Coleridge's Moral Copula

Abstract

In 1840 J.S. Mill surveyed the intellectual landscape around him and reported that it was dominated by two great figures: Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.' Between them, he said, they defined the terms of reflective thought, embodying the choices that had to be made and the dilemmas that had to be resolved. Cold calculation or warm sentiment? Individualism or community? Utilitarianism or Romanticism? If Mill was right then we should expect to find these two currents of thought flowing through all the cultural products of that time. This seems plausible if we are dealing with philosophy or economic theory or political rhetoric, but what about science? While there may seem to be a natural affinity between science and utilitarianism, the link with the romantic tradition is less easy to grasp. The temptation is to say that the idealist metaphysicians, and nature-philosophers who belonged to this tradition, were not contributing to science so much as perverting it. They might be using it, or extrapolating it, but they were not doing it. In short, we draw a line of demarcation between men like Coleridge and those like his friend Sir Humphry Davy who were, we are in no doubt, really scientists. Trevor Levere's fascinating book, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, is one of a number of recent works that are helping to challenge our