Imagination in the Contemporary World and the Legacy of Romantic Literary Thought

conceptions of physical and psychological reality” (216).

Not an ignoble venture.

Coleridge was aware that there is an element of passivity in the idea that Imagination is merely a by-product of a physical brain undergoing some permutations which cannot at present (but eventually might always) be controlled.  McFarland shows how Coleridge tried to attack some of the difficulties that arise in relying only upon scientific concepts of imagination.   When Coleridge understands not only Kant, but the objections of the philosopher Tetens, he begins to breathe more easily. An excerpt of Tetens’ thought will reveal what Coleridge was learning:

“‘Dichkraft can create no elements, no fundamental materials, can make only nothing out of nothing, and to that extent is no creative power. It can only separate, dissolve, join together, blend; but precisely thereby it can produce new images, which from the standpoint of our faculty of differentiation are discrete representations.’

There is accordingly a Selbstthatigheit— a spontaneous activity–in the “receptivity of the psyche” …a perceiving, reproducing and co-adunating power” (222).

Coleridge, noted McFarland, as especially found in Chapter Eight of his Biographica Literaria, embraced ideas such as these expressed by Tetens (even more, McFarlane asserts rather convincingly,  than those of Kant),  which gave him the intellectual relief he sought from the Newtonian outlook which had so depressed him:

“Newton was a mere materialist – Mind in his system is always passive – a lazy                  Looker-on an external World.  If the mind be not passive, if it indeed be made in                     God’s Image,

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