3 The Associative Fancy

24th March, 1808. In how kind and quiet a manner the Conscience talks to us, in general, & at first – how long-suffering it is, how delicate, & full of pity – and with what pains when the Dictates of Reason made impulsive by its own Whispers have been obstinately pushed aside, does it utter the sad, judicial, tremendous Sentence after which nothing is left to the Soul but supernatural aid. O what an aweful Being is Conscience! and how infra-bestial the Locks [sic], Priestleys, Humes, Condilliacs [sic] and the dehumanizing race of fashionable Metaphysicians. Metapothecaries, said one sportively, but I seriously, should say Gzraphysicians (i.e. Contranaturalists) when I spoke of them as Agents; but when I regard them merely in themselves & passive, I should call them Hypophysicians, i.e. below Nature. Zoophytes? – Nay, there is no contradiction in anything but degraded man. (CN, III, 3281)

The first four chapters demonstrate well the so-called ‘circularity’ of Coleridge’s discourse. He presents a series of interrelated terms (‘precision’, ‘beauty’, ‘truth’, ‘serenity’, ‘anger’, ‘insight’, ‘intellectual dimness’), each of which he links to ‘fanatic’ or to ‘genius’. These terms appear in each chapter; progressive development unfolds the relations of the terms, not just their meanings in the usual sense. One idea controls all these relations: the center of the circle is will. Chapter V begins an extended inquiry into will, and particularly into the relation between will and imagination.

Chapter V begins this inquiry by distinguishing three levels of will, and by asserting that the nature of will is epistemology’s central problem:

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…. [C]onjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of things and thoughts…. 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. (I, 65–6)

Coleridge’s attempt to base his criticism on principles ‘established and deduced from the nature of man’ (I, 44) formally begins with this account of the ‘traditional’ analysis of human nature. Later we learn that secondary imagination operates at the spontaneous level of will. It is ‘an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive’ (I, 86). As chapter V proceeds, Coleridge asks whether associationism can account for the spontaneous activity of mind; and he concludes that it cannot. The laws of association describe the operations and the materials of fancy, but imagination itself operates in other ways. Imagination does not associate; it synthesizes. What that distinction entails will be stated in chapters XII and XIII, and explained coherently in the chapters on Wordsworth.

This table of distinctions provides the epistemological and structural foundation of the Biographia’s inquiry into imagination. It functions here as a substitute, in some ways, for Coleridge’s more usual foundation: the distinction between reason and understanding. As the reader winds his way through chapters V to XIII the table slowly grows. The completed table looks like this:

	I	II	III
(levels of will)	receptive	spontaneous	voluntary
(forms of cognition)	sensuous	intuitive	discursive
(forms of	common	self-
consciousness)	consciousness	consciousness	memory
(acts of powers)	perception	synthesis	association
(names of powers)	primary imagination	secondary imagination	fancy

The table has three major features. First, columns I and II are very closely related. Both common consciousness and self-consciousness are self-knowledge, although knowledge of different aspects of the self. Common consciousness is or knows the self as agent. Self-consciousness is or knows the self as an act. Because will is never actually suspended (I, 77), ‘receptive’ (the ‘relatively passive’) and ‘spontaneous’ name differences in degree, not kind, of mental activity (cf. I, 202). Because all knowledge is the concurrence of subject and object, ‘perception’ itself is ‘synthetic’, albeit not consciously so. Yet the terms ‘sensuous’ and ‘intuitive’ are far less closely related. One is mediated, the other immediate; one is physical, the other spiritual.

This reveals the second feature of the table. All the elements in column I describe the mind’s encounter with the sensuous domain; all the elements in column II describe the mind’s encounter with itself. The table thus reflects the differences, and the similarities, between our knowledge of things and our knowledge of thoughts – a distinction with which epistemology begins (I, 65). The opposition between things and thoughts has already been observed at length in the differences between sensation-dependent fanatics, and geniuses, whose minds are ‘affected by thoughts, rather than by things’ (I, 20). In a highly characteristic way, Coleridge moves forward by delving beneath prior topics; he makes the implicit explicit; he moves background issues into the foreground. Yet notice as well that he does not tell us that this is what he is doing. He writes as if he presumes we will anticipate these epistemological issues as the next logical step. It is the logical progression only for one who makes much of the fact that fanatics’ minds are passive, while geniuses’ minds are active.

The table of distinctions at first accommodates the fanatic-genius, passive-active distinction by appearing to grant that minds are passive in their relation to the physical world. But as the table and the epistemology underlying it are developed, this appearance is gradually discarded. This development takes place in chapters V to IX, which are centrally concerned with the realities named in column III. The third feature of the table is the extent to which column III names the central issues in Coleridge’s critical commentary on his own times – and on Wordsworth. Throughout the analysis of associationism, the speaker argues that Lockean philosophies do not explain the phenomena named in column II, those concerned with the mind’s experience of itself. Materialist associationisms collapse the intuitive into the sensuous, the spontaneous into the receptive, and so on. The network of relations among these fifteen terms underlies Coleridge’s contention that Wordsworth’s attitude toward the landscape verges on an empiricism that is ultimately pantheist. Wordsworth, Coleridge contends, attributes to things what he ought to attribute to his own imaginative thinking. In his theory and in his poems, he sometimes exaggerates or mismanages all that column III represents, because he has been unduly influenced by the Lockeanism of the day. He, too, tends to represent the intuitive as the receptive (‘the light reflected, as a light bestowed’), although – Coleridge insists – he knows better. Coleridge’s own account of fancy explains that the poet’s associative processes should be controlled by imagination’s spontaneous impulses, not by the spacio-temporal forms of the landscape. He offers an imaginative, not material, account of associating.

The concept of will is the Biographia’s structural foundation because here Coleridge is centrally interested in discrediting the Lockean contention that the mind is a tabula rasa. The theory of imagination arises by contrast to this common but perniciously mistaken notion that the mind is passive. By asserting that the mind is active, he can account for the controversy over Lyrical Ballads by analyzing the intellectual passivity of fanatical critics. From the same standpoint, he can undermine portions of Wordsworth’s theory by contending that Wordsworth’s careless writing suggests that the mind is passive in its relation to the landscape. By analyzing the merits of Wordsworth’s best poems, Coleridge can champion the moral and cultural value of Wordsworth’s exemplary genius. He can restore the elements in column III to their proper place in our knowledge of human nature – to the dignity and value Wordsworth’s best poetry so brilliantly portrays.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this structural centrality, the Biographia seems to explain the idea of will everywhere in general, but very few places in particular. It is a genuinely elusive idea, but one that Coleridge regarded as crucial for his philosophy.¹ In most rudimentary terms, the idea of will comes down to this: the mind is active. Most precisely, the mind is an act. It is not a blank slate on which the material world writes by means of the sense organs. The pith of my system’, he is quoted as saying, ‘is, to make the senses out of the mind – not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did’ (TT, 25 July 1832). The pith of Biographia Literaria’s design is Coleridge’s insight into the relation between literary value and moral value. He risks the abyss of pantheism because he must have ways, even interim ways, to link imaginative power as a literary fact to imaginative power as an epistemological fact. He must have this link because it is crucial to the proper evaluation of Wordsworth’s poetry. The origin of great art, and the origin of moral insight, are one and the same: Wordsworth at his best is a great poet and a great thinker for one reason, not two reasons. Coleridge cannot prove the relation he sees between these two functions of imagination’s power, but he endeavors to reveal to the self-consciously thinking reader that a poem’s beauty and its truth elicit or require the same intellectual activity from its reader. By urging and helping us to think about our activities as readers, Coleridge elicits our consent to his new version of the old ideal, ‘dulce et utile’.

