h an inborn taste for
transcendental philosophy, he lived just at the time when that
philosophy took an immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with
an impressive literary movement. He had the good luck to light upon it
in its freshness, and introduce it to his countrymen. What an
opportunity for one reared on the colourless analytic English
philosophies of the last century, but who feels an irresistible
attraction towards bold metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such
occasions of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy,
chiefly as systematised by the mystic Schelling, Coleridge applied with
an eager, unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology, and poetic
or artistic criticism. It is in his theory of poetry, of art, that he
comes nearest to principles of permanent truth and importance: that is
the least fugitive part of his prose work. What, then, is the essence
of his philosophy of art--of imaginative production?

Generally, it may be described as an attempt to reclaim the world of
art as a world of fixed laws, to show that the creative activity of
genius and the simplest act of thought are but higher and lower
products of the laws of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own
inadequacy in dealing with the greater works of art, is sometimes
tempted to make too much of those dark and capricious suggestions of
genius, which even [75] the intellect possessed by them is unable to
explain or recall. It has seemed due to the half-sacred character of
those works to ignore all analogy between the productive process by
which they had their birth, and the simpler processes of mind.
Coleridge, on the other hand, assumes that the highest phases of
thought must be more, not less, than the lower, subject to law.

With this interest, in the Biographia Literaria, he refines Schelling's
"Philosophy of Nature" into a theory of art. "There can be no
plagiarism in philosophy," says Heine:--Es giebt kein Plagiat in der
Philosophie, in reference to the charge brought against Schelling of
unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno; and certainly that which is common
to Coleridge and Schelling and Bruno alike is of far earlier origin
than any of them. Schellingism, the "Philosophy of Nature," is indeed
a constant tradition in the history of thought: it embodies a permanent
type of the speculative temper. That mode of conceiving nature as a
mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may be traced up to