Abstract
This chapter traces the evolution of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s references to and affinities with the Cambridge Platonists, in order to lay the groundwork for a thorough comparison of ideas. Both the Cambridge Platonists and Coleridge modified a strongly dualistic philosophical legacy, the former responding to Descartes, the latter to Kant. Indeed, Coleridge’s study of More, Cudworth and Smith took place in parallel with his engagement with German thought, which helps to explain his portrayal of Schelling and other Naturphilosophen as ‘imitators’ of the Cambridge Platonists. The chapter analyses Coleridge’s direct, argumentative comments on the Cambridge Platonists; his use of images from Cudworth at different stages of his career; his engagement with Cudworth’s concept of ‘plastic nature’; and his use of Cudworth’s thought on the origin of evil, the ‘seniority’ of mind over world, and the Trinity. It concludes with a brief consideration of the theme of the pre-existence of the soul. Despite the apparently radical nature of Coleridge’s transition from Unitarianism to Trinitarianism, it emerges that his maintenance of interest in the historical scholarship of Cudworth and the poetry and philosophy of More reflects the longstanding consistency of his intellectual concerns.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry Crabb Robinson, ‘Diary’, 13 April 1817. Quotations from Robinson’s manuscripts are by permission of the Director and Trustees of Dr. Williams’s Library, London, and the Crabb Robinson Project (editors Timothy Whelan and James Vigus), School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. On Robinson’s philosophical background, see Robinson 2010. Cf. Passmore 1951 (22): ‘Cudworth’s arguments are not without a certain force: he sees, as Locke was not to see, that a passive mind could never perceive […] as distinct from merely being susceptible to pressure.’ My thanks go to Peter Cheyne for his invaluable comments on a draft of this chapter.
- 2.
Hazlitt 59. The unwieldiness of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System has long been noted by apologists and critics alike. Berkeley, another early favourite of Coleridge, refers in Siris to the ‘learned Dr. Cudworth’ (qtd. Passmore 1), and Cudworth’s foremost twentieth-century interpreter states that ‘Cudworth must somehow be rescued from his own wordiness’ (Passmore vii).
- 3.
McFarland’s opponent in scholarly polemic, Norman Fruman, abruptly dismisses Coleridge’s interaction with Cudworth (Fruman 1971, 475 n.57).
- 4.
Paragraphs xix-xxiii. Schrickx 76, offers further speculation on Coleridge’s reading of More.
- 5.
Perkins (63n.) notes that ‘Coleridge may also have known the Latin edition of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System (1743), which includes Mosheim’s notes to the text.’
- 6.
- 7.
The Virtual Library System of the Dissenting Academies Project, Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English, lists many holdings of Cambridge Platonist works in Dissenting Academy libraries (http://vls.english.qmul.ac.uk/)
- 8.
He revised it in ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism: An Allegoric Vision’ (Essays on His Times II 262–270), and abridged it as ‘Allegoric Vision’ (Lay Sermons 130–137); see Lectures on Politics and Religion 89n. The target was initially the Church of England, but later becames the Catholic Church. The story of infinite blindness supplying the place of sight reappears in Biographia Literaria, chap. 12 (I 266).
- 9.
Coleridge to Estlin, 26 July 1802; Letters II 821. Cf. Coleridge, Letters I 482 (8 April 1799): ‘I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestly [sic].’
- 10.
By 1822, Coleridge was using ‘esemplastic’ with a different meaning: it now described not the power of imagination (as opposed to fancy), but ‘Sense’: ‘the esemplastic and image—making Faculty (= the Sense)’. Notebooks III 4929.
- 11.
Hedley (2017, 934) notes that Cudworth’s assertion of a prisca theologia constituted a critique (rather than wilful ignorance) of Isaac Casaubon’s 1614 demystification of the Corpus Hermeticum.
- 12.
As J. R. de J. Jackson notes, ‘The sequence of Enfield, Cudworth, and Brucker, is probably the most important part of Coleridge’s first independent assault upon the history of philosophy’ (Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy xlvii).
- 13.
In Letters V 444, Coleridge notes that Aids to Reflection established the concept of the Trinity only negatively; whereas in his ‘larger work’ (Opus Maximum) Coleridge did so positively (Barbeau 2006, 13).
- 14.
Hall 1979 traces similarities between Coleridge’s and More’s notions of ‘mystery’.
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Vigus, J. (2019). ‘This Is Not Quite Fair, Master More!’: Coleridge and the Cambridge Platonists. In: Hedley, D., Leech, D. (eds) Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 222. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22200-0_12
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