Biographia Literaria

Coleridge critiques Hartley’s ideas about mental associations, claiming that they confuse the issue of causality. Nor does Coleridge agree with Hume, whom he writes “degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit” (37). Rather, “contemporaneity” is a law of the mind (37). A water insect jumping upstream is “no unapt emblem of the mind’s self experience in the act of thinking” (38). Thinking thus involves an “intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive” (38). Coleridge calls this “imagination” (38). Finally, he recommends “a condition free from anxieties” (39) to facilitate accurate perception.

Next, Coleridge critiques Cartesian dualism, as refined by Spinoza and Leibnitz. He finds Hylozoism and materialism no more convincing. Hylozoism he finds muddy, and materialism fails to explain the origin of consciousness: “in order to explain the thinking as a material phenomena, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence” (41). Coleridge concludes that the origin of consciousness remains a problem. Attempting to fathom it, “we might as rationally charged the Brahim creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of ‘This is the house that Jack built,’” Coleridge jokes (42).