Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds

Author(s): Arthur O. Lovejoy

Reviewed work(s):
Source: ELH, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 1940), pp. 341-362
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
By ARTHUR O. Lovwoy
The liaison between literary and philosophical studies, upon
the need for which the writer of this paper, among others, has
elsewhere dilated, is, no doubt, regarded by some students of
literature and its history as a liaison dangereuse. But in the
case of Coleridge, at least, it is patently inevitable. Coleridge's
metaphysical speculations were, on the whole, the most charac-
teristic manifestation of his mind, his persistently recurrent
preoccupation, and often the tacit premises in what he says
when he is not apparently talking metaphysics. They were, no
doubt-precisely because they were so deeply rooted in the man
himself-usually the expression of needs of the emotions and
of the imagination arising out of his native temperament and of
its reactions upon his personal experiences. But it is only
through these expressions that many of the underlying affective
factors in his personality and his literary activity can be fully
understood. To know Coleridge as man or as writer it is neces-
sary to understand (if possible) the nature and interrelations
of those philosophic ideas-abstract, often confused, usually
sketchily expressed in any single passage, frequently conflicting
with one another-which nevertheless were to him among the
most vital things in his existence.
Nearly all of his final philosophy, as is evident to any reader
of it, was related to, and could be subsumed under, that distinc-
tion between two methods of thought-or so-called " faculties "
of knowledge-the Reason and the Understanding, which, in the
form in which he held it, he had learned partly from Kant but
more from Jacobi and Schelling. The recognition of the superi-
ority of the former faculty as a source of philosophical insight
carried with it for him many and very diverse consequences;
but the most important use to which the distinction could be
put was, in his view, that of vindicating philosophically man's
moral freedom and accountability, and consequently the reality
of genuinely moral evil-evil for which the individual himself
is absolutely and alone responsible. That the abandonment of
341
342 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
necessitarianism was the turning-point in his mental history
has been often pointed out by others. In the Confessio fidei
(1816) -of which the first part contains what Coleridge calls
" the table of natural religion, i. e., the religion of all finite
rational beings "-the first article is:
I believe that I am a free agent, inasmuchas, and so far as, I have a
will, which rendersme justly responsiblefor my actions, omissive as
well as commissive.'
In Aids to Reflection (1825) it is above all because the Reason
justifies the belief in human freedom that he assures the
" youthful readers " of that work that
The main chance of their reflectingaright, and of their attaining to
a contemplationof spiritualtruths at all, rests on their insight into
the nature of this disparity,2
i. e., between Understanding and Reason. I shall not multiply
familiar quotations; it is impossible to read Coleridge's more
connected expositions of his moral and religious philosophy
without recognizing his engrossing concern to establish the
freedom of the will. The purpose of this paper is to inquire
into the precise nature and source of Coleridge's ideas on this
matter, and to consider whether it was, in fact, " freedom "
or its opposite that his reasonings, if accepted, established. It
is this part of his thought which seems to me to have been least
adequately expounded and insufficiently emphasized in the
three most recent attempts at a comprehensive account of his
philosophy and of its relation to Kant's.3
It has been supposed by some interpreters of Coleridge that
his conversion from the necessitarianism which he had accepted
under the influence of Hartley was due to (or found its ration-
alization in) the arguments by which Kant in the Kritik der
reinen Vernunft sought to show that the mind is " active " in
the determination of the character of its own experience, and
not merely a passive tabula rasa upon which sensations coming
1
Works, ed. Shedd, 5 (1884). 15.
2 Ibid., 1. 246; for the argument as a whole, cf. id., pp. 152, 154, 232, 267, 271-275.
3Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher, 1930; R. Wellek, Immanuel Kant in Eng-
land, 1931; E. Winkelmann, Coleridge und die kantische Philosophie, 1933. Lawrence
Hanson's admirable Life of Coleridge (Vol. 1) has not reached the period of the
poet's final conversion from necessitarianism.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 343
from without-and coming from a material world itself subject
to mechanical laws-write their impressions. Three questions
are to be distinguished here. (1) Is there in fact, in the
Kantian thesis of the so-called " activity of the mind," any
logical implication of the " freedom of the will? " The answer
is that there obviously is not. The Kantian theory of the way
in which our experience comes to be what in fact it is, is that
two factors are combined in it: (a) a " manifold of sense,"
consisting of the diverse qualitative elements of our perceptual
content-color, sound, and the like-in the reception of which
the mind is wholly passive, and (b) the " forms "--time, space,
and the categories-imposed upon this otherwise amorphous
material by virtue of the fact that the mind has a constitution
of its own, a set of frames or pigeon-holes into which the data
of sense must be fitted in order that we may have anything that
can properly be called " experience " at all. In so far as the
fitting of the sensory material into these frames may be
described as an act of the mind, " activity " may, in a sense,
be attributed to that organ; but it is an " activity " without
freedom. The forms are invariant for all minds, in accordance
with the supposed universal and unalterable constitution of
the Understanding as such. (2) Did Kant himself, neverthe-
less, regard the doctrine of the " activity of mind," in this
epistemological sense, as implying the freedom of the will?
