Biographia Literaria

- By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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English poet, literary critic and philosopher (1772–1834) "Coleridge" redirects here. For other uses, see Coleridge (disambiguation). This article is about the poet. For the composer, see Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Samuel Taylor Coleridge1795 portraitBorn(1772-10-21)21 October 1772Ottery St Mary, Devon, EnglandDied25 July 1834(1834-07-25) (aged 61)Highgate, Middlesex, EnglandOccupationPoetphilosophercriticmoralisttheologianAlma materJesus College, CambridgeSubjectSpiritual philosophypoliticsreligionLiterary movementRomanticismNotable worksThe Rime of the Ancient MarinerKubla KhanChristabelconversation poemsBiographia LiterariaSpouse Sara Fricker ​(m. 1795)​Children4, including Hartley, Sara and DerwentRelativesJames Coleridge (brother)Signature Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊlərɪdʒ/ KOH-lə-rij;[1] 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. 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 William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief".[2] He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime.[3] He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction. Although experiencing a turbulent career and personal life with a variety of highs and lows, Coleridge's esteem grew after his death, and he became considered one of the most influential figures in English literature. For instance, a 2018 report by The Guardian labelled him "a genius" who had progressed into "one of the most renowned English poets." Organisations such as the Church of England celebrate his work during public events such as a "Coleridge Day" in June, with these activities including literary recitals.[4] Early life and education[edit] Main article: Early life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England.[5] Samuel's father was the Reverend John Coleridge, the well-respected vicar of St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary and was headmaster of the King's School, a free grammar school established by King Henry VIII in the town. He had previously been master of Hugh Squier's School in South Molton, Devon, and lecturer of nearby Molland.[6] John Coleridge had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by the Reverend Mr. Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809),[7] probably the daughter of John Bowden, mayor of South Molton, Devon, in 1726.[8] Coleridge suggests that he "took no pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself.[9] After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school which was founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles.[10] In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read."[11] Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in recollections of his school days in Biographia Literaria: I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master...At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes...In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words...In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!...Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it ...worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises...to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day.[12] He later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem Frost at Midnight: "With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birth-place."[13] From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge.[14] In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote attacking the slave trade.[15] In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the 15th (The King's) Light Dragoons using the false name "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache",[16] perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of "insanity" and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from the university.[citation needed] Pantisocracy and marriage[edit] Mary Matilda Betham, Sara Coleridge (Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Portrait miniature, 1809 Image of Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Vision of Sir Launfal (by Coleridge and James Russell Lowell), published by Sampson Low, 1906. Plaque commemorating Coleridge at St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary Cambridge and Somerset[edit] At Jesus College, Coleridge was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey with whom he collaborated on the play The Fall of Robespierre. Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, later abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795, the two friends married sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol,[17] but Coleridge's marriage with Sara proved unhappy. By 1804, they were separated. When Coleridge wrote to his brother he laid all the blame on Sara: "The few friends who have been Witnesses of my domestic life have long advised separation as the necessary condition of everything desirable for me..." Subsequent biographers have not agreed with Coleridge's negative view of the wife he called his 'Sally Pally' when he first married her.[18][19] A third sister, Mary, had already married a third poet, Robert Lovell, and both became partners in Pantisocracy. Lovell also introduced Coleridge and Southey to their future patron Joseph Cottle, but died of a fever in April 1796. Coleridge was with him at his death. In 1796 he released his first volume of poems entitled Poems on Various Subjects, which also included four poems by Charles Lamb as well as a collaboration with Robert Southey[citation needed] and a work suggested by his and Lamb's schoolfriend Robert Favell. Among the poems were Religious Musings, Monody on the Death of Chatterton and an early version of The Eolian Harp entitled Effusion 35. A second edition was printed in 1797, this time including an appendix of works by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, a young poet to whom Coleridge had become a private tutor. In 1796 he also privately printed Sonnets from Various Authors, including sonnets by Lamb, Lloyd, Southey and himself as well as older poets such as William Lisle Bowles. Coleridge made plans to establish a journal, The Watchman, to be printed every eight days to avoid a weekly newspaper tax.[20] The first issue of the short-lived journal was published in March 1796. It had ceased publication by May of that year.[21] The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in what is now known as Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In 1795, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles [5 km] away.) Besides The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative poem Christabel. The writing of Kubla Khan, written about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his legendary palace at Xanadu, was said to have been interrupted by the arrival of "a person on business from Porlock" – an event that has been embellished upon in such varied contexts as science fiction and Nabokov's Lolita. During this period, he also produced his much-praised "conversation poems" This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale. In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems, but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was the longest work and drew more praise and attention than anything else in the volume. In the spring Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel[22] while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on Toulmin's strength, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin, "I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard that his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere [sic] (Beer). These events cut cruelly into the hearts of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like the true practical Christian, – there is indeed a tear in his eye, but that eye is lifted up to the Heavenly Father."