Coleridge: Philosopher and Theologian as Literary Critic

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In Coleridge's critical theory, the poetic imagination performs a function analogous in a general way to the function performed by practical reason in the ethical theory of Kant. Although Kant denied the idea of moral freedom as a subject of cognitive knowledge, he went on to show (i) that freedom in the realm of pure reason in its practical role, as distinct from its speculative or theoretical one, could be known, and not merely problematically thought, and (ii) that a being belonging to the world of the senses also belonged to the supersensible order, and that this too was positively known. The supersensible world is known and not merely transcendent as for theoretical purposes. It was, for practical purposes, immanent. For Kant, pure practical reason is not concerned with objects so as to know them cognitively, but with its own faculty for realizing them. As practical, the role of reason was not to furnish an intuition, but a law. The ideas of freedom, God, and immortality are regulative, and not constitutive.