Many critics have puzzled over the fact that both before and after Biographia Literaria Coleridge attributes to reason many of the epistemological functions that the Biographia seems to attribute to imagination. This is not quite the case, despite appearances: the Biographia’s account of will offers a very subtle and difficult distinction between secondary imagination and pure reason, which is the sheerly active pole that is one part of imagination’s synthesis. Because this very subtle distinction supplies the crucial link between literary value and moral value, let me stop here to preview Coleridge’s argument. Without such an outlook over the difficult terrain ahead, my own analysis will unduly recapitulate the baffling intricacies of Coleridge’s own way.

One preliminary note: generations of scholars have described the Biographia as almost a pivot in Coleridge’s career: before this, poetry; after this, religion. Before this, imagination; after this, reason. Beginning in a substantial way with McFarland’s and Barfield’s work in the late 1960s, this dichotomy has been increasingly challenged. From his early days as a Hartleyan to his last hours in Highgate, Coleridge was very centrally concerned with morals. His ‘orthodoxy’ – that usually scornful term – was no coward’s shelter. His Christianity was subtle, imaginative, and intellectually daring. His literary theories cannot be understood properly in a radical isolation from his religious speculation, because they rest on an analysis of consciousness that cannot be formulated without recourse to religious concepts. Similarly, his religious inquiries and allegiances cannot be appreciated by one who fails to recognize the bold imaginative powers at work in his reaffirmation of classically Western moral values. In short, let me begin by positing the integrity of Coleridge’s intellectual career, just as I began by positing the unity of his intellectual autobiography, because it permits me to gain a vantage-point from which this integrity can be more clearly seen and more objectively evaluated.

The scope and significance of this assumption becomes most fully evident if one contrasts this study with Kathleen Wheeler’s Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’. Wheeler contends that There are passages in the Biographia which have an imaginative, “paganistic” originality and individuality which no formulations explicitly Christian could possibly allow’ (p. 146). Later in his career, she explains, ‘uncertainties … led Coleridge to have to suppress imagination and irony as uncontrollable elements foreign to his Christian philosophy’ (p. 133). ‘Immediately upon finishing the Biographia he retired into the safety of the mainland of ordinary conventional consciousness, and occupied much of his intellectual energy with untangling the issues within the Christian theological tradition’ (p. 147). In representing Coleridge’s Christianity as a retreat from full self-consciousness, from the burden of individual identity, and from the responsibilities coinherent in creativity, Wheeler portrays him as attempting to return to the dimness of sensation and enfeebled intellect characteristic of the deficient multitude. Because such a retreat is not psychologically possible, the act of denying one’s own self-consciousness is profoundly self-deceptive. That is why Wheeler and those who share her view describe Coleridge’s later career as signaling a radical personal failure – however scrupulously they avoid condemning him. The quality and influence of his theology offer, apparently, no amends; nor do the ways in which his inquiries challenge the orthodox status quo. Different ways of understanding Coleridge’s career are important for the formal evaluation of Biographia Literaria as a discourse, because the Biographia includes many specific references to Christian beliefs. Those who regard such statements as irrelevant or contradictory change the Biographia no less radically than those who oppose Milton’s God change Paradise Lost.

In the Biographia, Coleridge’s arguments about Wordsworth’s theories and poems presume the theory of imagination, which presumes the idea of will, which cannot be defined apart from the ideas of reason and faith that are its complements in his analysis of consciousness. Understanding the relations among reason, faith and will, and understanding the relation between this complex and the idea of imagination, are prerequisite to following the path of his argument about the relation between moral value and literary value. So let us look first at the relations among reason, faith and will; and then at the relation between will and imagination; and finally at the ways in which this relationship influences what imagination produces. This preliminary summary can do scant justice to the richness and philosophic complexity of these issues.² But let complexity wait for later, as the Biographia itself gradually engages these problems. What we need now is no more than a very plain, very general sense of direction.

Will, faith and reason together name the single, complex, highest power of the human mind; and the ideal union of literary value and moral value derives from the singleness of this power. When discussing only one of these three, Coleridge usually attributes to it the whole complex power.³ He does so consistently in the Biographia, which focusses our attention almost exclusively on will. But when he defines all three together, he attributes to each a specific aspect of the single power: reason is cognitive, will is motive, and faith is the relation between the fullest operation of each.⁴ The most elegant and lucid definition of this psychological trinity concludes the ‘Essay on Faith’.

Faith subsists in the synthesis of the reason and the individual will. By virtue of the latter therefore it must be an energy, and inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, it must be exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents, faculties and tendencies; – it must be a total, not a partial; a continuous, not a desultory or occasional energy. And by virtue of the former, that is, reason, faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth. In the incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore – faith must be a light originating in the Logos, or substantial reason, which is co-eternal and one with the Holy Will, and which light is at the same time the life of men. Now as life is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is faith the source and the sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of man to God, by the subordination of his human will, in all provinces of his nature to his reason, as the sum of spiritual truth, representing and manifesting the will Divine. (Shedd, V, 565)

In describing faith as both motive (the ‘energy’ of will) and cognitive (reason, a ‘form of knowing’), Coleridge places himself approximately intermediate between Roman Catholic and Anglican Protestant doctrines.⁵ The essential act of faith is fidelity to God. Yet this is simultaneously fidelity to the self, to one’s own reason as the origin of individual identity and personality.⁶ Such simultaneity is possible because reason knows the difference between right and wrong. Reason knows the difference because it knows God’s will, or God as Absolute Will. In knowing the difference between right and wrong, reason itself participates in the motive aspect of faith: the entirely rational person will by definition not desire that which he knows to be wrong. Yet sin is precisely such a desire: it is the failure to subordinate desire (will) to knowledge (reason). By defining sin in this way, Coleridge portrays it as simultaneously inauthentic, psychologically diseased, and contrary to God’s will. The well-formed conscience, in turn, testifies both to mental health and to morals: it reflects the unity or the disharmony of faith, will and reason.⁷

The ‘Essay on Faith’ emphasizes faith’s role in this psychological trinity; Biographia Literaria emphasizes will’s role. It describes will as the mind’s power to act, and argues that the mind’s essential act is knowing. Coleridge usually calls this essential cognitive act reason, and then distinguishes (in basically Kantean ways) between reason’s cognition and the cognition of understanding.⁸ But the distinction between reason and understanding very seldom appears in the Biographia. For clarity’s sake, I will follow the Biographia’s usage, using will to name the mind’s power to act, a power primarily evident in the power to know. In the Biographia, then, will is both cognitive and motive, and its highest form of cognition is the act of faith or the knowledge of God.

Let us turn now to the character of will’s interactivity with imagination. Will is involved in ‘each and all’ human acts, from the most profound to the most trivial. Knowing is not a part of will, as an arm is part of a dancer. Rather, knowing is to human being as dancing is to the dancer per se. As chapter XII explains, the epistemologist examines the fundamental form of this human act, which is self-knowing or self-consciousness. By virtue of self-consciousness, all our other acts are different from the acts of unconscious nonhumans, just as by virtue of dancing all the movements of a dancer are (potentially, at least) more coherent, deliberate and beautiful than those of a nondancer. This turning inward of will, the self-consciousness, is the act of secondary imagination.

