Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The thesis begins by examining Coleridge's views on the role of feeling in intellectual activity. Hartley had argued that all forms of consciousness could be explained as effects of the body and its relation to external objects. Coleridge believed that thought was independent of physical causes. Feeling was the cause of association, and thought was an attempt to verbalize our intuitions. Chapter 2 examines his attempts to distinguish the types of feeling connected with truth and with delusion. ;Chapter 3 discusses the emotional benefits which Coleridge found in philosophizing and their role in determining the contents of his thought. No system, he argued, can do justice to our intuition of transcendent realities; truthfulness depends on an unceasing effort of self-criticism, which itself produces a feeling of the sublime. Pleasure is an objective of Coleridge's philosophy as well as his poetry. Chapter 4 shows how the pleasures of thinking led him to view philosophy as a divinely-ordained transcendence of material things. ;Chapter 5 discusses the role of feeling in Coleridge's metaphysics. Coleridge searched continually for ways to reconcile the immanence and transcendence of God. He believed that God is revealed to us through philosophical effort, and that the qualities of energy and production involved in thinking make it both an instance and a symbol of God's creativity. ;The final chapter shows how Coleridge's conception of metaphysical truth expresses itself in his advocacy of a complex, continuous, and self-critical prose-style. Only by striving to express the truth do we achieve a conviction of its inexpressibleness. This effort, however, results in a style so complex that it requires an equivalent effort in order to be understood, thus involving the reader in an awareness of truth's sublimity