Enquiries into the Nature of Man

Abstract

Disillusionment with politics in the late 1790s led Coleridge to conclude that the most important task for his generation was to investigate more deeply the nature of man: ‘What we are, and what we are capable of becoming’.¹ His pronouncements on the subject often followed the traditional tripartite scheme of man’s being, as animal, as intellectual and as religious.² As early as 1796 and continuing into his late work on the Logos, he planned ambitious schemes that would arrange human accomplishments under similar categories.³ For a long time he believed that Wordsworth’s great philosophical poem would be constructed according to a similar scheme, agreed, he claimed, during their earlier discussions.⁴