It is or requires the act of imagination because Coleridge here distinguishes knowing as such from the ability to dissolve and simultaneously to reconstitute the unity of consciousness. When Coleridge later in his career stops discussing imagination, it is at least in part because this distinction is not absolutely necessary to his principal arguments about reason itself. And later on he is more interested in determining how reason accounts for the richest development of human consciousness, rather than how imagination acts as an essentially necessary ‘catalyst’ for these supreme human achievements. The Biographia, however, does emphasize imagination’s role in attaining self-consciousness because (a) imagination’s access to the primal unity of will, faith and reason provides the link between moral value and the most perfectly achieved imaginative works, and (b) because self-consciousness is only one instance of imagination’s power to dissolve and recreate. The process of composing poetry is another.

When will and imagination interact as self-consciousness (when will through imagination strives to know itself), will discovers the pure spirit or soul. It discovers its own being-which-is-knowing that Coleridge usually calls ‘reason’. As we can and cannot tell the dancer from the dance, so we can and cannot distinguish our being from our knowing. The unity of being and knowing is an act, the act of self-knowing, which can be represented by the words ‘I am’. The human power of knowing is an echo in the finite human mind of the infinite and absolute knowing that is God, ‘the infinite I am’. One’s ability through will to know one’s own consciousness, to know the human being-which-is-knowing, is thus a knowledge of or an encounter with the absolute in a pure but relative form. It is consciousness of the human in the divine, or the divine in the human, or Christ within us, ‘begotten not made, one in being with the Father’.⁹ In short, it comes to this: will as cognition (the reason aspect of faith) knows God; it also knows itself as pure spirit, as pure knower, and thus as both free and immortal by virtue of its essential identity with or participation in the absolute knowing that is God.¹⁰ It attains such knowledge only when or as it exerts the fullness of its cognitive power on the mind itself, and such self-consciousness requires an immensely powerful secondary imagination.

Will thus involves two paradoxes. The first is the possibility of an absolute in relative form. This derives from the mystery of the Incarnation, or the Trinity generally, about which the Biographia says almost nothing. The second is the paradoxical relation between the mind and the world: the world is both physically real and independent, and created for us through the act of knowing. Since knowing is such an important access to the divine, the contradiction may be capable of symbolic resolution. But, again, the Biographia says almost nothing, repeatedly deferring solution to the Logosophia. These two paradoxes underlie Coleridge’s central contention that the greatest works of literature intimately synthesize moral insights with vividly particular portraits of all that we call ‘reality’. Because the paradoxes are genuinely irresolvable, the argument about literature is an essentially rhetorical construct. Coleridge seeks to persuade us by appealing to ‘inner experience’ generally, and by specific appeal to the ‘inner experience’ of the meditative reading of poems. And this mode of argument is neither outrageous nor sly. Recognizing that ‘proofs’ of God can no longer be valid or meaningful, Coleridge sees further that ‘proofs’ of the cultural and moral value of literature are equally futile. We need, he recognizes, a new defense of poetry.

This account of the interactivity of will and imagination has emphasized the role of will so as to sketch the connection between imagination and the moral realm. Explaining the same interaction with an emphasis now on imagination can sketch the connection between imagination and literature. The imagination mediates between the mind’s active pole (will) and its passive pole (sensation).¹¹ Imagination’s own activity is synthesizing these two poles. This synthesis generates two sets of ‘products’. The first set, produced through primary imagination, is common consciousness and perception. Common consciousness is the union of self-as-subject (will as act or as knowing) with self-as-object (will as agent or as being); it arises coinstantaneously and spontaneously with the act of perception. It can be represented by the phrase ‘I am’, whereby the T is regarded or discovered as an entity distinct from its surroundings.

The second set, produced through secondary imagination, is philosophic or imaginative self-consciousness and poetry (in the highest sense in which poetry and philosophy are equatable). These products arise when the synthesis comprising common consciousness becomes itself an object of knowledge. Common consciousness can itself be known only by one who can simultaneously dissolve and reconstitute its union of being and knowing. Such self-consciousness or philosophic consciousness is the knowing of common consciousness both as a unity and as its parts.¹² Secondary imagination distinguishes the dancer from the dance, but in doing so realizes that the two cannot be known in isolation from one another. Imaginative self-consciousness discovers or generates suprasensuous knowledge because it directly intuits the will itself (the purely active pole) when it regards the unity of common consciousness as its parts. It ‘dissolves, diffuses, [and] dissipates’ not the object itself, but the relation between mind and object. I will explain more about imagination’s direct intuition of will when we come to chapter XII.

The ‘Essay on Faith’ explains that faith as a product is knowledge, and faith as a process is will. The Biographia explains that poetry as a product is the union of universal (via will’s self-scrutiny) and particular (via the senses) that Coleridge calls a symbol.¹³ Poetry’s moral and human value derives from these two links, first to God and secondly to the richness of human experience or reality as humanly known. Poetry as a process ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity’ (II, 12). By virtue of this whole involvement, poetry is both an intellectual and linguistic craft with its own rules, and an impassioned self-expression bounded only by the expressing self. Poetry as a process also achieves symbolic richness: it is both universal in its fidelity to rules derived from fundamental patterns of human consciousness, and particular in its presentation of both specific situations and the individuality of its author. We will see much more of Coleridge’s ideas about the nature of poetry when we come to the Biographia’s second volume.

One final note about imagination. It is not directly cognitive. We have only two sources of knowledge: the relatively passive sense organs, and the will (or reason). The imagination – at either of its levels – can be called cognitive only because it synthesizes cognitive powers. It does not, itself, have access to objects as the senses do, nor to the suprasensuous as the will does. If it did, then the distinction between sensuous and suprasensuous would become very badly blurred; and this is likely to land us in pantheism. And yet we have no conscious knowledge of any sort without the imagination. Because it is not necessary in every context to specify that imagination ‘knows’ only in this qualified and indirect sense, Coleridge in the Biographia talks about imaginative knowledge or self-conscious knowledge when he wishes to contrast what may be known through sensation with what may be known through meditation. Such passages are highly condensed, or strictly adapted to local argument; but they are not contradictory. (They do, however, make it somewhat difficult to specify the relation between Coleridge’s idea of imagination and Kant’s.)¹⁴ Coleridge’s point, inevitably, is that imaginative knowledge arises from the synthesis or harmony of all human powers, both spiritual and natural. Its opposite is strictly empirical or sensory observation, which does not, finally, deserve the name ‘knowledge’.

The Biographia says little about faith, and less about reason and understanding, because it is primarily concerned with the products of imagination, not with the full intricacy of the activity of imagination in concert with other powers. Coleridge defines only those parts of his full philosophy that he needs to establish the unity of truth, verbal precision and aesthetic power in great poems. As he says in chapter IX, he intends to offer an aid to judgment not – as later – an aid to reflection. Formal arguments concerning the exact activity of will, and its interactivity with imagination, are confined to one chapter – to the extraordinarily compressed summary and revision of Schelling’s analysis of consciousness. But the practical or experiental aspects of will and imagination are worked out in a lucid and sometimes leisurely way in chapters V to XI, as the speaker gradually and simultaneously refutes materialism and recognizes the unity of being and knowing.

