The transcendentalism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Authors:   , Pachori Satya Sheel 
Published: August 2024

In this dissertation I have attempted to give an adequate treatment to the transcendental philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was not as much social, political, and spiritual, as epistemological. Coleridge sought "to make the senses out of the mind, not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did." Reason and imagination were transcendental faculties in his "schema" of mental powers to realize Absolute Truth. The entire Transcendental Movement was a revolt against the empirical tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, according to which all knowledge is derived from sense experience. To empiricists, the human mind was a "lazy looker on" which depended on the senses for the formation of ideas. During his early years, Coleridge adopted Hartley's doctrine of association in which he found a systematic explanation of the feelings of pain, pleasure, and of moral sense. Hartley related the whole bodily frame to its apparatus of sense organs and nerves, which affect the sensations and finally create feelings. Coleridge's early poems, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, "Eolian Harp," Dejection: An Ode, and others manifest the Hartleian philosophy of the passivity of mind and the activity of associations and sensations. But very soon, Coleridge began to suspect the validity of this philosophy because it failed to lead him to the realization of Ultimate Reality. He always desired to feel the infinite through the finite-- that is, through the human mind and intuition. Coleridge was significantly aided by the Berkeleian notions of "esse is percipi" and "esse is concipi"--the notions that served as a bridge for him to apprehend the Kantian metaphysics. Kant's distinction between Reason and Understanding furnished him with a weapon to fight against the empiricists. For Coleridge, however, there were other sources in the Neoplatonists and Cambridge divines for apprehending this distinction. Without Reason, man is just a "thing," as Coleridge believed. Reason, for him, is a supersensuous and intuitive faculty which could lead us to Absolute Unity, while understanding is a phenomenal and discursive faculty which generalizes and reflects over the material furnished by sense and fancy. As given in Coleridge's "schema" of mental powers, sense-- a passive faculty-- is at the bottom followed by fancy and understanding in an order ascending to imagination and Reason and vice-versa in a descending order. Both fancy and understanding, for Coleridge, are empirical powers which aid the "esemplastic" power of imagination to use the material creatively. In the transcendental philosophy of Coleridge, imagination plays an important part although it is under the guidance of Reason. If imagination is the reconciling power of the two opposite faculties--understanding and Reason. Reason is so superior a faculty in the human mind that it not only comprises sense, fancy, understanding, and imagination, but it also leads to the Absolute Unity. If imagination is "the eye of the soul," it can also serve as the "eye of reason, the noblest part of mind." Coleridge, unlike Kant but like the Cambridge divines, elevated the status of Reason to such a supreme height as to equalize it with God. Reason, in Coleridge's system, is a vital means in realizing supersensuous and transcendental reality. Coleridge followed Hegel's triad of thesis, anti� thesis, and synthesis in order to apprehend the notion of Absolute Unity in the world. Coleridge should be credited for going beyond Hegel in developing the triad into a pentad: prothesis, thesis, antithesis, mesothesis, and synthesis. Coleridge's transcendental theory of knowledge, which emphasizes the realization of higher consciousness with the aid of self-consciousness, is the essence of his transcendental philosophy which was the "ultimate science" for him.