In 1932 Owen Barfield, eminent jurist and man of letters, delivered and published a lecture on "The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge." Now, after four decades of continuing interest in that subject, he undertakes to define the organizing principles that shape Coleridge's thinking in all its many areas of concern, philosophical, psychological, historical, literary, social, and theological. The author tells us at the outset of this ambitious task that he will leave out of account both the temporal development of Coleridge's thinking and the tangled issue of the Germanic and other sources of his ideas and processes of reasoning, on the premise that it is well to know precisely "what Coleridge thought before beginning to discuss when, or why, or in what company he thought it" (12). Barfield side-steps, then, the question of Coleridge's derivativeness, or "plagiarism," which has in the past year or so revived as a heated scholarly issue, in order to emphasize the integrity of Coleridge's systematic thinking, whatever the source of its components. What he in fact presents to us is what Coleridge thought after about the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the time when, having assimilated Schelling's nature-philosophy and his Transcendental Idealism (1800), he set himself to adapt these views to his own prior interests and theological prepossessions. The result is by far the clearest, best organized, and most comprehensive account yet written of the intellectual premises and procedures that inform all of the work of Coleridge's maturity--work that includes Biographia Literaria, The Statesman's Manual, the Theory of Life, the revised Friend of 1818, the Philosophical Lectures, Aids to Reflection, and On the Constitution of Church and State.
Like other metaphysical "systems," Coleridge's is shaped no less by the world-view which he radically opposes than by the world he sets himself to explain. That world-view, to which Coleridge had himself briefly succumbed in the 1790's, permeated what he called "the Epoch of the Understanding and the Senses" which had been inaugurated by Descartes, Locke, and Newton. The crippling limitation of that way of thinking is that "the conceivable" is inevitably "reduced within the bounds of the picturable"; accordingly, its radical image is that of a natural world whose elements are matter and the laws of motion, whose mind is on one hand sharply divided off from nature, and on the other hand assimilated to the same explanatory principle as nature--that is, its component "ideas" are pictures as "inner" replicas of the "outer" material world, and the associative laws governing the separation and conjunction of these ideas are conceived s the mental correspondents of the laws of motion that govern matter. To Coleridge such a world-view is, precisely speaking, lethal, for it "strikes death through all things, visible and invisible."
Against this view Coleridge sets in radical opposition his "Dynamic" or "Constructive Philosophy." Behind the dead fixities and definites of the "phenomenal" world that Coleridge calls "Natura Naturata"--the world delivered by the senses and ordered in causal sequences by the understanding--lies the "Natura Naturans," or nature in its living process of bringing everything into being, not only in the realm we ordinarily call "nature," but in "mind" as well. The elements of this living and all-productive nature can only be imagined, not pictured, for they consist not of matter and motion and their mental equivalents, but of immaterial potencies that Coleridge calls "energies," :powers," "forces," which effectuate "the universal law of polarity":
Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve and opposite as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendency to re-union. This is the universal law of polarity. . . .(The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (London 1969), I, 94 note.
As the ground of the universe, Coleridge posits a unitary "power" which polarizes into opponent positive and negative "forces" (also called "thesis and antithesis"). These polar forces, in their "living and generative interpenetration," constitute the creative principle that brings into being everything that exists. By the simultaneous action of expanding outward and pulling back, they "individuate" in order to repossess as a unity, or "differentiate" in order to "reconcile" into a "synthesis," which is a "higher third thing" that consists of two opponent forces in various ratios of the "predominance of the one character or quality, not by the absolute exclusion of the other."