This refutation formally begins in chapter V, which begins with the ‘table of distinctions’ that we have just examined. Somehow it ought to be obvious that the three levels of will provide a basis for the philosophic inquiry projected in chapter IV. But the remarkable absence of will as a term and an explicit issue in most commentaries on the Biographia demonstrates that these valuable distinctions, especially as later elaborated, largely escape even careful readers.¹⁵ This happens, I suspect, because Coleridge moves so rapidly to the summary of Mackintosh’s lectures that he invites us to see the chapter’s opening paragraph as no more than an introductory historical flourish. Furthermore, one who expects Coleridge to be always digressive and disjointed will be particularly willing to dismiss this paragraph because it does not immediately and intimately link chapter V to chapter IV. That expectation becomes self-fulfilling: the analysis of associationism appears largely irrelevant, and this misperception itself generates much subsequent confusion. The unity of the Biographia begins rapidly to unravel, especially for a reader who also discarded chapter II because of its equally off-handed opening. As a composition, Biographia Literaria is by far too fragile to resist and correct such readers.

I doubt that it is possible to apportion ‘responsibility’ or ‘blame’ for the reader’s probable misdirection at chapter V: Coleridge’s genuine clumsiness here is too complexly interwoven with the traditions influencing how we approach his works. I would point out only that autobiography offered Coleridge ample resources for the devising of a more helpful transition, resources that one must assume he ignores for conscious and unconscious reasons of his own. Regarded as autobiography, chapters V to VII refute the claims advanced in lectures by Sir James Mackintosh, who according to Coleridge asserted that Hobbes had advanced a new explanation of spontaneous mental activity, an explanation fully worked out by Hartley. The speaker sharply disagrees with Mackintosh’s high praise for these two philosophers. Mackintosh’s lectures are not linked to the sequence of influences recorded in chapters I to IV, although since Coleridge attended them in 1800 they might have been fitted in. Since Hartley was actually a quite major influence (a fact noted in chapter X), he, too, offers a means of linking these chapters to the first four.¹⁶ But no autobiographical continuity links chapter V to what has gone before, until chapter IX describes the philosophers analyzed in these chapters as a sequence of studies the speaker had undertaken. This ‘revision’ establishes Mackintosh as a student and historian of philosophy opposite and equivalent to the speaker. It reflects helpful emphasis back to the table of distinctions, and to the question whether ancient or modern philosophers more accurately understood the spontaneous (i.e. imaginative) activity of mind. It is possible that the lack of immediate autobiographical linkage is intended to signal that Biographia Literaria is not simply or exclusively an intellectual autobiography, but also an inquiry into will and poetry. If so, then the principal chronological tie becomes the speaker’s present intent to present his ‘poetic creed’ not as opinion, but as ‘deductions from established premises’ (I, 65): the autobiography takes the first of several leaps ‘forward’ into the speaker’s present time.

Regarded as philosophy, chapters V to VII progressively develop the issues of earlier chapters: they define fancy, and distinguish it from imagination. In defining fancy, Coleridge asserts that association is governed not by things but by thinking. The spacio-temporal relations of objects matter less than the power of will to focus attention and thereby to control the clarity with which items are present or accessible within one’s memory. The spontaneous operation of will (the secondary imagination) thus can govern the activity of fancy in associating elements linked by any notion or feature at all. Coleridge sketches this interaction of fancy and imagination in the densely metaphoric and analogic ‘water-insect’ passage late in chapter VII. These images and analogies reappear in the criticism of Wordsworth when Coleridge contends that Wordsworth attributes to the rural landscape a power to govern association that properly belongs to secondary imagination. This error, Coleridge claims, is evident both in Wordsworth’s statements about rustics’ language, and in his unsuccessful poems.

Let us begin with the definition of fancy, turning afterwards to the critique of materialist theories of association. Chapter V describes fancy objectively, from the perspective of things associated; chapter VI describes fancy subjectively, from the perspective of mental controls over this process. Chapter VII explores the consequences of mental control over fancy, and formulates the ‘true practical general law of association’ in a way that emphasizes fancy’s subordination to will and imagination. Chapter VIII explores the metaphysical issues raised by this subordination; further inquiry into such issues will generate the formal definition of imagination in chapter XIII.

The objective account of what perceptions are associable begins from the same fundamental conservatism we have already noted: Tor 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’ (I, 66). On this basis, the speaker prefers Aristotle to the moderns: ‘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’ (I, 71). Yet, as Shawcross points out, the speaker emends Aristotle, who does not list the ‘five agents or occasioning causes’ of association (I, 72). Even this position is subsequently ‘clarified’ into something quite different. The five causes are summarized as variations on the contemporaneity of original impressions; the speaker later substitutes continuity to eliminate altogether any necessary temporal link (I, 87; cf. I, 70). Coleridge calls down the authority of Aristotle against the authority of the associationist tradition in English materialism, arranging and adding to Aristotle’s rather sketchy remarks on the topic for his own purposes.

Aristotle’s sketchiness very nicely deflates association from the complete theory of mind that it is in Hartley to no more than the name of one class of actions that the mind can perform. The speaker approvingly notes that Aristotle provides only ‘a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other without supposition, i.e. a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation’ (I, 72). Because Aristotle consistently distinguishes mental movement or activity from movement in space, the speaker claims that Aristotle supports his own major contention about fancy: association is controlled not by the physical relations of the objects whose impressions are associated by the mind but, rather, by strictly mental processes. Association is not a law governed by things, but a law governed by thinking – a process that the mind itself controls.

Chapter VI turns from this concern with the relations among associable objects to consider the mental processes by which fancy is directed. The speaker asserts that ‘the will, the reason, the judgement, and the understanding’ are the ‘determining causes’ of association (I, 76). If these higher powers failed to exercise such authority, then ‘our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory’ (I, 77).

There follows an example designed to support this very central contention. It begins with a verb in the imperative mood: ‘Consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St. Paul’s church …’ (I, 77). The reader who resists has demonstrated his control over association: he refuses to summon up the view associated with these words. The reader who cooperates would be swept into delirium if will did not control and limit the associative movement of mind. Either way, the speaker makes his point by eliciting the control that is at issue, rather than by constructing formal philosophic counter-arguments.

Because this strategy would probably not persuade a professional philosopher (especially a sophisticated empiricist), we have here fairly clear evidence concerning the kinds of reader Coleridge expected. This passage, like the footnote defining ‘idea’ (I, 69 n), or the explanation that both materialism and idealism can be traced back to the ancients (I, 66), or the footnote distinguishing objective and subjective forms of consciousness (I, 53 n), seems to suggest that Coleridge expected little formal sophistication. The argument is designed for one who shares the speaker’s essential values – both his Christian ideas about the mind and about moral responsibility, and his attitudes toward inquiry. The long experiential arguments identify the speaker as a person more deeply concerned about practical consequences or moral issues than about formal proofs. We are to realize that, for this man, proofs without such practical bases and moral conviction are merely academic word-games – an abuse of language closely akin to that of anonymous critics (see I, 95–7; I, 178–9; cf. CL, II, 961). In effect, these experiential arguments define the powers of will as axioms, a status that never changed (see AR, 153–9). Personal agency is an unquestioned but well-examined fact from which Coleridge begins. The reader who is more interested in poetry and Wordsworth than in philosophy and Schelling might accept such a complex axiom. But such a reader is apt to be confused and annoyed when Coleridge suddenly shifts to a dense discourse that presumes a thorough knowledge of the implications of various philosophic formulae, as he does in chapters VIII and XII.

