Abstract

Douglas Hedley’s study reveals Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a leading figure in the nineteenth-century revival of Christian Platonism. This tradition flourished at Cambridge in the seventeenth century until it was eclipsed by the Lockean tradition, which prevailed in the eighteenth century among Christians as well as nonbelievers. Coleridge’s theological work was explicitly a polemic against the Cambridge empiricists. His importance was such that John Stuart Mill divided Victorians into “Benthamites and Coleridgeans”.