Coleridge uses this single generative principle to "construct" (that is, to explain or render intelligible) the total phenomenal world of natura naturata. By incremental progression, in which the status of any state is measured by the degree of its integrated diversity, or "multeity in unity," the polar forces generate the ascending order of the inorganic world, then of the organic world, up to the stage of organic life at which the human mind; hence "consciousness," emerges. The achievement of consciousness is a radical break-through in the developmental process, for consciousness is capable of a reflex act through which, by the productive polarity between the conscious subject and the object it knows, it recapitulates to generic human awareness the generation of the natural world from which it has itself emerged; furthermore, by the act of self-consciousness," it is capable also of opposing itself as an object to itself as a subject. And within the realm of mind, the same generative principle effects the various levels of mental functions or faculties, up to the level of "Reason," which is the faculty that generates "ideas." This stage both culminates and closes the great circle of universal development, for by its "ideals of Reason," human consciousness rounds back to incorporate into awareness the starting point of the entire process: the basic laws of natura naturans, including the primal law of polarity itself. "For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in the mind to a law of nature." In Coleridge's view, the "ideas of Reason" are not an intuitive capacity to penetrate through the phenomenal veil to a hidden reality; instead, they are the mental products and correspondents, as the culminating stage of conscious development, to the laws of nature themselves, to which they therefore stand as "correlatives that suppose each other." They are, in other words, "living and life producing ideas, which . . . are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature," and so are "constitutive" of the generative principles which they represent in the realm of awareness.
Coleridge applies the distinction between the overt phenomena of natura naturata (available to sense-observation and ordered into causal uniformities by the understanding) and the underlying generative principle of polarity-in-unity (available only to the Reason) not only in the realms of nature and mind, but in his systematic consideration of all human institutions and all human history, and also in his theoretical analysis of all modes of human productivity, including literature and the other arts. On the paradigm of this same generative principle he conceives also his theology. "One Power manifesting as two forces," in which the unitary power sustains itself without diminution throughout the progressive activities of its two polarities, serves as the ground idea of a triune God, who is Himself the one ground of all process and productivity. And by recourse to the concept of a "faith" that involves an act of the moral will--the "fidelity . . . of the finite will and understanding to the reason . . . as one with, and representative of, the absolute will"--Coleridge attempts to leap the gap which separates a timeless metaphysic from a historical religion, by identifying the second aspect of the triune principle of all being with the Christ of the Scriptures.
This may serve as my rough sketch of the systematic thought that Barfield explicates in detail. I should like now to stress the importance of this general philosophical scheme to our understanding of Coleridge's literary theory, and especially his central concept of the secondary imagination.
To Coleridge all emergent novelty, or "creativity," can only be adequately explained as the results of a vital, generative process of polarities, which separate and individuate only to reunite in a synthetic "third thing" that manifests the "multeity in unity" characteristic of an organized whole. The "secondary Imagination" of the creative poet of genius, as Coleridge describes in the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Biographia, is conceived as a manifestation of such a process: it is "essentially vital," it "dissolves" the fixities of sense "in order to recreate," and it is a "synthetic . . . power," in that it "reveals itself" in its product by a reunion of polar elements, "the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities." Thus, although it is a consciously creative process of which only the man of genius is capable, the secondary Imagination is identical "in the kind of its agency" with the unconscious creativity by which the "primary Imagination," which is the generic possession of all mankind, brings into being the world of "all human Perception," and ultimately it is also one in kind with "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am"--that is, with the primal creative process that continuously brings into being the world both of nature and of mind.
In his understandable concern with demonstrating the elementary principles of Coleridge's systematic thinking, Barfield has neglected to bring out an important feature of the completed system, and that is the overall figure or design described by these elements in the course of their self-starting and self-sustaining evolution. According to Coleridge polarity, in its sustained tension between the pressure out and the pull back--the tendency "perpetually to individuate . . . counteracted by an attempt of nature to recall it again to the common organization"--moves inevitably in a circular course; indeed "organization," he says, "has no other meaning than a power which instead of moving in a straight line as the mechanism does, moves round upon itself in a circle" (Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn [New York, 1949], 357. This is a circle, however, which ascends at the same time that it turns back upon itself--"the whole process is cyclical tho' progressive" (Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs [Oxford 1956], IV, 769)--so that to Coleridge, as to contemporary German philosophers, all vital process performs a spiral evolution, in a circuitous returns to its point of departure, but on a higher plane of unified diversity.
