Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridgewas an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 October 1772
Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.
Motives are symptoms of weakness, and supplements for the deficient energy of the living principle, the law within us. Let them then be reserved for those momentous acts and duties in which the strongest and best-balanced natures must feel themselves deficient, and where humility no less than prudence prescribes deliberation.
As long as we have to administer the law we must do so according to the law as it is. We are not here to make the law.
It is the duty of the Judge in criminal trials to take care that the verdict of the jury is not founded upon any evidence except that which the law allows.
We have to administer the law whether we like it or no.
A Court has no right to strain the law because it causes hardship.
We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.
I must lay down the law as I understand it, and as I read it in books of authority.
Law grows, and though the principles of law remain unchanged, yet (and it is one of the advantages of the common law) their application is to be changed with the changing circumstances of the times. Some persons may call this retrogression, I call it progression of human opinion.
I am sure from my experience of juries that, in a criminal case especially, they will obey the law as declared by the Judge; they will take the law from the Judge, whether they like it or do not like it, and apply it honestly to the facts before them.
As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not" is their characteristic formula.
He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.