The Essential Self and the Life of Nature

Abstract

The principle which is the turning point of all Coleridge’s thought in the first volume of the Biographia is the principle which has informed all his thinking on the nature of the Trinity and of interpersonal relations: that what arises from within a man is the determinant of all reality. Only in self-consciousness, he says, are ‘object and subject, being and knowing… identical, each involving, and supposing the other’ [BLC I 273]. A few pages later he again asserts ‘that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge [BLC I 284]¹.

Life begins in detachment from Nature, and ends in union with God. [LR IV 401]