Questions of Evil and the Will

Abstract

For a few years in his youth, and once he had declared his allegiance to the doctrine of necessitarianism, the problem of evil did not trouble Coleridge.’ Initially, the optimism concerning human benevolence that had prompted the setting up of the Pantisocratic scheme meant that he could set it to one side, confident that given the right associations of ideas in the first participants a steady progress towards human perfection must ensue, which could in time act as a model for the rest of humanity. Even when the scheme failed to materialize, he still believed that contemporary Unitarianism offered a framework for the experimental investigation of such possibilities. In one or two of his early poems, notably Religious Musings, he pictured the ideal human society that might still emerge from the troubled world around him. By 1801, how-ever, he was writing to Poole that he had overthrown the doctrine—a part of what he now described as ‘all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels’—along with ‘Associationism, as taught by Hartley’.2 Yet the more he investigated the problem of consciousness as a result, the more he found himself facing the question of evil. We have already seen how his intellectual speculations could be checked by a feeling of unworthiness that cast his mind into what seemed like a different mode altogether. How could the two kinds of thinking be reconciled?