Abstract
Coleridge yearned to believe in the oneness of all things. However this aspiration is always in tension with a delight in multiplicity. ‘Each man will universalize his notions, & yet each is variously finite. To reconcile therefore is truly the work of the Inspired! This is the true Atonement -/ i.e. to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various Finite with the Permanent’ (CN, 2, 2208). From the viewpoint of one who demands logical clarity Coleridge’s arbitrations between the one and the many may sometimes seem to be incoherence. But, if that is so, incoherence becomes, for Coleridge, a necessary move in a negotiation of meaning, simultaneously offering apparently contradictory theses as a theoretical physicist might, with the reservation that there must be a tertium aliquid.
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Notes
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© 2013 David Ward
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Ward, D. (2013). ‘Something One and Indivisible’. In: Coleridge and the Nature of Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362629_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362629_3
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