[23] West Midlands and the North[edit] This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Coleridge also worked briefly in Shropshire, where he came in December 1797 as locum to its local Unitarian minister, Dr. Rowe, in their church in the High Street at Shrewsbury. He is said to have read his Rime of the Ancient Mariner at a literary evening in Mardol. He was then contemplating a career in the ministry, and gave a probationary sermon in High Street church on Sunday, 14 January 1798. William Hazlitt, a Unitarian minister's son, was in the congregation, having walked from Wem to hear him. Coleridge later visited Hazlitt and his father at Wem but within a day or two of preaching he received a letter from Josiah Wedgwood II, who had offered to help him out of financial difficulties with an annuity of £150 (approximately £13,000 in today's money[24]) per year on condition he give up his ministerial career. Coleridge accepted this, to the disappointment of Hazlitt who hoped to have him as a neighbour in Shropshire.[25] From 16 September 1798, Coleridge and the Wordsworths left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. In February 1799 he enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn.[26] During this period, he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism and critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English. He continued to pioneer these ideas through his own critical writings for the rest of his life (sometimes without attribution), although they were unfamiliar and difficult for a culture dominated by empiricism. In 1799, Coleridge and the Wordsworths stayed at Thomas Hutchinson's farm on the River Tees at Sockburn, near Darlington. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's daughter Sara Coleridge – 1830. Portrait by Richard James Lane It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem Love, addressed to Sara Hutchinson. The knight mentioned is the mailed figure on the Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn church. The figure has a wyvern at his feet, a reference to the Sockburn Worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a possible source for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky).[a][b] The worm was supposedly buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; this was the "greystone" of Coleridge's first draft, later transformed into a "mount". The poem was a direct inspiration for John Keats' famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.[29] Coleridge's early intellectual debts, besides German idealists like Kant and critics like Lessing, were first to William Godwin's Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's Observations on Man, which is the source of the psychology which is found in Frost at Midnight. Hartley argued that one becomes aware of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived by noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy"). Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a continued desecration of literature. In 1800, he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends in Greta Hall at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to be near Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. He stayed with the Wordsworths for eighteen months, but was a difficult houseguest, as his dependency on laudanum grew and his frequent nightmares would wake the children. He was also a fussy eater, to the frustration of Dorothy Wordsworth, who had to cook. For example, not content with salt, Coleridge sprinkled cayenne pepper on his eggs, which he ate from a teacup.[30] His marital problems, nightmares, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers fuelled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an intensification of his philosophical studies.[31] In 1802, Coleridge took a nine-day walking holiday in the fells of the Lake District. Coleridge is credited with the first recorded descent of Scafell to Mickledore via Broad Stand, although this may have been more due to his getting lost than a purposeful new route. He coined the term mountaineering.[32] Later life and increasing drug use[edit] Coleridge at age 42, portrait by Washington Allston Main article: Coleridge and opium Travel and The Friend[edit] In 1804, he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Civil Commissioner, Alexander Ball, a task he performed successfully. He lived in San Anton Palace in the village of Attard. He gave this up and returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and then travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas De Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested that this reflects De Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's.[33] His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814. His addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular and humiliating enemas.[34] In 1809, Coleridge made his second attempt to become a newspaper publisher with the publication of the journal entitled The Friend. It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge's typically ambitious style, was written, edited, and published almost entirely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be highly disorganised and had no head for business, the publication was probably doomed from the start. Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis and Coleridge was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp",[35] Tom Poole and one or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan to continue. The Friend was an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism. Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times. Years after its initial publication, a revised and expanded edition of The Friend, with added philosophical content including his 'Essays on the Principles of Method', became a highly influential work and its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: final years and death[edit] Blue plaque, 7 Addison Bridge Place, West Kensington, London From 1810 to 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued the play's reputation, and his thoughts on it are often still published as supplements to the text. In 1812, he allowed Robert Southey to make use of extracts from his vast number of private notebooks in their collaboration Omniana; Or, Horae Otiosiores. In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by John Murray, Lord Byron's publisher, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe's work that purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).[36] From 1814 to 1816, Coleridge rented from a local surgeon, Mr Page, in Calne, Wiltshire. He seemed able to focus on his work and manage his addiction, drafting Biographia Literaria. A blue plaque marks the property today.