Coleridge repeatedly asserts that the essential ideas that interested him in Schelling were known to him through the English Platonic tradition. This claim has led scholars to scrutinise Coleridge's contact with Neoplatonic philosophy before his visit to Germany in 1798–99. Generally scholars have concluded that Coleridge is lying or they are forced to claim a depth of study and insight that is barely supported by the evidence of his notebooks and letters. Wellek argued that Coleridge has no sense of the incompatibility of his seventeenth-century English sources and German Idealism:

Norman Fruman attacks the claim that Coleridge felt a genial affinity with Schelling by remarking that the ‘specific influence from antiquity or the Neoplatonists consists of scraps and tatters’. Our counter thesis is that Wellek and Frumann are mistaken. Coleridge's claim is ingenuous and his achievement ingenious. The post-Kantians revived the doctrine of the Trinity in a philosophical manner.