Again the obvious answer is in the negative. What, in the con-
structive part of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, he was chiefly
concerned to show was that all the temporal events of our
conscious life are completely predetermined. So far from
regarding the sensationalist's assumption of the passivity of the
mind as too deterministic, his objection to it was that it was not
deterministic enough. If the theorems of mathematics and the
laws of physics are 'merely statements about the habits of a
world wholly independent of the mind, we have, Kant felt, no
assurance that that alien world's habits are uniform and depend-
able; in technical terms, we could in that case make no " syn-
thetic judgments a priori," could never generalize and predict
with confidence. But if we can know how the mind, as the
subject of experience, is itself constituted, we can know in
advance (Kant assumed) that any experiences which we can
344 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
ever have will conform to that constitution, will be subject to a
certain antecedently formulable general rules of concomitance
and succession. And this necessity applies not only to the
sequences of our sensations but also to our motives. " It mat-
ters not that these are internal, . . . that they have a psycho-
logical and not a mechanical causality, i. e., that they produce
actions by means of ideas and not by bodily movements; they
are still determniningprinciples of the causality of a being whose
existence is determinable in time and consequently are subject
to necessitating conditions in past time, which, therefore, when
the subject has to act, are no longer in his power." 4 Thus the
effect of the Kantian arguments for the " activity of the mind "
should have been to confirm Coleridge in his necessitarianism
-by providing him with a new and better proof of it than
could be got from Hartley or Priestley. (3) Did Coleridge
himself, however, (erroneously) suppose that the Kantian
doctrine of " the activity of the mind " in giving form to its
own experience did somehow imply indeterminism? The belief
that he did appears to rest mainly upon two of his letters to
Thomas Poole, of March, 1801. The first of these has been
regarded by most of Coleridge's biographers as marking the
point of his intellectual conversion from Hartleian necessitari-
anism - though not, doubtless, of his earliest emotional
revulsion against it. The passage therefore demands somewhat
careful scrutiny.
Coleridge begins by saying that the interval since his last
letter to Poole " has been filled up in the most intense study ";
and what follows is obviously a summary report of the results
of that study. The letter concludes with the expression of
an intention (one of his innumerable unrealized projects) to
write and publish forthwith a work which will " prove that I
have not formed an opinion without an attentive perusal of
the works of my predecessors, from Aristotle to Kant." By
this time, then, Coleridge evidently believed himself to have
completed a sufficiently " attentive perusal " of Kant to be
qualified to expound the essentials of his doctrine; and it is a
probable inference that this perusal had been at least a part,
and the culminating part, of the " intense study " to which
'Kr. d. pr. V., A. 172-3; italics in original.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 345
Coleridge refers. What, then, was the briefly indicated out-
come of that study? " If I do not greatly deceive myself,"
Coleridge writes, " I have not only (a) completely extricated
the notions of time and space, but have (b) overthrown the
doctrine of association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all
the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels-especially (c)
the doctrine of necessity." ' Now (a) what did Coleridge mean
by " extricating the notions of time and space? " The answer is
not certain; but he must have meant one or the other of two
things. i. The reference may have been to the Kantian sepa-
ration of time and space from the properties of objective
reality; the words sound, indeed, rather like a syncopated echo
of a phrase of Kant's own, in concluding the exposition of his
argument for " freedom": Von so grosser Wichtigkeit ist ...
die Absonderung der Zeit (so wie des Raums) von der Existenz
der Dinge an sich selbst.6 This was the essence of the supposed
Kantian refutation of necessitarianism, to which we shall
return. ii. It is, however, perhaps more probable that Cole-
ridge meant " mutually extricated," i. e., that he had com-
pletely distinguished the notions of time and space from one
another. So construed, the point of the sentence is to be
gathered from a passage of Biographia Literaria in which he
discriminates " time per se ... from our notion of time; for this
is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the contrary
of time, is therefore its measure."" This distinction, then,
which sounds like an anticipation of Bergson but is in fact
probably an echo of Schelling, may have been the first of the
metaphysical discoveries which Coleridge believed himself to
have made in the spring of 1801. The complete despatializing
of " time per se " presumably implied that it is not " extended,"
that the " moments " of it are not, as are the points or regions of
space, mutually external and exclusive, but rather compresent or
interpenetrating. And this, in turn, is fairly evidently connected
(though Coleridge himself characteristically does not make the
connection explicit) with the idea of the true " self " of the indi-
vidual as simultaneously apprehending or possessing all the
'Letters (1895 ed.), 1. 348; italics in original. The letters in parentheses have
been added for convenience in reference.
' Kritik der pr. V., A, 184. 7Biogr. Lit., ed. Shaweross, 1. 187.
346 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
experiences which seem separated as past and present; if it were
not for the material body, Coleridge tells us, it is " probable "
that " every human soul " would " have the collective experience
of its whole past existence ... Yea, in the very nature of a living
spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should
pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be
loosened, or lost, from that living chain of causes, to all whose
links, conscious or unconscious, the free will, our only absolute
self, is co-extensive and co-present."8 Here-though in a way
which thus far remains obscure,-" the free will " is identified
with a self somehow transcending time (in the ordinary, spati-
alized notion of time). Whichever of these two interpretations
of Coleridge's " extrication of the notions of space and time " be
the right one, in neither case is the doctrine of freedom based
upon, or confused with, the Kantian thesis of the " activity "
of the Understanding in giving a priori form to its perceptual
content.
But (b) the " doctrine of association" might, nevertheless,
be naturally held by one who, like Coleridge, had formerly
accepted it, to have been definitely " overthrown " by Kant's
first Critique; for the thesis of a priori forms of perception and
thought, if established, invalidated the supposed explanation of
all thought-processes by quasi-mechanical, empirical associa-
tions of ideas. Did this, however, entail (c) -the overthrow
of the " doctrine of necessity?" Coleridge's language (" with
it ") doubtless seems to suggest that he thought it did; and
there was some logical connection between the two, of which
Coleridge may well have been thinking. In so far as associa-
tionism implied determinism, a refutation of the former
removed one of the premises of the latter-for a former associ-
ationist, the principal premise. But the fact that the particular
Kantian reasoning by which associationism was " overthrown "
was- as deterministic in its implications as the Hartleian doc-
trine itself can scarcely have been unknown to Coleridge at any
time after he had gained even a superficial acquaintance with
Kant; in many later passages, he clearly recognized the fact and
insisted upon it. It is, then, probable that it was the Kantian
8 Ibid., p. 80. How much of Bergson's philosophy, especially of Matiere et
Metnoire, is implicit here, need not be pointed out.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 347
exclusion of space and time (at least of " spatialized " time)
from the real, or non-phenomenal, world, that was the logical
instrument of Coleridge's final and complete conversion from
necessitarianism; and it is, we shall see, certain that, in his
published writings, it was this that provided the usual philo-
sophical basis of his own doctrine of freedom and of his most
cherished religious and moral convictions.9
Before showing this, I digress to consider a supposed evidence
of the influence of Kant upon Coleridge's poetry in the same
period-namely, in " Dejection, an Ode," of which the first of
several versions was published in 1802.10 This poem, Professor
Gingerich has said, " gives the fullest expression to be found
in [Coleridge's] poetry of the transcendental principle." The
generalization expressed in the lines
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live ...
