[3] By the early twentieth century, however, it had emerged as a major if puzzling work in criticism and theory, with George Saintsbury placing Coleridge next to Aristotle and Longinus in his influential History of 1902-04.
At first an adherent of the associationist psychology of the philosopher David Hartley, he came to discard this mechanical system for the belief that the mind is not a passive but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
The first volume culminates in his gnomic definition of the imagination or "esemplastic power", the faculty by which the soul perceives the spiritual unity of the universe, as distinguished from the fancy or merely associative function.
The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
At the beginning of chapter 13, Coleridge attempts to bring his philosophical argument to a head with the following claim: DESCARTES, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe....
In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.
[12] However, with half of the Biographia already printed, Coleridge realised that his proposed modifications were not going to work, a crisis he solved by inventing a "letter from a friend" advising him to skip the deduction and move straight to the conclusion.
The underlying problem is that Schelling's dialectic does not ever supply a final synthesis in which the two forces find equilibrium (a moment of true self-instantiation), which means that they cannot account for a Trinitarian God who is the origin of all things.