Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: nature and mind
- CHAPTER 1 Early Years: From Hartley to Davy
- CHAPTER 2 Surgeons, Chemists, and Animal Chemists: Coleridge's Productive Middle Years From the Biographia Literaria to Aids to Reflection
- CHAPTER 3 Two Visions of the World: Coleridge, Natural Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Nature
- CHAPTER 4 Coleridge and Metascience: Approaches to Nature and Schemes of the Sciences
- CHAPTER 5 The Construction of the World: Genesis, Cosmology, and General Physics
- CHAPTER 6 Geology and Chemistry: The Inward Powers of Matter
- CHAPTER 7 Life: Crown and Culmination
- Notes
- Index
CHAPTER 1 - Early Years: From Hartley to Davy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: nature and mind
- CHAPTER 1 Early Years: From Hartley to Davy
- CHAPTER 2 Surgeons, Chemists, and Animal Chemists: Coleridge's Productive Middle Years From the Biographia Literaria to Aids to Reflection
- CHAPTER 3 Two Visions of the World: Coleridge, Natural Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Nature
- CHAPTER 4 Coleridge and Metascience: Approaches to Nature and Schemes of the Sciences
- CHAPTER 5 The Construction of the World: Genesis, Cosmology, and General Physics
- CHAPTER 6 Geology and Chemistry: The Inward Powers of Matter
- CHAPTER 7 Life: Crown and Culmination
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Hartley and Priestley
Politics and religion provided Coleridge's introduction to science. In December 1795 he had published a sonnet to Joseph Priestley, whose sympathy for the French Revolution had wrought the mob to drive him out of Birmingham. Priestley was a Socinian, and thus congenial to Coleridge, then a Unitarian and a Democrat. And Priestley had recently crossed the Atlantic in search of freedom from persecution. In his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, he had stated his creed as a natural philosopher:
This rapid process of knowledge, which, like the progress of a wave of the sea, of sound, or of light from the sun, extends itself not this way or that way only, but in all directions, will, I doubt not, be the means, under God, of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion, as well as of science; and all the efforts of the interested friends of corrupt establishments of all kinds, will be ineffectual for their support in this enlightened age; though, by retarding their downfall, they may make the final ruin of them more complete and glorious. It was ill policy in Leo X. to patronize polite literature. He was cherishing an enemy in disguise. And the English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine.
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- Information
- Poetry Realized in NatureSamuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, pp. 9 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981