this "is as radical transcendentalism as some of the poet's
earlier conceptions were radical necessitarianism. The mind
now is not an automaton, but an original creative force; nature
becomes a mirror, not a mere mechanical instrument, in which
man's mind can reflect itself." 1 Similarly, Frl. Winkelmann
declares that it is in these lines that " there first appears quite
clearly die kritisch-idealistische Geisteshaltung seiner 'philoso-
phischen' Epoche "; i. e., they too are expressions of the doc-
trine of the " activity of mind " in shaping its own experience;
9 Shaweross in his edition of the Biographia Literaria (Introd., p. xxx), denies
that "Coleridge's final abandonment of Hartley's system" is to be " attributed
to the influence of Kant," and even thinks that " this letter forbids such a con-
clusion." This view, for reasons indicated in the text, and others, appears to me
unconvincing. In the other letter usually cited in this connection (March 23, 1801,
in Letters, 1. 352), Coleridge argues for the doctrine of the creative activity of the
mind, and declares that " there is ground for suspicion that any system built on
the passiveness of the mind must be false." But this is not connected with the
issue concerning the freedom of the will; and, as already shown, if the reference is
to Kant's disproof of " the passiveness of the mind " in the first Critique, there
is no good reason to suppose that Coleridge so grossly misunderstood Kant as to
find in that reasoning an argument for such freedom.
'" Into the differences between these versions it is not necessary, for the purpose
of this paper, to enter. They are fully dealt with by E. de Selincourt, " Coleridge's
'Dejection,"' Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 22 (1936),
where the text of the origiinal ns. may be found.
'" Essays in the Romantic Poets, p. 46.
348 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS

and another writer refers to the poem as " ces vers que l'on peut
considerer comme une interpretation metaphysique de l'aprio-
risme kantien." 12 This reading of Kantian epistemology
and metaphysics into the Ode seems to me to rest upon a pure
confusion of ideas. Coleridge is not expressing the thesis of
' transcendental ' idealism that the mind gives form to the world
of objects that it perceives; he is expressing, out of a painful
personal experience, the psychological fact that the power of
natural beauty to give us pleasure is conditioned by our sub-
jective states. What we must give to nature in order to receive
it back is the aesthetic transfiguration:
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth.
We must, in short, bring " joy " to the contemplation of the
external world in order to receive joy from it; for
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight .

Without this inner glow which we project into nature, it

remains an " inanimate cold world." But this " beautiful and
beauty-making power " the poet finds that he cannot command
at will. In a mood of deep depression-arising, as we now
know, in part from ill health and the effects of opiates taken to
relieve it, in part from domestic unhappiness, in part from a
feeling of moral weakness-he discovers that the delight he
once found in the sunset, the stars, the crescent moon, is gone.
I see them all, so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.
This inability to respond emotionally to the spectacle of nature
was, obviously, not the consequence of a reading of the Kritik
der reinen Vernunft; the generalization which Coleridge bases
upon this experience was not to be found in that work, which
has nothing to say about the fact of empirical psychology that
is dwelt upon in the poem; " joy " was not one of the a priorn
categories of Kant; and there is not even a formal parallel
12 B. Munteano, review of Wellek's Kant in England, in Rev. de litt. comparee,

13 (1983). 562; cf. J. W. Beach, The Concept of Nature .. ., p. 128.

 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 349

between Coleridge's psychological observation and Kant's

metaphysical theorem, since " the mind " which Kant makes
the source of the a prkoripercepts (space and time) and the
categories is the generic mind, identical in all men and unmodi-
fied by circumstances, while Coleridge is insisting upon the
differences between the aesthetic reactions of individual minds
-and specifically, of his own mind (at the moment) and
Wordsworth's-and even of the same mind in different moods.
There is in the Ode, it is true, the poetic intimation of an
aesthetic theory; and this is in accord with the Kantian aesthet-
ics in so far as it admits that there may be an intellectual
recognition that an object is abstractly " beautiful," without
emotion: " I see, not feel, how beautiful they are." But Kant
had scornfully (and characteristically) declared that any
" taste that requires an added element of emotion and charm
for its delight, not to speak of adopting this as the measure of
its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism "; ' whereas
the burden of Coleridge's poem is the emptiness of this unemo-
tionalized judgment, the indispensability, for any genuine
aesthetic experience, of the non-intellectual and non-universal
element which Kant had so loftily dismissed. There is also, in
the original version of the poem, a delicate, perhaps a scarcely
intended, hint of a criticism of Wordsworth, in the guise of a
compliment-the suggestion that that " simple spirit," more
serene and equable in temperament than Coleridge, and more
fortunate in the circumstances of his life, " rais'd from anxious
dread and busy care," was not wholly aware that he gave to
nature the " life " and " joy " that he found in it, and that his
power to do so was due to his temperament and circumstances.,4
'L Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 223; Meredith tr., pp. 64-65. The relation to the
Kantian aesthetic doctrine of Coleridge's Principles of Genial Criticism (1814) and
other later writings on the subject, there is not here space to consider.
"c
14 That this contrast with Wordsworth was the root idea of ' Dejection,"'
writes de Selincourt (op. cit., p. 15), "becomes doubly clear when we relate the
facts of Coleridge's life . . . with those of Wordsworth's during the same period."
Wordsworth, however, was not unmindful of the truth expressed in Coleridge's
poem; e. g., in the familiar lines of Yarrow Revisited (1834):
Yea, what were mighty Nature's self?
Her features, could they win us,
Unhelped by the poetic voice
That hourly speaks within us?
7
350 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
This has been a divagation from my principal theme, due to
a feeling that it is worth while to make an attempt-probably
futile-to prevent certain current misreadings of " Dejection "
from becoming stock annotations in future textbooks. It is
more pertinent to the present subject to point out that, if that
poem has any relevance to the question of the freedom of the
will, it is not as a vindication of freedom. For what it records
is the powerlessness of the poet's will to control even his moods.
He would recapture his accustomed joy in nature, he would feel
as Wordsworth feels, but he cannot; and his inability to alter
his inner state is caused by external circumstances not of his
own choice. It should be added, however, that, as artist, he
finds a certain triumph in defeat; for he is able to derive, and to
impart, aesthetic pleasure from the very emotion aroused by his
inability to experience aesthetic pleasure or at all events, from
the poetic utterance of that emotion. The Ode is a paradox
among poems in that it not merely-like many other poems-
makes melancholy enjoyable, but achieves beauty by the
description of the loss of the feeling for beauty. If Coleridge
himself had considered this aspect of his poem, he would have
gained from it a further pleasure; for he would doubtless have
seen in it a welcome example of the " reconciliation of oppo-
sites," another striking illustration of the truth of the proverb
he loved best: " Extremes meet."
Let us return to the examination of the actual Kantian source
of Coleridge's ideas about the moral freedom of the individual.
Kant's doctrine on the subject is, of course, familiar to all philo-
sophical readers; but for the purposes of this paper it is neces-
sary to summarize it briefly. It was connected with a charac-
teristic of Kant's philosophy which is not always sufficiently
recognized. Kant, not less than Plato, was a philosopher who
believed in two worlds, or realms of being, corresponding to the
two "faculties " of knowledge, the Understanding and the
Reason. There is 'this ' world, the world of existents and
events in time and space, and another, a " supersensible " or
"noumenal" or "intelligible" world, consisting of entities
which are neither in time nor in space, for which there is no
' before ' or ' after ' and no ' here ' or ' there.' But the realities
belonging to this other world of Kant's, at least the ones in
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 351
which he was chiefly interested, were not Platonic Ideas-
hypostatized universals; they were supratemporal individuals,
and the class of them pertinent to our subject were selves or
egos. The human individual belongs to both orders; he has an
" empirical " and a " noumenal " ego. The empirical ego is the
concrete personality, the self that consists in or experiences the
totality of sensations, thoughts, feelings, desires, impulses, that
vary from moment to moment; and this ego, being in time and
subject to change, is subject also to the complete causal deter-
mination which governs all changes in time. In short, the
empirical ego is a part of " nature," a " phenomenon (in the
sense of that term in which it is the antithesis of "noume-
non "); 15 it is an object of the Understanding, and must con-
form to the laws of the Understanding, which exclude freedom.
In Kant's own words:
If we would attribute freedomto a being whose existence is deter-
mined in time, we cannot except him from the law of necessity as
to all events in his existence, and consequently as to his actions
also; for that would be to hand him over to blind chance.... It
follows that if this were the mode in which we had also to conceive
the existence of these things in thermnelves,
freedom would have to
be rejected as a vain and impossible conception.16
But the Practical Reason, i. e'.,the moral consciousness, seemed
to Kant, as to Coleridge, not merely to demand but logically to
imply " freedom ";17 without it, he declares, " no moral law and
no moral imputation are possible." Freedom, then, must be
13 A definition of the distinction of phenomenonand noumenon by Coleridge
occurs in the British Museum vms.,Egerton fol. pp. 96-97 printed by Winkelmann,
op. cit., pp. 181 f. It is, however, somewhat inadequate as an explication of either
Kant's or Coleridge's actual use of term.
16Kr. d. pr. V, A, 170. Cf. the whole passage, ibid., 167-185; in Abbott's English
translation (Kant's Theory of Ethics, 1889), pp. 187-197.
7It is often forgotten that Kant gave to the belief in freedom a different and
superior logical status to that assigned to the " postulates " of God and immortality;
cf. Kr. d. Urt., A, 431-432: The possible objects of belief (Filrwahrhalten) are
divisible into three classes: matters of opinion (Meinungssachen), matters of fact
(Thatsachen), and matters of faith (Glaubenssachen). The Ideas of God and
immortality belong to the third class; but " it is very noteworthy that one of the
Ideas of the Reason is to be found among the matters of fact .. ., namely, the Idea
of Freedom"; for this, "through the practical laws of the Pure Reason, can be
manifested in actual deeds "-and therefore, in experience. It must, however, be
added that-as the discerning reader will note-this last is inconsistent with other
parts of Kant's doctrine.
352 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
" saved "; and " no other way remains to do so but to attribute
it " to the noumenal ego. It is true that Kant speaks of the two
egos as " the same being "; and if they were really conceived by
him as the same, his double doctrine would also be an expressly
self-contradictory doctrine. But two subjects of discourse are
not-and, properly speaking, are not conceived as-" the
same " when defined by mutually exclusive attributes; and a
self which is in time and subject to change is obviously not
defined in the same terms as a self to which all temporal predi-
cates are inapplicable, and which is therefore incapable of
change. There must, it is also true, be-for Kant's purposes-
a connection between them; his two worlds, like Plato's, must
after all be somehow linked together. How Kant conceives
them to be connected we shall presently see; for the moment it
suffices to recognize that the freedom which he asserts is that of
a different kind of being from the self which is not free, and that
it is precisely for this reason that the joint assertion of freedom
and necessity is, in Kant's words, only an "apparent
contradiction."
