Notes on Coleridge Resources

Notes to Stauffer's Introduction to Coleridge

Stauffer's notes

Note: Much of his later thought was devoted to an explication of the Trinity, in order to make philosophy more acceptable to a Cristian, or Christianity to a philosopher. His earlier Unitarianism seemed to him in the end to be marked by folly, ignorance, and ``high unreasonableness.'' The Trinity gave him a better paradigm of reality, since it made allowance for a needful element of mystery, and permitted relationship, the fluidity and interplay which established spirit. He applied his trinitarian thinking characteristically to philosophy: ``The Hunterian position is a genuine philosophic idea, the negative test of which, as of all ideas, is that it is equi-distant from an ens logicum or abstraction, an ens repraesentativum or generalization, and an ens phantasticum or imaginary thing or phaenomenon.'' He applied it also to biology: ``Life itself is neither of these separately, but the copula of all three [reproduction, irritability, and sensibility, the powers of length, surface, and depth].''

Marj's notes

Comment: ``Slightly indisposed'' is quite a large understatement for Coleridge's health during most of his life--recurrent rheumatic fever (which painfully inflames the joints when acute and does permanent damage to the heart), progressive heart disease (first apparent heart attack at age 31), at least one instance of facial neuralgia (also quite painful), bad teeth--all this in an age when opium was freely available and routinely taken (asperin wasn't invented till about 1880 or so) and when the level of sanitation (actually, the almost total lack of it) was such that a visit to the dentist was a real risk to one's life. He was also rather high-strung and had learned that he was likely to get ill when under stress. He was probably in almost constant pain from about 1800 until his death in 1834, after spending almost the entire winter of 1800-01 nearly completely bed-ridden with rheumatic fever. It would probably have been more unusual had he not become addicted to opium. In spite of all, he somehow produced a surprising amount of work. Additional references on this subject can be found in Richard Holmes' biography of STC, after you read that book.

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