The Opus Maximum was a set of philosophical manuscripts dictated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to his friend and colleague, Dr Joseph Henry Green, between 1819 and 1823.
[9] The volume's eventual publication was also protracted, something explained in part by Thomas McFarland's claim to have taken longer not editing the book than Coleridge had spent not writing it.
[11] Evans argues that the volume's apparently unsystematic form reflects Coleridge's belief that arguments for God cannot be demonstrated using the resources of the Understanding, but must draw their substance from within their readers through the power of the Reason, and that the work is designed rhetorically to achieve this.
[16] Perkins and Reid argue that the Opus Maximum could not have been written until Coleridge made the conceptual breakthrough contained in a note presumably intended for Green in September 1818:[17] It is ever awful to me to reflect on the morning of our first systematic Conversation, when we opened Schelling's Introduction to his Naturphilosophie and looking thro' the first 20 pages obtained a clear conviction, that he had imprisoned his System within a Circle that could never open ....The argument in the Opus Maximum still formed the basis of Coleridge's thinking until his death in 1834.
[18]His failure to publish thus did not arise from a change of mind, though there is evidence that he continued to refine the argument in the late 1820s, so as to account for the survival of the soul after the death of the body.