It is in these passages of Kant, then, that we may recognize
the probable means-or at all events, one of the means-of
Coleridge's conversion-or his justification of his conversion-
from his earlier deterministic, pantheistic and optimistic views
(expressed best in the poems Religious Musings and The
Destiny of Nations) to his final creed. The most important
thing-by Coleridge's own standards of importance, which are
not necessarily those of the historian of nineteenth-century
thought-which he gained from his acquaintance with German
philosophy, was a feeling-or the confirmation of a feeling to
which he was already predisposed-of the moral indispensa-
bility of the belief in individual freedom, and-what was to him
equally indispensable-a means of logically justifying that
belief, this means consisting in the Kantian scheme of the two
worlds, and of man as a being belonging to both. It is true that
more than one conception, explicit or implicit, of what " free-
dom " consists in may be discerned in the vast range of Cole-
ridge's writings; on this, as on most philosophical questions, no
single, clear-cut, and invariant way of thinking is to be found in
him. But the source of the main and most persistent strain in
his reflection on this, to him, all-important issue is unmistak-
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 353
able. The problem of the freedom of the will, he observes (in
a relatively late writing) was not clearly understood by
" Luther, Erasmus or Saavedra." In fact, " till the appearance
of Kant's Kritiques [sic] of the pure and of the practical reason,
the problem had never been accurately or adequately stated,
much less solved." 18 The nature of this solution as Coleridge
understood it, is most fully expressed in several unfortunately
separated passages in Aids to Refleotion, which are here
brought together.
" Nature is the term in which we comprehendall things that are
representablein the forms of Time and Space, and subjected to the
relations of Cause and Effect; and the cause of the existence of
which, therefore,is to be sought for perpetuallyin somethingante-
cedent.... It follows, therefore,that whatever originatesits own
acts, or in any sense contains in itself the cause of its own state,
must be spiritual, and consequently supernatural;yet not on that
account necessarily miraculous. And such must the responsible
Will in us be, if it is to be at all.... No natural thing or act can
be called originant. The moment we assume an origin in Nature,
a true Beginning, and actual First-that moment we rise above
Nature.... But a moral evil is an evil that has its origin in the
Will.... [To conceive of such evil as possible], let the evil be
supposed such as to imply the impossibility of an individual's
referringto any particulartime at which it might be conceived to
have commenced.... Let it be supposed,in short, that the sub-
ject stands in no relation whatever to Time, can neither be called
in Time, nor out of Time; but that all relations of Time are alien
. . . and heterogeneousin this question."19
And again:
" I still find myself dissatisfied with the argument against Free-
dom derived from the influence of motives, Vorstellungen,etc.,
. . .All that we want to prove is the possibility of Free Will,
or, what is really the same, a Will. Now this Kant had unanswer-
ably proved by showing the distinction between phenomena and
noumena,and by demonstratingthat Time and Space are relevant
to the former only . . . and irrelevant to the latter, to which class
the Will must belong."20
"8 Works,5.280-1.
1" Works, 1. 263, 272, 286-7; cf. Allsop 265: " All the sophistry of the Predesti-
narians rests on the false notion of eternity as a sort of time antecedent to time.
It is timeless, present with and in all times."
20 I regret that the reference for this citation has, through some mischance in
copying, become separated from the text, and cannot be verified without delaying
publication.
354 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
The " Will " here is-or belongs to-the noumenal ego; the
empirical ego which acts in time is not-or has not-a Will,
precisely because, as Coleridge holds, in full agreement with
Kant, it is in no concrete choice or act ever free, but completely
predetermined. It follows from this that Coleridge cannot be
said ever to have abandoned the form of necessitarianism which
he held in his Hartleian period; for that related solely to nature
and to man's temporal existence. Coleridge merely supple-
mented this determinism with respect to the homo phenome-
non by finding (as he thought) another kind of freedom in
another kind of world.
It should perhaps be added that in Biographia Literaria
(1817) the freedom or " activity" which Coleridge defends (in
chapters 5-8) against the Hartleian associationism is not the
Kantian kind of freedom; it is a property not of the noumenal
but of the phenomenal ego. What Coleridge here is chiefly
concerned to show, in his long meandering approach to his doc-
trine about the poetic Imagination, is that " the will, the reason,
the judgment, and the understanding," and also " the affections
and the passions," are " determining causes of association," and
not, as Hartley's theory would make them, " its creatures and
among its mechanical effects." Upon that theory " our whole
life would be divided between the despotism of outward impres-
sions, and that of senseless and passive memory." It is, thus,
implied by the Hartleian system that " we only fancy that we
act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses
of anger, love or generosity," while in reality all our acts are
determined by past involuntary conjunctions of sensations,
themselves determined by merely mechanical laws of the
motion of material particles. But Coleridge finds it to be a
plain fact of experience that both emotive impulses and (what
is most of all important) rational reflection on the value of
future ends to be attained (the operation of " final causes "),
do affect our thought-processes and thereby our action-are,
indeed, " distinct powers, whose function it is to controul, deter-
mine and modify the phantasmal chaos of association " itself.2
The vindication of a sort of freedom in this sense is for Cole-
ridge a necessary preliminary to his account of the nature and
21Biogr. Lit., pp. 80, 81.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 355
working of the Imagination; it is as such a preliminary that it
is introduced, and for that purpose it is sufficient. But in all
this, obviously, Coleridge is dealing solely with concrete tem-
poral processes of consciousness, and is asserting, against
Hartley, the potency of certain kinds of causes-reasoning and
purposive thought, spontaneous impulses of anger, love, etc.-
for which associationism seemed to him to find no place. But
such mental " powers " were still causes; nor does Coleridge
clearly maintain that they are themselves uncaused, that their
actual operation in time is wholly unrelated to any kind of
antecedent events or conditions-which, indeed, he could not
do, in consistency with his general philosophy. The refutation
of Hartley, then, in Biographia Literaria is irrelevant to
Coleridge's Kantian doctrine of the exclusively " noumenal"
freedom of the individual.
The same Kantian dualism of the phenomenal and noumenal
worlds is of the essence of Coleridge's doctrine of " Original
Sin," for him the central truth of Christianity and, indeed, of
ethics: " Wherever the Science of Ethics is acknowledged and
taught, there the Article of Original Sin will be an Axiom of
Faith in all classes." It is " no tenet first introduced and
imposed by Christianity, and which, should a man see reason to
disclaim the authority of the Gospel, would no longer have any
claim on his attention, ... no perplexity which has no existence
for a philosophic Deist," but a " fact acknowledged in all ages,
and recognized, but not originating, in the Christian Scrip-
tures."22 But the Coleridgean " Original Sin" was by no
means that of Augustine or of orthodox theology in general-
the hereditary transmission to all the descendants of Adam of
the taint arising from the sin of our first parents,
The sad bequest of sire to son.
The traditional doctrine seemed to Coleridge superficial,
mechanical, and, above all, immoral; since we are not Adam, it
is not his sin, nor even its supposed consequence-the non posse
non peccare-for which,,our wills are responsible.28 My sinful-
22 Aids to Reflection;Works,1. 284, 287; cf. id., pp. 195-6, and Table Talk, 6. 418.
23 For Coleridge's attack upon the traditional doctrine, see Aids to Reflection,
Comment CIXC; Works, 1. 275-283.
356 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
ness must be inherent in me, not determined by my heredity,
any more than by anything else external to my separate self;
if it were T should not be free, and therefore no guilt would be
imputable to me. There can be no sin which is not " original,"
i. e., intrinsic and independent of any prius.24 But no act of the
temporal ego is thus original and free; and therefore, if man's
being were simply temporal, the very notion of sin would be
meaningless. The locus, then, of sin, as of freedom, can be only
in the noumenal world, beyond time and the succession of
causes and effects. Thus the portion of Coleridge's Confessio
fidei which contains " the creed of revealed religion " begins:
I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity,
that I am a fallen creature;that I am of myself capable of moral
evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that an evil
groundexisted in my will, previouslyto any given act, or assignable
moment of time, in my consciousness. I am born a child of wrath.
All the noumenal egos, in short, are bad egos. So, again, in one
of Coleridge's marginalia on Kant:
The ineffable act of Will choosing evil, which is underneath or
within consciousness, . . . must be conceived as taking place in
the Homo Noumenon, not the Homo Phaenomenon.25
And again in " Notes on The Pilgrnm's Progress ";
It is one thing to perceive this or that particulardeed to be sinful,
. . . and another thing to feel sin within us independent of par-
ticular actions, except as the particular ground of them. And it
is this latter without which no man can become a Christian.26
Coleridge's zeal to establish man's freedom was chiefly due to
this desire to show that man is a sinner-a real and intrinsic
sinner, not an unfortunate victim of circumstances.
But in what sense can freedom be intelligibly predicated of
a noumenal or supratemporal ego? No doubt, if the reality of
such an entity be admitted, its character is " uncaused," in the
temporal sense of cause; as it is not in time, there was nothing
prior to it which made it what it is. But the question remains
24 Works,5. 16.
25 Marginal note in Kant's Metaphysik der Sitten; ed. by H. Nidecker in Rev.
de litt. Cormp.,7. 337.
28 Works,5.9258.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 357

whether it is determined by any non-temporal ground not itself

-either, e. g., by an eternal logical necessity, as in Spinoza, or
by an " eternal decree " of the Divine Will, as in Calvinism.
The only answer to this which would leave the noumenal ego
really free would be the negative answer: that its " intelligible
character "-and therefore, its timeless sinfulness-is a blank,
unrelated fact, which nothing else in the entire universe, not
even God, in any degree explains. The eternal ego would need
to be eternally isolated from everything else. What it is, it
just timelessly happened to be, and there an end of the matter.
This was a solution which neither Kant nor Coleridge could
consistently and unequivocally adopt, for it implied that the
noumenal order is a realm of utter unintelligibility, of pure
chance, in which no sufficient reason, no reason of any kind,
exists for anything; and it was, moreover, irreconcilable with
the Christian doctrine of creation, which, even when philo-
sophically construed as referring to a " timeless " act, all the
more implied that the finite eternal selves owe their being-and
their being what they are-to God. Kant had expressly
insisted upon this:
If existence in time is merely a sensible mode of representationon
the part of thinking beings in the world, and consequentlydoes not
apply to them as things-in-themselves,then the creation of these
beings is a creation of things-in-themselves,since the notion of a
creation does not belong to the sensible mode of existence and of
causality,but can have referenceonly to noumena. . . God, as
universal first cause, is also the cause of the existence of substance
[i. e., of things-in-themselves,not of "appearances"], a proposi-
tion which can never be given up without at the same time giving
up the conceptionof God as the Being of all beings, and therewith
denying his all-sufficiency, on which everything in theology
depends.27
And Coleridge was as little disposed as Kant to deny the Ailge-
nugsamlkeit of deity; along with his desire to believe in the
27
Kr. d. pr. V., pp. 187, 180. Kant, however, adds that " the circumstance that
the acting beings are creatures cannot make the slightest difference," with respect
to their freedom, " since creation concerns their supersensible existence, and there-
fore cannot be regarded as the determining ground of the appearances " (ibid,
p. 184). Yet, as will appear, Kant declared that the noumenal ego is the " deter-
mining ground," of those appearances which are the individual's temporal acts;
so that the Creator is the cause of the latter at one remove.
358 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
freedom of the will, he had an equally, or all but equally, strong
inclination to think of God as the only vera causa,28 and,
indeed, as the all-comprehensive reality. Thus, ca. 1814,-in
commenting on the dictum of the seventeenth-century divine,
Richard Field, that " in the highest degree freedom of the will
is proper to God only, and in this sense Calvin and Luther
rightly deny that the will of any creature is or ever was free "
-Coleridge adds: " except as in God, and God in us. Now the
latter alone is will; for it alone is ens super ens. And here lies
the mystery, which I dare not openly and promiscuously
reveal." 29 To the philosophic reader Coleridge in this
it reveals " enough to indicate that, at least when writing this
comment, he conceived human freedom to mean only that God
is free, and that, inasmuch as every creature's nature and action
is determined by the will of God acting in him, he in a sense
participates in that freedom. This, however, is a denial of
individual freedom; it is essentially Calvinism, with a vaguely
pantheistic coloring. Coleridge, however, at this time, evi-
dently regarded this as a doctrine dangerous, though true. He
also, as others have shown, had a strong inclination to the
conception - akin to the Hlegelian-of the universe as an
organic whole in which everything implies and is implied by
everything else-in which, in other words, there is a complete
mutual determination of things, and nothing is thinkable,
except inadequately and falsely, in isolation. " The ground-
work of all pure speculation is the full apprehension of the
difference between the contemplation of reason, namely, that
intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as
one with the whole, and that which arises when, transferring
reality to the negations of reality, . . . we think of ourselves as
separate beings." The latter, " the abstract knowledge which
belongs to us as separate beings, . . . leads to a science of
delusion." 3' But to think of our noumenal egos as " free," in
2B n
" Religious Musings " Coleridge had spoken of the deity as the " sole
"
operant." In a letter to Cottle of 1807, he writes that this expression is indeed
far too bold; may be misconstrued into Spinozism; and therefore, though it is
susceptible of pious and justifiable interpretation, I should by no means now use
such a phrase " (Biogr. Epistolaris, 2.10). What the " pious and justifiable inter-
pretation" is Coleridge, unhappily, does not tell us; but to the conception expressed
by the phrase his mind persistently tended to revert.
29 Works, 5 (1884). 68. '? The Friend; Worb, i.469-472.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 359
the sense required by the Coleridgean notions of imputability
and of Original Sin, is to think of them as " separate beings."
Thus three potent motives in Coleridge's thought-his accept-
ance of the orthodox doctrine of creation (translated into
Kantian terms), his strong religious feeling of the pervasiveness
of a divine presence and power-the conviction that " God is
All and in all "-and the quasi-Hegelian strain in his meta-
physics, all were hopelessly at variance with his doctrine of
individual freedom, and of an evil which originates solely in the
individual.31 Since he never abandoned the former, he cannot
be said-nor can Kant-to have shown, or even consistently
to have asserted, that the eternal or " intelligible character "
of the individual ego is not necessitated by some reality other
than itself.
They did, however, expressly declare that this noumenal
self-however it came to have the precise degree of inherent
goodness or badness characteristic of it-is responsible for the
behavior, good or bad, of the concrete individual. For, says
Kant, in a man's noumenal existence,
nothing is antecedent to the determinationof his will, but every
action [i. e., in time,], and in general every modification of his
existence, . . . even the whole series of his existence as a sensible
being, is, in the consciousnessof his supersensibleexistence,nothing
but the result . . . of his causality as a noumenon.'2
This, taken in conjunction with the doctrine about causality
of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, means that all human acts
"1In a passage of the Huntington Library ms, which has been printed by
Muirhead (Coleridge as Philosopher, pp. 9278-279,cf. also pp. 236-242) Coleridge
faces the difficulty and makes an earnest and ingenious effort to reconcile the
theses: (a) that " a particular will " has " no true being except as a form of the
universal, and one with the universal Will," (b) that, in so far as morally bad, a
" particular will makes a self that is not God, and hence by its own act becomes
alien from God." The " solution " is that this separate (and therefore evil) will
can not, after all, be actually separate, because " in God all actual reality is con-
tained." No reconciliation, in short, is achieved; the reader is left with the choice
between a simple contradiction in terms, or a denial of the independence (and
therefore the responsibility) of the " particular will." None the less, this curious
and largely verbal piece of reasoning evidently gave its author the feeling of having
reconciled these opposite beliefs, both so needful for his peace of mind. For another
passage in which Coleridge struggles with the same difficulty, see Aids to Reflection,
in Works, 1. 274 n.
82 Kr. d.
pr. V., A, 175; Abbott's tr., p. 191.
360 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
have a curious sort of two-fold causation: as natural phe-
nomena, they are caused by antecedent natural phenomena,
and are not free; they are also completely determined by the
nature of the particular noumenal self whose acts they are-
though it never acts in time.33 We have similarly seen Cole-
ridge asserting that the sinful I which is "independent of
particular actions " is nevertheless " the particular ground of
them," while also asserting that everything that belongs to
"4nature " and is " representable under the form of Time "-
as all " particular actions " are-is determined by antecedent
temporal causes. Whether these two conceptions are logically
reconcilable I shall not here discuss; I point out only that if the
noumenal ego's " intelligible character " is not-as for Coleridge
it could not be-an isolated and arbitrary fact, to say that it is
c responsible " for the temporal character and acts of the indi-
vidual is another way of saying that they are not free. Thus
the Coleridgean doctrine of Original Sin-of which also the germ
may be found in Kant-represents all concrete moral evil, all
the particular sins of individuals, as necessitated from all
eternity by the inherently sinful nature of the immutable
noumenal self of each of those individuals, this nature, in turn,
being the result of no act of conscious choice on the part of any
one of them, but simply an inexplicable eternal property of
theirs-inexplicable unless, as in the passage cited above, it was
conceived to be attributable to the (in itself " mysterious ")
will of God. This, it seems probable, was, in one phase of his
philosophizing, Coleridge's real, but esoteric, view of the
matter. If so, let it be repeated, man's freedom still more
manifestly disappeared altogether-though of this consequence
Coleridge was apparently imperfectly, or only intermittently,
aware.
