Coleridge, Hartley, and Berkeley: Philosophy, religion, and politics, 1794--1796 (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, David Hartley, George Berkeley)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's career has been seen as developing from an initial commitment to the doctrine of materialism, influenced by the writings of eighteenth-century psychologist and theologian David Hartley, to a belief in the philosophical system of idealism brought about by a growing acquaintance with the works of Plato, as well as the philosopher George Berkeley. This study challenges such a model by arguing that Coleridge's early thought is divided between the materialist account of human nature presented in Hartley's system and the idealist account of God's action in creation established in Berkeley's system, both of which advocate of a deterministic view of nature and a passive theory of mind. Hartleyan materialism and Berkeleyan idealism are linked in a system of natural laws which necessarily leads to a unity with God, in which all human beings are reconciled to one another through the Hartleyan principle of benevolence. In this, Berkeley's account of the vital actions of God's providence in nature are employed to correct Hartley's mistaken account of the mechanical operations of nature, even while retaining the theological and necessary trajectory of Hartley's overall system, located in the moral and religious notion of benevolence.; But in applying these principles to the practical considerations of politics and the moral concerns of religious activity, Coleridge develops an account of the subjective faculties of the human being, through a discovery of the creative power of imagination, which runs counter to a deterministic view of nature. Through a confrontation with politics and a reflection on the subjective origins of human action, the doctrine of necessity is brought to critical reflection. Such an account runs counter to the prevailing model of the development of Coleridge's career as marked by a retreat from the realities of lived experience, and motivated by the need to replace the political defeats of his early youth with a recompensatory vision on the order of imagination. The discovery of the imagination as a human faculty informing political reform effects a release from determinism into historical contingency and political exigency, opening up the possibility for the freedom of human action.