[37][38] In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3, The Grove.[39] It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson. In Gillman's home, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Hush (1820), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830).[40] He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as Essay on Faith (1838)[41] and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840).[42] A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century.[43] Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which form his "Opus Maximum", a work which was in part intended as a post-Kantian work of philosophical synthesis.[44] The work was never published in his lifetime, and has frequently been seen as evidence for his tendency to conceive grand projects which he then had difficulty in carrying through to completion. But while he frequently berated himself for his "indolence", the long list of his published works calls this myth into question. Critics are divided on whether the "Opus Maximum", first published in 2002, successfully resolved the philosophical issues he had been exploring for most of his adult life.[45] Coleridge died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.[46]Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being, so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication to being generally, as far as the same is not the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me; in other words a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim (regula maxima, or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings. Essay on Faith Carlyle described him at Highgate: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle...The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon."[47] Remains[edit] Coleridge's grave in St Michael's Church, Highgate, London Coleridge is now buried in the aisle of St. Michael's Parish Church in Highgate, London. He was originally buried at the Old Highgate Chapel, next to the main entrance of Highgate School. Coleridge could see the red door of the then new church from his last residence across the green, where he lived with a doctor he had hoped might cure him (in a house owned until 2022 by Kate Moss). When it was discovered Coleridge's vault had become derelict, the coffins – Coleridge's and those of his wife Sarah, daughter Sara Coleridge, son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge, and grandson Herbert Coleridge, were moved to St. Michael's Highgate after an international fundraising appeal in 1961.[48] [4] [49] Drew Clode, a member of St. Michael's stewardship committee states, "They put the coffins in a convenient space which was dry and secure, and quite suitable, bricked them up and forgot about them." A recent excavation revealed the coffins were not in the location most believed, the far corner of the crypt, but actually below a memorial slab in the nave inscribed with: "Beneath this stone lies the body of Samuel Taylor Coleridge".[4] St. Michael's plans to restore the crypt and allow public access. Says vicar Kunle Ayodeji of the plans: "...we hope that the whole crypt can be cleared as a space for meetings and other uses, which would also allow access to Coleridge's cellar."[4] Poetry[edit] See also: List of poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge's mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth's great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge's originality. As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A. O. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards.[50] The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan[edit] Coleridge draft of the poem Kubla Khan Coleridge is arguably best known for his longer poems, particularly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all." Millions more who have never read the poem nonetheless know its story thanks to the 1984 song "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden. Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.[citation needed] Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional "Romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing."[citation needed] Conversation poems[edit] Main article: Conversation poems The Eolian Harp (1795) Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement (1795) This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison (1797) Frost at Midnight (1798) Fears in Solitude (1798) The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) Dejection: An Ode (1802) To William Wordsworth (1807) The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". The term was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well.[51][52] The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge's finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, "With Dejection, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight shows Coleridge at his most impressive."[53] They are also among his most influential poems, as discussed further below. Harper considered that the eight poems represented a form of blank verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton".[54] In 2006 Robert Koelzer wrote about another aspect of this apparent "easiness", noting that Conversation poems such as "Coleridge's The Eolian Harp and The Nightingale maintain a middle register of speech, employing an idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets itself be taken as 'merely talk' rather than rapturous 'song'."[55] A statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet Harbour, Somerset, England The last ten lines of Frost at Midnight were chosen by Harper as the "best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet."[56] The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his side: Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. In 1965, M. H. Abrams wrote a broad description that applies to the Conversation poems: "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation."[57] In fact, Abrams was describing both the Conversation poems and later poems influenced by them. Abrams' essay has been called a "touchstone of literary criticism".[58] As Paul Magnuson described it in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called the 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre that began with Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Shelley's Stanzas Written in Dejection and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, and was a major influence on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden."[52] Literary criticism[edit] Biographia Literaria[edit] In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817. The work delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth.[59][60] Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text and into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical analysis and emotion. However, Eliot also criticises Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are provoked by the work being studied.[61] Hugh Kenner in Historical Fictions, discusses Norman Fruman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel and suggests that the term "criticism" is too often applied to Biographia Literaria, which both he and Fruman describe as having failed to explain or help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the rational process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking that makes the volume more of a biography than a work of criticism.