What was the relation of Coleridge's persistent quest of a
vindication of the freedom of the will and of the doctrine of
original sin, to his individual psychology? Why did he want-
33It would appear, however, that Coleridge sometimes (as in the passage of
Biogr. Lit. above cited, Shawcross 1. 80) conceived of the " absolute self " of the
individual as simultaneously experiencing all of the moments of its temporal,
phenomenal experience, as both " coextensive " and " co-present " with all " that
living chain of causes." Though Coleridge finds "free-will " in this, there is
nothing in this variation upon the notion of the noumenal ego and its relation to
the temporal that invalidates the observation in the text above.
 ARTHUR 0. LOVEJOY 361

as he manifestly did-to believe these things, and resort to such

desperate metaphysical expedients to justify his beliefs? The
answer is not simple; but one part of it may be suggested. I
suppose that a literary psychologist in the current fashion would
be likely to say that this strain in Coleridge's thought was a
species of systematization and rationalization of an inferiority-
complex; in Coleridge's time they would have called it by the
pleasanter, and in his case the juster, name of humility-a
humility not inconsistent with a consciousness of superior
intellectual powers. After his youthful self-confidence and
optimism were broken by a series of tragic experiences and
disappointments-above all, disappointments with himself-he
manifestly was often accompanied by a feeling of self-reproach,
a sense of great gifts never put to commensurate use, and of
inner inadequacy to situations which confronted him: a
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given and knowledge won in vain.34
He was, in short, deeply conscious of guilt for, at least, a long
succession of " omissive " sins. One way in which such a feeling
may find both expression and relief is through those modes of
religious experience called evangelical-the relief arising partly
from the propitiatory attitude of humility itself, chiefly from an
assurance of the possibility of redemption through an agency
other than one's own works and merits.35 Coleridge, at the same
time, was an intensely ratiocinative mind, and needed to have
an apparently philosophical basis for his religious emotions;
and it was this that he found in part in the Kantian reasoning
which has been outlined. From the premise- supposed to have
been justified by Kant-of man's imputable iniquity, plus the
assumption that this iniquity is universally and necessarily in-
herent in men's "noumenal" constitution, he deduced the
3 From " To William Wordsworth," written in 1807; Poems, ed. E. H. Coleridge,
1935, p. 403.
3 This supernatural redemptive action is also, in at least one passage, assigned
to the noumenal world: the " influence of the Spirit of God " acts " directly on the
homo noumenon " and through this upon " the homo phenomenon by the pre-
arrangement of outward or bodily circumstances-what are commonly called, in
pious language, providences." (Note on Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzeln der
blossen Vernunft, cited in Muirhead, p. 249.)
It should seem that a bad eternal ego should be eternally bad; but this im-
plication, also, of his Kantian metaphysics Coleridge appears to have happily
overlooked.
 362 COLERIDGE AND KANT'S TWO WORLDS
necessity for a supernatural means of grace and of salvation.86
Thus Kant opened for him the gate back into the emotionally
congenial fields of evangelical faith and piety.
I conclude with a remark concerning the bearing of all this
upon the nature of what is termed " Romanticism," and its
effects upon religious and moral ideas. Coleridge is commonly
described as one of the great English Romanticists and as the
principal introducer of German Romanticism into the English-
speaking world. But here-as in the most representative Ger-
man Romantic writers-we see that one characteristic thing in
the so-called Romantic influence was a revolt against natural-
ism, an ethical and metaphysical dualism, a philosophy of two
worlds. I mention this because some eminent literary critics
and historians have represented the whole Romantic influence
as of quite the opposite character. There could scarcely be a
greater historical error. Again, Mr. Muirhead has suggested
that Coleridge's revulsion against the " necessitarian philoso-
phy." of his early period is broadly explicable by the fact that
such a philosophy " was in essence antagonistic to the romantic
spirit of freedom that was the deepest strain in Coleridge's own
being." Since " freedom " is one of the most equivocal of terms,
I am uncertain what the " romantic spirit of freedom" is to be
understood to be; and I am not wholly certain what the " deep-
est strain," among the many and conflicting strains, in Cole-
ridge's being was. But if the foregoing analysis is at all correct,
one of the deepest strains in it, and the one which gave rise to
his belief in the freedom of the individual will, was a sense of
sin-his own and other men's; and if anything distinctive of
Coleridge's thought and feeling, after he turned away, under
German influences, from the AufkUlirungsphilosophieof his
youth, is to be called " romantic," then a renascence of the
sense of sin and of the doctrine of human depravity is one of
the most evident of the " Romanticisms."
Johns Hopkins University

38 Coleridge quotes with the symbol of " assent " the dictum of Thomas Adam
that "the design of the Christian religion is to change men's view's, lives and
tempers, . . . by convincing men of their wretched guilt, blindness and impotence;
by inculcating the necessity of remission, supernatural light and assistance; and
actually promising and conveying these blessings." Cf. also his approval of Adam's
reference to "the corruption of human nature " (Critical Annotations of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, ed. Taylor [1889], p. 6).