This spiral design manifests itself in all organized development, not only in the universe, but also in the philosophical system used to describe the universe, and in all vital processes and products of the human faculties. Thus the "science of method" common both to science and to art, Coleridge says, begins with a "mental Initiative" which demonstrates its efficacy as a "germinal" idea by evolving, through the perpetual action and counteraction of polarities, up to the point at which it returns to, incorporates, and so validates at its end its own beginning:
From this we started . . . and it is this whose re-appearance announces the conclusion of our circuit, and welcomes us at our goal. (The Friend, I, 523)
Thus also the process and products of the secondary imagination, since this power, as against the fancy, "is essentially vital" rather than mechanical, manifest a parallel circuitry of organization. As he puts it:
The common end of all narrative, nay of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion--the snakes with its Tail in its mouth. (Collected Letters, IV 545)
Coleridge's systematic thought turns out to be consonant with, and to justify, the circuitous design of his best poems, including The Eolian Harp, Frost at Midnight, Dejection: An Ode and The Ancient Mariner--a return-upon-itself in which the end recapitulates its beginning, but on a higher level which incorporates all that has evolved between the beginning and the end.
We must keep in mind another characteristic feature of Coleridge's thought to understand his characteristic procedure in aesthetic and literary criticism. To Coleridge the science "of the sense and the Understanding" was not in itself false but, when operating within its proper bounds, both valid and immensely useful; its fallacy was one of misplaced concreteness, in that it extended an abstract hypothesis, framed to deal solely with physical phenomena, into a concrete and all-inclusive world picture. The "Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy," as he says, abstracted from corporeal substances all properties except "figure and mobility," and "as a fiction of science, it would be difficult to overvalue this invention." But Descartes and his followers "propounded it as truth of fact: and instead of a World created and filled with productive forces by the Almighty Fiat, left a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of his of his own Grinding" (Aids to Reflection [London 1913] 268-69) Coleridge's enterprise is to save the partial truth of this and other philosophical schemes by "such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but an enlargement that includes the former," seen from a higher "perspective central point." (Anima Poetae [London1895], 142-42; Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross [Oxford 1907], I, 170). And one persistent tact by which he pursues this aim is to set up a set of doublets, or paired terms, as speculative instruments for use in intellectual investigations. In each doublet the first term is adequate to account only for natura naturata, the phenomenal aspects of nature and those processes and achievements of mind which consist in the reordering and adjustment of the "fixities and definites" of sense-perception. The second term, on the other hand, is necessary to account for natura naturans, the play of contrary forces in everything that is generative, creative, and grows into an organized whole.
These doublets are the bifocal perspectives through which Coleridge examines the natural and human world: understanding and reason, notion and idea, rule and law, mechanical and organic, shape and that serve to distinguish the processes and products of nature and art form, talent and genius, and (especially with reference to literary criticism) copying and imitation, poem and poetry, fancy and imagination. The paired terms, on the pragmatic level, are useful distinctions that serve to distinguish the processes and products of nature and art into two kinds, and by that token into two orders of status or excellence; although Coleridge maintains that they are "distinctions," not "divisions," in that, when viewed from a higher perspective point, the lower mental powers represented in some of these doublets are seen to differ from the higher not in kind but in degree, and the higher powers are seen to involve the co-efficiency of the lower powers which, in their functioning, they necessarily comprehend.
Owen Barfield makes it clear that he speaks not only as an expositor, but as an advocate, since he believes that what Coleridge thinks is true--or more precisely, that it is a notable stage on the way toward the truth later achieved by Rudolf Steiner (see pages 177-178). In this regard Barfield remains faithful to the views he expressed in his first essay on Coleridge forty years ago, in which he put forward the theosophy [sic] of Steiner as the point in intellectual history at which (in the title of the book in which the essay first appeared) Romanticism Comes of Age. In the present book Barfield converts his parti pris into a virtue. It motivates him to entertain with sympathy and understanding philosophical and scientific claims which other commentators, dismayed by their violation of what Barfield calls the "prefabricated grids" of current theoretical prepossessions, reject out of hand. Barfield also employs the admirable method of letting Coleridge speak at some length for himself, in passages selected both from his published works and manuscripts, before going on to explicate and co-ordinate the passages he has quoted. The resulting work will be a standard reference for helping us to establish, from his diverse, tangled, and typically fragmentary writings, what Coleridge, in his own philosophical coming of age, essentially thought.