Following the failure of Biographia Literaria's deductions, Coleridge moved to place knowledge, and philosophy, within a broader context of human value. Unlike the other English Romantics, however, Coleridge retained system-building ambitions, whereby the perspective of ‘understanding’ and philosophy was to be harmonized within a theocracy of higher reason which combined both the dialectical and voluntaristic moments of an absolutist metaphysics. Coleridge's subsequent work, particularly in The Friend (1818), Philosophical Lectures (1819) and Aids to Reflection (1825) places him within a network of post-Kantian concerns which he shares with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer. Moreover, by agreeing with Kant in his Logic that the fate of knowledge after Hume depended upon the possibility of grounding synthetic a priori principles, while at the same time cultivating a non-foundational notion of ‘wisdom’ which incorporated volitional, affective and practical elements, Coleridge's thought maps out much of the territory for succeeding philosophy for the next two centuries. By doing so, however, it remains ambivalent in a peculiarly English Romantic way; that is, caught between finding an end for knowledge, and declaring the end of ‘knowledge’.

Such ambivalence is well expressed by a comment made to Henry Nelson Coleridge in 1831, when he offered the following assessment of his philosophical achievements: