Chapter V Summary and Analysis

Coleridge believes that there have always been men who viewed their own nature as a problem and have spent their time trying to find a solution to the problem. They were concerned with problems of the will. People have always been concerned with the origination of perception and look at the different aspects of man's nature. Man's inner experiences are arrange in terms of the passive sense, the voluntary, and the spontaneous. Others believed that the law of association was the basis of how the mind worked. Coleridge disagrees with them and looks at the views of Hobbs and Des Cartes in his discussion.

The law of association was defined before Des Cartes and Hobbs and dates back to Melanchthon, Amerback, and Ludovicus Vives who sought to explain the power of comprehension. Philosophers like Aristotle also examined the functioning...