of [Greek:
anamnesis], every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until
the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton or
Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason is
entire. Next he supposes that this reason or intelligence in nature
gradually becomes reflective--self-conscious. He fancies he can track
through all the simpler orders of life fragments of an eloquent
prophecy about the human mind. He regards the whole of nature as a
development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after
shade of systematic change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the
axes of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal
troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages which anticipate
consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was
forming itself; each stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming
to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
life on its confines, the 'shadow of approaching humanity' gradually
deepening, the latent intelligence working to the surface. At this
point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice; rather
it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the
highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of refining
shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the
limits of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of
modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to
an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas become
effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected
and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its
latent purposes is fixed in works of art.

In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it
under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What
is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the
slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in
Kant's fine-spun theory of the transformation of sense into
perception. What every theory of perception has to explain is that
associative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the
objects of the world about us. Sense, without an associative power,
would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours--each
struck upon one for a moment, and then withdrawn. The basis of this
association may be represented as a material one,