[62] In Biographia Literaria and his poetry, symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life. Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic[edit] Engraving of a scene from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The frozen crew and the albatross by Gustave Doré (1876) Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe's books and The Mad Monk, among others. He comments in his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, – to reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est." and "The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite...We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured." However, Coleridge used these elements in poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published in 1816, but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like these both drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic romance. Coleridge also made considerable use of Gothic elements in his commercially successful play Remorse.[63] Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. C. S. Lewis also makes mention of his name in The Screwtape Letters (as a poor example of prayer, in which the devils should encourage). Religious beliefs[edit] Part of a series onConservatism Variants Authoritarian Corporatist Cultural Fiscal Green Liberal Libertarian Moderate National Paternalistic Populist Pragmatic Progressive Reactionary Religious Social Traditionalist Ultra Principles Ancestral worship Authority Traditional Class collaboration Collective identity Cultural heritage Cultural values Culture of life Pro-Life Discipline Duty Elitism Aristocracy Meritocracy Noblesse oblige Ethical order Familialism Family values Fundamentalism Gender roles Complementarianism Historism Honour Imperialism Law and order Loyalty Maternalism Monarchism Royalism Nationalism Norms Conventions Customs Mores Ordered liberty Organicism Organized religion Orthodoxy Patriotism  Property rights Public morality Rule of law Social hierarchy Social institutions Social order Sovereignty State religion Stewardship Subsidiarity Tradition Intellectuals Johnson Hume Burke More Maistre Bonald Haller Chateaubriand Coleridge Karamzin Savigny Carlyle Newman Tocqueville Cortés Taine Le Bon Belloc Iorga Chesterton Spengler Savarkar Schmitt Jünger Evola Strauss Röpke Oakeshott Burnham Lefebvre Kuehnelt-Leddihn Gómez Dávila Kirk Koselleck Buckley Sowell Mansfield Scruton Hitchens Peterson Works Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Considerations on France (1796) Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1798) The Genius of Christianity (1802) On the Pope (1819) Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) Democracy in America (1835) The Concept of the Political (1932) The Conservative Mind (1953) The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) How to Be a Conservative (2014) Politicians Adams Pitt Canning Metternich Disraeli Bismarck Salisbury Dmowski Mannerheim Baldwin Maurras Horthy Metaxas Churchill Adenauer De Gasperi Chiang Salazar De Gaulle Dollfuss Franco Khomeini Reagan Powell Pinochet Marcos Park Smith Suharto Lee Zia Thatcher Kohl Fujimori Trump Netanyahu Modi Putin Bolsonaro Orbán Meloni Organizations Centrist Democrat International European Conservatives and ReformistsParty European People's Party Identity and Democracy International Democrat Union Muslim Brotherhood Tradition, Family, Property Religion Anglo-Catholicism Christian right Clericalism Confucianism Conservative Christianity Hindutva Islamism Jewish conservatism Religious Zionism Traditionalist Catholicism Integralism Ultramontanism Traditionalist School Perennialism Personal variants Berlusconism Cameronism Chiangism Erdoğanism Francoism Fujimorism Gaullism Janismo Maurrassisme Mellismo Metaxism Powellism Pinochetism Putinism Reaganism Sarkozysm Thatcherism Trumpism National variants Australia Austria Bangladesh Belgium Belize Brazil Canada China Mainland Hong Kong Taiwan Colombia Cuba Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Guatemala Iceland India Italy Japan Luxembourg Malaysia Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Pakistan Peru Panama Russia Serbia Singapore Spain Sweden Switzerland South Korea Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom United States Historical background Ancien Régime Bourbon Restauration Congress of Vienna Conservative Order Counter-Enlightenment Counter-revolution German Romanticism Holy Alliance Ultra-royalism White Terror Related ideologies Agrarianism Christian democracy Clerical fascism Communitarianism Conservative liberalism Corporatism Ordoliberalism Related topics Anti-communism Anti-gender movement Black conservatism United States Catholic social teaching Conservative feminism Conservative wave Hispanic conservatism United States LGBT conservatism Nativism Patriarchy Right realism Right-wing politics Authoritarianism Far New Radical Small-c conservative Toryism  Conservatism portal  Politics portalvte His father was an Anglican vicar, and though Coleridge worked as a Unitarian preacher from 1796 to 1797, he eventually returned to the Church of England in 1814. His most noteworthy writings on religion are Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825) and The Constitution of Church and State (1830).[64] Theological legacy[edit] Despite being mostly remembered today for his poetry and literary criticism, Coleridge was also a theologian. His writings include discussions of the status of scripture, the doctrines of the Fall, justification and sanctification, and the personality and infinity of God. A major figure in the Anglican theology of his day, his writings are still regularly referred to by contemporary Anglican theologians. F. D. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort, F. W. Robertson, B. F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the "Scottish Coleridge") were all influenced by him.[64] Political thinking[edit] Coleridge was also a political thinker. Early in life he was a political radical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution. However he subsequently developed a more conservative view of society, somewhat in the manner of Edmund Burke.[65] He was critical of the French Constitution of 1799, adopted following the Coup of 18 Brumaire, which he regarded as oligarchic.[66] Although seen as cowardly treachery by the next generation of Romantic poets,[67] Coleridge's later thought became a fruitful source for the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill.[68] Mill found three aspects of Coleridge's thought especially illuminating: First, there was Coleridge's insistence on what he called "the Idea" behind an institution – its social function, in later terminology – as opposed to the possible flaws in its actual implementation.[69] Coleridge sought to understand meaning from within a social matrix, not outside it, using an imaginative reconstruction of the past (Verstehen) or of unfamiliar systems.[70] Secondly, Coleridge explored the necessary conditions for social stability – what he termed Permanence, in counterbalance to Progress, in a polity[71] – stressing the importance of a shared public sense of community, and national education.