The professional philosopher who can read such chapters with relative ease will most likely object to the breadth of Coleridge’s initial assumptions. The professional is more likely than the amateur to demand that Coleridge prove his idea of will, or argue formally on behalf of his concept of God. In the absence of such proofs and arguments, the professional might think that these illuminations are to be taken as proofs; and thence conclude that Coleridge is a bungler with no sense of formal argument, nor of the complexity of his issues. This misperception derives in part from the sharp wit that guides less experienced readers: Coleridge writes as if he has demolished his opponents’ positions. His repeated statements of intent to supply formal proofs in another book should signal his recognition that such proof is necessary. Yet the confident tone, the unfinished Logosophia, and the irresolvable paradoxes leave Coleridge quite vulnerable to sharp professional attack.

And in all this it must be remembered that in the Biographia Coleridge explicitly refers to a class of readers to whom he expects to be almost entirely opaque: anonymous critics and their kind. Rather than leave his argument vulnerable to the confused apprehension of this powerful group, Coleridge’s speaker periodically breaks off his discourse with a reference to the unspoken. Usually the unspoken is represented as the Logosophia or some other unwritten or unfinished work; occasionally, as in chapter VI, it is represented as a mystery that should not be revealed indiscriminately. As these references become more explicit, it gradually becomes evident that all refer to the relation between the creative powers of human cognition, and the power or activity that is God. The most famous reference to ‘mysteries’ is the chapter’s second ‘anecdote’, describing the delirious serving girl. The story attributes to memory the passive recording falsely attributed to fancy itself, and asserts that conscious memory represents only a fraction of the total power. The girl’s ravings reveal association without the conscious control of will. The story claims that even relatively passive mental processes rest not on material but on spiritual causes: ‘all thoughts are in themselves imperishable’, and their record is the ‘dread book of judgement’ (I, 79–80).¹⁷ The concluding lines attribute the unity and permanence revealed by association operating as memory to ‘the free-will, our only absolute self’ (I, 80).

The passage from Plotinus links will to the aesthetic issues defined earlier. Before defining imagination, the speaker must solve several problems in epistemology and metaphysics. Because he solves them through religious meditation, moral issues often color chapters V to XIII. As a result, thematic unity demands coherent relations among morals, aesthetics, imagination and will. These relations are first defined here, when the speaker ‘breaks off’ a discussion of the moral implications of will to quote the following. It is ‘profanation’ to speak of such things, he explains,

‘To those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform,’ (i.e. pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) ‘neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty.’ (I, 80 n)

Coleridge adds ‘imagination’ to the first sentence to adapt the passage to his own ends – a characteristic strategy.¹⁸ The speaker literally asserts that he cannot continue this line of moral inquiry because not everyone will understand (another instance of the ‘deficient multitude’ theme).¹⁹ In Coleridge’s context, the passage from Plotinus implicitly equates imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, and consciousness of will. It also asserts a necessary connection between this psychological unity and the metaphysical unity of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The speaker later substantiates this necessary connection through the analysis of will and consciousness (i.e. through the definition of imagination). The theory of imagination explains how the Good, the True and the Beautiful are evident in the most perfect instances of poetry.

In short, if the last paragraph of chapter VI is read as a transition – certainly what the reader expects in a last paragraph – one discovers both the unity of prior issues and a basis for understanding how the diversity of earlier issues will lead to a higher unity. Will interrelates imagination, beauty and the fanatic-genius opposition; the equation of imagination and the consciousness of will maps new ground. The ‘breaking off’ is merely stylistic, an odd and probably unsuccessful device to draw attention to the highly condensed and important integration of several central issues.

Chapter VII defines the ontological and metaphysical consequences of mental control over association. Its concluding definition of fancy both complements and supplants the ‘Aristotelian’ five causes by locating the real cause of association in the controlling power of will. The chapter is dense, quick, and tightly woven with the critique of Hartley; but every idea follows clearly from one central point: failure to recognize the agency of will destroys the ideas of consciousness, moral responsibility or personal agency, God, faith and causality.

As a philosopher (and a Christian), the speaker values final causes, as he explains in chapter IX: ‘We learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learnt force us inward on the antecedents, that must be pre-supposed in order to render experience itself possible’ (I, 94). That is, we ought to be forced inward to final causes, by our own ontology. ‘The facts’ will only ‘force’ us if we establish certain standards for explanations. The speaker argues for the necessary existence of suprasensible realities. His argument centers on a complex of terms (‘consciousness’, ‘will’, ‘self’, ‘soul’) that are not entirely synonymous but, rather, aspects of basic human identity. This complex is closely linked to God, in part through the traditional associations of religious language, and in part for reasons only later explained (but discussed by me at the beginning of the present chapter).

The speaker first defends consciousness itself. According to Hartley’s followers (including, once, Coleridge himself), ‘consciousness [is] considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of [material] breeze and [bodily] harp[.]… [But] what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?’ (I, 81) To hear and to analyze the music made by the harp requires a third position, neither harp nor breeze but auditor. If consciousness were merely a product of the physical world and the physical body, then we could by definition never achieve the knowledge of consciousness that the image defines. ‘Listening’ requires the power to observe one’s own mind. It requires self-consciousness. The power of self-observation is the single most central fact for Coleridge’s philosophy generally; it is defined here for the first time through a metaphor. Coleridge’s equation of poetry and philosophy must be taken very seriously by any student of his prose – or his poetry.

The second suprasensible is will itself, considered as moral responsibility or personal agency. If final causes are discarded, then ‘the disquisition, to which I am at present soliciting the reader’s attention, may be as truly said to be written by Saint Paul’s church, as by me’ (I, 82). The reference to St Paul’s echoes the earlier reference to introduce another witty portrait of common-sense experience. The passage appeals to the experience of personal agency, rather than proving its ‘objective’ possibility. None the less, the paragraph strongly and successfully urges the irrationality of denying personal agency.

The denial or the defense of self-consciousness and personal agency leads directly to the denial or the defense of God. Our knowledge of our own will (i.e. self-consciousness) intimately involves a knowledge of God as ‘an intelligent and holy will’ (I, 83). Limiting all explanations to efficient causality necessarily leads to the ‘degredation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology’ because these ideas depend on entities that are not knowable through the sense organs. Spinoza’s denial of both personal agency and the personality of God stands silently behind the critique of associationism. The speaker refutes not the intent of Locke or Hartley, but the consequences of object-oriented philosophy as made evident by Spinoza.²⁰ By suggesting that the similarity of God and man rests on the power of will, Coleridge firmly anchors the relation between his moral and his aesthetic concerns: the activity of mind that generates art also leads to God.

Final causes must be distinguished not only from efficient causes, but also from necessary conditions (I, 85). The contemporaneity of objects (as stressed by Hartley’s mechanism) is a law of matter, not of mind. The development of this idea introduces the first substantial explanation of the interaction of fancy and imagination: the famous ‘water-insect’ passage, followed by the formal definition of the law of association. This definition stresses the agency of will that the water-insect passage illuminates in greater detail.

