Excerpt from The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1 of 7: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions

Philosophy has yet been called to meet, we call to mind no thor oughly elaborated, and truly profound estimate, of the philosophi cal opinions oi' Coleridge. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, the Speculative opinions of Coleridge were a slow formation, and although they finally came to have a fixed and determined character, yet during the first half of his literary career, he was undoubtedly not clear in his own mind. The consequence therefore is, that the philosophy of Coleridge must be gathered from his writings rather than quoted from them, and hence the difficulty for the critic, which does not exist in the in stance of a rounded and finished treatise, to determine the real form and matter of his system. In the second place, the literary world has not been interested in the department of Philosophy. Those problems relating to the nature of man, the universe, and God, which in some ages of the world have swallowed up in their living vortex all the best thinking of the human mind, and which in reality have been the root whence have sprung all the loftiest growths of the human intellect, have been displaced by other and slighter themes, and hence the English Philosopher of this age has been a lonely and solitary thinker. There have been ages when the striking expression of Hazlitt, would apply with literal truth to the majority of the literary class Sir, I am a metaphysician, and nothing makes an impression upon me but abstract ideas. But. The age in which one of the most subtile and profound of English minds made his appearance and cast his bread upon all waters, was the least abstract in its way of think ing, the most concrete and outward in its method and tendency, of any. These two causes combined, will account, perhaps, for the fact that while the poetical and strictly literary productions of Coleridge have on the whole met with a genial reception and an appreciative criticism, his philosophical and theological opinions have been at the best, imperfectly understood, and more often, much misunderstood and misrepresented. While therefore Cole ridge has done more than any other man, with the exception of Wordsworth, to form the poetic taste of the age and to impart style and tone to the rising generation of English Poets, and as a literary man has done more by far than any other one, to revo lutionize the criticism of the age - while in this way he has been melted into the rising literatures of England and America - Coleridge as a Thinker has accomplished far less.

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