lungs continue to permit breathing, tho' in pain. But let the disorder or a bullet destroy the lungs, the thought-organ is soon rendered useless. Butler ought to have shewn instances of diseases attacking the probable organs of thought, such as inflammations or palsies of the brain, that left the reflective powers in full vigor. This he could not do, & less than this is Legerdemain. [CC 12:1, 868]

Coleridge annotated thousands of volumes over the course of his life, and it's possible that these marginalia are his, and that this volume happened to be the one Google selected to digitise. It's also possible this is some quite other geezer.  What do you think?