Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes on Mind
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) and the late Aids to Reflection (1825) gave English Romantic philosophy its most influential systematic philosophy of mind. The central commitments — the famous distinction between the primary imagination (the living power of perception itself), the secondary imagination (the conscious creative re-creation of perception that produces poetry), and the merely associative fancy, alongside the parallel distinction between reason as the higher organ of spiritual truth and understanding as the lower discursive faculty of the empirical sciences — articulate a distinctive English Idealist alternative to the Hartleyian associationism Coleridge had earlier defended. The framework, drawing on Schelling, Kant, Boehme, and the broader German Idealist tradition Coleridge encountered through his Göttingen visit and his subsequent reading, shaped subsequent English Romantic philosophy of mind through Carlyle, Mill’s response in his On Bentham and Coleridge essays, and the broader Victorian engagement with the post-Kantian tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.”
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“Reason is the power of universal and necessary convictions.”
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“What I most love in another is what I do not understand.”
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Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”
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“O! the one Life, within us and abroad, Which meets all Motion, and becomes its soul, A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light, Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance every where.”
The Eolian Harp ", st. 2 (wr. 1795; pub. 1796) -
“And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversly fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?”
The Eolian Harp", st. 3 (wr. 1795; pub. 1796)