portions of the Biographia Literaria will show this more. clearly.

After introducing, in chapter iv, the distinction of imagination and fancy, Coleridge proceeds to investigate it psychologically. He begins with an historical discussion of the theory of association, and compares Aristotle's theory with that of Hartley; the inadequacy of the 'mechanical theory' is then exposed, and the true nature of association explained. Having thus cleared the ground, Coleridge next purposed to show 'by what influences of the choice and judgement the associative power becomes. either memory or fancy, and to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason and the imagination'. But this promise of a psychological treatment of the distinction is not fulfilled indeed we hear little more of the fancy until, in the final summing up, it is defined side by side, or rather in contrast, with the imagination. After some intervening chapters of general or biographical interest, Coleridge advances to the statement of his system, from which he proposes 'to deduce the memory with all the other functions of intelligence', but which, as a matter of fact, he views in connexion with one faculty only-the imagination. In a series of theses he discovers the final principle of knowledge as 'the identity of subject and object' in 'the Sum, or I Am', which 'is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the same act it becomes a subject'. Originally, however, it is not an object, but 'an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may become an object'. It must, therefore, be an act. Thus it follows that consciousness in its various phases is but a self-development of absolute spirit or intelligence. This process of selfdevelopment Coleridge asks us to conceive 'under the idea of an indestructible power with two counteracting forces,

which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces'. Such a power he 'assumes for his present purpose, in order to deduce from it a faculty the generation, agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter'.

This faculty is the imagination or esemplastic power. But the promised deduction is cut short by the timely or untimely letter of warning from Coleridge's fictitious friend. The chapter on the imagination, 'which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages,' was laid aside, and we are left with the mere conclusion, which is framed in the following words :-

"The imagination, then, I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the manner of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates in order to recreate: or, where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.'

The distinction here drawn is evidently between the imagination as universally active in consciousness (creative) in that it externalizes the world of objects by opposing it to the self) and the same faculty in a heightened power as creative in a poetic sense. In the first case our exercise of the power is unconscious: in the second the will directs, though it does not determine, the activity of the imagination. The imagination of the ordinary man is capable only of detaching the world of experience from the self and contemplating it in its detachment; but the philosopher

1 Biog. Lit. i. 202.

penetrates to the underlying harmony and gives it concrete expression. The ordinary consciousness, with no principle of unification, sees the universe as a mass of particulars only the poet can depict this whole as reflected in the individual parts. It is in this sense (as Coleridge had written many years before) that to the poet 'each thing has a life of its own, and yet they have all our life'. And a similar contrast is present to Schelling when he writes that 'through the objective world as a whole, but never through a single object in it, an Infinite is represented whereas every single work of art represents Infinity'.2

With the definition of fancy which now follows we are already familiar. 'Fancy has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive its materials all ready-made from the laws of association.' This distinction, which in its essentials Coleridge made so long before, need not be long dwelt upon here. As connected by the fancy, objects are viewed in their limitations and particularity; they are 'fixed and dead' in the sense that their connexion is mechanical and not organic. The law, indeed, which governs it is derived from the mind itself, but the links are supplied by the individual properties of the objects. Fancy is, in fact, the faculty of mere images or impressions, as imagination is the faculty of intuitions. It is in this sense that Coleridge sees in their opposition an emblem of the wider contrast between the mechanical philosophy and the dynamic, the false and the true.

1 In 1802 (Letters, p. 405). See also supra, p. xl.

2 Werke, i. 627.

3 Biog. Lit. ib.

But with all this we have nothing of the promised 'deduction' of the imagination, still less that of the memory and other 'functions of intelligence'. The definition of fancy is founded, apparently, on the psychological discussion of the earlier chapters, not on the theory of knowledge propounded later on. As to the imagination, it seems at first sight, from the close coincidence of Coleridge's statement with that of Schelling, that he had accepted Schelling's system wholesale and with it his account of that faculty. But the sudden termination of the argument, and the unsatisfactory vagueness of the final summary, in which he does not really commit himself to Schelling's position, suggest that that position was not in fact his own. And this suggestion is confirmed by other evidence.

That Coleridge's attitude from the first to Schelling's philosophy was by no means one of unqualified approval, we have already seen. But in the Transcendental Idealism which he studied at a time when he was deeply engaged in aesthetic problems, he found a peculiar attraction. Here for the first time the significance of 'the vision and the faculty divine' seemed to be adequately realized. At first it appeared to Coleridge that he had met with a systematized statement of his own convictions, the metaphysic of poetry of which he was in search. But he was soon to find that the supposed concurrence did not exist— that the Transcendentalism of Schelling in fact elevated the imagination at the expense of other and more important factors in our spiritual consciousness.

No doubt the feature most unsatisfactory to Coleridge in the Transcendental Idealism and in Schelling's philosophy in general was its vague conception of the ultimate ground of reality. For Schelling's absolute, which is prior to and behind self-consciousness, from which self-consciousness originates, is conceived as mere self-less identity or total indifference, of which all that can be said is that it

is neither subject nor object, but the mere negation of both.1 From such an abstract principle, it is evident, no living bond of union can be derived to hold together the complementary elements in self-consciousness when it is mysteriously generated: hence subject and object, intelligence and nature, appear as parallel lines of co-ordinate value, connected by a merely logical necessity. In such a system there was clearly no place for the God of Coleridge's faith, as a Spirit to whom self-consciousness is essential, a Being 'in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite power'. Thus it is that in his own account in the Biographia Literaria Coleridge is all the time striving to identify Schelling's 'intellectual intuition' of subject and object in their absolute identity with the religious intuition, the direct consciousness of God.

But this, of course, involves him in contradictions. For the power of intellectual intuition, the philosophic imagination is, as Schelling conceived, a gift confined to a favoured few, not a state of being in which all can, by moral effort, raise themselves: his philosophy cannot therefore take the form of a moral appeal. And here Coleridge, so long as his thoughts are concerned primarily with the imagination and its deduction, is inclined to follow him. The solution of the problem is to discover 'for whom and to whom the philosophical intuition is possible'. For 'there is a philosophic no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection of talent, not by degree, but by kind'. If, however, this intuition of the supersensuous is none other than the consciousness of God, it must

1 In later years Schelling sought to reconcile his system with the idea of a personal God; but with doubtful success. See the Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), and Coleridge's marginal comments thereon (Biog. Lit., 2nd Edition, Vol. I, Appendix). See also Professor Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism.

2 Confession of Faith, 1818.