the human
reason to discover the unifying idea which underlies all the variety
of nature; and thus it is that when manifold objects of sense are
reduced by the imagination to order and unity the soul is satisfied,
and its experience is an experience of what is called the beautiful.
It is with this discovering of order in the seemingly chaotic, in
other words the discovering of beauty, that the creative artist is
concerned. It is his business to inform matter with idea; and matter
symbolically used becomes the expression of the artist's thought just
as for the theologian the world of nature is an expression of the
thought of God. "To make the external internal, the internal external,
to make nature thought, and thought nature--this is the mystery of
genius in the Fine Arts." And he goes on significantly: "Dare I add
that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving
to become mind--that it is mind in its essence?" And in all the
_Biographia Literaria_ there is perhaps no more striking suggestion
than: "Remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and
thence the loveliness of the former."

It should be observed that Coleridge's philosophy presupposes "a bond
between nature in the higher sense and the soul of a man,"
presupposes, that is, that the spirit of the artist "has the same
ground with nature," whose unspoken language he must learn "in its
main radicals." It is only by reason of this bond that external
nature, the manifestation of _Natura naturans_, lends itself to the
artist so that he too may manifest himself. To attain this end the
artist will imitate nature but not copy her. ("What idle rivalry!" he
exclaims. Is not a copy of nature like a wax-work figure, which shocks
because it lacks "the motion and the life which we expected?") The
artist imitates what he perceives to be essential in nature; he takes
the images which life affords him and so disposes of them as to bring
to light the unities which the spirit loves; it is he who brings order
out of disorder, imposing upon matter a form which the imagination has
conceived.

For the purposes of the general critic of art, Coleridge has given us
too much and too little. He gives us too much: for the acceptance of
his theory in its completeness is only possible for those who can also
accept his metaphysic (his artist stands in a special relationship to
that _Natura naturans_ which is a name for God). It is indeed clear to
me that no