The explanation seems to be that while on Christian grounds he repeatedly denounced pantheism as being in all its forms equivalent to atheism, he was latterly much swayed by the thought of Schelling in the pantheistic direction which was natural to him. To these conflicting tendencies were probably due his self-contradictions on the problem of original sin and the conflicting claims of feeling and reason. It would seem that, in the extreme spiritual vicissitudes of his life, conscious alternately of personal weakness and of the largest speculative grasp, he at times threw himself entirely on the consolations of evangelical faith, and at others reconstructed the cosmos for himself in terms of Neo-Platonism and the philosophy of Schelling. So great were his variations even in his latter years, that he could speak to his friend Allsop in a highly latitudinarian sense, declaring that in Christianity “the miracles are supererogatory,” and that “the law of God and the great principles of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ never assumed humanity.”
From Schelling, whom he praised as having developed Kant where Fichte failed to do so, he borrowed much and often, not only in the metaphysical sections of the Biographia but in his aesthetic lectures, and further in the cosmic speculations of the posthumous Theory of Life. On the first score he makes but an equivocal acknowledgment, claiming to have thought on Schelling’s lines before reading him; but it has been shown by Hamilton and Ferrier that besides transcribing much from Schelling without avowal he silently appropriated the learning of Maass on philosophical history. In other directions he laid under tribute Herder and Lessing; yet all the while he cast severe imputations of plagiarism upon Hume and others. His own plagiarisms were doubtless facilitated by the physiological effects of opium.
Inasmuch as he finally followed in philosophy the mainly poetical or theosophic movement of Schelling, which satisfied neither the logical needs appealed to by Hegel nor the new demand for naturalistic induction, Coleridge, after arousing a great amount of philosophic interest in his own country in the second quarter of the century, has ceased to “make a school.” Thus his significance in intellectual history remains that of a great stimulator. He undoubtedly did much to deepen and liberalize Christian thought in England, his influence being specially marked in the school of F. D. Maurice, and in the lives of men like John Sterling. And even his many borrowings from the German were assimilated with a rare power of development, which bore fruit not only in a widening of the field of English philosophy but in the larger scientific thought of a later generation.
(J. M. Ro.)
Of Coleridge’s four children, two (Hartley and Sara) are separately noticed. His second child, Berkeley, died when a baby. The third, Derwent (1800-1883), a distinguished scholar and author, was master of Helston school, Cornwall (1825-1841), first principal of St Mark’s College, Chelsea (1841-1864), and rector of Hanwell (1864-1880); and his daughter Christabel (b. 1843) and son Ernest Hartley (b. 1846) both became well known in the world of letters, the former as a novelist, the latter as a biographer and critic.
After Coleridge’s death several of his works were edited by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the husband of Sara, the poet’s only daughter. In 1847 Sara Coleridge published the Biographia Literaria, enriched with annotations and biographical supplement from her own pen. Three volumes of political writings, entitled Essays on his Own Times, were also published by Sara Coleridge in 1850. The standard life of Coleridge is that by J. Dykes Campbell (1894); his letters were edited by E. H. Coleridge.
COLERIDGE, SARA (1802-1852), English author, the fourth child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sarah Fricker of Bristol, was born on the 23rd of December 1802, at Greta Hall, Keswick. Here, after 1803, the Coleridges, Southey and his wife (Mrs Coleridge’s sister), and Mrs Lovell (another sister), widow of Robert Lovell, the Quaker poet, all lived together; but Coleridge was often away from home; and “Uncle Southey” was a pater familias. The Wordsworths at Grasmere were their neighbours. Wordsworth, in his poem, the Triad, has left us a description, or “poetical glorification,” as Sara Coleridge calls it, of the three girls—his own daughter Dora, Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge, the “last of the three, though eldest born.” Greta Hall was Sara Coleridge’s home until her marriage; and the little Lake colony seems to have been her only school. Guided by Southey, and with his ample library at her command, she read by herself the chief Greek and Latin classics, and before she was five-and-twenty had learnt French, German, Italian and Spanish.
In 1822 Sara Coleridge published Account of the Abipones, a translation in three large volumes of Dobrizhoffer, undertaken in connexion with Southey’s Tale of Paraguay, which had been suggested to him by Dobrizhoffer’s volumes; and Southey alludes to his niece, the translator (canto iii. stanza 16), where he speaks of the pleasure the old missionary would have felt if
| “.... he could in Merlin’s glass have seen By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught.” |