Coleridge, Samuel Taylor(1772–1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the critic, romantic poet and philosopher, was born four years before the publication of Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, and died only two years before the death of Bentham's most influential disciple, James Mill, at a time when the young John Stuart Mill was making a brilliant success in political journalism. The striking fact about Coleridge's place in English intellectual history, however, is that he developed a form of idealism in virtual isolation from the mainstream of empirical philosophy. In developing his own philosophical insights, Coleridge turned to Immanuel Kant. He had two reasons for doing this. First, he was deeply dissatisfied with the mechanistic theory of mind still flourishing in English philosophy, since he was unable to formulate within its terms certain views about poetic imagination; while Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) had, however, set out with great rigor, and within a much more tractable conceptual framework, views essentially similar to Coleridge's own.
Second, Coleridge thought he saw in Kant's Transcendental Dialectic a way of combating the chroniclatitudinarianism in English theology that had predominated throughout the eighteenth century and continued until the time of the Oxford Movement. But it must be remembered that although Coleridge was a serious student of Kant and one of Kant's earliest and ablest English interpreters, he was not a systematic or academic philosopher.
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