[72] Coleridge also usefully employed the organic metaphor of natural growth to shed light on the historical development of British history, as exemplified in the common law tradition – working his way thereby towards a sociology of jurisprudence.[73] Coleridge also despised Adam Smith.[74] References in popular culture[edit] Orson Welles's Citizen Kane alludes to Kubla Khan (Kane builds a palace called Xanadu, and the poem is quoted in the newsreel segment). In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, Coleridge and his poems Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner feature prominently in the plot. The song "Xanadu" by Rush was inspired by Kubla Khan (Neil Peart says it was also influenced by Citizen Kane). The English heavy metal band Iron Maiden set The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to music.[75] In the 2003 mystery thriller In the Cut by Jane Campion, Meg Ryan portrays a New York City English teacher named Annie Avery who recites lines from Coleridge's poem "The Picture, or The Lover's Resolution". In the 1990 film Shipwrecked, a female character repeatedly quotes from "Kubla Khan". Collected works[edit] The current standard edition is The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn and many others from 1969 to 2002. This collection appeared across 16 volumes as Bollingen Series 75, published variously by Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul.[76] The set is broken down as follows into further parts, resulting in a total of 34 separate printed volumes: Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion (1971); The Watchman (1970); Essays on his Times in the Morning Post and the Courier (1978) in 3 vols; The Friend (1969) in 2 vols; Lectures, 1808–1819, on Literature (1987) in 2 vols; Lay Sermons (1972); Biographia Literaria (1983) in 2 vols; Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy (2000) in 2 vols; Aids to Reflection (1993); On the Constitution of the Church and State (1976); Shorter Works and Fragments (1995) in 2 vols; Marginalia (1980 and following) in 6 vols; Logic (1981); Table Talk (1990) in 2 vols; Opus Maximum (2002); Poetical Works (2001) in 6 vols (part 1 – Reading Edition in 2 vols; part 2 – Variorum Text in 2 vols; part 3 – Plays in 2 vols). In addition, Coleridge's letters are available in: The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956–71), ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). See also[edit] Biography portal Coleridge's theory of life Lake Poets Organic form Romantic epistemology References[edit] Notes[edit] ^ Old Sockburn church: "The stone effigy of a knight, four brasses and some grave-covers occupy their original positions in the chapel. The effigy belongs apparently to the middle of the 13th century (fn. 130), and is represented in a suit of mail with sleeveless surcoat. The head rests on a square cushion and the feet on a lion and wyvern in combat."[27] ^ LOVE (1798–1799) "She leant against the armed man, / The statue of the armed knight"[28] Citations[edit] ^ "Coleridgean Morsels | Sundry | Coleridge Corner". inamidst.com. Retrieved 30 July 2018. ^ See J C McKusick '"Living Words": Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the OED', Modern Philology, 90.1 (1992), which notes that the OED first edition (1884–1928) cites Coleridge for 3,569 words, many of which he coins. ^ Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Free Press (1994), 219–224. ^ a b c d Kennedy, Maev (12 April 2018). "Samuel Taylor Coleridge's remains rediscovered in wine cellar". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 June 2023. ^ Radley, 13 ^ Unsworth, John, The Early Background of S.T. Coleridge, published in The Coleridge Bulletin, No 1, Summer 1988, pp 16–25 [1] "Lecturer of Molland" was an office established and funded by a member of the Courtenay family, lords of the manor of Molland, and involved preaching sermons in Molland Church, possibly also in Knowstone Church adjoining ^ James Gillman (2008) The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bastion Books ^ Unsworth, John, The Early Background of S.T. Coleridge, published in The Coleridge Bulletin, No 1, Summer 1988, pp 16–25 [2] ^ Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Joseph Noel Paton, Katharine Lee Bates.Coleridge's Ancient Mariner Ed Katharine Lee Bates. Shewell, & Sanborn (1889) p. 2 ^ Morley, Henry. Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, &c. New York: Routledge (1884) pp. i–iv ^ "October 9, 1797 to Thomas Poole | The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Retrieved 7 February 2024. ^ Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton UP, 1985, p. 10. ^ "Frost at Midnight". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 29 February 2024. ^ "Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (CLRG791ST)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. ^ Radley, p. 14 ^ Holmes, p. 4 ^ "Chatterton". St Mary Redcliffe. Archived from the original on 3 July 2011. Retrieved 17 January 2011. ^ Lefebure, Molly (1987). The bondage of love: a life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Repr., 1. American ed.). New York: Norton. ISBN 9780393024432. ^ Lefebure, Molly (2013). Private lives of the ancient mariner: Coleridge and his children. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press. ISBN 978-0718893002. ^ Bate, 24 ^ Radley, 16 ^ Welcome to Taunton's Historic Unitarian Congregation and Chapel (Dec. 2005). Unitarian Chapel, Mary Street, Taunton. Retrieved 21 October 2006. ^ "Joshua Toulmin (*1331) 1740 – 1815. Calvert-Toulmin, Bruce. (2006) Toulmin Family Home Page". Archived from the original on 11 October 2012. Retrieved 21 October 2006. ^ "Measuring Worth – Purchase Power of the Pound". measuringworth.com. Retrieved 4 November 2017. ^ Dickins, Gordon (1987). An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire. Shropshire Libraries. p. 19. ISBN 0-903802-37-6. ^ van Woudenberg, Maximiliaan (2018). Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism 1794–1804. The Legacy of Göttingen University. London: Routledge. pp. 93–103. ISBN 9781472472380. ^ Page 1914, pp. 449–454. ^ *Poems of Coleridge by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 1 June 2022. ^ The Conyers falchion (a broad, short medieval sword) is traditionally presented to incoming Bishops of Durham, as they ride across the bridge at Croft. ^ Waldegrave, Katie (2013). The Poets' Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge. London: Windmill Books. p. 21. ISBN 978-0099537342. ^ Waldegrave, Katie (2014). The Poets' Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge. London. p. 21. ISBN 9780099537342.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) ^ "Poet climbs Scafell – A natural history of Britain". iberianature.com. 18 December 2010. Retrieved 4 November 2017. ^ Hough, Barry; Davis, Howard (2010). Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta. Open Books Publishers. ISBN 9781906924133. ^ Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, London: HarperCollins, 1998, pp. 12–14 (quoting Coleridge's notebooks 2805). ISBN 9780007378821 ^ For an appraisal of Sharp's role in Coleridge's career, see Knapman, D. (2004) Conversation Sharp: the Biography of a London Gentleman, Richard Sharp (1759–1835), in Letters, Prose and Verse. [Private Publication]. (Held by British Library) ^ "Faustus (1821) controversy". Archived from the original on 15 November 2012. Retrieved 13 March 2009. ^ Stuff, Good. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge blue plaque in Calne". blueplaqueplaces.co.uk. Archived from the original on 1 September 2017. Retrieved 4 November 2017. ^ "Question: Coleridge and Calne". Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. Wiltshire Council. 27 July 2004. Retrieved 14 May 2023. ^ Holmes (1998), p.429. ^ Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1830). On the Constitution of the Church and State according to the Idea of Each with Aids toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill (1 ed.). London: Hurst, Chance & Co. Retrieved 12 September 2014. ^ "Readbookonline.org". readbookonline.org. Retrieved 4 November 2017. ^ "Readbookonline.org". readbookonline.org. Retrieved 4 November 2017. ^ See Luke S. H. Wright, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2010); and Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion(Cambridge: CUP, 1976) ^ See Peter Cheyne, Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). ^ Mary Anne Perkins and Nicholas Reid both argue that in September 1818 Coleridge resolved the problems he had earlier faced in his discussion of Schelling in the Biographia, and that the "Opus Maximum" accordingly sets out a relatively systematic post-Kantian position (Perkins, Coleridge's Philosophy, p.10, and Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol, pp.viii and 126). ^ Gillman, Alexander William (23 July 1895). Searches into the History of the Gillman Or Gilman Family: Including the Various Branches in England, Ireland, America and Belgium. E. Stock – via Internet Archive. searches into history alexander gillman. ^ Carlye, Thomas, Life of John Sterling, Book 1 Chapter 8 ^ Cameron. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge Highgate London". Poets' Graves. Retrieved 11 August 2017. ^ The Monumental Inscriptions of Middlesex Vol III - Cansick 1875. ^ "Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The English Literary Canon". theenglishcanon.info. Retrieved 25 October 2019.[dead link] ^ Harper (1928), pp. 3–27. ^ a b Magnuson (2002), p. 45. ^ Bloom (1971), p. 202. ^ Harper (1928), p. 11. ^ Koelzer (2006), p. 68. ^ Harper (1928), p. 15. ^ Abrams (1965), p. ^ Koelzer (2006). p. 67. ^ Beckson (1963), pp. 265–266. ^ See article on Mimesis ^ Eliot (1956), pp. 50–56. ^ Kenner (1995), pp. 40–45. ^ Parker, p. 111 ^ a b "Coleridge's Religion". victorianweb.org. ^ D Daiches ed., Companion to Literature 1 (1963) p. 110 ^ Morrow, John (October 1986). "The National Church in Coleridge's Church and State: A Response to Allen". Journal of the History of Ideas. 47 (4): 640–652. doi:10.2307/2709723. JSTOR 2709723. ^ D Hay, Young Romantics (London 2011) p. 38 and p. 67 ^ E Halevy, The Triumph of Reform (London 1961) p. 158 ^ A Ryan, J S Mill (London 1974) p. 70; A Hamilton, 'Coleridge and Conservatism: Contemplation of an Idea', in ed. P Cheyne, Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford: OUP 2017) ^ J Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today? (London 2007) p. 7-8 ^ J S Mill, On Liberty Etc (Oxford 2015) p. 192 ^ A Ryan, J S Mill (London 1974) p. 57-8 ^ P Edwards, The Statesman's Science (2004) p. 2-3 ^ Samlaren: Tidskrift för forskning om svensk och annan nordisk litteratur, Årgång 137, 2016 – Myt och metall: Värdemodeller i litteratur och ekonomisk prosa under tidigt 1800-tal, Jonas Asklund ISBN 9789187666360 ^ Smith, Rosa Inocencio (17 September 2016). "Track of the Day: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Iron Maiden". The Atlantic. Retrieved 4 January 2023. ^ "Browse Princeton Catalog in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Princeton University Press". press.princeton.edu. Retrieved 29 January 2018. Further reading[edit] Library resources about Samuel Taylor Coleridge Online books Resources in your library Resources in other libraries By Samuel Taylor Coleridge Online books Resources in your library Resources in other libraries Abrams, M. H. (1965). "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric". In Hilles, Frederick W.; Bloom, Harold (eds.). From Sensibility to Romanticism. Oxford University Press. pp. 527–8. Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). (Extensive study of Coleridge as philosopher.) Barth, J. Robert. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969). (Examines Coleridge's theology.) Barth, J. Robert. The Symbolic Imagination (New York: Fordham, 2001). (Examines Coleridge's concept of "symbol") Bate, Walter Jackson (1968). Coleridge. The Macmillan Company. ISBN 0-8262-0713-8. Beckson, Karl E. (1963). Great Theories in Literary Criticism. Farrar, Straus. Beer, John B. Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970). (Places Coleridge's poems in the context of his thought.) Berkeley, Richard. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Bloom, Harold (1971). The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Revised ed.). Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-9117-7. (Close readings of all of the Conversation Poems) Bloom Harold (2010). Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ISBN 9781604138092. Boulger, J.D. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969). (Contains 20th-century readings of the 'Rime', including Robert Penn Warren, Humphrey House.) Cheyne, Peter. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Class, Monika. Coleridge and the Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Cutsinger, James S. The Form of Transformed Vision (Macon GA: Mercer, 1987). (Argues that Coleridge wants to transform his reader's consciousness, to see nature as a living presence.) Eliot, T.S. (1956). "The Perfect Critic". Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Harcourt. ISBN 0-15-180702-7. Engell, James. The Creative Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981). (Surveys the various German theories of imagination in the eighteenth century) Engell, James (2023). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Then & Now: Romantic-Era Poets in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910-1911 Fruman, Norman. Coleridge the Damaged Archangel (London: George Allen and Unwin). (Examines Coleridge's plagiarisms, taking a critical view) Harper, George McLean (1969) [1928]. "Coleridge's Conversation Poems". Spirit of Delight. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8369-0016-3. The Poems of Friendship make yet another claim on our attention: they are among the supreme examples of a peculiar kind of poetry. Others not unlike them, though not surpassing them, are Ovid's `Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,' and several of the Canti of Leopardi. Holmes, Richard (1982). Coleridge. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-287592-2. Hough, Barry, and Davis, Howard. Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010). ISBN 9781906924126. Kenner, Hugh (1995). "Coleridge". Historical Fictions. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-86547-424-9. Koelzer, Robert (Spring 2006). "Abrams Among the Nightingales: Revisiting the Greater Romantic Lyric". The Wordsworth Circle. 37 (2): 67–71. doi:10.1086/TWC24044130. S2CID 169769197. (Detailed, recent discussion of the Conversation Poems.) Leadbetter, Gregory. Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Lefebure, Molly (1987). The bondage of love: a life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Repr., 1. American ed.). New York: Norton. ISBN 9780393024432. Lefebure, Molly (2013). Private lives of the ancient mariner: Coleridge and his children. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press. ISBN 071889300X. Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu (London: Constable, 1930). (Examines sources for Coleridge's poetry). Magnuson, Paul (2002). "The 'Conversation' poems". In Newlyn, Lucy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Cambridge University Press. pp. 32–44. ISBN 0-521-65909-4. Magnuson, Paul. Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988). (A 'dialogical' reading of Coleridge and Wordsworth.) McFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: OUP, 1969). (Examines the influence of German philosophy on Coleridge, with particular reference to pantheism) Modiano, Raimonda. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1985). (Examines the influence of German philosophy on Coleridge, with particular reference to nature) Morley, Henry (1884). Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, &c. New York: Routledge. Muirhead, John H. Coleridge as Philosopher (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930). (Examines Coleridge's philosophical texts) Murray, Chris. Tragic Coleridge (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).link Parker, Reeve, Romantic Tragedies (Cambridge: CUP, 2011). Perkins, Mary Anne. Coleridge's Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: OUP, 1994). (Draws the various strands of Coleridge's theology and philosophy together under the concept of the 'Logos'.) Perry, Seamus. Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: OUP, 1999). (Brings out the play of language in Coleridge's notebooks.) Radley, Virginia L. (1966). Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Twayne Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0-8057-1100-7. Riem, Natale Antonella. The One Life. Coleridge and Hinduism (Jaipur-New Delhi: Rawat, 2005). Reid, Nicholas. Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or the Ascertaining Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). (Argues for the importance of Schelling as a source for Coleridge's philosophical texts). Richards, I. A. Coleridge on Imagination (London: Kegan Paul, 1934). (Examines Coleridge's concept of the imagination) Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). (Examines the sources for Coleridge's interest in psychology.) Shaffer, Elinor S. Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge: CUP, 1975). (A broadly structuralist reading of Coleridge's poetical sources.) Stockitt, Robin. Imagination and the Playfulness of God: The Theological Implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Definition of the Human Imagination (Eugene, OR, 2011) (Distinguished Dissertations in Christian Theology). Toor, Kiran. Coleridge's Chrysopoetics: Alchemy, Authorship and Imagination (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011). Vallins, David. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought (London: Macmillan, 2000). (Examines Coleridge's psychology.) Wheeler, K.M. Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980). (Examines the idea of the active reader in Coleridge.) Woudenberg, Maximiliaan van. Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism 1794–1804. The Legacy of Göttingen University (London: Routledge, 2018). Wright, Luke S. H., Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2010). Page, W.H., ed. (1914). Parishes: Sockburn, in A History of the County of York North Riding: Volume 1. Victoria County History. British History Online. pp. 449–454. Retrieved 1 June 2022. External links[edit] Wikimedia Commons has media related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wikiquote has quotations related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wikisource has original works by or about:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Internet Archive Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) Poems by Coleridge from the Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 19 October 2010 Works of Coleridge at the University of Toronto. Retrieved 19 October 2010 Friends of Coleridge Society. Retrieved 19 October 2010 The re-opening of Coleridge Cottage near Exmoor. Celebrating a cave's link to town's most famous son – Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Martin Hesp at Western Morning Press Portraits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the National Portrait Gallery, London Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the British Library Romantic but hardly romantic: Sarah Fricker's life as Coleridge's wife article by Pamela Davenport Archival materials[edit] "Archival material relating to Samuel Taylor Coleridge". UK National Archives. Coleridge archive at the Victoria University. Retrieved 19 October 2010 Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Internet Archive. Retrieved 19 October 2010 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. vteSamuel Taylor ColeridgeList of poemsTopics Early life Opium use Albatross metaphor Lake Poets Pantisocracy Person on business from Porlock Coleridge's theory of life Organic form Romantic epistemology Suspension of disbelief Early poetry "The Destruction of the Bastile" "Dura Navis" "Easter Holidays" "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" "On Quitting School" "Pain: Composed in Sickness" "Songs of the Pixies" "The Ballad of the Dark Ladié" Love (Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie) Plays The Fall of Robespierre Remorse (Osorio) Zapolya Cambridge andBristol poetry The Destiny of Nations Lines on an Autumnal Evening Lines Written at Shurton Bars On Receiving an Account Ode on the Departing Year Poems on Various Subjects Sibylline Leaves Religious Musings To a Young Ass To Fortune To the River Otter "Lewti" EminentCharacters "To Erskine" "To Burke" "To Priestley" "To Fayette" "To Kosciusko" "To Pitt" "To Bowles" "To Mrs Siddons" "To Godwin" "To Southey" "To Sheridan" "To Lord Stanhope" Conversationpoems Dejection: An Ode The Eolian Harp Fears in Solitude Frost at Midnight The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison To William Wordsworth Late poetry andLyrical Ballads Christabel "France: An Ode" "Hymn Before Sunrise" Kubla Khan The Rime of the Ancient Mariner "The Devil's Thoughts" "Time, Real And Imaginary" "The Knight's Tomb" Biographical andother works Biographia Literaria The Watchman Notebooks Family Sara Coleridge (daughter) Derwent Coleridge (son) Hartley Coleridge (son) Christabel Rose Coleridge (granddaughter) Ernest Hartley Coleridge (grandson) Herbert Coleridge (grandson) James Coleridge (brother) Henry Nelson Coleridge (nephew and son-in-law) vteColeridge family tree John Coleridge[i](1718–1781)Ann Bowden[i](1727–1809) Luke Herman Coleridge[ii](1765–1790)Frances Duke Taylor(1760–1838)James Coleridge(1759–1836)Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772–1834)Sara Fricker(1770–1845) William Hart Coleridge[ii](1789–1849)Francis George Coleridge(1794–1854)Edward Coleridge(1800–1883)Henry Nelson Coleridge[iii](1798–1843)Sara Coleridge[iii](1802–1852)Hartley Coleridge(1796–1849)Derwent Coleridge(1800–1883) John Taylor Coleridge(1790–1876) Henry James Coleridge(1822–1893)Alethea Coleridge(1827–1909)John Mackarness(1820–1889)Charles Edward Coleridge(1827–1875)Herbert Coleridge(1830–1861)Christabel Rose Coleridge(1843–1921)Ernest Hartley Coleridge(1846–1920) John Coleridge(1820–1894)Francis James Coleridge(1825–1862)Arthur Duke Coleridge(1830–1913) Stephen Coleridge(1854–1936)Bernard Coleridge(1851–1927)Mary Mackarness(1851–1940)Percy Duke Coleridge(1850–1881)Mary Elizabeth Coleridge(1861–1907) Jessie Alethea Mackarness(1881–1957)Geoffrey Coleridge(1877–1955)John Coleridge(1878–1951) Richard Coleridge(1905–1984)Cecilia Fisher(1909–1991)Sylvia Coleridge(1909–1986) William Coleridge(born 1937) Notes: ^ a b Srinivasan, Archana (2004). Eminent English Writers. Sura Books. p. 12. ISBN 9788174785299. ^ a b  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Wroth, Warwick William (1887). "Coleridge, William Hart". In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co. ^ a b Barbeau, Jeffrey W. (2014). Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137430854. 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CHAPTER V
