'an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that the products of the more reflective faculty partook of death', and so enabled him 'to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of unbelief'.' Hence it is that when, during the years of his retirement at Stowey' (the Pantisocratic enthusiasm now dead), he devoted his thoughts to 'the foundations of religion and morals', the doubts which assailed him were directed against the human intellect as an organ of final truths, not against those truths themselves. 'I became convinced,' he writes, 'that the evidence of the doctrines of religion could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will.' 'If the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration that no legitimate argument could be drawn from the intellect against its truth.' It is significant to note that in thus turning the intellect against itself, and causing it to assign bounds to the sphere of its own validity, Coleridge, still a stranger to Kant, is adopting the critical attitude. For Kant he is further preparing himself by his recognition of the importance of the Will, of self-activity, in the attainment of truth-the conviction that a moral act is indispensable to bring us into contact with reality. This conviction, if he owed it partly to his training in idealism, was also forced upon him by experiences whose very strength was the testimony of their truth-the experiences of his religious, his moral, and also of his imaginative self, in all of which he was conscious that his will was not merely active, but in a sense even originative.

To the record of his mental state during this period contained in the Biographia Literaria may be added the

1 Biog. Lit. i. 98.

2 Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey on Dec. 30, 1796.
3 Biog. Lit. i. 135.

evidence of the poems which belong to it. These of themselves are sufficient to show us that his professed adherence to the necessitarian doctrines of his day was by no means the genuine conviction of his whole being. The Religious Musings, completed before his retirement to Stowey, breathe (in spite of their rhetoric and tentative metaphysics) a spirit of more settled faith than he was to know again for many a year. Not by any process of reasoning, but by a direct intuitional act, the poet feels himself brought into communion with a reality itself emotional, the 'one omnipresent mind' whose 'most holy name is Love'. To this Love the soul must be 'attracted and absorbed '. Till by exclusive consciousness of God All self-annihilated, it shall make God its identity! God all in all!

In later years Coleridge was to assign to this 'exclusive consciousness' a distinct faculty of the soul: what concerns us here is that he regards the attainment of this highest consciousness as consequent upon an act, a volitional effort, in which the finite mind is brought into direct contact with an infinite whose essence, as Love, is itself activity. It is in this faith that he denounces the futile endeavours and the inevitable tendencies of a philosophy which seeks in physical manifestations a complete solution of the questionings of the soul-the attempts of those who (as he wrote in another poem of this period)2

1 Religious Musings, 11. 42-4.

2 The Destiny of Nations, pub. 1797, ll. 27 ff. It seems not improbable that Coleridge, both in this poem and in the Religious Musings, has in mind (among a mixture of theories) the central notion of Boehme's philosophy, in which he anticipates Schelling that of self-distinction as the essence of spiritual life. Cp. letter to Thelwall, Dec. 1796, 'I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere apparition, a naked spirit, and that life is, I myself I' (Letters, i. 211). No doubt he was also influenced by the Hebrew conception of Deity.

Within this gross and visible sphere

Chain down the winged thoughts, scoffing ascent,
Proud in their meanness and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,

Untenanting creation of its God;

and his sense of the inadequacy, if not impiety, of all speculations of the intellect, the 'shapings of the unregenerate mind', is expressed in a letter written at the end of 1796 to Benjamin Flower, 'I found no comfort till it pleased the unimaginable high and lofty one to make my heart more tender in regard of religious feelings. My metaphysical theories lay before me in the hour of anguish as toys by the bedside of a child deadly sick.'1

But it was not through his religious, nor his moral feelings alone, that Coleridge received assurance of a reality transcending that of the senses. This sensible world itself, impenetrable as its meaning remained to the mere 'sciential reason', might yet, if viewed under another aspect and by another faculty, confirm the witness of morality and religion. It is of this faculty that Coleridge is thinking when, in the letter to Poole above quoted, he remarks that those educated through the senses' seem to want a sense which I possess. The universe to them is but a mass of little things'. And with the same thought he writes to Thelwall in the autumn of 1797, 'The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?... My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of that, that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sub

...

1 The same expression occurs in one of the manuscript note. books of this period.

limity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!'

1

This sense or faculty, for which the finite object counterfeits or symbolizes the infinite, the material part embodies the immaterial whole, is a peculiar possession, a thing 'which others want'. It is in fact, though Coleridge has not yet consciously defined it thus, the imaginative faculty, which, if allied with creative power, makes the poetwhich is indeed in a sense creative, wherever it exists. But the imaginative interpretation of nature is not necessarily in all minds the same. It may lead to pantheism. With Coleridge this was impossible because, as we have seen, he placed the exclusive, transcendent consciousness of God above all other forms of consciousness. To him, therefore, the beautiful in nature was necessarily regarded as symbolic of a spiritual reality, but not coexistent with it, nor yet an essential medium to its fruition. It is at best a reflection by which we are aided to a deeper knowledge of the reality for, as he writes,

All that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical, one mighty alphabet

To infant minds; and we in this low world
Placed with our backs to bright reality,

That we might learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from the shadow.2

Thus individual objects, which to the intellect appear merely as parts of an undiscoverable whole, are to the gaze of imaginative faith the symbol of that totality which is its object. Through the medium of phenomena spirit meets spirit; but in that contact the symbol is forgotten,

1 Letters, p. 228. It is interesting to compare Schelling's words in the Transcendental Idealism (quoted on p. lxviii.) that 'every single work of art represents Infinity'.

2

Destiny of Nations, 11. 17 ff. A similar figure is found in Goethe, Faust, Pt. II, First Monologue: 'So bleibe mir die Sonne stets im Rücken,' and ib., ' Am farb'gen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.'

the means is discarded in the attainment of the end; or if it still abides in consciousness with the reality which it figures forth, yet its presence is secondary and subordinate. Such a spiritual experience does the poet prophesy for one who, with heart rightly attuned,

Might lie on fern or withered heath,
While from the singing lark (that sings unseen
The minstrelsy that solitude loves best)
And from the sun, and from the breezy air,
Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame:
And he with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of nature:
Till all his senses gradually wrapt

In a half-sleep, he dreams of better worlds
And dreaming hears thee still, O singing Lark,
That singest like an angel in the clouds!1

The symbol is still present, but now only co-present with

the direct consciousness of the ideal.

The symbolic interpretation of nature, and the symbolic use of natural images, was thus a fact and an object of reflection to Coleridge, even before the period of his settlement at Stowey, but we have no evidence that he had before that date assigned a definite faculty to this sphere of mental activity, or named that faculty the imagination. Indeed, a letter to Thelwall, written immediately before the migration to Stowey, seems to preclude such an hypothesis. In this letter he speaks of the imagery of the Scriptures as 'the highest exercise of the fancy': yet it is this very imagery which at a later date, in comparing the fancy with imagination, he adduces as an example of the latter power. There can, however, be no doubt that the conception of beauty, as the revelation of spirit through matter, had been fostered in him many years before through the study

1 Fears in Solitude, 1798, ll. 17-27. The italics are of course mine.