Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, Print Culture, and Mediated Spiritual Community

Abstract

When Coleridge wrote Aids to Reflection (1825), he believed print culture was perilously dominated by empirical and utilitarian forms of rationality and manipulative appeals to a rational reading public. By guiding future educators and authors to discover within themselves an indwelling divine Reason (Logos), Coleridge hoped to promote a reformed print network through which the nation would recognize itself as a spiritual republic of letters. To this end, Coleridge addressed young readers of Aids as if he were personally leading them into self-reflection within the classroom of his text. If Coleridge asked readers to confuse print with presence, he used this delusion to undermine a fiction he considered more dangerous – a purely mechanical universe. The new dynamic spirit in science, Coleridge claimed, demonstrated that the book a reader held depended on a level of reality at which his or her deeper self was sustained by the Logos. I argue that one graduate from the virtual academy of Aids, F. D. Maurice, surprisingly extended Coleridge's views, and in a direction Coleridge would never have approved: read self-reflectively, Maurice asserted, even a page of advertisements became a virtual portal into the nation's spiritual community.