… the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever. (I, 87)

The substitution of ‘continuity’ eliminates the last traces of materialism from the law of association: continuity can link past and present, or objects here with objects there, on the basis of subjectively originating similarity. Most important, the recalled feature that triggers the associative leap depends not on physical conditions, but on the ‘arbitrary’ or selective focussing of attention on to particular features of a given perception. Thus, the operations of fancy are determined by habits of observation (what aspects are noted?), by the power of attention or concentration (how clearly are the aspects noted?), and by the subtlety with which resemblances are noted (are the relations crude or delicate?). The important qualities of fancy are determined not by the acuity of sense organs, but by the entire character of a person’s relation to the environment – a relation established through primary and secondary imagination.²¹

This definition follows the water-insect passage; it partially explains how imagination, or the spontaneous level of will, can control the associative activity of fancy. Having looked at the definition first, we are better prepared to recognize how much more the metaphor suggests than the consecutive first reader may immediately recognize.

… contemporaneity (Leibnitz’s Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion…. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface or rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION….) (I, 85–6)

The passage opens with a reference to gravity which, like the earlier reference (I, 30 n), asserts the relative opposition of two forces between which imagination mediates. The passive aspect is sensation, which obeys laws of matter such as contemporaneity. The purely active pole is pure will (or pure reason). Despite the vivid sensual detail of the insect and its shadow, the description emphasizes not the creature itself, but its activity. It is easy to enjoy Coleridge’s metaphors as rich ornament, but one dare not stop there.

As the swimming insect or the leaping person demonstrates, genuine synthesis requires that imagination share essential features with the active will and the relatively passive sense receptors. That is, the leaping body has both mass and the capacity to resist gravity by virtue of the same essential property: muscle, skeleton, and nervous organization. In the same way, imagination’s mediation cannot be a merely mechanical switching back and forth from activity to passivity, because then imagination would be no more than a title for the alternative dominance of one or the other over consciousness. Nothing so crude could possibly account for the delicately balanced unity that characterizes both geniuses’ psyches and their works.

How does the imagination achieve its mediation between the active and passive aspects of mind? That is the question with which the consecutive first reader is left – that, and the image of progress via synthesis. This strategy provides a framework or a niche for the definition of imagination. This definition develops quite slowly until the image of synthesis reappears in the relative definitions of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in chapter XII.

Let me once again pause to preview Coleridge’s answer to the question poised at this point. As I have already explained, imaginative synthesis consists partly in the relative passivity of primary imagination as perception, and partly in the activity of secondary imagination as it dissolves and reconstitutes perceptual unity and common consciousness. The whole issue arises in chapter VI because the imagination’s synthesis per se depends on the fancy’s power to collect perceptions that have features in common, to assemble ‘material’ capable of synthesis into a whole by virtue of its fundamental interrelations. But, as the law of association points out, fancy cannot collect coherently except under specific direction. The other two analogies in this passage make the process quite clear. In trying to recollect a name, one summons to preconsciousness many scattered memories all of which have some bearing on the sought-for name. The secondary imagination seeks or creates the pattern in the memories that will reveal the name. Yet this creating is only theoretically distinguishable from the imagination’s control of the recollecting or assembling performed by fancy, because the synthesis gets under way as soon as there is more than one ‘datum’ present. The ‘Essays on Method’ explain this more fully (F, I, 448–524).

The process of composing demonstrates the same inseparable cooperation. Assembling materials can be mechanical and dull, yet clearly it is crucial. In any substantial investigation, knowing what to gather and where to look depends partly on logic and experience, but more centrally on intuition. The act of composing requires that one discover the pattern one has created, the pattern implicit and buried in the reams of notes. For this process to succeed, the writer’s genius (that is, both imagination and, in the old sense, guiding spirit) must both fuse with and stand critically aside from what has been gathered. As many scholars have testified, one delight of the work is in discovering how central one’s whimsical quests can prove to be. Such experiences would be far from delightful were it not for confidence that such whimsy is not blind chance but preconscious purpose. Whether poetry or prose, literature or literary criticism, imaginative works of any kind both resist and imitate the material world by means of the extraordinary care exercised by imagination through fancy in the selection of appropriate materials.

My point is that when Coleridge suggests, ‘let a man watch …,’ he expects that we will. Although fancy and imagination are distinct, imagination cannot operate without fancy any more than fancy can operate coherently without the focus or motive that will provides. This focus need not be imaginative, but it certainly can be. As Coleridge is quoted as saying, ‘Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as, in like manner, imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower’ (7T, 20 August 1833). By interposing the activity of the water-insect and the other analogies in the definition of fancy, Coleridge sketches the interaction of fancy and imagination through images for it. The images function analogously to a statement of intent, yet only for the reader who knows to take them this seriously, and who is capable of carrying forward the cognitive range of a metaphor.

The definition of fancy as partial and dependent provokes curiosity concerning the powers that control fancy. This curiosity would have been even more keen for the sympathetic contemporary reader. By attributing all association to fancy, and then defining fancy as he does, Coleridge prepares ground for his own ideas about the mind. These begin to come to the foreground in chapter VIII.

But, before proceeding to chapter VIII, I should summarize one aspect of the issues in question. When Coleridge demotes ‘association’ from the title of an adequate philosophy to the name of one class of mental acts, he reopens the questions this popular philosophy had answered: What is perception? and What is thinking? One option is to reverse Lockean mental passivity, but this generates other, equally severe problems. The mind is neither absolutely active nor absolutely passive: as chapter VII concludes, there is the ‘intermediate’ or synthetic power of imagination – the spontaneous movement of mind that Mackintosh claims Hartley had explained. Chapter VIII’s emphasis on dualism may seem tangential, because this word has not previously appeared. Yet Coleridge does not depart from his topic. He again delves beneath it, to the fundamental issue that has been shaping his counter-arguments all along: What is the relation between mind and external reality? He must answer this metaphysical question before answering the psychological ones; his fundamental disagreement with associationism is as much metaphysical as psychological.

But Coleridge himself had not yet answered the metaphysical question in strictly philosophical terms. (As McFarland has explained, a rigorous solution is not possible.²²) In the Biographia, Coleridge does not attempt to close his system or to complete his argument formally. Completion is repeatedly deferred to the Logosophia, as we see for the first time in chapter VIII. As we shall see, in chapter X he offers instead a pair of assertions about faith and cognition: through the activity of faith, we have immediate knowledge of both a personal God and a real world of physical objects immediately known. Beyond these assertions, one finds only hints toward a philosophical construction. As these suggestions become more explicit, claims about the relative completeness of the Logosophia become more explicit as well.

In chapter VIII these hints are not very specific. The first two depend on Coleridge’s prior critique of anonymous critics and the reading public. The speaker describes the possibility that body and spirit ‘may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum’, but explains that this possibility was not ‘the fashion’ (I, 88). Yet fashion is hardly a reliable guide to philosophic truth. As Coleridge remarks elsewhere, ‘From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, Good Sense deliver us!’²³ A second, rhetorically similar hint emerges later: ‘Leibnitz’s doctrine of a pre-established harmony … was in its common interpretation too strange to survive the inventor – too repugnant to our common sense; (which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy, but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence)’ (I, 89). As he elsewhere explains, philosophic arguments ‘can be of no permanent utility, while the authors themselves join in the vulgar appeal to common sense as the one infallible judge in matters, which become subjects of philosophy only, because they involve a contradiction between this common sense and our moral instincts, and require therefore an arbiter, which containing both (eminenter) must be higher than either’ (LS, 110). Coleridge uses the accumulated pressure of his critique of ‘popular’ thinking to identify two philosophic ideas as viable: Leibnitzian pre-established harmony, and the common substratum of being and knowing.