On the law of Association-Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley. There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations, perceptions, and movements were classed as active or passive, or as media partaking of both. A still finer distinction was soon established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. In our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvass on which some unknown hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of Idealism may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or Materialism; and Berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi or Hobbes. These conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things and Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external, while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception most honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own country claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,-(who, amid the variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)-affirmed in the Lectures, delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical) psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.
Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak. So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's philosophical creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it over would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the statement is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning.
First, then, I deny Hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been anticipated by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes's De Natura Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more importance, Hobbes builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does not even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too in his after writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurations. But, in his interesting work, De Methodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish it as a general law: that contemporaneous impressions, whether images or sensations, recall each other mechanically. On this principle, as a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only general terms, but generic images,-under the name of abstract ideas,-actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power. As one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association a simple image may represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of association, or (in his own language) discursion of mind, as an admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any originality. His system is briefly this; whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs. This motion constitutes a representation, and there remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas,) [24] are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation in order to become mutually associable. The same result will follow when one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the other by the memory.
Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare." To time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes of association. The soul proceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the place, from place to person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. The apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae Turcicae, propter victorias ejus de Asia, in qua regnabat Antiochus."
But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and "De Memoria," which last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations Parva Naturalia. In as much as later writers have either deviated from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either error or groundless supposition.
In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes; nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general; nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches-nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes,-as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,-images out both past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation; though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the contrary, in his treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.
The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part. In the practical determination of this common principle to particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third, interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth, likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves, that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links, sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. In association then consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.
In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close resemblance to Hume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. Among these volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the old Latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned
It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he differed only to err: and next as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my dim and perilous way."

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Word Lists:

Interdependence : the dependence of two or more people or things on each other

Ontological : relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being

Perspicuous : (of an account or representation) clearly expressed and easily understood; lucid

Contemporaneous : existing or occurring in the same period of time

Pathologist : a scientist who studies the causes and effects of diseases, especially one who examines laboratory samples of body tissue for diagnostic or forensic purposes

Impinge : have an effect or impact, especially a negative one

Swaddle : wrap (someone, especially a baby) in garments or cloth

Receptive : willing to consider or accept new suggestions and ideas

Ascension : the act of rising to an important position or a higher level

Arrogate : take or claim (something) without justification

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Rating: Words in the Passage: 2463 Unique Words: 903 Sentences: 70
Noun: 685 Conjunction: 270 Adverb: 122 Interjection: 0
Adjective: 198 Pronoun: 131 Verb: 290 Preposition: 379
Letter Count: 12,029 Sentiment: Positive Tone: Formal Difficult Words: 620
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