Coleridge: Prescience, Tenacity and the Origin of Sociology

Abstract

how can we love our universal Friend and Almighty Parent whom we have not seen?'2 More than a quarter of a century later, in his Opus Maximum, he asked the same question: 'If ye love not your earthly parent, how can ye love your father in heaven?'3 All that time, from 1795 to 1820 or later, the question had been held in his mind. It was occupying his thoughts in his fledgling, though virtuoso, work of the mid-1790s; and it was occupying his mind as he set forth on what he considered 'the great object ofmy life'4, that object being 'my Opus Maximum on which I chiefly rely for the proof that I have not lived or laboured in vain' (CL, VI, p. 541, January 1826). It is extraordinary that a mental formulation should remain vital in anyone's mind for so long a period of time. It is even more extraordinary, however, that it not only remained in Coleridge's mind for more than a quarter of a century, but that it did not rest there inertly. On the contrary, it permuted and combined under constant reflection to eventuate in the most distinctive and vivid insistence of the entire Opus Maximum. For the apex of that work, and perhaps the most original and powerful insistence in his entire edifice of thought, is Coleridge's derivation of the belief in God from the relationship of mother and child. Few before Coleridge had dwelt so insistently on the meaning of that relationship, but under his intense scrutiny the profoundest of meanings are uncovered to view. The 'first dawnings' of a baby's