The third hint is somewhat more difficult to explain. On the narrative level, as we shall see shortly, Coleridge in these chapters examines philosophy since Descartes and Hobbes as described by Mackintosh. Chapter VIII returns to Descartes. It briefly describes attempts to correct Descartes’ erroneous supposition that mind and matter are absolutely heterogeneous, dividing these attempts into the unsuccessful and the unfashionable. This strategy delivers the speaker to an apparent dead end. No prior philosopher seems able to explain the relation between mind and physical reality. Yet he perseveres.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. (I, 89)

This statement shifts our attention from particular philosophies to the logical form of basic philosophic questions. It allows the speaker to formulate the question about mind and matter that ‘the philosopher’ seeks to answer, and thus to determine the necessary form of all possible answers. His formulation changes the question in crucial ways.

How the esse, assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite itself with it: how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of being; i.e. either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or self subsistence. The former is, indeed, the assumption of materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. (I, 89–90)

By shifting the inquiry from mind and matter to knowing and being, Coleridge tries to sidestep the insolvable problems that radical dualisms pose. His answers represent one position – the ‘hypostasis or self subsistence’ of being and knowing – as the only remaining viable alternative.

He also reaches back to gather in the ‘unfashionable’ possibilities: these three hints tend in a single direction. Hypostasis or self-subsistence or common substratum (etymologically and historically related terms, generally speaking) all point to a pre-existent harmony between being and knowing. Chapter IX consolidates and clarifies the basic point Coleridge has asserted:

The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is [in] no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio, identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other’s substrate. (I, 94; my italics)

As the reference to hypostasis suggests, this is potentially a Neoplatonic and pantheist answer to the metaphysical question. But only potentially. ‘Hypostasis’ also translates into Latin and then English as ‘person’, and figures in theories of the Trinity. The subsequent reference to the Logosophia leaves no doubt about Coleridge’s intention, although it provides no explanation of how this intent will be realized.

The strategy is designed to lead us to accept the substantial unity of being and knowing as both an orthodox and a necessary solution. He defers to the Logosophia only the proof for that which we should see as logically necessary. However irking for those who share Coleridge’s interest in the philosophical grounds of literary theory, such a tactic is not formally unreasonable in a book with the Biographia’s declared intent. Not every author is bound in every circumstance to trace the grounds of his argument back to first principles in metaphysics. Yet, because the speaker has rigorously examined Mackintosh’s claims, we expect and demand equivalent rigor when he advances his own, alternative philosophy. We might tolerate the missing metaphysics had the speaker not already engaged metaphysical issues with such passion and in such detail. That earlier detail supplies the necessary grounds for the speaker’s claim that his ideas are the only remaining viable ones, but the imbalance per se threatens his credibility.

The reader is also apt to be disappointed by chapter VIII’s brevity. Coleridge’s prose is often highly condensed, because he richly utilizes the semantic powers of sentence structure and etymology. Such condensation merges with the genuine difficulty of his ideas and arguments to generate a stylistic surface that has been judged cryptic, or obscure, or impenetrable. Recent scholarship has sufficiently undercut those accusations: the need for generalized defense is past. What needs to be noted here is how Coleridge’s departure from his usual standards both provokes and justifies charges of obscurity. In chapter VIII undue brevity replaces condensation. The so-called hints tend to accumulate rather than develop; one finds redundance, not richness.

One easy explanation would suggest that the unusual brevity immediately reflects anxiety generated by pantheism and unresolved metaphysical questions. In reply, I would point to later places – to be examined in detail – that are far more pantheistic and yet masterfully managed.²⁴ I prefer another explanation, if explanations be necessary. Coleridge appears to have lost for a time his concentered attention to a particular audience, because basic comprehension of the chapter requires recognizing the metaphysical and theological issues signaled by ‘substratum’, ‘subsistence’ and ‘hypostasis’. Such is not the case generally in Biographia Literaria. Coleridge writes for an astute and attentive reader, but not one particularly learned in the history of philosophy and theology.

This lapse also reveals what I take to be a fundamental uncertainty underlying Coleridge’s idea of his most probable audience. I have said that Coleridge writes for someone who firmly but unreflectively accepts the dominant Lockean psychology and metaphysics of his day. This expectation makes a sort of ‘demographic’ common sense, I grant: surely the majority of his contemporaries did accept this world-view; Wordsworth’s poetry can strongly appeal to thoughtful empiricists (witness John Stuart Mill). But I wonder how likely it is that one who is naïvely empiricist will prove capable of thinking with the energy and rigor that the Biographia demands. If one’s own experience has never prompted dissatisfaction with Locke, will one possess the imaginative energy such thinking requires? And if one’s experience has prompted dissatisfaction, then it is plausible that one will have read some other philosophy somewhere along the line, or that one will not be quite so persuadable as Coleridge seems to desire. Perhaps Coleridge’s lapses into philosophically dense argument reveal a wavering doubt that there can exist a readership of capable, philosophically naïve minds. It is as if he is just not sure how much philosophic sophistication to expect from his ‘good readers’, which may in turn reflect a reasonable fear that the right audience does not in fact exist. Perhaps his audience is as much an artful construct as his ‘speaker’. Haven remarks that ‘In the development of Coleridge’s thought, the problem posed by the confrontation of Mariner and Wedding Guest is as important as the Mariner’s experience itself’.²⁵ This may prove true not only for Coleridge’s thought, but also for his works. The ideal reader – the perfect Friend of the Friend – will both understand the technicalities and tolerate the postponed proof because he understands that symbolic realities cannot be demonstrated.

Coleridge’s problem in imagining the right audience is no doubt a thorny one, given his times, and given the formally incomplete argument he has chosen to write. But abrupt changes such as chapter VIII must still be accounted serious flaws; he has entirely lost control of the useful contrast between good readers and Lockean blockheads. Some good readers will be perplexed by the chapter; others will find that it raises confusing questions about what level of philosophic rigor they should expect of this book generally. In his art as in his life, perhaps, Coleridge understood very little about how to elicit and to satisfy consistent, reasonable expectations from those around him. Or, conversely, disappointing expectations served some subterranean purpose of its own.

The major flaws of chapter VIII are recouped in the second paragraph of the next chapter, where Coleridge more solidly forges the link between Christian orthodoxy and the unity of being and knowing. Whatever its flaws, chapter VIII could not have been simply deleted: it summarizes materialism’s failure, so as to close the preceding three chapters and to clarify those points on which future development depends. Preserving this numbered summary would have meant substantial rewriting of chapter VIII. Rather than rewrite, Coleridge repeats before proceeding, addressing once again the reader to whom earlier chapters have been addressed. Such repetitions are not at all characteristic, and may signal his recognition that chapter VIII is genuinely obscure.

As we have seen, the long discussion of fancy serves in part as a critique of contemporary associationist psychologies. This aspect of chapters V to VIII comes more fully into view if we examine them from the perspective of narrative continuity. Mackintosh’s four claims reflect the speaker’s perception of the philosophical status quo in England. Given his early allegiance to Hartley, and the opening paragraph of chapter IX, these chapters also recount the first stages of his own philosophical development. Let me list Mackintosh’s claims, for easier reference later.

1 the ‘law of association as established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed the basis of all true psychology’

2 ‘any ontological or metaphysical science, not contained in such (i.e. empirical) psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations’

3 Hobbes is ‘the original discoverer of this great law’, while Hartley offers ‘full application to the whole intellectual system’

4 association is to the mind what gravitation is to matter (I, 67).

These objections, listed here in the order presented, are refuted as a group rather than individually. The only Mackintosh claim contextually emphasized concerns Hobbe’s originality. One does not necessarily expect any further refutation of Mackintosh. Nor, more importantly, is it particularly evident in chapter V that the speaker fundamentally disagrees with associationism. His principal methodological criticisms could just as easily have led to a new and better associationist psychology.²⁶ Although one might charge that Coleridge inadequately introduces the scope of things to come, what he introduces and how he begins suggest a reasonable respect for the power accruing to the ideas he would discredit.

His intent is not primarily to discredit Hobbes or Hartley or Mackintosh, but to discredit the domination of the material world over the mind by means of the sense organs, as advocated by the English empiricist tradition generally. His critique is not primarily ontological, not the argument that it is naïve or inadequate to see reality as comprised of discrete independent objects impinging on passive human consciousness to generate our knowledge of things. On the contrary, this real world of independent objects immediately (but not passively) known remains a very English cornerstone in his system. The critique instead depends on an analysis of ordinary mental experience. As we have seen already, he consistently appeals to our knowledge of our minds rather than to our knowledge of things.

Hobbes is fitted into the table of distinctions through Mackintosh’s claim that psychological association accounts for the spontaneous activity of mind. But, as the speaker shows, Hobbesian theories deny genuine spontaneity by defining the mind as passive. When the speaker describes the imagination as spontaneous, he integrates himself into the table, and further clarifies his rivalry with Hobbes et al. Hobbes surrenders originality to Descartes and accuracy to Aristotle; the speaker credits him only with inventing a physiological mechanism that has no basis in fact and no power to account for the complexity of association per se. As Mackintosh, Shawcross and the family editors point out, this is hardly fair to Hobbes; but Coleridge may have quite complex motives here.²⁷

Coleridge refutes Hobbes so as to reshape the contemporary view of psychology. He wants to shift attention away from the popular (and persistent) misconception that psychology will achieve the spectacular practical results of the physical sciences by equating the real with the quantifiable or the visible, by making itself into a subordinate branch of mechanics or astronomy. By insisting that association has long been studied by philosophers, Coleridge focusses attention far more sharply on the specific recent innovations: physiological mechanisms. By discrediting the mechanisms, he can discredit associationism as a total psychology without denying its power to account for substantial areas of mental experience.

Hartley’s mechanism is analyzed in a way that discredits any strict physiological mechanism: if they are strict or consistent, they deny will. By refuting Hartley’s theory logically, experientially and morally, the speaker again asserts his criteria for philosophy. The logical refutation demonstrates well the Coleridgean difference between the conceivable and the visible (I, 74–6). If you visualize Hartley’s mechanism as the balls on a billiard table, everything works beautifully. But if you realize that two different sensations must be two different vibrations, then it becomes impossible to understand how one vibration could ever directly propagate another vibration different from itself. Thinking of acts (vibrating) as things (billiard balls) leads only to mayhem. Coleridge refutes the mechanism by appeal to the distinction between visual and conceivable so as to prepare the reader for his own philosophic method: analyzing the act of perceiving rather than the things perceived. The difference proves crucial.

I have already discussed the experimental refutations: the speaker denies the mental passivity inherent in Hartley’s philosophy by appeal to the experience of psychological self-control, and the experience of personal agency. The refutation on moral grounds consists partly in the experiential appeal to personal agency, and partly in the argument that Hartley’s apparently strict empiricism disallows any nonmaterial God. Moral values lose any ground but observable utility: doing good for its own sake loses meaning.²⁸ Hartley’s evident piety allows the speaker to renew the contrast between himself and anonymous critics: he distinguishes between the system’s morality and the man’s (I, 83–5). The distinction serves another purpose as well. It enforces the speaker’s claim that bad ideas mislead good men. It underscores England’s need for correct philosophy – a need argued at length in chapter X.

We have seen how the speaker responds to Mackintosh’s first and third claims, concerning the validity of associationist psychology and the importance of these two figures. The speaker refutes Mackintosh’s second claim by experiential arguments that turn the same charge against Hartley: his metaphysics is but ‘a web of abstractions and generalizations’ that both morals and concrete experience disprove. The fourth claim (association: mind::gravity:matter) restates the second claim within a different metaphor, one that emphasizes again Coleridge’s disagreement with a falsely grounded imitation of physical science in the sciences of mind.²⁹ A law of the mind will be found in the mind, not in the relations of material bodies: philosophers must remember the difference between things and thoughts.

A law of mind will also not be found in the relations between the central nervous system and its environment. Chapter VIII highlights this underlying disagreement with the English tradition, which to the speaker represents one set of attempts to amend Descartes’ erroneously absolute distinction between mind and matter. As we have seen, the chapter’s first two paragraphs divide emendations into the unsuccessful and the unpopular. The speaker proposes instead that the question be located within the mind, as the relation of being and knowing, rather than outside the mind, as the relation of mind and matter.

Materialism generally – and mechanist associationism in particular – may at first appear to locate the question properly, because it regards knowing as an attribute of being. But the speaker argues that this is not the case. Consistent materialism replaces dualism with monism, but it is an object-dominated monism. Everything is absorbed in the material; the mind is reduced to passive neural mechanisms. This amounts to a denial of real individual existence, a denial logically prior to the denials of moral responsibility and suprasensible realities that we examined earlier. As I commented earlier, Spinoza stands in the shadows. It was he who demonstrated the necessity of these consequences from materialism; ‘hylozoism’ was Cudworth’s veiled term for the argument of Spinoza’s Ethics.³⁰ As McFarland’s Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition so persuasively argues, Spinoza’s importance to Coleridge cannot be underestimated. Spinoza informs and enlivens Coleridge’s opposition to the English materialist tradition – an opposition everywhere present in Biographia Literaria.

The chapter concludes with a numbered list of objections to any associationist psychology that is dependent upon a materialist epistemology (I, 92). These objections reflect and counter-balance Mackintosh’s claims. They also concenter reader attention on the problem of perception. What is it? How is it possible? What may be known? These are the questions taken up in chapter IX as Coleridge begins to define the most fundamental synthesis achieved through imagination: the synthesis of being and knowing in perception and common consciousness. The complexity and apparent indirectness of chapters IX to XI derive from his attempt to describe this synthesis within the context of issues we have seen to this point: the contrast of geniuses and fanatics, with all that involves; the various activities or ‘levels’ of will, and how they are coordinate; the moral and ontological consequences of suprasensible will; the cultural conflict between true philosophy and its ‘popular’ counterparts. These issues remain so much in the foreground because the formal definition of the unity of being and knowing, and in particular how that definition unifies his positions on these issues, will be repeatedly deferred to the Logosophia. It is only by interweaving these issues that the speaker can explain the unity of being and knowing without verging into formal metaphysics. We see more of the practical consequences than of the theoretical bases. Biographia Literaria is an unrelentingly practical book.